| | |  | BY RYAN HEATH | With help from Michael Grunwald
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| FIVE-RING CIRCUS — Seven weeks before the start of the Tokyo Summer Olympics, organizers insist the games are “100 percent” going ahead. The venues and medal podiums are ready, the official costumes and theme music have been launched. But a lot of Covid caveats remain. As America gets ready for a summer of vaccinated partying, Japanese officials face a different, more daunting set of numbers. Tokyo is experiencing around 500 new Covid cases per day this week, roughly double the number in New York, and with the added problem that only 3 percent of the Japanese population is vaccinated. With Japan still likely to be completing vaccination of its over-65s as the curtain rises for the Olympic opening ceremony on July 23, Tokyo remains under an extended state of emergency. The Tokyo Medical Practitioners Association has called for the Games to be canceled. Only 17 percent of Japanese adults want the Olympics to go ahead in July, according to a poll completed this week by Morning Consult. Ten thousand volunteers have quit, and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s approval rating is down to 27 percent approval versus 62 percent disapproval.
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The Olympic Rings are displayed by the Odaiba Marine Park Olympic venue in Tokyo. | Getty Images | The International Olympic Committee rarely reacts to short-term or political considerations. The 1972 Munich Olympics continued even as two Israeli athletes lay dead in the Olympic village and barely paused as others were held hostage by Palestinian terrorists. When nine athletes were killed during a botched rescue operation, the Games resumed within 24 hours. Olympic heavyweight Dick Pound, a former IOC vice chair, told Nightly in an interview that he’s used to the host country’s public and news media getting nervous in the run-up to the Olympics. “Remember in 1984 in L.A., the media were speculating on how many Olympic athletes are going to die during the games because of the smog,” Pound said. Recent test events in Tokyo had “gone swimmingly,” he said, and “everyone thinks the necessary level of interaction with the Japanese public can be limited.” The IOC accepted Japanese requests to cut down the size of support teams coming into Japan for the Games, which will take place during school and summer holidays, meaning a less crowded Tokyo. But Games organizers are attempting a logistical feat far beyond what professional sports leagues like the NBA have attempted. Altogether they expect 250,000 athletes, support staff, officials, contractors and volunteers from around the world to be mingling in Olympic venues and accommodation. NBC paid $2.38 billion for the rights to air this global competition, which is still being called Tokyo 2020. Whether anyone will be able to watch the Games in person and not on NBC has yet to be determined. Tokyo 2020 president Seiko Hashimoto told the BBC today that she believes “we must be prepared to have these Games without any spectators.” Pound says a final decision on that may be weeks away. Athletes and other Olympic visitors would be “out of their mind” to travel without being vaccinated, Pound said, yet IOC still expects around 3,000 unvaccinated athletes and support staff to arrive in Japan. Many local volunteers will also be unvaccinated. Don’t worry about the Covid risks for healthy young Olympic athletes, said Kentaro Iwata, an infectious disease specialist at Kobe University Hospital. The problem will be the other 240,000 people mixing in Olympic venues and accommodation, he said. Most won’t be vaccinated, and many will be older. Despite those concerns, the Japanese government feels locked into going ahead. It was Japan who insisted on a maximum 12-month delay to the Games, Pound said. A successful Games would be a boost to Japan’s ruling party heading into an October national election. Tomita Koji, Japan’s ambassador to the U.S., declined to comment on the situation. A last-minute cancellation would carry its own political and patriotic risks: national humiliation just months before neighboring China hosts the Winter Olympics in Beijing. And there’s the $25 billion investment in the Games that Japan would like a return on. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas for us at rheath@politico.com, or on Twitter at @PoliticoRyan.
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Illustration by Arn0 | An excerpt from “What Makes Caitlyn Jenner Run?” by Michael Kruse, coming Friday in POLITICO Magazine: “I have no more secrets,” she said. “And for the first time in my life, I can be honest.” But she, of course, or anybody else, can be simultaneously honest and unprepared. Why in this “next chapter,” as she called it, at this stage of her life when she’s truly and finally herself, does she want to re-rev attention, prompting scrutiny of a more concerted, more serious sort? Why politics? Why now? “Why not,” I asked, “be authentically yourself, honestly and authentically Caitlyn, and recede from the public eye?” “I don’t quite understand what the question is,” she said.
