Archives for February 2021

MADRID (AP) — Atlético Madrid was held to a 1-1 draw at Levante on Wednesday in a Spanish league match postponed from the second round, a result that still extended its lead over Real Madrid to six points.

Seeking its first league title since 2014, Atlético still has a game in hand compared to its city rival. Diego Simeone’s team is unbeaten in 11 straight league matches but has drawn two of its last three.

The match had been postponed as Atlético and other teams were given extra time to rest after participating in European competitions later into last season because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Atlético had won nine of its last 10 league matches, with the only setback a 2-2 home draw against Celta Vigo two rounds ago in a game in which it conceded a late equalizer.

“It was a difficult opponent that has been playing well recently,” Simeone said. “It was a fair result between two teams that played a good match.”

Levante took the lead through Enis Bardhi after a breakaway in the 17th minute. Marcos Llorente equalized for the visitors in the 37th with a shot from outside the area that deflected off a defender before going in.

Ángel Correa had a great chance to score the winner early in the second half but missed the net from close range with only the goalkeeper to beat off the rebound of a shot by Luis Suárez.

Atlético forward Saúl Ñíguez had a goal disallowed for offside near the end and Atlético goalkeeper Jan Oblak made a great save in the final minutes to keep the match level.

“We had some clear chances but also could have lost the match at the end,” Simeone said, noting that his team needs to improve defensively after conceding eight goals in the last six matches.

Levante and Atlético will meet again on Saturday in Madrid in the 24th round.

Atlético has a tough schedule ahead, with matches against Chelsea in the Champions League and Villarreal and Real Madrid in the Spanish league.

Simeone’s team saw the return of João Félix after a positive coronavirus test, though he started on the bench. Moussa Dembélé, Thomas Lemar and Héctor Herrera remained out because of the virus. Defender José María Giménez was back in the squad after an injury.

Levante, sitting in 11th place, hasn’t won in its last seven league matches against Atlético, with five losses and two draws. It is winless in the league since a victory at Real Madrid three rounds ago, though it recently made it to the semifinals of the Copa del Rey for the first time in 86 years.

Midfielder Koke Resurrección made his 484th official appearance for Atlético to surpass Tomás Reñones and become the player with the second most matches in the club’s history, behind the 550 of Adelardo Rodríguez.

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More AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

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Tales Azzoni on Twitter: http://twitter.com/tazzoni

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WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Central European leaders pushed Wednesday for faster deliveries of COVID-19 vaccines from every reliable manufacturer to speed up inoculations which they said is the way to conquer the pandemic and jump-start Europe’s economic recovery.

The leaders of Hungary, Slovakia and Poland said they support purchasing vaccines from manufacturers regardless of “geopolitics” provided they are safe and effective. Hungary is the European Union’s first and so far only member state to administer Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine without waiting for approval from the European Medicines Agency.

“There is no Eastern or Western vaccine, there is only a good or a bad vaccine,” Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban told a news conference in Krakow, Poland. “It is not good to be too political about the health security of the people.”

The Hungarian leader said procuring safe and effective vaccines quickly is now more important than their cost.

Slovakia’s Prime Minister Igor Matowic and Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland backed Orban. The EU has not been receiving the full scheduled amounts of some 2 billion vaccine doses it has signed agreements for with Western drug makers.

The leaders were speaking at a meeting to mark the 30th anniversary of the Visegrad Group, an informal body of political and economic cooperation between Poland, Hungary, The Czech republic and Slovakia. Hosted by Morawiecki, it brought together Orban, Matovic and Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis.

European Council President Charles Michel, who attended the celebrations, said EU leaders will discuss next week ways of increasing vaccine production and of speeding up inoculations.

The EU announced Wednesday that it has agreed to buy a further 300 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine and was pumping almost a quarter of a billion euros (almost $300 million) into efforts to counter the threat of coronavirus variants that are spreading throughout the continent.

The development came on top of an announcement by Pfizer and BioNTech that they had signed a deal to deliver an additional 200 million doses of their vaccine to the bloc.

Michel hailed the V4 group’s development and role in the EU but stressed that it must be “based on principles of democracy.”

The words seemed directed at Hungary and Poland that are seen as the EU’s recalcitrant members, often criticized for perceived political interference in areas like the judiciary and media freedom.

Orban said earlier Wednesday that the role of Central European nations is to help protect the EU from external threats but also against the bloc’s own “tendencies” at empire building, while guarding their own independence.

The leaders also signed a declaration of cooperation in the cyber sector.

The V4 was founded in February 1991 from a declaration of cooperation that then-Presidents Lech Walesa of Poland, Vaclav Havel of the former Czechoslovakia and Jozsef Antall of Hungary signed in Visegrad, Hungary. Those countries joined the EU in 2004.

Poland currently holds the group’s 12-month rotating presidency and will hand it over to Hungary on July 1.

