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Days after Finland and Sweden formally applied to join NATO essentially ending decades of neutrality on the world stage former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called the development "huge" and a major defeat for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin's decision to invade Ukraine was partly driven by a desire to prevent the country from joining NATO, which would put the military alliance right at Russia's border. But last week's move by Finland and Sweden suggests that plan has backfired, Gates told "Face the Nation" Sunday.

"I think it changes the geopolitics in Europe in a dramatic way. Now he's got NATO on his doorstep, not only in Ukraine and elsewhere," Gates said, referring to Putin.

"He's going to have them on his border in Finland. And it's an amazing thing he's done because he's gotten Sweden to abandon 200 years of neutrality," Gates said. "So I think one of his many, huge miscalculations in invading Ukraine is he has dramatically changed the geostrategic posture of Western Europe. And now that you have the Swedes and the Finns as part of that, he's really put Russia in a much worse strategic position than it had before the invasion."

NATO's 30 member countries are now reviewing Sweden's and Finland's applications. If their bids are accepted, the two once-neutral Nordic nations could become members within a few months.

When the leaders of the two countries visited the White House last Thursday, President Biden offered his "strong support" for their applications.

Gates, who served as defense secretary under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said Putin's brutal invasion of Ukraine could continue to hurt Russia's economy and affect the country in other ways. He also doesn't believe Putin could win the war by taking over Ukraine and "absorbing it" into Russia, but he said Putin might still walk away with some strategic areas of Eastern Ukraine.

"He has the potential to hold on to a good part of the Donbas. But I think in terms of pushing on to Odessa or trying to bring a change of government in Kyiv or absorb Ukraine, I think if that's winning, I don't see that he can win," Gates said.

"His invasion has weakened Russia and it's got now long-term economic problems," Gates said. "Europe, I think, is very serious at this point about weaning itself away from dependence on Russian oil and gas. So that will weaken Russia significantly."

The former defense secretary expressed doubt that Putin's biggest ally, China, would do enough to rescue Russia's economy partly because it wouldn't want to become dependent on Russia for energy sources.

"China will want to remain diversified," Gates said. "They might buy some more Russian oil and gas, but nothing like what would be required to replace the European market. Putin will remain a pariah ... He has put Russia really behind the 8-ball economically, militarily, and because now people are going to look at the Russian military and say, 'You know, this was supposed to be this fantastic military. Well, they give a good parade, but in actual combat, not so hot.'"

Asked if he believes Putin could resort to using a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine, Gates said it's unlikely.

"I think the probability of him using a tactical nuclear weapon is low, but not zero," he said. "There are no large masses of Ukrainian forces that would be taken out by a tactical nuclear weapon. And if [there's no] military purpose, then the only purpose is as a terror weapon to try and break the will of the Ukrainian people. And I think that moment has come and gone. I don't think that there's anything at this point that will break the will of the Ukrainian people."

Gates noted that a nuclear attack on Ukraine could possibly affect Russia's mainland as well.

"In that part of the world, and particularly in eastern Ukraine, the winds tend to blow from the west," he said. "If you set off a tactical nuclear weapon in eastern Ukraine, the radiation is going to go into Russia. So I just hope somebody reminds him of that."

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Robert Gates says NATO expansion "changes the geopolitics of Europe in a dramatic way" - CBS News

The Associated PressMarch 13, 2022 GMT

Former President Barack Obama said on Sunday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, though hes feeling relatively healthy and his wife, Michelle, tested negative.

Ive had a scratchy throat for a couple days, but am feeling fine otherwise, Obama said on Twitter. Michelle and I are grateful to be vaccinated and boosted.

Obama encouraged more Americans to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, despite the declining infection rate in the U.S. There were roughly 35,000 infections on average over the past week, down sharply from mid-January when that average was closer to 800,000.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that 75.2% of U.S. adults are fully vaccinated and 47.7% of the fully vaccinated have received a booster shot. The CDC relaxed its guidelines for indoor masking in late February, taking a more holistic approach that meant the vast majority of Americans live in areas without the recommendation for indoor masking in public.

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Obama tests positive for COVID-19, says hes feeling fine

During a speech at Stanford University on Thursday, April 21, 2022, former U.S. President Barack Obama presented his audience with a stark choice: Do we allow our democracy to wither, or do we make it better?

Over the course of an hour-long address, Obama outlined the threat that disinformation online, including deepfake technology powered by AI, poses to democracy as well as ways he thought the problems might be addressed in the United States and abroad.

This is an opportunity, its a chance that we should welcome for governments to take on a big important problem and prove that democracy and innovation can coexist, Obama said.

Obama, who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017, was the keynote speaker at a one-day symposium, titled Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm, co-hosted by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and the Obama Foundation on the Stanford campus on April 21.

The event brought together people working in technology, policy, and academia for panel discussions on topics ranging from the role of government in establishing online trust, the relationship between democracy and tech companies, and the threat of digital authoritarians.