| | — DOJ investigating DeJoy over campaign contributions from former employees: The Department of Justice is investigating Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in relation to campaign contributions from his former private employees , a spokesperson for DeJoy told POLITICO. DeJoy denies that he ever “knowingly violated” campaign contribution laws, spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement. — GOP mulls throwing Biden more infrastructure money: Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), her party’s lead infrastructure negotiator, is preparing to come back to the table with Biden on Friday in the latest round of high-stakes talks that have frozen the White House’s initial $4 trillion proposal on Capitol Hill. The gap between the two sides is massive at the moment — Biden and Republicans aren’t even counting the size of the bill the same way and are approximately $750 billion apart. Their differences appear nearly impossible to bridge right now, according to two GOP sources familiar with the negotiations. — Biden broadens Trump policy restricting investment in Chinese firms: The new policy expands an executive order that former President Donald Trump imposed in November prohibiting U.S. investors from trading stock in companies linked to the Chinese military . Biden’s executive order would extend the restrictions to additional firms that operate in China’s defense or surveillance technology sectors, bringing the total number of targeted companies to 59 from 48. — Yang chased by angry protesters during Brooklyn campaign stop: New York mayoral candidate Andrew Yang was headed to the Park Slope YMCA — a spot notorious for Mayor Bill de Blasio’s workouts, for a stop many expected would bring some criticism of the mayor. Instead, Yang was met by a dozen members of New York Communities for Change, a social justice organization, who shouted down the candidate and ultimately scuttled the event. — Biden directs federal agencies to up their anti-corruption game: The president is formally directing federal departments and agencies to make fighting global corruption a priority. Biden issued a “national security study memorandum” today that directs the U.S. government to send to him in 200 days a report and recommendations on how the United States can better use its resources and partner with other countries to battle corruption.
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| | SUBSCRIBE TO WEST WING PLAYBOOK: Add West Wing Playbook to keep up with the power players, latest policy developments and intriguing whispers percolating inside the West Wing and across the highest levels of the Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today. | | | | | | | ‘YOU SHOULD NOT SPY ON YOUR NEIGHBORS’ — European Commission Executive Vice President and former Danish Interior Minister Margethe Vestager said today that European countries “should not spy on your neighbors,” in the wake of allegations that Denmark’s intelligence services helped the U.S. spy on top European politicians. Denmark’s public broadcaster DR reported Sunday that Danish services assisted the U.S. National Security Agency to tap communications and data of politicians in Germany, France, Sweden, Norway and other countries, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Vestager — now one of the EU’s most prominent politicians — was national economy and interior minister at the time. The Danish politician dismissed suggestions that she may have had knowledge or responsibility for the spying scandal, saying that “being minister in the Interior in Denmark is having the responsibility for elections and referendums, and the workings of municipalities and regions from an economic and from a legal perspective. There is no intelligence services inside” this portfolio.
| | HAIR OF THE DOG WHILE DOGWALKING? The pandemic sucked. But to-go cocktails? Not too bad. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, health care reporter Dan Goldberg looks at whether pandemic perks, from liquor laws to telehealth regulations, will stick around after emergency orders are lifted.
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19 million The number of Covid-19 vaccine doses the U.S. will route through the global vaccine aid program COVAX, the White House said today . The Biden administration will send the remaining 25 percent of the first 25 million doses donated by the U.S. to help low- and middle-income nations to specific countries. |
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| | | MIRROR UNIVERSE — Senior writer Michael Grunwald emails Nightly about NASA’s new plans to explore the second planet from the sun: Venus is often described as Earth’s twin, because it’s got similar size, density, composition and gravity. It resides in the so-called Goldilocks Zone, the potentially habitable precincts of space where water can remain liquid, and scientists believe it may have had oceans for billions of years. But it doesn’t now, because it’s a scorching hellscape with surface temperatures that can melt lead, which is why it’s also often described as Earth’s evil twin. This week, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced two new missions to explore Venus, not only to try to understand how the planet became such a nasty inferno, but why the Earth has avoided a similar fate. One mission called DAVINCI will investigate the atmosphere of Venus, while another called VERITAS will study its geology for clues about its ancient history. As one agency official put it: “We want to know what the heck went on.” It’s an exciting scientific undertaking, but in one sense we already know what the heck went on: Climate change. Venus is an unbearable hothouse because its atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide, the same heat-trapping greenhouse gas that humans have been pumping into Earth’s atmosphere for the last two centuries. Yes, Venus is also closer to the sun than Earth, but Mercury is closer to the sun than Venus, and Venus is still way hotter than Mercury because of the greenhouse effect. CO2 happens to be a remarkably efficient planet-warmer. Obviously, Venus has a heck of a lot more of it than we do, which is why temperatures on Earth don’t reach 860 degrees Fahrenheit, even in Florida in August. And it will be extremely interesting to know how Venus ended up that way; one of the mission’s principal investigators called Venus “a Rosetta stone for reading the record books of climate change.” But we already know what we need to know about climate change on Earth, which is that burning more fossil fuels and clearing more forests will increase global temperatures, which will produce nastier droughts, more intense storms, mass migrations, mass extinctions and all kinds of other unpleasant outcomes. We’re currently on track for about 5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming in this century, which wouldn't melt lead, but could transform the world's jungles into savannas, cripple agricultural yields, wipe out the polar ice caps, and create 50 meters of sea-level rise. You don’t have to be an astronomer to understand that space is very big, we are very small, and life is a blow-your-mind miracle. Maybe it once flourished on Venus. Maybe NASA’s geniuses will figure out what the heck went wrong there. But regardless of what they discover in the heavens, we’re making the earth a bit more like Venus every day. We’ve lucked into the ultimate Goldilocks planet, an improbably awesome refuge in a relentlessly inhospitable universe. The lesson of its evil twin is that we should probably stop setting it on fire. Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | |
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