After Wednesday’s meeting, Poland’s Morawiecki and Hungary’s Orban held bilateral talks and attended a ceremony at Wawel Castle for handing over a suit of armor made for 16th century King Sigismundus II Augustus that had been housed in a Budapest museum.

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Rush Limbaugh, the talk radio host who ripped into liberals and laid waste to political correctness with a gleeful malice that made him one of the most powerful voices in politics, influencing the rightward push of American conservatism and the rise of Donald Trump, died Wednesday. He was 70.

Limbaugh said a year ago that he had lung cancer. His death was announced on his show by his wife, Kathryn.

Unflinchingly conservative, wildly partisan, bombastically self-promoting and larger than life, Limbaugh galvanized listeners for more than 30 years with his talent for sarcastic, insult-laced commentary.

He called himself an entertainer, but his rants during his three-hour weekday radio show broadcast on nearly 600 U.S. stations shaped the national political conversation, swaying ordinary Republicans and the direction of their party.

Blessed with a made-for-broadcasting voice, he delivered his opinions with such certainty that his followers, or “Ditto-heads,” as he dubbed them, took his words as sacred truth.

“In my heart and soul, I know I have become the intellectual engine of the conservative movement,” Limbaugh, with typical immodesty, told author Zev Chafets in the 2010 book “Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One.”

Forbes magazine estimated his 2018 income at $84 million, ranking him only behind Howard Stern among radio personalities.

Limbaugh took as a badge of honor the title “most dangerous man in America.” He said he was the “truth detector,” the “doctor of democracy,” a “lover of mankind,” a “harmless, lovable little fuzz ball” and an “all-around good guy.” He claimed he had “talent on loan from God.”

Long before Trump’s rise in politics, Limbaugh was pinning insulting names on his enemies and raging against the mainstream media, accusing it of feeding the public lies. He called Democrats and others on the left communists, wackos, feminazis, liberal extremists, faggots and radicals.

When actor Michael J. Fox, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, appeared in a Democratic campaign commercial, Limbaugh mocked his tremors. When a Washington advocate for the homeless killed himself, he cracked jokes. As the AIDS epidemic raged in the 1980s, he made the dying a punchline. He called 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton a dog.

He suggested that the Democrats’ stand on reproductive rights would have led to the abortion of Jesus Christ. When a woman accused Duke University lacrosse players of rape, he derided her as a “ho,” and when a Georgetown University law student supported expanded contraceptive coverage, he dismissed her as a “slut.” When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Limbaugh said flatly: “I hope he fails.”

He was frequently accused of bigotry and blatant racism for such antics as playing the song “Barack the Magic Negro” on his show. The lyrics, set to the tune of “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” describe Obama as someone who “makes guilty whites feel good” and is “Black, but not authentically.”

Limbaugh often enunciated the Republican platform better and more entertainingly than any party leader, becoming a GOP kingmaker whose endorsement and friendship were sought. Polls consistently found he was regarded as a voice of the party.

His idol, Ronald Reagan, wrote a letter of praise that Limbaugh proudly read on the air in 1992: “You’ve become the number one voice for conservatism.” In 1994, Limbaugh was so widely credited with the first Republican takeover of Congress in 40 years that the GOP made him an honorary member of the new class.

During the 2016 presidential primaries, Limbaugh said he realized early on that Trump would be the nominee, and he likened the candidate’s deep connection with his supporters to his own. In a 2018 interview, he conceded Trump is rude but said that is because he is “fearless and willing to fight against the things that no Republican has been willing to fight against.”

Trump, for his part, heaped praise on Limbaugh, and during last year’s State of the Union speech, awarded the broadcaster the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, calling his friend “a special man beloved by millions.”

Both men ultimately found Florida more comfortable than New York: The former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate is eight miles down the same Palm Beach boulevard as Limbaugh’s $50 million beachfront expanse.

Trump called into Fox News Channel to discuss his friend’s death Wednesday, saying they last spoke three or four days ago, lauding him as “a legend” with impeccable political instincts who “was fighting till the very end.”

Former President George W. Bush said Limbaugh “spoke his mind as a voice for millions of Americans.”

Limbaugh influenced the likes of Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and countless other conservative commentators who pushed the boundaries of what passes as acceptable public discourse.

His brand of blunt, no-gray-area debate spread to cable TV, town hall meetings, political rallies and Congress itself, emerging during the battles over health care and the ascent of the tea party movement.

“What he did was to bring a paranoia and really mean, nasty rhetoric and hyperpartisanship into the mainstream,” said Martin Kaplan, a University of Southern California professor who is an expert on the intersection of politics and entertainment and a frequent critic of Limbaugh. “The kind of antagonism and vituperativeness that characterized him instantly became acceptable everywhere.”

Such criticism echoed again and again, but Limbaugh seemed only to push further, assembling an ever-growing list of those branded enemies, of the issues the public was purportedly being fooled on, and the lies the mainstream media was supposedly feeding.

