Group items tagged

The Senate is set to debate President Biden’s nearly $2 trillion stimulus plan on Friday as Democrats prepare to barrel past widespread opposition from Republican lawmakers and approve billions of dollars in funding for unemployed Americans, vaccine distribution, small businesses, schools and hospitals.

Senators will reconvene with three hours of debate before engaging in a rapid-fire series of votes on proposed amendments.

The threat of yet another late night in the Senate comes after Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, demanded that a group of Senate clerks read all 628 pages of the legislation on the floor before debate could continue.

Manhattan prosecutors are intensifying their investigation into Donald Trump’s businesses, taking aim at a Westchester County, N.Y., estate that the former president unsuccessfully tried to develop, according to people familiar with the matter.

the Manhattan district attorney’s office has issued new subpoenas and requested recordings of local government meetings related to the Trump Organization’s failed attempt to create a luxury subdivision at Seven Springs, a 213-acre property that the former president bought for $7.5 million in 1995.

Inflating assets to help secure loans or other financial benefits can be a state criminal offense, legal experts said.

The "enemies" will have fictional names, but when hundreds of US military personnel around the globe log on to their computers later this summer for a highly classified war game, it will be clear what a major focus of the scenarios will be -- how the US should respond to aggressive action and unexpected moves by China and Russia

Several defense officials tell CNN that the war game is a top priority for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, who will lead the exercise. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will be briefed as it plays out.

The war game is designed to equip the US military's top leaders to deal with a fictional global crisis erupting on multiple fronts and players will have to deal with constantly changing scenarios and compete for military assets like aircraft carriers and bombers.They will take place at a crucial time for the Pentagon just months into Joe Biden's presidency.

Five men and two women -- half the jury -- had been chosen to serve during the trial in Minneapolis by the time court adjourned on Friday.

Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin, a White former Minneapolis Police officer, placed his knee on Floyd's neck for an extended period while Floyd pleaded, "I can't breathe." His final moments were captured on video, and his death led to widespread protests against police brutality and racism under the banner Black Lives Matter as well as incidents of unrest and looting.

Eric Nelson is questioning the prospective jurors for the defense, while Steve Schleicher is questioning them for the prosecution. Judge Peter Cahill is presiding over the trial.

We’re seeing a policy realignment without a partisan realignment.

In a polarized era, the legislation is widely popular. Three-quarters of Americans support the law, including 60 percent of Republicans, according to a Morning Consult survey. The Republican members of Congress voted against it, but the G.O.P. shows no interest in turning this into a great partisan battle. As I began to write this on Thursday morning, the Fox News home page had only two stories on the Covid relief bill and dozens on things like the royal family and cancel culture.

This is not socialism. This is not the federal government taking control of the commanding heights of the economy. This is not a bunch of programs to restrain corporate power. Americans’ trust in government is still low. This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people, and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.

he new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to labor unions to level out pay scales.

This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were.

Though Substack paid advances to a few dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald.

INDIANAPOLIS — The authorities were searching for a motive on Friday after a gunman stormed a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis late Thursday, fatally shooting eight people and injuring at least seven others in a fast-moving, chaotic scene that emerged as the latest mass shooting to rock the nation in a matter of weeks.

The violence in Indianapolis comes only weeks after back-to-back mass shootings last month at spas in the Atlanta area and at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., drawing renewed attention to America’s deep-seated problems with gun violence and evoking both exhaustion and grief.

Officials used a common word — “another” — to define the tragedy. “This is another heartbreaking day and I’m shaken by the mass shooting at the FedEx Ground facility in Indianapolis,” Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana said on Twitter. Mayor Joe Hogsett of Indianapolis condemned the “horrific news of yet another mass shooting, an act of violence that senselessly claimed the lives of eight of our neighbors.”

Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, who led the challenges to President Biden’s victory in their chamber, each brought in more than $3 million in campaign donations in the three months that followed the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia who called the rampage a “1776 moment” and was later stripped of committee assignments for espousing bigoted conspiracy theories and endorsing political violence, raised $3.2 million — more than the individual campaign of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, and nearly every other member of House leadership.

Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, a freshman who urged his supporters to “lightly threaten” Republican lawmakers to goad them into challenging the election results, pulled in more than $1 million. Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado — who like Ms. Greene compared Jan. 6 to the American Revolution — took in nearly $750,000.

Dr. Martin Tobin, a pulmonary specialist who works in critical care, testified Thursday that George Floyd died from a lack of oxygen, bolstering the prosecution's argument that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin caused Floyd's death last May.

"Mr. Floyd died from a low level of oxygen, and this caused damage to his brain that we see. And it also caused a PEA [pulseless electrical activity] arrhythmia that caused his heart to stop."

rosecutors say Chauvin killed Floyd by pressing his knee on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes. But Chauvin's attorney says that Floyd had a history of taking fentanyl and had an underlying heart condition and they may have contributed to his death.

Ransomware hacks are everywhere if you look for them. These are just the ones we know about:

Food -- A hack of JBS Foods, the world's largest meat processor, shut multiple plants over the weekend.Fuel -- The Colonial Pipeline hack led to fuel shortages on the East Coast last month. The company has admitted to paying more $4.4 million in ransom, although the FBI has said ransoms of more than $25 million have been demanded.Hospitals -- A hack of the Scripps hospital system in San Diego has led to the breach of medical information for more than 150,000 people. The Irish health system was also targeted. More on how hackers target hospitals and first responders below.Trains -- A New York City subway system hack from April was reported Wednesday by the The New York Times.Ferries -- There are also smaller hacks, like the one affecting the ferry system in Cape Cod.

