Howie Carr: Stupidity not in short supply in Bay State

Has everyone forgotten the old political axiom?

Brian Walshe listens during his arraignment Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2023, at Quincy District Court in Quincy, Mass., on a charge of murdering his wife Ana Walshe. Not guilty pleas were entered on behalf of Walshe, 47. Ana Walshe was reported missing Jan. 4, 2023 by her employer in Washington, where the couple has a home. (Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool)© Provided by Boston Herald

“Never write when you can speak. Never speak when you can nod. Never nod when you can wink.”

And to add a new admonition: “Never Google when you can use Duck Duck Go.”

Because when you’re using Duck Duck Go, you can delete your questions, or so they say, anyway. But Brian Walshe, accused murderer of his wife in Cohasset, took no such precautions when he was asking those New Year’s questions on Google about how to dispose of a cadaver – and when he could inherit said corpse’s money.

It’s a terrible story, and I don’t mean to make light of it, but really, you have to wonder about a guy who was able to engineer art scams across three continents, but he couldn’t do any better than this at covering his tracks.

Then there’s the crackpot chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party, Jim “Jones” Lyons. A private detective is trying to collect a $53,217 bill for surveillance work he did for the hapless state GOP on the sex life of now-Gov. Maura Healey.

Lyons has been claiming he doesn’t owe the money because there’s no signed contract – nothing written, in other words. Which left the p.i. no choice but to turn over all his emails to the not-insane caucus of the state committee.

One of the emails to Lyons is “the weekly update” on the project that apparently didn’t exist.

Then on Oct. 13 Lyons emails back: “As discussed please do not do any additional work on the current project.”

In other words, Lyons stopped the project he claims wasn’t going on.

Then Lyons sends the p.i. this email: “On one sheet of paper please explain what you think we should highlight regarding your investigation.”

But I thought there was no investigation. Wait, though, there’s more. Lyons, a three-time political loser, also tells the p.i.: “I will forward to Tony Nader.”

Nader is the guy who runs the independent expenditure PAC that was supposed to be paying for the investigation that Lyons now says never was. Only one problem, and again, it involved Lyons’ habit of putting down everything on paper.

In this case, Lyons had earlier solicited a written opinion from the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) about whether a state committee like his could collaborate with PAC’s like the one run by… Tony Nader.

No, said OCPF. You may not collude. That’s in writing too. And Jim Jones Lyons took the official opinion and apparently put it in the circular file.

Finally we come to one Mohammed Chowdhury, formerly of Bangladesh, more recently of Roxbury, and now, for the next few years most likely in Club Fed.

Being a newcomer to our land, according to the federal complaint, perhaps he was not assimilated enough to realize that when one solicits a “hitman” to handle a murder in these here parts, you are almost certainly talking to an undercover cop.

Mohammed made so many errors in his attempt to have his wife rubbed out, it’s hard to know where to begin. First, he initially made a down payment of $500, after which the would-be assassin vanished.

You know, when you can’t trust a hitman, who the hell can you trust?

But Mohammed was not deterred. He still wanted to get rid of his wife, and her new boyfriend. After all, he told the cops, he had “paid money for her” in Bangladesh and then “she cheated on him with another guy and kicked CHOWDHURY out of the house.”

The first clue that something was not quite on the level might have been when two “hitmen” showed up at Charlie’s House of Pizza in Dorchester for the sit-down. A witness, in other words.

But he was careful, Mohammed was. When he arrived at the pizza palace, he “wrapped his face in a scarf… then requested that the meet be moved outside to the car because there may be people and cameras inside the restaurant.”

There was a third undercover cop in the wired-up car – another witness. Mohammed tried to bargain.

“(He) asked if he could make monthly payments because he does not make much money and worked in a convenience store.”

In other words, he wanted the hitmen to do a hit… on the arm. They told him no, they needed $10,000 per murder, with a deposit upfront.

“Yeah, I understand,” he admitted, “but uh, it’s too expensive for me, you know, because honestly, I don’t make that much money, you know? I work for $12 per hour, and that’s not his problem, you know, that’s just, like, my situation, you know? I thought it was going to be cheaper, you know?”

