St. Paul City Council OKs variances for United Village restaurant building by Allianz Field

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The St. Paul City Council voted this week to support two zoning variances requested by the developer behind a proposed restaurant building within United Village, the development area around Allianz Field.

The single-story “Shops in the Green” building will be located west of Simpson Street, between Spruce Tree Avenue and Shields Avenue, north of a secondary restaurant building, both of which would open onto patios along the Great Lawn. Both zoning variances were previously denied by the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals.

The zoning code requires that 30% of the wall area along the ground floor on all new commercial buildings be covered in window or door openings, but Snelling-Midway Redevelopment LLC requested that requirement be lowered to 19.6% on the northern building’s northern façade along Spruce Tree Avenue.

The city code also requires a primary pedestrian entrance on street-facing facades such as Spruce Tree Avenue.

Mike Hahm, a consultant for the developer, noted that the building will already have two other entrances, making a third entrance redundant and difficult to monitor.

‘Unique circumstances’

Council Member Anika Bowie, who represents the neighborhood, said given the restaurant building’s general orientation toward the Great Lawn, as well as its sizable mural on the northern façade, “unique circumstances” made the added windows and entrance impractical.

“This plan is going to include a large scale art display, green space, and space for … small businesses,” Bowie said. “The architectural design within the Super Block is very comprehensive.”

Council President Mitra Jalali noted the extra 10% of door and window coverage would detract from the mural. The Union Park District Council had opposed the variance request pertaining to the window and door opening requirement, but supported the variance eliminating the primary pedestrian entrance on Spruce Tree Avenue.

The Board of Zoning Appeals had previously approved four other variance requests reducing the required door and window openings on the building’s southern and eastern façades, as well as on the southern restaurant building’s eastern façade.

The council voted 6-0 on Wednesday to support the developer’s appeals. Council Member Nelsie Yang is on maternity leave.

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Supreme Court sides with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, spurning a conservative attack

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By MARK SHERMAN (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a conservative-led attack that could have undermined the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The justices ruled 7-2 that the way the CFPB is funded does not violate the Constitution, reversing a lower court and drawing praises from consumers. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion, splitting with his frequent allies, Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, who dissented.

The CFPB was created after the 2008 financial crisis to regulate mortgages, car loans and other consumer finance. The case was brought by payday lenders who object to a bureau rule that limits their ability to withdraw funds directly from borrowers’ bank accounts. It’s among several major challenges to federal regulatory agencies on the docket this term for a court that has for more than a decade been open to limits on their operations.

The CFPB, the brainchild of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, has long been opposed by Republicans and their financial backers. The bureau says it has returned $19 billion to consumers since its creation.

Unlike most federal agencies, the consumer bureau does not rely on the annual budget process in Congress. Instead, it is funded directly by the Federal Reserve, with a current annual limit of around $600 million.

The federal appeals court in New Orleans, in a novel ruling, held that the funding violated the Constitution’s appropriations clause because it improperly shields the CFPB from congressional supervision.

Thomas reached back to the earliest days of the Constitution in his majority opinion to note that “the Bureau’s funding mechanism fits comfortably with the First Congress’ appropriations practice.”

In dissent, Alito wrote, “The Court upholds a novel statutory scheme under which the powerful Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) may bankroll its own agenda without any congressional control or oversight.”

The CFPB case was argued more than seven months ago, during the first week of the court’s term. Lopsided decisions like Thursday’s 7-2 vote typically don’t take so long, but Alito’s dissent was longer than the majority opinion, and two other justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote separate opinions even though they both were part of the majority.

Consumer groups cheered the decision, as did a bureau spokesman.

“For years, lawbreaking companies and Wall Street lobbyists have been scheming to defund essential consumer protection enforcement,” bureau spokesman Sam Gifford said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has rejected their radical theory that would have devastated the American financial markets. The Court repudiated the arguments of the payday loan lobby and made it clear that the CFPB is here to stay.”

Jesse Van Tol, president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said the decision upholding the consumer bureau’s funding structure would have positive effects across the U.S. economy.

“It’s always nice to see the courts get something right — especially in this tawdry circumstance where payday loan predators sought to wriggle out of basic oversight using absurd distortions of law and fact,” Van Tol said in a statement.

While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and some other business interests backed the payday lenders, mortgage bankers and other sectors regulated by the CFPB cautioned the court to avoid a broad ruling that could unsettle the markets.

