By Dana O’Neil, CNN

(CNN) — The great ones make it look so easy that we forget how hard it is to be exceptional.

Secretariat running like a machine in the Belmont and Michael Phelps gobbling up gold medals in 2008; Tom Brady engineering seven Super Bowl victories and Simone Biles coming back for more golds after battling the twisties; Carl Lewis winning golds in 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996 and Katie Ledecky lapping Olympians like she’s out for a rec league swim.

There is, however, a fragility to true excellence. As thin, you might say, as a skate blade or a ski’s edge.

What Ilia Malinin failed to do in his free skate at these Olympics and what Mikaela Shiffrin has struggled to do at her last Games and in her first event here do not erase anything that they have accomplished elsewhere. They are champions.

Alas, the reality of sports demands that true greatness is measured only on the biggest stage, where the physical strength and innate talent gifted to every superior athlete takes a backseat to mental fortitude. It becomes more about compartmentalizing while simultaneously absorbing the moment, blocking out the noise and still embracing the pressure.

It is true for every athlete in every sport, the delineation between having an asterisk – the greatest who never won – to just being the greatest.

But reaching that singular plateau is especially tricky for Olympic athletes. Like Malinin and Shiffrin, they can achieve record-setting numbers in the off years between the quad cycle only to have it all rendered irrelevant by one misstep in the Games.

In the course of her track career, Mary Decker Slaney set 17 official and unofficial world records and became the first woman to run a sub 4:20 in the mile. Even now, more than 40 years later, the lasting image of her career is of Decker laying on the track in anguish and tears after colliding with Zola Budd in the 1984 Olympic 3,000-meter run. She never got a gold.

Everyone remembers the “Miracle on Ice.” No one talks much about the heavily-favored Russian team that had won five of the previous six gold Olympic gold medals only to lose to the upstart Americans.

Shiffrin, who has succeed and failed in three Games prior to this one, talked about the unique spotlight of the Olympics before racing here. She said she wished more people recognized what happens during the longevity of a career versus the quadrennial, three-week window of the Olympics. But she’s also smart enough to understand that’s not how it works.

Sometimes, Olympians are like basketball teams that win big in the regular season only to get bounced in the NCAA Tournament or the NBA Playoffs.

Kentucky won 38 games in 2014-15 and lost one, but the one came in the national semifinal to Wisconsin. The 2015-16 Golden State Warriors went a record 73-9 in the regular season and were 3-1 up in the NBA Finals – but they unbelievably lost to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in seven games.

No banner, no glory.

Pressure is a privilege?

”I really chose to believe that it’s a beautiful gift, despite maybe feeling a little bit of pressure at times,’’ Shiffrin said.

“Knowing that judgments can be made on the sole moment when there’s so much else that has gone into the course of the last four years, in the last eight years and 16 years of my career so far, so pressure can exist. Billie Jean King said pressure is a privilege, but maybe that doesn’t always feel that way.’’

Malinin discovered the enormity of the Games only when it was too late. “It’s not like any

By Catherine Nicholls, CNN

(CNN) — Russian opposition figure and outspoken Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny, who died two years ago, was killed while in prison by a lethal toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America, five European countries have said in a statement Saturday.

Analyses of samples taken from Navalny’s body have “conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine,” the statement said. The substance is not found naturally in Russia, it added.

The five countries – UK, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands – said Moscow “had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison” to Navalny while he was held in a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle.

Only “the Russian state had the combined means, motive and disregard for international law” to contribute to Navalny’s death, they added.

Russian officials have repeatedly denied being responsible for Navalny’s death. CNN has reached out to the Kremlin for comment.

The announcement came during the Munich Security Conference in Germany, during which Navalny’s death was announced in 2024.

During the event two years ago, Navalny’s wife Yulia Navalnaya came on stage at the conference in tears and received a standing ovation.

In a post on X Saturday, Navalnaya said that she “was certain from the first day that my husband had been poisoned, but now there is proof: (Russian President Vladimir) Putin killed (Alexey) with chemical weapon.”

“I am grateful to the European states for the meticulous work they carried out over two years and for uncovering the truth,” she said, adding: “Vladimir Putin is a murderer. He must be held accountable for all his crimes.”

When Navalny died, the Russian prison service said that he had “felt unwell after a walk” and “almost immediately” lost consciousness.

He had been imprisoned in an Arctic penal colony since returning to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he had been treated after being poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent.

A joint investigation by CNN and the group Bellingcat implicated the Russian Security Service (FSB) in the poisoning. It found that the FSB had formed an elite team specializing in nerve agents that trailed Navalny for more than three years.

Russia denied involvement then, too, with Putin saying at the time that if the Russian security service had wanted to kill Navalny, it “would have finished” the job.

Navalny, who had organized anti-government street protests and used his blog and social media to expose alleged corruption in the Kremlin and in Russian business, was viewed as one of the most serious threats to Putin before his death.

In a 2018 interview with CNN, he said that he had a “clear understanding” of the risks involved in

By Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst

(CNN) — Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill arrived at the Supreme Court shortly before 10 a.m. on January 9 and took a seat in the spectator section of the columned courtroom. When US Solicitor General John Sauer, the Trump administration’s top courtroom lawyer, entered a few minutes later, he cut across the room to warmly greet her.

Murrill was waiting for ruling in a redistricting case that could unwind protections for Blacks and Latinos under the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The decision could simultaneously boost the GOP’s chances in the US House of Representatives this year.