Hey pal, you’re not in Dhaka anymore, you know?

All this is transcribed into the complaint from video and audio.

It doesn’t sound like there was too much nodding or winking going on, although Mohammed did communicate with the hitmen on Telegram, which is described as “an encrypted messaging application… (that) sets messages to self-destruct.”

So Mohammed was at least one step ahead of Brian Walshe, the native-born rich kid.

Eventually, Mohammed bargained the cops down to a two-for-one deal – both cheaters were to get whacked for $10,000, with a grand down and the rest to be paid “in installments.”

The boyfriend would be whacked first – “he look like me, little bit beard… I want him first… Not killed, just, you know, just do something like, like you know, beat him up very well….”

This is starting to remind me of Anthony “the Saint” St. Laurent, the Mafia soldier from Providence whose g-i woes led to his underworld moniker, “Public Enema Number One.”

The Saint wanted to whack Bobby DeLuca. The Saint was in a wheelchair, doing a federal bid at Devens. So the G-men sent in a “hitman” to talk to the Saint.

He ordered up the hit on Bobby.

“I want you should shoot him in the head,” he instructed, “and then tell him, ‘This is from The Saint.’”

It always seemed to me that it would have been preferable for DeLuca to hear that this was from the Saint before, rather than after, his brains were blown out.

They let the Saint out of prison just before he died in 2016. Bobby DeLuca testified against Frank Salemme and seems to have disappeared into WitSec – Witness Security.

As for Mohammed, I don’t think he’ll do a lot of time. He checks a couple of boxes. His only drawback as a sympathetic figure seems to be that he actually worked for a living. That will be held against him, in a court of law in Massachusetts.

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FOCUS: Rory Finnin | Why Crimea Is the Key to Peace in Ukraine

 

 

19 January 23

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FOCUS: Rory Finnin | Why Crimea Is the Key to Peace in Ukraine
Rory Finnin, POLITICO
Finnin writes: "The cost has been unbearable. But the deep sacrifices and hard-won battlefield successes of the people of Ukraine have already dealt an epic moral and strategic blow to the Kremlin. Now a Russian military defeat may be on the horizon, provided the West continues to give Ukraine the support it needs."   

Peace is only possible if Ukraine keeps Crimea. Here's why.

The cost has been unbearable. But the deep sacrifices and hard-won battlefield successes of the people of Ukraine have already dealt an epic moral and strategic blow to the Kremlin. Now a Russian military defeat may be on the horizon, provided the West continues to give Ukraine the support it needs.

Whenever genuine peace talks begin, there’s little doubt that Crimea will feature high on the agenda. Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula is the ground zero of Russia’s current war of aggression. Since its seizure by Vladimir Putin’s troops in 2014, Crimea has been flooded with weapons, disinformation and fear. Its residents have been cut off from the rest of Ukraine and the wider world.

There had been a tendency in the West to look away from this Russian occupation of Crimea and shrug our shoulders. But with Ukrainian forces now staging a dogged counteroffensive and striking military targets inside Crimea, there seems to be precious little indifference today. Some pundits are calling on Kyiv to back down and dangle Crimea as a pawn in a future settlement with Russia. Amateur mediators like Elon Musk casually ponder surrendering the peninsula to Putin and calling it a day.

Such overtures are too quick to reward Russian aggression, which has razed entire cities and slaughtered thousands of Ukrainian civilians over the last year alone. And they are too slow to recognize that returning Crimea to Ukrainian control is not only a matter of moral and legal principle that would restore rights and freedoms to millions of people under the Kremlin’s occupation. It is also the only practical way any peace plan could succeed.

The truth is Crimea has no natural physical connection to Russia. Crimea is an extension of the Ukrainian mainland, and as such, it has been deeply connected to and dependent on Ukraine’s resources and trade for centuries.