In 2020, the court decided another CFPB case, ruling that Congress had improperly insulated the head of the bureau from removal. The justices said the director could be replaced by the president at will but allowed the bureau to continue to operate.

___

Lisa Jarvis: A shocking number of doctors don’t understand menopause

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A new analysis of a controversial study affirms something menopause experts have long argued: For many women, the benefits of short-term hormone replacement therapy outweigh their risks.

The news drops at a time when menopause is having a moment. Celebrities from Halle Berry to Gwyneth Paltrow are talking openly about their journeys, while businesses, the medical establishment and the government are waking up to the needs of the 75 million women in the U.S. experiencing perimenopause, menopause or are postmenopausal.

But it’s a moment that must be backed by solid data, not guesswork. A recent AARP survey estimates that menopause costs the U.S. about $1.8 billion in worker productivity losses and $24 billion in related health care.

To be clear, hormones are not a panacea, nor are they the right choice for every woman. But the messaging around the use of estrogen and progestin has been so muddled for so long that the treatment has become emblematic of the overall state of health care for women who have passed their reproductive years.

Women entering midlife simply aren’t being given straightforward, accurate information from their doctors — too often, they’re told nothing at all, or worse, given the wrong message.

All of the confusion began back in 2002, when the world of women’s health was rocked by the abrupt cessation of a large study called the Women’s Health Initiative. Designed to understand whether hormones could lower a woman’s risk of certain diseases, the researchers instead found treatment was raising the risk of heart disease, strokes and breast cancer. The message was that women taking hormones should stop them and others shouldn’t start.

That altered the course of care, depriving a generation of women from therapy that is known to treat common menopause symptoms, like hot flashes, night sweats, vaginal dryness and bone loss.

The new data, shared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, came from following the women enrolled in the study for 20 years. Researchers found that decades on, hormone therapy could offer meaningful benefits while posing few risks for women in the early stages of menopause. It is also safe to use for most women in their 60s and 70s who are experiencing more severe symptoms, like hot flashes and night sweats.

Importantly, HRT did not increase the risk of heart attacks. Nor did short-term use of both estrogen and progestin raise the risk of breast cancer. Moreover, since the Women’s Health Initiative was halted, a raft of newer products have emerged to offer different delivery methods — often at much lower doses — that might further minimize their health risks, though the authors noted more study is needed.

For menopause experts, this update feels like old news. But having it stated in plain language in a medical journal is still a big deal.

Not all doctors have kept up with the times. Lisa Larkin, president of The Menopause Society, says she regularly hears from women whose physicians refuse to prescribe HRT, with one recently telling her that her doctor claimed to adhere to a “hormone-free practice.”

The lingering divisiveness was underscored by a series of editorials published in March in The Lancet arguing that menopause is a natural process that has become over-medicalized. The editors focus their critique on HRT, suggesting companies are appropriating “feminist narratives” to push hormone therapy without acknowledging the risks.

Of course, we should be wary of movements that want to turn a normal life process into a disease or sell us something to fix a problem they’ve invented. But the authors go on to perpetuate myths about the universal dangers of HRT — now firmly debunked. And just because symptoms are “natural” doesn’t mean they aren’t uncomfortable or disruptive — or undeserving of treatment.

Rather than being over-treated, most women “are left to navigate their perimenopausal and menopausal years with no medical guidance whatsoever,” as a group of Stanford University menopause specialists noted in their response to The Lancet.

Doctors in the U.S. aren’t sufficiently educated to offer women good advice. One survey of U.S. medical trainees found that only 7% said they felt sufficiently trained to help women during menopause. Another survey of OB-GYN trainees found that less than a third were exposed to a menopause curriculum during their residency. Yes, you read that right: Even some gynecologists aren’t offered guidance on ushering women through perimenopause and menopause.

That’s left women to fill in the blanks themselves. They might find solace in the upswell of specialists taking to social media to put out accurate information about menopause. Or they could consult a cluster of new books (from “The Menopause Manifesto” to “The New Menopause”) that empower women with solid information and the right questions to ask.

Still, I worry about how much work we are putting on patients. Menopause is a transition that affects half the population; women shouldn’t have to rely on social media, which can have as many charlatans as true experts, nor should they have to sift through the medical studies themselves.

A few burgeoning efforts could help. President Joe Biden’s recent executive order creating a fund to close the knowledge gap around women’s health includes money for improving our understanding of and care for menopause. And Congress should pass a bill introduced recently by a bipartisan group of senators intended to support training, research and awareness around menopause with $275 million over five years.