He offered a litany of it to his listeners, as in a 1991 broadcast he heavily quotes in his first book, “The Way Things Ought to Be.” In that single show, in one breathless segment, he railed against the homeless, AIDS patients, criticism of Christopher Columbus, aid to the Soviet Union, condoms in schools, animal rights advocates, multiculturalism, the social safety net and on and on.

His foes accused him of trafficking in half-truths, bias and outright lies — the very tactics he decried in others. Al Franken, the comedian and one-time senator, came out with a book in 1996 called “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.”

Earlier this year, Limbaugh took a dismissive tone to those calling for an end to violence after the ugly scenes of a mob insurrection at the Capitol, comparing the rioters to the colonists who sparked the American Revolution.

“We’re supposed to be horrified by the protesters,” Limbaugh told his listeners the next day after the Jan. 6 attack. “There’s a lot of people out there calling for the end of violence … who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable regardless of the circumstances.”

“I am glad Sam Adams … Thomas Paine … the actual tea party guys … the men at Lexington and Concord, didn’t feel that way,” he added.

In 2003, Limbaugh admitted an addiction to painkillers and went into rehab. Authorities opened an investigation into alleged “doctor shopping,” saying he received up to 2,000 pills from four doctors over six months.

He ultimately reached a deal with prosecutors in which they agreed to drop the charge if he continued with drug treatment and paid $30,000 toward the cost of the investigation.

He lost his hearing around that time. He said it was from an autoimmune disorder, while his critics said hearing loss is a known side effect of painkiller abuse. He received cochlear implants, which restored his hearing and saved his career.

A portly, cigar-chomping, round-faced figure, Limbaugh was divorced three times, after marrying Roxy Maxine McNeely in 1977, Michelle Sixta in 1983 and Marta Fitzgerald in 1994. He married his fourth wife, the former Kathryn Rogers, in a lavish 2010 ceremony featuring Elton John. He had no children.

Rush Hudson Limbaugh III was born Jan. 12, 1951, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to the former Mildred Armstrong, and Rush Limbaugh Jr., who flew fighter planes in World War II and practiced law at home.

Rusty, as the younger Limbaugh was known, was chubby and shy, with little interest in school but a passion for broadcasting. He would turn down the television during St. Louis Cardinals baseball games, offering play-by-play, and gave running commentary during the evening news. By high school, he had snagged a radio job.

Limbaugh dropped out of Southeast Missouri State University for a string of DJ gigs, from his Missouri hometown, to McKeesport, Pennsylvania, to Pittsburgh and then Kansas City. Known as Rusty Sharpe and then Jeff Christie on the air, he mostly spun Top 40 hits and sprinkled in glimpses of his wit and conservatism.

“One of the early reasons radio interested me was that I thought it would make me popular,” he once wrote.

But he didn’t gain the following he craved and gave up on radio for several years, beginning in 1979, becoming promotions director for baseball’s Kansas City Royals. He ultimately returned to broadcasting, again in Kansas City and then Sacramento, California.

It was there in the early 1980s that Limbaugh really garnered an audience, broadcasting shows dripping with sarcasm and bravado. The stage name was gone.

Limbaugh began broadcasting nationally in 1988 from WABC in New York. While his know-it-all commentary quickly gained traction, he was dismayed by his reception in the big city. He thought he would be welcomed by Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather.

“I came to New York,” he wrote, “and I immediately became a nothing, a zero.”

Ultimately, Limbaugh moved his radio show to Palm Beach and bought his massive estate. Talkers Magazine, which covers the industry, said Limbaugh had the nation’s largest audience in 2019, with 15 million unique listeners each week.

“When Rush wants to talk to America, all he has to do is grab his microphone. He attracts more listeners with just his voice than the rest of us could ever imagine,” Beck wrote in Time magazine in 2009. “He is simply on another level.”

Limbaugh expounded on his world view in the best-selling books “The Way Things Ought to Be” and “See, I Told You So.”

He had a late-night TV show in the 1990s that got decent ratings but lackluster advertising because of his divisive message. When he guest-hosted “The Pat Sajak Show” in 1990, audience members called him a Nazi and repeatedly shouted at him.

He was fired from a short-lived job as an NFL commentator on ESPN in 2003 after he said the media had made a star out of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb because it was “very desirous that a Black quarterback do well.” His racial remarks also derailed a 2009 bid to become one of the owners of the NFL’s St. Louis Rams.

“Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and just think to yourself, `I am just full of hot gas?’” David Letterman asked him in 1993 on “The Late Show.”

“I am a servant of humanity,” Limbaugh replied. “I am in the relentless pursuit of the truth. I actually sit back and think that I’m just so fortunate to have this opportunity to tell people what’s really going on.”

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Associated Press writer Terry Spencer contributed to this report.

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