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Barack Obama Addresses the Intersection of Online Disinformation, Regulation and Democracy at Stanford Event - Freeman Spogli Institute for...

The buyers, according to the Cook County clerk, are Maurice and Robyn-Ashley Taylor. The Taylors have not responded to phoned and emailed requests for comment.

The Taylors do not appear to have filed any building permits or plans yet for the 7,500-square-foot site, where previous owners reportedly planned to build a house of about 8,000 square feet.

This is the lot that gained some infamy after the Chicago Tribune reported in 2006 that political influencer Tony Rezko and his wife bought it on the same day in 2005 that then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama and Michelle Obama bought the house next door.

The Obamas house is a six-bedroom, roughly 3,700-square-foot house built in 1916 on Greenwood Avenue. Its lot was about 15,500 square feet, approximately the size of five standard Chicago lots, until it went on the market in 2005 as two separate parcels, the northern one containing the house and the southern one unbuilt.

According to the Tribunes 2006 report, Obama said his family's real estate broker brought the house to his wife's attention. He said he discussed the house with Rezko but isn't sure how Rezko began pursuing the adjacent lot. But Obama raised the possibility that he was the first to bring the lot to Rezko's attention.

The Obamas bought the northern portion, including the house, for $1.65 million in June 2005. At the same time, Rita Rezko paid $625,000 for the southern portion.

My understanding was that (Rezko) was going to develop it, Obama told the Tribune in 2006.

The Obamas later bought one-sixth of the Rezko lot, 1,500 square feet along the property line, for $104,500, and Rezko footed the $14,000 cost of building a fence between the properties, the Tribune reported.

Detractors of Barack Obama believed the transactions showed that Obama was more closely allied with Rezko than he let on. In 2008, Rezko, who had been a fundraiser for Obama and other politicians,was found guilty of 16 counts of fraud, money laundering and bribery. Obama was not implicated.

Rita Rezko sold the lot, in its reduced size, in December 2006 for $575,000. With the $104,500 from the Obamas, her proceeds totaled $679,000, a profit of $54,000.

That buyer sold the lot in March 2008 for $675,000 to John and Marjorie Poulos,who planned to build an 8,000-square-foot home on the site.

About 18 months after buying the lot, the couple listed it at $1.3 million. It was on and off the market a few times over subsequent years, coming down to an asking price of $699,000 in March 2019.

At the $699,000 sale price after owning it for 13 years, the sellers made $24,000, or about 3.5%, not counting their carrying costs. This low profit is one sign the Taylors did not buy the site as an investment but to build on it. Maurice Taylor is in finance, and Robyn-Ashley Taylor is an attorney.

The property was not actively listed at the time of the sale. Carlos Sanchez, the Bloom/Sanchez Realty agent who represented the lot in 2019, told Crains the owners sold the lot on their own in December. Crains could not reach John or Marjorie Poulos.

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The Obamas may be seeing a new home next to theirs in Kenwood - Crain's Chicago Business

The First Lady, a ten-episode miniseries on Showtime, desperately wants to convince you that it is a chamber piece. Scarcely does the camera go wide; it observes the East Wing of the White House in medium closeup, shrinking the domain of the Presidents spouse down to a miserable tableau of dour furniture and even more dour facial expressions. This is a straightforward dramatic metaphordomestic interior as psychological interiorand it might have been effective if the script demonstrated an interest in its protagonists inner lives. But it does not. The show wont let Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford, and Michelle Obama, who are played by Gillian Anderson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Viola Davis, respectively, be anything but handsomely wounded victors.

The miniseries, cooked up by Aaron Cooley, a first-time creator, and showrun by Cathy Schulman, with all ten episodes directed by Susanne Bier, is an odd failure. It has a halting structure and a maudlin view of history that make the show feel dated. Early on, it dawns on you that the project is very anti-Ryan Murphy. When middle-aged Hollywood goddesses are gathered, our minds are thrust to that auteurs precinct, where, for better or for worse, the mature performer is the rebel muse and historical incident is a putty plaything. In contrast, Cooleys cast has been sealed in an enclosure, given no freedom to roam beyond the barrier of impersonation. Style, too, has been banished. The First Lady refuses any hint of irony, satire, glamour, or scandal. I, too, can tire of the showy po-mo aesthetics of historical fictions these days, but that doesnt mean the answer is to abdicate the insertion of perspective.

If The First Lady does have a perspective, its a mannered one, a fait accompli: the idea that Americans have an insatiable fascination with the paradox of the First Spouse, she who is proximate to power though officially endowed with none. As Eleanor Roosevelt, dismayed to have not been given an official position in her husbands Cabinet, laments, the First Lady position is not a job but, rather, her circumstance. The show makes First Ladydom both generic and somehow cosmic, a kind of condition passed on from Administration to Administration, a mark placed on fifty-three Eves.