Crimea’s historical experience of Russian and Soviet rule, meanwhile, has been one of persistent ethnic cleansing, violence and trauma. This helps explain why a majority of Crimea’s residents voted for Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It also helps explain why in 2013, prior to Russia’s invasion of the peninsula, a large majority of poll respondents in Crimea expressed the view that Crimea should be a part of Ukraine.

If the past teaches us anything, it is that Crimea suffers decline when separated from Ukraine, and that Crimea triggers conflict when occupied by Russia. Failing to understand this history is to sleepwalk into a future of more military escalation from the Kremlin.

In the spring of 2014, as Vladimir Putin’s “little green men” were invading Crimea, a Russian meme went viral on social media: KrymNash, or “Crimea Is Ours.” It was a classic imperialist message. Brash, insistent claims to conquered territory are what empires do to mask anxieties about their own political legitimacy. As Edward Said once remarked about empires and their colonies, “If you belong in a place, you do not have to keep saying and showing it.”

Russia is an expansionist land empire, and Crimea is one of its most prized colonies. The strategic port of Sevastopol is home to the Kremlin’s Black Sea fleet, while resort towns like Yalta on the mountainous southern coast offer Russian vacationers a rocky Riviera, an exotic playground of warm water beaches.

But behind Crimea’s postcard image lie much deeper realities of demography, history and geography that Russia has anxiously tried to conceal and erase for a long time. One of them is the Crimea of the Crimean Tatars, who are recognized as an indigenous people of Ukraine.

For centuries Crimea was the dominion of the Crimean Tatar khanate, a Sunni Muslim Turkic-speaking state aligned with the Ottoman Empire. Only after invading Crimea four different times did Catherine II succeed in dismantling the khanate in 1783 and in absorbing its territory into a Russian Empire on the march.

But what Catherine acquired in 1783 was not what Putin grabbed in 2014. The territory of the Crimean Tatar khanate she annexed included both the Crimean peninsula and the adjacent steppeland of today’s southern Ukraine, which stretches along the shores of the Black Sea and Azov Sea. In fact, much of the frontline of today’s war follows the contours of what were once the northern reaches of the Crimean Tatar khanate.

Decades after Catherine’s death, this Russian expansion came to a halt. In the mid-19th century, Crimea became the site of an imperial clash of the titans, with British, Ottoman and European allies facing off against Russia over control of the Black Sea region. The Crimean War was the world’s “first armchair war,” a drama and spectacle that reached audiences around the world in something akin to “real time” by way of new technologies like the telegraph. It ended with Russia’s defeat, but in the Western popular imagination, the war served to mingle Crimea and Russia on our mental maps. The effect has been lasting.

Despite defeat, the tsars held on to Crimea. But they never let go of anxieties about their control of the territory of the former Crimean Tatar khanate. In 1857, Tsar Aleksandr II took drastic measures to tighten his grip and explicitly ordered “the cleansing of the Tatars from the entire Crimean peninsula” and their replacement by Slavic “peasants from internal provinces” of the empire. At this time Crimean Tatars constituted nearly 80 percent of Crimea’s inhabitants. By 1900 they plummeted to roughly 25 percent of the population.

In the 20th century, Stalin sought to finish what Aleksandr II started. In May 1944, after the Nazis had retreated, Stalin deported the remaining Crimean Tatar population — approximately 200,000 people — to Central Asia and other far-flung parts of the Soviet Union. The sick and injured not fit for transit on train cars originally meant for livestock were “liquidated.” Those who openly defied the deportation order were shot. Stalin’s Crimean atrocity ultimately claimed tens of thousands of lives. Survivors spent the next half century in places like Uzbekistan fighting for the right to return to their homeland, which they won in the twilight of the Soviet period.

Stalin turned what had been a rudimentary system of ethnic cleansing under the tsars into a brutally efficient machine aimed at decimating the past as well as the present. Our maps today bear evidence of this destruction. Before 1944 there were around 2,000 towns and villages in Crimea bearing Crimean Tatar names. After the deportation, only a relative handful remained. Stalin consigned traces of the legacy of the Crimean Tatars to what Orwell would call a “memory hole.”

