Biden vows Putin will pay, MLB cancels Opening Day: 5 Things podcast
On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Biden vows Putin will pay
Russia's invasion of Ukraine was a major focus of President Joe Biden's first State of the Union address. Plus, senior tech and economic opportunity reporter Jessica Guynn has ways to protect yourself against Russian or any cyberattacks, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testifies before Congress amid high inflation, baseball reporter Gabe Lacques updates us on the MLB lockout and today is Ash Wednesday.
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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Wednesday, the 2nd of March 2022. Today, one week of Russian invasion, plus initial games from the upcoming MLB season have been canceled, and more.
Here are some of the top headlines:
- President Joe Biden gave his first State of the Union address last night. In addition to promising to check Russian aggression, Biden also touched on soaring inflation and the remnants of the coronavirus pandemic.
- The death toll has now risen to 14, amid severe flooding in Eastern Australia, and up to eight inches of rain are forecast for Sydney late today into tomorrow.
- And the moon this week will get slammed with three tons of space junk. A leftover rocket is set to smash onto the far side of the moon at 5,800 miles an hour on Friday. Experts believe China launched it nearly a decade ago.
It's been one week since Russia invaded Ukraine, and attacks are increasingly taking aim at Ukraine's largest cities. The second largest, Kharkiv, was hit by missile fire this week, including an attack on its central square that killed at least six people.
[Sound of explosions and people scrambling].
That was the scene as rescuers entered a bombed-out building in Kharkiv. A 40 mile convoy of hundreds of Russian tanks also remains outside the capital of Kyiv. It's not clear how many people have been killed since Russia sparked violence last week. Neither Russia nor Ukraine is releasing clear troop casualty numbers, but the UN Human Rights Office said it's recorded 136 civilian deaths. Some Western officials have estimated that Russia has lost thousands of troops, but tactics may be shifting away from the ground to the air with bombardments, like the one in Kharkiv continuing in major cities.
Britain's Defense Ministry said it has seen an increase in Russian air and artillery strikes on populated urban areas over the past two days. Ukrainian officials said five people were killed in an attack on a TV tower near central Kyiv yesterday. And the nearby Babi Yar Holocaust memorial was also hit. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke to the European Parliament by video yesterday. He applied for EU membership and asked EU lawmakers for help amid the invasion.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy:
[Speaking Ukrainian]
Taylor Wilson translating for Volodymyr Zelenskyy:
"We are fighting for our rights, for our freedom for life, for our life. And now we are fighting for survival with our motivation at its peak, but we are fighting also to be equal members of Europe."
Taylor Wilson:
Meanwhile, Russia is becoming increasingly isolated by the rest of the world. The country has almost no international friends at the moment beyond a handful like China, Belarus and North Korea. And sanctions are crippling the economy. Leading Russian bank, Sberbank, announced earlier today that it's pulling out of European markets amid tightening Western sanctions. For his part, President Joe Biden, during his State of the Union Address last night, condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin directly.
President Joe Biden:
Six days ago, Russia's Vladimir Putin sought to shake the very foundations of the free world thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways, but he badly miscalculated. He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead, he met with a wall of strength he never anticipated or imagined, he met the Ukrainian people. From President Zelenskyy to every Ukrainian, their fearlessness, their courage, their determination, literally inspires the world.
Taylor Wilson:
Many Ukrainian civilians continue to huddle underground in basements and other structures. And many essential workers are continuing their work amid the violence. At least 660,000 refugees have fled Ukraine. And that number is expected to continue to rise.
Security professionals are urging Americans to take immediate steps to protect themselves from a higher risk of Russian cyberattacks after the invasion of Ukraine. Senior Tech and Economic Opportunity Reporter Jessica Guynn has more.
Jessica Guynn:
Figuring out how to protect ourselves is hardly anyone's idea of a good time. And most of us don't really know how to do it or where to even start. And the problem kind of seems overwhelming, especially since a lot of these threats are going to be against critical infrastructure like power plants and so on, or against big corporations or institutions, and there's just not a lot we can do to prevent our local hospital or city agency from getting targeted by ransomware.
So that's why I asked a whole bunch of security experts like, so what seriously can we do to safeguard our devices, our computers, our laptops, our tablets, our phones, because we're so dependent on technology? And the answers are actually pretty simple and straightforward. And to get that extra layer of protection is to do the things that people have been telling us to do for a really long time, like use multifactor authentication so that you have to get a code or a text to log in that the app has a way of verifying that it's really you. Update your malware and all your operating systems and make sure that's done automatically so you don't miss any of that.
