TALKIN’ TURKEY: The NATO summit is under way in Lithuania today only hours after Turkey reversed itself and decided to allow Sweden to join the growing military alliance.

  As world leaders discuss the war in Ukraine and the possibility of allowing that country to join, Russian President Vladimir Putin is confronted with the reality that his invasion has only served to strengthen the western alliance. The US appears to have bought Turkey’s vote on Sweden by agreeing to given them F-16 fighters for their air force.

  Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to attend the meeting after threatening to stay home if members did not commit to when and how Ukraine would be allowed to join NATO. He tweeted today that not admitting Ukraine is “weakness.” He wrote, “This means that a window of opportunity is being left to bargain Ukraine’s membership in NATO in negotiations with Russia. And for Russia, this means motivation to continue its terror.”

  Soon to have 32 members, NATO at this meeting for the first time approved detailed plans for collective military defense against a major attack by a non-member, which would most likely be Russia. 

  Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said Russia is closely watching the NATO summit and that the meeting had already started to demonstrate “a strong anti-Russian attitude.”

THE WAR ROOM: Russia attacked the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv today with a barrage of drones, all of which were shot down, the city’s military administration claimed.

  France and Germany announced they are giving Ukraine more weapons. France is sending long-range missiles and Germany is handing over 25 refurbished Leopard 1A5 tanks, 40 armored infantry fighting vehicles, and two Patriot missile launchers. 

  In a further development in Russia’s internal power politics, the Kremlin now admits that Vladimir Putin held a lengthy meeting with mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin just five days after his Wagner private military company launched a brief mutiny. Prigozhin was supposed to be in exile in Belarus at the time. 

RAINMADEGGON: Vermont and other parts of the Northeast are flooding and draining out after Biblical amounts of rain have fallen in the past 36 hours. As many as 4 million people are under flood alerts across parts of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

  Climate scientists say global warming is “supercharging” weather events, leading to disaster.

  Vermont is under a state of emergency as flooding brought dozens of rescues and evacuations. The Winooski River at Montpelier swelled by nearly 14 feet. Flooding left Weston and South Londonderry inaccessible. 

  In New York’s Hudson Valley on Sunday, a woman was swept away as she tried to rescue her dog from her flooding home. The dog survived, but the woman’s body has not been found. 

PROMOTIONS ABORTED: Promotions among the senior ranks of the military are all jammed and delayed because Alabama’s conservative Sen. Tommy Tuberville is single-handedly blocking them to force a change in the Pentagon’s abortion policy. The Defense Department offers time off and travel expenses to service members who need to go out of state for abortions.

  Tuberville has said his action is about “not forcing the taxpayers of this country to fund abortions.”

  In the meantime, promotions are being held up, including for those officers replacing members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whose terms are expiring. The Marine Corps will have a temporary replacement unless Tuberville lets up.

  His blocking move prevents voting on promotions as a group. Tuberville disingenuously says he’s not stopping anything because Congress could just vote on the promotions individually … hundreds of them.

FOUL BALL: The New York Times announced yesterday that it will shut down its sports desk and hand over its coverage to The Athletic, a subscription-based sports website owned by the Times. 

  As usual in situations like this, the party making the announcement claims this is an improvement, with the Times saying this will provide a “greater abundance of sports coverage than ever before” without layoffs. Don’t believe it.

  An email to the paper’s staff said, “We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large.” In other words, if you want to know who won last night’s game, you’re reading the wrong paper.

  The Times had already been featuring The Athletic on the front of its web page, but if you wanted to read a story you had to subscribe. The announcement said that The Athletic will be included for readers who subscribe to two or more of The Times’s bundle of products, whatever that means. It’s sad day when a newspaper uses the term “bundle of products” like the Flex Seal huckster on cable television.

THE SPIN RACK: Larry Nassar, the former sports doctor convicted of molesting young female gymnasts, was stabbed at least 10 times by a fellow inmate inside a Florida federal prison. Reports say it’s amazing he survived.  — James Lewis, the man long suspected but never prosecuted in the infamous Tylenol poisonings that killed seven Chicago people in the Chicago area in 1982, has died in Cambridge, Massachusetts at 76. Lewis spent 12 years in prison for writing an extortion letter promising to end the poisonings for $1 million, but investigators could never nail him for the killings that led to safety seals on medications that are standard today.

BELOW THE FOLD: Speaking of Tommy Tuberville, CNN host Kaitlan Collins pressed him on the question of whether white nationalists — avowed racists — should be allowed to serve in the military and Tuberville answered, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”

   Collins countered that, “A white National is someone who believes the white race is superior to other races.”

  “Well, that is some peoples’ opinion,” Tuberville said. “My opinion of white nationalist, if someone wants to call them white nationalist, to me is an American.”

  Then he said he’s dead set against racism.

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