The creators have chosen their three subjects carefully; a feminist gloss sticks on them. The nature of these First Ladies does not mesh with the expectations of the role. Eleanor is the visionary, in the closet in more ways than one; initially, she can evince her genius as a diplomat only through ventriloquism, feeding her husband his best lines. Betty is exhausted with the fakery of political life; an iconoclast, and the last Republican wife before the onslaught of the Reaganite far right, she thumbs through The Feminine Mystique and dances uninhibitedly to Harry Nilsson. Michelle, as we know well, has a disdain for the equivocation necessary to keep the political engine going. Shes also, as the First Black First Lady, the unspoken justification for the series: the ne plus ultra of its gurgling optimism. Virtually every shred of dialogue is aphoristic. First Ladies and their teams are often the vanguards of social progress in this country, Betty writes in a letter to Michelle, at the beginning of the Obama Administration. That argument is specious at best, though theres nothing wrong with the show allowing a fictionalized Betty to impart her belief. The problem is that The First Lady doesnt dare to stray from her viewpoint.

In its attempt to tell three histories, the show scrambles the chronologies of its subjects White House tenures as well as their larger biographies. There are flashbacks nested in flashbacks; a second suite of actors play the women and their husbands when they were young. Two time lines, which span more than a century of activity, are tenuously anchored by theme. The writers have fabricated resonances, but these only elide the specificity of each womans life. It serves none of these figures, and certainly not the viewer, to insinuate equivalence between a young orphaned Eleanor (Eliza Scanlen), sent to boarding school in Britain; a young Michelle (Jayme Lawson), facing institutional racism on the South Side of Chicago; and a young Betty (Kristine Froseth), a dancer who trained under Martha Graham, and whose dreams of stardom were thwarted by a bad first marriage and by alcoholism.

On occasion, The First Lady offers insights into the eccentricity of political marriage. Thats not to say that any of the Presidents are well written or capably performed. Kiefer Sutherland, Aaron Eckhart, and O-T Fagbenleas FranklinD. Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Barack Obama, respectivelystruggle to give life to waxen cartoons of ironic emasculation. Still, scenes of compromise stand out amid the two-dimensionality. Andersons pursed mouth (even tighter than the mouth she uses for Margaret Thatcher, on The Crown) breaks when her character discovers correspondence between her husband and his longtime mistress; it breaks, too, in the company of Eleanors own lover, the reporter Lorena Hickok (Lily Rabe). The Roosevelts marriage is a dtente, an alliance between political operators. Pfeiffer and Eckhart, meanwhile, give the Fords a sexual chemistry that feels daring; when Gerald pardons Richard Nixon, his decision disturbs the couples emotional universe. Davis and Fagbenle, as the Obamas, are the least successful pairing. Their relationship is filtered only through racial insecurity, with Michelle as the real-talk bully to Baracks dreamer. Playing Michelle is clearly a burden for Davis. How do you summon a living titan, a figure who already plays herself so well? The actor ultimately relies on mimicry, and makeupa parody of two-thousands corporate glam, with the thin eyebrows and the glossed lips. The First Lady is not ready to puncture the hip grandiosity of the Obamas, instead leaving the couple hazy and ill-defined. Its an offensive navet, considering how artfully the Obamas have crafted their modern legend.

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Throughout the show, extraordinary eventsPearl Harbor, Watergate, the Sandy Hook shootingare rendered as catalysts for personal growth. Anna, what happened? Eleanor asks her daughter, after rushing into the West Wing. The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor, Anna responds. How bad? Very bad. But, on the other hand, the tragedy gave Eleanor an opportunity to address the frightened populace, so, as the series seems to imply, not all bad? After a few minutes of this, we are jolted to another lady, another dilemma. Encouraging her husband to stand up to his white liberal base, Michelle Obama speechifies, Weve been called nigga in every way possible. For once, lets be the niggas. The rushed tempo has a way of caricaturing what is meant to be serious.

Sometimes you ought to allow a bad-wig costume drama to be a bad-wig costume drama. The triumphalist vibe of The First Lady penetrates every element of its world, down to the major-chord score. This sort of big-name vehicle, reeking of Hollywood hubris, can sometimes take on cult-classic status owing to its concentration of bad performances from great actorsor, as in the case of The First Lady, its one good performance amid a sea of middling ones. If such status is conferred on this show, itll be because of Michelle Pfeiffer. Anderson and Davis are regulars on the grandstanding-bio-pic circuit, so they have a bag of tricks to pull from when giving flesh to myths. Pfeiffer is acting in a different milieu altogether. When she speaks the wretched dialogue, she tempers the awkwardness, adding a sigh, a pause. Her Betty Ford is a study of the womans fears and attractions, a suggestive riff on themes of addiction, frustrated freedom, and wifely melancholy. When Bettys compulsions spin out of control, and her family stages an intervention, Pfeiffer nudges the script away from the written psycho-biddy mania, deciding to show us, instead, controlled rage. Its real.

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The First Lady Is a Bad-Wig Costume Drama - The New Yorker