Louisiana, backed by the Trump administration and several other Republican-controlled states, has its eye on the upcoming midterm elections and told the justices it wanted a decision by early January as it seeks to replace its current congressional map – which includes two court-ordered majority Black districts – with a new map for this year’s midterm elections.

But it did not take long after the justices ascended the bench that day for the gavel to fall. There was no decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Nor has one come since.

Speculation has only grown about the case and its consequences for voters and control of the US House, where the GOP holds a slim margin. (The justices announced on Friday that they will be issuing more opinions later this month.)

The case tests the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2, which prohibits race discrimination, and a remedy that judges have often required when they find that maps have diluted the voting power of Blacks or Hispanics. Such “majority-minority districts” are intended to give them a chance to elect a candidate of choice.

States have been closely watching for Supreme Court action, some of them anticipating an opportunity for relief from earlier court orders and a chance to redistrict before November’s midterm elections. Each week that passes, however, makes it harder for some places to consider such an option. In Louisiana, where primary deadlines were pushed back last year to potentially take advantage of a Supreme Court ruling, deadlines are closing.

Irrespective of what happens in the current cycle, the eventual Supreme Court decision is certain to give states more latitude for 2028 and future elections. That’s because over the past two decades the conservative court has been steadily erasing the racial remedies of the Voting Rights Act and deferring to state legislatures.

So far, the court’s actions in the Louisiana dispute suggest the majority will make it more difficult to bring Section 2 claims. The only question is to what degree. At the most extreme, the court could outright invalidate Section 2’s protection for minorities in the redistricting process.

After a round of oral arguments in an earlier court session, the justices suddenly scheduled a second hearing in Louisiana v. Callais and broadened their review of the Voting Rights Act. Based on that second round of arguments, held last October, the justices appear ready to further limit the protections of the law considered an exemplar of the nation’s civil rights era. The VRA was passed after the March 7, 1965, “Bl

The post One for Jeff appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

Por Ángela Reyes Haczek, CNN

De Venecia a Río de Janeiro, de Barranquilla a Nueva Orleans, hay una celebración que cada año atraviesa las barreras de edad, género, raza y nacionalidad y convoca a millones: el carnaval. Para rastrear su origen hay que hacer un largo viaje en el tiempo.

El origen histórico de la festividad no está claro, según la Enciclopedia Britannica, que identifica dos posibles raíces: las fiestas dedicadas al dios Saturno en el Imperio romano pagano y una celebración primitiva que “honraba el comienzo del nuevo año y el renacimiento de la naturaleza”.

Hacia esta antigüedad se remonta la New Carnival Company, una organización sin ánimo de lucro inglesa, que sitúa el antecedente más remoto en el antiguo Egipto. Allí, afirma, se llevaba adelante un festival pagano llamado Sham El-Nessim que celebraba el comienzo de la primavera y en que se encuentra la primera semilla de nuestra fiesta.

Siglos después —con las campañas de Alejandro Magno mediante— los griegos adoptaron la fiesta, y luego los romas, dice la organización. Se la llamó Bacanal, en honor al dios Baco, también conocido como Dionisio (un “dios de la naturaleza, de la fecundidad y la vegetación, especialmente conocido como dios del vino y el éxtasis”, tal como lo describe Britannica). Esas fiestas contaban con abundante canto, baile y vino y un “comportamiento de excesos”, dice la New Carnival Company.

Otros rasgos del carnaval pueden remontarse a la Fiesta de los Locos, dice la organización. En este celebración popular en la Edad Media se elegían un papa u obispo de broma y se parodiaban los rituales eclesiásticos, según la Enciclopedia Britannica. “La gente llevaba máscaras de animales y ropa de mujer, cantaba canciones obscenas, recitaba discursos disparatados y corrían como locos por las calles”, cuenta por su parte la organización promotora de la celebración del carnaval.

La fiesta se prohibió en el siglo XVI, pero los carnavales modernos heredaron la sátira y el ridículo.

Como ha sucedido con otras festividades paganas, los cristianos adoptaron este festival y le otorgaron su propio sentido, al que es posible acercarse a través de la palabra. Aunque su origen exacto es “incierto”, según Britannica, puede provenir de dos expresiones en latín, carnem levare o carnelevarium, que significan quitar la carne.

Esto coincide con que el hecho de que el carnaval es la celebración previa al inicio de la cuaresma, un período de austeridad de 40 días previo a la Pascua en el que los católicos se abstenían de comer carne, entre otras prácticas ascéticas.

Para la comprensión del carnaval moderno más popular del mundo, el de Río de Janeiro, entre otros, hace falta sumar otra pieza: las tradiciones africanas.

Con la llegada de Cristóbal Colón a América y la conquista del territorio, el carnaval cruzó el océano, explica la New Carnival Company.

Los dueños de las plantaciones celebraban hasta el miércoles de cenizas con desfiles por las calles y bailes con disfraces que remitían a las tradiciones del Viejo Mundo. Mientras tanto, los esclavos traídos de África también celebraban fiestas con sus propias tradiciones, que estaban vinculadas a la quema y la cosecha de la caña de azúcar y donde las máscaras y las mímicas eran clave.

Eventualmente, tras su liberación, se incorporaron a la celebración del carnaval, que hoy es en el mundo una amalgama de distintas tradiciones.

En EE.UU., por ejemplo, el Mardi Gras (martes gordo o graso), en el último día del periodo de Carnaval, se celebró por primera vez en 1703, y el desfile más icónico, el de Nueva Orleans,Read more