These changes took place with great speed. After demoting Crimea from the status of an Autonomous Republic to a mere oblast or “province” of Soviet Russia, Communist Party authorities ordered that Crimean Tatar names of cities, towns and villages be replaced with Russian ones. The daunting task fell to one man, the executive secretary of the newspaper Red Crimea, who had to rename a territory roughly the size of Massachusetts virtually overnight. For ideas, he flipped through a 19th-century fruiticulture book, on the one hand, and an account of the Red Army’s Crimean offensive against the Nazi Wehrmacht on the other.

That is why the names of so many places in Crimea strike visitors as bland and unimaginative today. Kiçkene, a village near Simferopol with only 156 recorded residents in 1939, became Malenkoe, “Smallville.” Qutlaq, a village in the Sudak region first cited in historical records in the 15th century, had a majority population of 1,636 Crimean Tatars in 1939. For assisting the Soviet partisan movement during the war, its residents had to watch as Nazi occupiers retaliated by burning the village to the ground. Qutlaq was renamed Veseloe, “Happytown.”

This campaign to efface the Crimean Tatar people from Crimea — both physically and symbolically — intersected with a campaign to replace them. Between 1944 and 1946 alone, the Kremlin distributed stolen Crimean Tatar homes and property to roughly 64,000 settlers who arrived from other Soviet oblasts. Tens of thousands more arrived in the 1950s. Stalinist officials explicitly described this project in revealing terms. It was an initiative “to make Crimea a new Crimea with its own Russian form.”

Such statements from Soviet authorities implicitly acknowledge that, prior to the 1940s, Crimea did not have a “Russian form.” They give the lie to claims that Crimea is “primordial” Russian territory, as Putin likes to insist. In the 1950s, the poet Boris Chichibabin walked through Crimea’s old Tatar streets and put it bluntly: “This is not Russia at all.”

Another truth about Crimea that Russians work hard to dismiss and conceal today is the peninsula’s dependence on the Ukrainian mainland.

But Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, learned the lesson up close and personal. In 1953 he travelled to Crimea with his son-in-law, the prominent Soviet journalist Aleksei Adzhubei. The trip was no vacation. According to Adzhubei, Khrushchev had a series of awkward encounters with crowds of post-war Soviet settlers, who made desperate pleas for more material assistance. Khrushchev was frustrated by all the complaints. “Why did you come here anyway?” Adzhubei recalls Khrushchev asking the settlers. “We were tricked!” they replied.

Adzhubei described Crimea at the time as a deeply “desolate” region still struggling to rebound from Nazi occupation and what he called Stalin’s “Tatar genocide,” which had not only depopulated the peninsula but deprived it of agricultural know-how in the cultivation of vineyards and tobacco fields.

By all accounts, the bleak conditions in Crimea shocked Khrushchev. According to Dmitrii Polianskii, who served as head of the Communist Party in Crimea between 1953 and 1954, Khrushchev came to the conclusion that “Russia had paid little attention to Crimea’s development” and that “Ukraine could handle it more concertedly.”

Khrushchev and other Soviet authorities learned the hard way that Crimea is not an “island” or a “jewel,” as Russian metaphors would have it, a beautiful but self-sufficient swath of territory. Instead, to reach for another metaphor, Crimea is a flower whose blossom floats in the Black Sea and whose stem reaches deep into the Ukrainian steppe, into the territory around today’s frontline cities of Kherson, Melitopol’, and Mariupol’.

The Crimean Tatars used to refer to this steppeland as the Özü qırları or Özü çölleri, the “Dnipro fields.” The reference to the Dnipro (or Dnieper), Ukraine’s largest river, was not ornamental. The Crimean peninsula is largely arid and warm, lacking abundant fresh water of its own. For centuries it has thirsted for the Dnipro’s water and relied on resource flows from mainland Ukraine.