If you can afford it, subscribe to a password manager. If you can't, use strong, unique passwords, stop reusing them all over the place and then do that common sense stuff, like you get an email, there's a link in there, an attachment, don't just click on things. Take a beat, practice some mindfulness, figure out if you should really be doing that. If there's important stuff that you have, back it up, back it up multiple places, back it up in the cloud, back it up in an external drive. And if you're traveling, use a VPN to protect yourself, if you're using public wifi and make sure your home wifi is secure. Lock it down, make sure it's password protected.
I think the final thing is also, we're going to be hearing a lot of stuff that's being propagated by different sides and the conflict. And it's really important to have your bull... detector on all of the time, because there's going to be a lot of effort to manipulate public sentiment. And the less we contribute to that by sharing it willy-nilly with our friends and family and so on before we know it's real or legit, that way we can do our part in keeping things a little more sane.
Taylor Wilson:
You can find Jessica's full story in today's episode description.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will testify before Congress today. His appearance in front of the House Financial Services Committee comes as the stock market tumbles under the prospect of higher interest rates and the war in Eastern Europe. In January, Powell indicated that a rate hike was all but certain this month.
Jerome Powell:
At the Federal Reserve, we are strongly committed to achieving the monetary policy goals that Congress has given us, maximum employment and price stability. Today, in support of these goals, the Federal Open Market Committee kept its policy interest rate near zero and stated its expectation that an increase in this rate would soon be appropriate. The committee also agreed to continue reducing its net asset purchases on the schedule we announced in December, bringing them to an end in early March. As I will explain, against a backdrop of elevated inflation and a strong labor market, our policy has been adapting to the evolving economic environment and it will continue to do so.
Taylor Wilson:
But since then, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has driven up oil and gas prices and made supply chain bottlenecks even worse, which could mean even higher inflation. At the same time, the invasion raises the possibility of slower economic growth if soaring prices and supply chain issues cut down on spending and falling stocks weaken consumer and business confidence.
Yesterday, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that he was canceling Opening Day, which was originally scheduled for March 31st, as well as the first two series of the regular season. That comes as the League's lockout and labor dispute with players continues with no new collective bargaining agreement in sight. That could mean the first regular season games lost to a labor dispute since 1995. A deal did appear to be within reach as of Monday night. So then what happened? Producer PJ Elliot sat down with Baseball Reporter Gabe Lacques to find out.
Gabe Lacques:
Well, first of all, the representatives for the players caucused with all 30 team representatives, union reps from every individual team. So you had Max Scherzer and executive director Tony Clark of the union and others in the meeting. MLB sweetened its offer a little bit, but still fell far short of what the union wanted. And the union went back and caucused with their people overnight and came back the next morning and presented a counter offer. The way MLB negotiates is if you don't accept what they offer, they take that as hostility, as opposed to just what we might call negotiations. So things went a little bit sideways from there. A couple of more offers were exchanged. They got a little bit closer on many of the core economic issues, but ultimately not quite enough to close the gap. And we'll see how many games this cost us and how long it takes to kind of get this settled.
PJ Elliot:
So where do things stand now and what happens next?
Gabe Lacques:
Yeah, so everybody's leaving Florida and both the union and MLB are headquartered in New York. They're both heading up there. They are expected to sit down again on Thursday. If we're treating this like a game of tennis, it would be the union's turn to whack the ball over the net and maybe come forth with another offer. Probably won't happen that quickly. I imagine they'll sit down and get the niceties out of the way and maybe talk philosophically a bit and then perhaps prepare a counter offer from there.
The key thing for fans to keep in mind is MLB has estimated there to be a five-day lag between agreement on a collective bargaining agreement and the time by which training camps could open. So as Rob Manfred, Commissioner, said it today, if an agreement is somehow miraculously reached on Thursday, the soonest that camps could open would be March 8th. And then that wouldn't leave a whole heck of a lot of time to ramp up for Opening Day.
So if you think that an agreement means that the doors are going to fling open to all the training camps and Spring Training begins, not quite. It does take a few days to ratify it and all sorts of other wonky labor stuff, and of course, the logistics of getting 100 people to one place, although I'm sure the majority of the players are already hovering around Florida and Arizona as they do anyway. So yeah, keep that in mind, just add five more days from an agreement to the point which training camps can open.
Taylor Wilson:
You can follow along with Gabe's work on the lockout over on Twitter @GabeLacques.
Today is Ash Wednesday. For Christians, it marks the start of the 40-day season of Lent. On Ash Wednesday, a priest or minister puts ashes on a worshiper's forehead in the shape of a cross. That signifies a person's acknowledgement of their sins, the same sins that Christians believe Jesus died on the cross for. Christians show repentance for their sins during Lent with prayer, fasting and other sacrifices. The six-week Lent period wraps up with Easter next month.
Taylor Wilson:
Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us on whatever your favorite podcast app is. Thanks as always to PJ Elliot for his great work on the show. And I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from Paste BN.