Opinion | How Many Will Die for the Dow? - The New York Times - 0 views
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What was the strategy Trump abandoned? It was the same strategy that has worked in other countries, from South Korea to New Zealand. First, use a lockdown to “crush the curve”: reduce the number of infected Americans to a relatively low level. Then combine gradual reopening with widespread testing, tracing of contacts after an infected individual is identified, and isolation of those who might spread the disease.
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In short, the hastily constructed Covid-19 safety net, while full of holes, has nonetheless protected many Americans from extreme hardship.
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that safety net will be snatched away over the next few months unless Congress and the White House act to maintain it. Small businesses have only an eight-week window to convert loans into grants, which means that many will start laying off workers within a month or so. Expanded unemployment benefits will expire on July 31.
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Trump cancels summit but says he will invite Putin to later G7 event | World news | The... - 0 views
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Donald Trump has been forced to cancel a planned face-to-face summit of G7 leaders in June and now wants to host an expanded meeting in September dedicated to countering China, to which Vladimir Putin would be invited.
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Reports suggest the call between Merkel and Trump on Thursday was stormy, ranging over German plans for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Hong Kong, and the potential health risks of a face-to-face summit.
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Merkel and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, will also be reluctant to provide Trump with a prestigious platform to set out his China strategy weeks before the US presidential election. The Republicans see a tough approach towards China as an election-winning formula, even though his likely Democrat challenger, Joe Biden, is also sharply critical of Beijing’s modern direction.
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2 Hurricanes Devastated Central America. Will the Ruin Spur a Migration Wave? - The New... - 0 views
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The storms displaced hundreds of thousands of people, creating a new class of refugees with more reason than ever to migrate north and setting up an early test for the incoming Biden administration.
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“This is where I live,” said Jorge Suc Ical, standing atop the sea of rocks and muddy debris that entombed his town. “It’s a cemetery now.”
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The storms, two of the most powerful in a record-breaking season, demolished tens of thousands of homes, wiped out infrastructure and swallowed vast swaths of cropland.
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Trump's Campaign Saw an Opportunity. He Undermined It. - The New York Times - 0 views
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If Mr. Trump recovered quickly from his bout with the coronavirus and then appeared sympathetic to the public in how he talked about his own experience and that of millions of other Americans, he could have something of a political reset.
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While that was the hope, it was severely undermined over the last few days by the president’s own behavior — no more so than Monday when he tweeted to the nation “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life!” without acknowledging that, as president, he gets far better care than the average citizen. His comments signaled a far likelier reality: that the erratic handling of his illness by Mr. Trump and his aides will remind voters of his administration’s failures and efforts to play down the deadly pandemic for six months.
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almost immediately ripped off his mask for the cameras once there. He then filmed a campaign-style video from the balcony, saying that he was “better” and that “maybe I’m immune, I don’t know” to the ravages of the virus.
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Trump's Return Leaves White House in Disarray as Infections Jolt West Wing - The New Yo... - 0 views
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The West Wing was mostly empty, cleared of aides who were sick or told to work from home, and staff in the White House residence were in full personal protective equipment.
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Aides said the president’s voice was stronger after his return from the hospital Monday night, but at times he still sounded as if he was trying to catch air.
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Four more White House officials tested positive, including Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, bringing to 14 the number of people carrying the virus at the White House or in the president’s close circle.
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U.S. States Face Biggest Cash Crisis Since the Great Depression - WSJ - 0 views
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“All you can do is grip the bar as tight as you can, make the smartest decisions you can in real time, plan for the worst and be surprised at something less than worst,” said Mr. Lembo.
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Nationwide, the U.S. state budget shortfall from 2020 through 2022 could amount to about $434 billion, according to data from Moody’s Analytics, the economic analysis arm of Moody’s Corp.
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States are dependent on taxes for revenue—sales and income taxes make up more than 60% of the revenue states collect for general operating funds, according to the Urban Institute. Both types of taxes have been crushed by historic job losses and the steepest decline in consumer spending in six decades.
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Russia preparing to attack Ukraine by late January: Ukraine defense intelligence agency... - 0 views
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Russia has more than 92,000 troops amassed around Ukraine’s borders and is preparing for an attack by the end of January or beginning of February, the head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency told Military Times.
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Such an attack would likely involve airstrikes, artillery and armor attacks followed by airborne assaults in the east, amphibious assaults in Odessa and Mariupul and a smaller incursion through neighboring Belarus
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Russia’s large-scale Zapad 21 military exercise earlier this year proved, for instance, that they can drop upwards of 3,500 airborne and special operations troops at once, he said.
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Why Russia's War in Ukraine Could Run for Years - WSJ - 0 views
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Russia’s war on Ukraine is in danger of becoming a protracted struggle that lasts several more years. The reason isn’t just that the front-line combat is a slow-moving slog, but also that none of the main actors have political goals that are both clear and attainable.
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Ukraine’s central war aim—restoring its territorial integrity—is the clearest, but appears a distant prospect given the limits of Western support. The U.S. and key European allies such as Germany want to prevent Russia from winning, but fear the costs and risks of helping Ukraine to full victory.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declared aims are the most elastic, ranging from ambitious imperial schemes to more limited land grabs, and shifting with Russia’s military fortunes. His long-term objective of bringing Ukraine back under Moscow’s sway looks unrealistic now, but Ukrainians believe he would treat smaller gains as mere steppingstones, rendering treacherous any peace based on concessions.
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Opinion | U.S. Military Aid Is Killing Civilians in Gaza - The New York Times - 0 views
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The United States currently provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion in annual military assistance, the most to any country per year, with the recent exception of Ukraine. High levels of assistance date back roughly to the 1970s and reflect a longstanding American bargain with Israel of security for peace — the notion that the more secure Israel feels, the more concessions it will be able to make to the Palestinians.