In February 1954, Khrushchev’s regime took action to rejoin the blossom to its stem, announcing the formal transfer of the Crimean oblast from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine. During the formal Politburo proceedings, Soviet Russian politician Mikhail Tarasov justified the transfer by describing Crimea in the way we should understand it today: as “a natural continuation of Ukraine’s southern steppe.”

Adzhubei called the transfer a “business transaction” directed toward Crimea’s economic development. It produced quick dividends. In 1957, Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv oversaw the launch of what had been decades earlier merely a Russian pipedream: the construction of the North Crimean Canal, which expedited flows from the Dnipro river near Kherson to irrigate the entire peninsula. Crimea’s economy, particularly its agricultural sector, improved dramatically. So did its tourism industry. High-rise sanatoria for the Soviet elite popped up along the southern coast, driving the image of a Soviet Shangri-La along the Black Sea.

Only in later years would Ukraine’s success in developing Crimea be denigrated and mythologized as Khrushchev’s “gift” of Crimea to Ukraine – or worse, as Khrushchev’s “mistake.” The transfer of Crimea to Ukraine was no mistake. It was a rescue.

Connecting the dots between Crimea’s geography, history and scarred demography helps explain some of the trajectories of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. It also illustrates the need for Ukraine’s absolute victory.

Putin’s 2014 annexation operation ended up disconnecting Crimea from resource flows from Ukraine, including the North Crimean Canal, which still supplied 85 percent of fresh water to the peninsula. His massive vanity bridge, stretching 12 miles over the Kerch Strait from the eastern edge of Crimea to mainland Russia, was completed in 2018 but could not come close to compensating for these losses. That’s why in February 2022 — on the very first day of the full-scale invasion — Putin’s forces used Crimea as a launchpad to tear into Ukraine’s Kherson oblast and seize control of this critical water and resource supply. The move was an implicit recognition of a fundamental reality: Crimea needs to be connected to the Ukrainian mainland to thrive or even survive.

Russia’s hold on Crimea is, therefore tenuous. Any proposed peace settlement that codifies its occupation in exchange for a cessation of hostilities would be a ticking time bomb. The truth is that Ukraine will never be stable and peaceful with a Russian-occupied Crimea, and a Russian-occupied Crimea will never be resource-secure without Ukraine.

Crimean Tatar activist and Amnesty International prisoner of conscience Emir-Usein Kuku frames the problem with a sardonic question that refers to the Russian security and intelligence agency, the FSB.

“Doesn’t it seem strange,” he asked during his illegal trial in Russia in 2019, “that in the 23 years under Ukrainian authority in Crimea there were no ‘extremists,’ no ‘terrorists,’ and no ‘acts of terror’ for that matter? But then Russia arrived with its FSB, and suddenly all of these things appeared together?”

The track record is clear. Ukraine stabilized Crimea; Russia has turned it into a hinge of expansionist aggression. In 2014 the world stood by and let it happen in the vain hope of easy peace.

We cannot afford to make the same mistake now. Half-measures and short-sighted compromises are a recipe for endless war against a state bent on savage imperialist conquest. The difficult path to lasting peace is Ukraine’s de-occupation of Crimea and an unmistakable defeat of Russian aggression.

Europe and the United States should know well the urgency of a total defeat of the aggressor. In his address to Congress in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt pledged that, “no matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”

Now as then, only absolute victory will do. Only a defeated, demilitarized Russia and a fully liberated Ukraine — whole and integral within its internationally recognised borders — can promise long-term stability and an enduring peace.

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POLITICO NIGHTLY: Don’t freak out over the debt limit … yet

 