It’s a start. For a transition that half the population will experience, it should not be so hard to have a thoughtful conversation with a knowledgeable physician.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

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Daniel DePetris: Vladimir Putin has much to celebrate. But the Russian people don’t

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, the man who plunged Russia into a war that has proved far costlier than he anticipated, is riding high at the moment.

Last week, Putin formally took office for a fifth term after a presidential election that the United States, Europe and international monitors widely regarded as illegitimate. The inauguration ceremony was, shall we say, Putin-esque. The 71-year-old, modern-day Russian czar strolled into the grand hall past the honor guard with a spring in his step, inherently confident in his decisions and even more confident of his stature as the only person in Russia today to keep the country secure.

“You, the citizens of Russia, have confirmed that the country is on the right course,” Putin told the delegates during his inauguration speech. Of course, the dissidents, journalists and anti-war protesters locked up in Russia’s penal system would beg to differ.

It’s not a mystery as to why Putin is feeling pretty good with himself. Compare today with last year, and the difference is rather stark. Last summer, the normally decisive strongman was thrust into the biggest challenge of his nearly quarter century in power when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary leader of the Wagner Group, ordered thousands of his militiamen to storm back into Russia to depose the Russian defense establishment. The Russian security forces were largely missing in action; Prigozhin’s troops shot down several Russian military helicopters and came within 150 miles of Moscow. Putin, caught unprepared, had to cut a deal with Prigozhin to turn his troops around and stop the mutiny. All of this came as Russian troops in Ukraine were in the beginning stages of defending against a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Now, however, Putin doesn’t have these immediate troubles. Prigozhin, who caused the Kremlin so much grief last year, is dead, the victim of an August plane crash the U.S. intelligence community concluded was orchestrated by Putin’s inner circle. The Wagner Group, which at times competed with the Russian army for men, is now under the control of the Russian state. The war in Ukraine still isn’t a bright spot for Putin, but it’s brighter than it was last year. Over the weekend, Russian forces took nine villages in northern Ukraine, forcing thousands of civilians to flee and prompting Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s top military commander, to admit that the situation had ” significantly worsened” for Ukrainian forces.

Things aren’t particularly bad for the Russian economy, at least over the short term. Putin’s economic team has managed to adapt to the U.S. and European sanctions enacted after the invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. The ruble, which lost much of its value in the weeks after the invasion, has recouped losses and has been quite stable this year. The Russian oil industry, the lifeblood of the Russian economy, has largely balanced out its losses in Western markets by pumping more to the East, with China and India more than happy to scoop up the discounts Moscow is offering. Russia’s fossil fuel export revenues actually increased in March as sea-born crude rose by 13%.

The International Monetary Fund predicts Russia’s gross domestic product will increase by 3.2% this year, which if true would mean that Russia’s growth rate will exceed America’s.

It all sounds pretty uplifting from Putin’s perspective. But what’s good for Putin isn’t necessarily good for Russia or the Russian people as a whole.

Take the Russian economy, for instance. While it’s true that growth figures are on the upswing and Russian crude is still being exported around the world, there is no such thing as permanence in economics. Indeed, Russia’s economic upswing is a bit deceptive because it’s intricately tied to the price of crude and the war in Ukraine. Crude can be notoriously volatile as any car owner in the summer can attest.

For a petro-state like Russia, a few months of low crude prices can translate into tens of billions of dollars in losses, putting added strain on the budget and forcing the government to adopt one of three strategies: lower spending, raise taxes or run a deficit. Over the long term, crude will become less vital to the global economy as countries around the world invest in green-energy technology, forcing Putin (or whoever eventually replaces him) to diversify on the fly.

Banking productivity on the war isn’t exactly a winning strategy, either. Sure, it’s paying off at the moment as the Russian military industrial complex is in full swing churning out artillery shells, tanks, planes and armored personnel carriers. But how long can this last, particularly when Russia is losing its workforce in the trenches of Ukraine? Putin is trapped in a paradox of his own making: Continuing the war is a boon to the Russian economy, but over time, the economy suffers because men who in more peaceful times would be working back in Russia are instead dying in Ukraine.

The Russians are in effect sacrificing their future for the present, worsening a three-decade-long demographic crisis in the process. The future is coming quickly. Even as the IMF gave the Russian economy high marks this year, it projected Russian growth to decrease by more than 40% in 2025.

Putin may be loving life right now. But he is digging a big hole for the country he claims to love so much. And his successor will eventually have to find a way to climb out of it.

Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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