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Since the mid-1990s, the United States has also been a major sponsor of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority Security Forces, providing training and equipment on the theory that as the Palestinians stand up, the Israelis can stand down.
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In both cases, the rationale for U.S. security assistance is fatally flawed.
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Taliban Renege on Promise to Open Afghan Girls' Schools - The New York Times - 0 views
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The schools were supposed to reopen this week, and the reversal could threaten aid because international officials had made girls’ education a condition for greater assistance.
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Under the Taliban’s first rule, from 1996 to 2001, the group barred women and girls from school and most employment.
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The news was crushing to the over one million high school-aged girls who had been raised in an era of opportunity for women before the Taliban seized power in August last year — and who had woken up thrilled to be returning to classes on Wednesday.
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As U.S. sends Ukraine military aid, a lobbying coalition is forged - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Ukrainian civil society, she said, has “this approach, which is called ‘we are a drop in the ocean,’ which means that we all, all the efforts, are modest because we are not gods, we are human beings,” Matviichuk said. “But together … we can change the reality for better.”
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As part of a nationwide campaign, they also aired television and radio spots and bought billboard ads highlighting that Russian forces have destroyed hundreds of churches and tortured and killed Christian pastors.
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One such billboard popped up across the street from the church Johnson attends in his district. “We pushed on every lever,” said Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy at Razom
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Mike Johnson's Ukraine Moment - WSJ - 0 views
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Mr. Biden has abdicated his obligation to build bipartisan support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine. He has made no show of outreach to the Republicans who have voted for U.S. support to Ukraine.
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Voters hold Presidents responsible for trouble on their watch, and they know Mr. Biden has framed the fight in Ukraine as an inflection point in history in the struggle between freedom and autocracy. The White House is so far indicating that it won’t abide a trade on natural gas, but is the President’s election-year LNG sop to the climate lobby really worth an historic blow to U.S. credibility if Ukraine falls to Mr. Putin?
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n the end we hope he will let the House work its will in a floor vote on the Senate’s aid bill. House Republicans can rightly sell the vote as a down payment on U.S. rearmament on everything from 155mm ammunition to Patriot missiles. Ditto for more funding for Israel’s air defenses and Taiwan that is also part of the Senate bill thanks to Republicans like Alaska’s Dan Sullivan.
U.N. Court Acquits 2 Serbs of War Crimes - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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a United Nations court on Thursday acquitted two close aides of the former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, spurning the prosecution’s demand for life sentences for his once all-powerful secret police chief and the chief’s deputy.
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The judges, voting 2 to 1, found that the men had formed, directed and paid special secret combat units during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia from 1991 to 1995, but that they were not criminally liable for crimes committed by those units.
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Legal experts expressed astonishment at the acquittals, which apparently rested on new standards applied by senior judges.
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For Obama's Second Term, Start Here - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Since President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” the United States has spent some $16 trillion or more on means-tested programs. Yet the proportion of Americans living beneath the poverty line, 15 percent, is higher than in the late 1960s in the Johnson administration.
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What accounts for the cycles of poverty that leave so many people mired in the margins, and how can we break these cycles? Some depressing clues emerge from a new book, “Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance,” by Susan Neuman and Donna Celano.
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there’s a difference in parenting strategies, the writers say. Upper-middle-class parents in America increasingly engage in competitive child-rearing. Parents send preschoolers to art classes and violin lessons and read “Harry Potter” books to bewildered children who don’t yet know what a wizard is.
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The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama's Foreign-Policy Guru - The New York Times - 0 views
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Standing in his front office before the State of the Union, Rhodes quickly does the political math on the breaking Iran story. “Now they’ll show scary pictures of people praying to the supreme leader,” he predicts, looking at the screen. Three beats more, and his brain has spun a story line to stanch the bleeding. He turns to Price. “We’re resolving this, because we have relationships,” he says.
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Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.” I watch the message bounce from Rhodes’s brain to Price’s keyboard to the three big briefing podiums — the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon — and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. It’s a tutorial in the making of a digital news microclimate — a storm that is easy to mistake these days for a fact of nature, but whose author is sitting next to me right now.
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Watching Rhodes work, I remember that he is still, chiefly, a writer, who is using a new set of tools — along with the traditional arts of narrative and spin — to create stories of great consequence on the biggest page imaginable. The narratives he frames, the voices of senior officials, the columnists and reporters whose work he skillfully shapes and ventriloquizes, and even the president’s own speeches and talking points, are the only dots of color in a much larger vision about who Americans are and where we are going
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"You're supporting a bigot. That makes you part of the bigotry." Charles Blow's master ... - 0 views
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As I explained in an earlier Salon piece, Donald Trump, with his background in reality TV and professional wrestling, created a spectacle that rewarded him with at least $3 billion in free media coverage. Trump’s sophisticated meta game also allowed him to exploit a risk-averse news-media establishment that operates according to a clear and predictable set of rules and conventions governing “the boundaries of the approved public discourse.”
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These rules and conventions consist of maintaining the appearance of “objectivity” and “fairness,” perpetuating a “both sides do it” framework when discussing Republicans and Democrats, and an obsessive need to present “all sides of an issue.” Clear statements of fact and truth are treated as mere opinions though as Paul Krugman once said, “if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.’”
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The American corporate news media also prefers to feature generalists who understand these rules as opposed to real experts who will not obey said script. Ultimately, in covering political campaigns and elections, the American corporate news media is more interested in covering the “horse race” — because it is an easy story to communicate — than in critically evaluating the specific policy proposals and qualifications of a given candidate.
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