View in browser   BY BEN WHITE KOCH FUNDED PROPAGANDA:  DON'T BELIEVE IT! Presented by Americans for Prosperity With help from Ari Hawkins Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images ‘EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES ’ — The U.S. breached its statutory $31.4 trillion “debt ceiling” today. And precisely nothing happened. Markets paid it little mind. Even senior White House aides privately expressed fairly breezy confidence to Nightly that they will somehow find a path with a raucous House majority to raise the borrowing cap by mid-to late summer when it will really matter. “The media wants to turn this into a central daily issue,” one top White House aide told Nightly. “It isn’t. The mechanics will come together towards the end.” Between now and sometime this summer, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen can execute “extraordinary measures” to keep paying the nation’s bills on time and avoid a catastrophic and unprecedented debt default by Uncle Sam. This mainly entails green eyeshade accounting moves Treasury can make that are too dull to unpack here. (There are explainers all over the Internet.) In her letter to Congress today , Yellen suggested such measures may last until early June. Other forecasters say it could be as late as September. The so-called “X date,” when extraordinary measures will fail and the U.S. would default on outstanding debt, depends largely on the flow of 2022 tax receipts into Treasury’s coffers the next couple of months. It’s hard to nail with any precision. But the “X date” — to steal from the “X-Files” — is “out there.”   And it is right and good and just to fear coming even close to blowing past it. We came close in 2011 and got downgraded by bond rating firm Standard & Poor’s, the first such blow to America’s iron-clad AAA credit rating in history, rattling markets and hiking government borrowing costs. But it’s way too soon to look for windows to leap out. The arguments for not freaking out yet are stronger than those for going bonkers. So let’s start with … Why you shouldn’t worry : The short answer is that a debt limit beach — even one that includes attempts to “prioritize” payments to existing bondholders to avoid technical default — is pretty much unthinkable. It would likely send markets tanking, spike borrowing costs and undermine an economy that is already teetering near recession as the Fed boosts interest rates to fight inflation. The U.S. Treasury bond market is the foundation of the global financial system and rates on the 10-year and other heavily traded Treasury securities help determine all kinds of other borrowing costs. Treasury bonds are also considered among the safest investments in the world. Throwing that away on a fight over discretionary spending levels would be, to put it mildly, completely insane. The White House for its part, may be staying calm but it’s still taking things very seriously. Ithas a troika of officials — including Yellen, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and legislative affairs director Louisa Terrell — assigned to getting a debt limit hike or suspension passed in a timely manner with little or nothing in the way of spending concessions to Republicans. The trio meet weekly in White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s office. In the White House’s view, Republicans are on very poor political ground. Unlike 2010, they scored no big mandate for spending cuts in the 2022 midterms. Republicans raised the debt limit repeatedly under President Donald Trump without any spending cuts. And they were expected to romp in 2022 and only barely snared the House. Democrats, meanwhile, will hammer them for the next several months about holding the economy hostage over giving Treasury the ability to pay for spending commitments Congress has already made . The White House team figures there will be a path to a relatively clean hike featuring Democrats and moderate Republicans from districts President Joe Biden carried. Which gets us to … Why you should worry a bit . The main reason is that, in order to get the gavel, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) agreed that he would not push through any debt limit hike without significant spending cuts. And his speakership hangs on just one Republican deciding to force a vote to push him out. So hardline fiscal conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus will have outsized power. And making a deal that features mostly Democratic votes seems like it will be quite difficult. This drama will run for the next five months and possibly more . It may look very grim and hopeless at times. It has before. But the U.S. has never defaulted. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics knows it simply can’t be allowed to happen. So it’s reasonable — for now at least — to believe 2023 won’t be the year that Congress decides to vaporize the economy for absolutely no good reason. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at bwhite@politico.com or on Twitter at @morningmoneyben .     KOCH FUNDED PROPAGANDA: DON'T BELIEVE IT! A message from Americans for Prosperity: DeOnomic crises of our time? For too long, conventional wisdom has been that divided government is a free pass for gridlock. You can be the Congress that bucks that trend and makes life more affordable. Americans need you to succeed. Will you? Learn more at www.Dear118Congress.com.   WHAT'D I MISS? — Supreme Court could not identify who shared draft abortion opinion: An investigation by the Supreme Court has been unable to determine who disclosed to POLITICO last year a draft opinion overturning the federal constitutional right to abortion, the court said in a statement today. The internal probe zeroed in on 82 employees who had access to electronic or hard copies of the draft majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade , but “was unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence,” the high court said. — Judge denies Navarro effort to dismiss contempt case for defying Jan. 6 committee: A federal judge today rejected a last-ditch effort by Peter Navarro , a former adviser to Trump, to dismiss the contempt of Congress charges he faces for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee, keeping his late January trial on track to begin. U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta said Navarro had failed to prove that the former president wanted him to assert executive privilege over his potential testimony — a key claim that Navarro has long maintained justified his decision to simply blow off the select committee’s subpoena. — HUD revamps Obama-era discrimination rule in rebuke to Trump: The Biden administration today renewed a push to require cities to address patterns of residential segregation , revamping a regulation that Trump had scrapped in a bid to woo suburban voters in the 2020 campaign. The new proposed rule from the Housing and Urban Development Department incorporates the framework of the 2015 rule, an Obama-era effort to ensure that state and local governments were meeting their obligation to “affirmatively further fair housing” under the 1968 Fair Housing Act. — Santos denies having been a drag performer: Embattled Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) today shot down claims that he once performed as a drag queen, the latest allegation about the freshman member whose fabrications on his own resume have embroiled him in scandal in recent weeks. “The most recent obsession from the media claiming that I am a drag Queen or “performed” as a drag Queen is categorically false,” Santos said in a tweet. “The media continues to make outrageous claims about my life while I am working to deliver results. I will not be distracted nor fazed by this.”   STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING : What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today .     AROUND THE WORLD German tanks and soldiers during a NATO military exercise. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images PLEASE AND TANK YOU — A group of European nations is working to form a coalition to pressure Berlin to allow them to send their German-made tanks to Ukraine , as frustration mounts over Berlin’s insistence that the U.S. donate their tanks first, write Alex Ward , Lara Seligman and Paul McLeary . The group, which will likely be led by Poland, could take its first steps at a Friday meeting of 50 nations committed to helping Ukraine in Ramstein, Germany, during a regular gathering of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group. The move is part of a new multi-front campaign by U.S. and Western allies to persuade German leaders to change their minds on the tank issue. Twelve countries operate Leopard tanks, and many have said they want to donate them to Ukraine ahead of an expected spring offensive. But due to expert rules, they need Germany’s permission before they can transfer the vehicles. SEE-EU LATER — Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said his country was “not enthusiastic” about European Union membership anymore and hit out at critics of Vladimir Putin, writes Wilhelmine Preussen . Speaking at a POLITICO panel event at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Vučić said: “We are not as enthusiastic as we used to be, in a way that the European Union is not as enthusiastic about us as we thought it was.” He added he was “pessimistic” about Serbia entering the European Union any time soon . Serbia was originally identified as a potential EU candidate country in 2003 and Belgrade put in a formal application for membership in 2009. But accession talks have dragged on, with Serbia’s closeness to Russia an increasingly important sticking point. The EU has made clear that would-be members must follow its line on foreign policy and sanctions. While Belgrade has said it supports Ukraine, it has refused to impose sanctions on Moscow, its longtime ally. ARDERN OUT — New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will resign from the top job “no later” than February 7, she announced today at a press conference at her party’s annual caucus meeting, saying she didn’t have “enough in the tank” to continue, writes Zoya Sheftalovich . Ardern, who became the youngest female head of government when she was elected prime minister in 2017 aged 37, confirmed New Zealanders will head to the polls for a national election on October 14 this year, and that she would not stand for reelection. Speaking to her 4-year-old daughter Neve, Ardern said she was looking forward to spending time with her when she started school this year. In a message to her fiancé Clarke Gayford, she said: “Let’s finally get married.” Ardern said that while she knew there would be “much discussion in the aftermath of this decision as to what the so-called real reason was, I can tell you that what I’m sharing today, is it. The only interesting angle that you will find is that after going on six years of some big challenges, I am human, politicians are human. We give all that we can for as long as we can. And then it’s time. And for me, it’s time,” she said. Ardern led New Zealand through the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as several crises such as the terror attack on two Christchurch mosques in March 2019 and the White Island volcanic eruption in December 2019.       KOCH FUNDED PROPAGANDA: DON'T BELIEVE IT! A message from Americans for Prosperity: T    NIGHTLY NUMBER 10.1 percent The percentage of American workers who were members of a union in 2022 , dropping from 10.3 percent in 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the lowest figure since the agency began tracking the number nearly four decades ago, and it comes despite the highest labor union approval rate — 71 percent, according to Gallup — since 1965. RADAR SWEEP STICKY FINGERS — We’re living in the age of the shoplifter . Products from chain stores are constantly ending up on the street marked down, or just stolen. So, after years of ignoring the issue, stores like Walgreens are attempting to crack down, keeping their goods under lock and key. But this leads to its own set of problems: if you’re a paying customer, it’s much more difficult to get what you want. James D. Walsh reports for Curbed on the wide world of shoplifting, pawnshops and how these practices affect the rest of us.   LISTEN TO POLITICO'S ENERGY PODCAST: Check out our daily five-minute brief on the latest energy and environmental politics and policy news. Don't miss out on the must-know stories, candid insights, and analysis from POLITICO's energy team. Listen today .     PARTING WORDS John Kerry, U.S. special climate envoy, during a discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. | Markus Schreiber/AP Photo DAVOS DEALINGS — On the penultimate day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, geo-political tensions came to a slow boil at one of the world’s largest gatherings of titans of industry and heads of state, Ari Hawkins writes for Nightly. John Kerry, the U.S. special climate envoy, defended this year’s decision to host United Nations climate talks in the United Arab Emirates and said the oil-rich nation is rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels. Hours later, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, alongside three other young female climate activists, slammed the special climate envoy’s argument and called the decision “completely ridiculous” and presented a petition demanding energy companies stop new coal, oil and gas projects. Earlier this week, POLITICO reported on tensions between the president of France and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and rising pressure on Germany to send tanks to Ukraine. Organizers say this year’s theme “The New Global Context” refers to “the period of profound political, economic, social and technological change that the world has entered.” Today’s panel lineup also included sessions on LGBTQ+ equality, global cooperation on climate change and Ukraine’s path to recovery amid the Russian invasion. Nightly caught up with Alex Ward , who has spent the past week in Davos, to explain the conference and its relevance to global politics. This interview has been edited. What are the big takeaways or news coming out of Davos this week? As with all conferences, the events are less interesting than what happens around the event. High-powered people say a lot of nice things and rarely act on them. There’s some paeans to collective action, but generally, most Davos attendees make statements on how they will tackle climate change or poverty or global hunger, for instance. It’s really a good opportunity for businesses to do their work and for politicians to hold many meetings in a row. We also stirred up trouble ourselves, with a deeply reported piece on who would replace Klaus Schwab, the longtime WEF leader. It was the talk of the conference. Who exactly attends conferences like the World Economic Forum? The world’s elite. Globalization of true believers. Oligarchs. Business leaders, world leaders and journalists. It’s really the world gathering for a week. How likely is collective action?  In terms of new action, that really depends. It’s always the question after the WEF. Will the well-heeled and well-meaning do what they say, or will world events end the unity shown in the Swiss Alps? History suggests the worst. But there’s always room for surprise. Did someone forward this email to you?  Sign up here .     KOCH FUNDED PROPAGANDA: DON'T BELIEVE IT! A message from Americans for Prosperity: Congress at a Crossroads: Americans are facing a cost-of-living crisis. Divided government can’t be an excuse to do nothing. The 118th Congress can drive a policy agenda to make life more affordable by reining in spending to get inflation under control, cutting red tape to bring down energy costs, and expanding opportunities for fulfilling work. But to do that, Washington needs to rise above the political dysfunction to get things done. Americans can’t afford to wake up two years from now to a country on the same path. Learn how we can change course at www.Dear118Congress.com.     Follow us on Twitter Charlie Mahtesian @PoliticoCharlie Calder McHugh @calder_mchugh Katherine Long @katherinealong Ari Hawkins @_AriHawkins   FOLLOW US

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