Eyes on Russia. The White House has its eyes on Russia for enabling both the Colonial Pipeline and JBS meat processing hacks. Read CNN's full report on the JBS attack here.

An American contractor went to a small town in the Guatemalan mountains with an ambitious goal: to ignite the local economy, and hopefully even persuade people not to migrate north to the United States.

Pedro Aguilar, a coffee farmer who hadn’t asked for the training and didn’t see how it would keep anyone from heading for the border, looked confused. Eyeing the U.S. government logo on the pamphlet, he began waving it around, asking if anyone had a phone number to call the Americans “and tell them what our needs really are.”

As vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr. led an enormous push to deter people from crossing into the United States by devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to Central America, hoping to make the region more tolerable for the poor — so that fewer would abandon it.

Donald Trump named more of his political allies to serve as ambassadors than any president in modern history. Now the pressure is on Joe Biden to reverse that trend — and set a new standard.

“Our diplomats expect Biden to build diplomacy back better. That’s what he promised on the campaign trail,” said Brett Bruen, a former Foreign Service officer who now does consulting work.

The Biden presidency is no different, according to interviews with five donors, but after the perception of corruption around nominees grew during the Trump years, Biden is being pressed to appoint more career diplomats.

A 14th juror was selected in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin's murder trial on Monday, one week before opening arguments are scheduled to begin on March 29. The court initially called for 12 jurors and at least two alternates; it could now add additional jurors to the panel, in case anyone drops out.

Chauvin, who is white, is charged with second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd, who was Black. Video recordings showed that Floyd was held facedown on the asphalt — and that Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes.The jury reflects a range of ethnicities, although slightly over half of the jurors have been described in court as white.

The trial is expected to last at least four weeks. The two alternate jurors won't know of their status until the panel heads to the deliberation phase. Jury selection in the case has often moved more quickly than was predicted: when it began on March 9, the process was expected to last several weeks, as the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys quizzed dozens of potential jurors about their lives and any opinions they held about Floyd's death in police custody last Memorial Day.

The suspect was prone to angry outbursts, according to former classmates.

The suspect charged in the murders of 10 people at a Boulder, Colo., grocery store — the second mass shooting to shake the country in less than a week — is a 21-year-old man from a nearby Denver suburb who used an AR-15 type of assault rifle, law enforcement officials said.

Among the victims of the massacre on Monday was Officer Eric Talley, 51, with the Boulder Police Department, who had responded to a “barrage” of 911 calls about the shooting, Chief Maris Herold said.

Democrats renewed their efforts Wednesday to muscle through the largest overhaul of U.S. elections in a generation, setting up a fight with Republicans that could bring partisan tensions to a climax in the evenly split Senate and become a defining issue for President Joe Biden.

The Senate bill, similar to a version passed by the House earlier this month, could shape election outcomes for years to come, striking down hurdles to voting, requiring more disclosure from political donors, restricting partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts and bolstering election security and ethics laws.

The debate over who has the right to vote, and how elections are conducted, could play out for months, if not years.

The prospect that a police chief would take the witness stand against a fellow officer is exceedingly rare. But there was the chief of the Minneapolis Police Department on Monday, condemning the actions of Derek Chauvin, the officer charged with murdering George Floyd, as wrong by every imaginable measure.

“To continue to apply that level of force to a person proned out, handcuffed behind their back — that in no way, shape or form is anything that is by policy,” said the chief, Medaria Arradondo. “It is not part of our training. And it is certainly not part of our ethics or our values.”

Chief Arradondo said Mr. Chauvin’s actions might have been reasonable in the “first few seconds” to get Mr. Floyd “under control.” But, he said, “Once Mr. Floyd had stopped resisting, and certainly once he was in distress and trying to verbalize that, that should have stopped.”

When Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner shared their decision to pick up and move their family to Washington from New York four years ago, multiple sources who know the couple said the idea was the White House years would allow easy entree to their ambitious next steps: Kushner would become a powerful player in global politics and Trump would become a shoo-in to a higher office of her own.

Yet now they find themselves staring down the end of the ignominious Trump presidency: the United States Capitol still showing signs of the deadly mob attack that breached the seat of democracy, thousands of National Guard troops cordoning off the city, President Donald Trump impeached (again) for his role in inciting the mob and the family patriarch robbed of his most powerful outlet after getting permanently banned from Twitter.

A White House official sent this statement when asked for comment: "Ivanka came to Washington to give back to a nation that has given her so much and to fight for policies that help hardworking American families. Over four years, she spearheaded policies that created jobs, empowered American workers, fed families in need and supported small businesses throughout the pandemic. She is proud of her service and excited for the future."

The CDC had wanted to start helping states plan in June how to get people vaccinated. But officials at Operation Warp Speed rebuffed the agency’s plan for distributing vaccines. They adopted a similar plan in August only after exploring other options—and then held the release of the CDC’s playbook for states for two weeks for additional clearance and to put it out with another document

Operation Warp Speed was supposed to be a high-water mark of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response, but it stumbled at the finish line because of problems in federal planning and foresight

“They didn’t plan for the last inch of the last mile, the part that matters most—how you’re going to actually vaccinate that many people quickly,”

Though rarely used and often overlooked, the 14th Amendment could be the key to preventing a president who contributed to a domestic terrorist attack from ever receiving a position of public office again.

he president of the United States meets all the criteria for being permanently barred from public office under even a rigid originalist reading of the third section of the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War as a way to expel public officials who sided with Confederate insurrectionists over the union.

The benefit of the 14th Amendment over impeachment is that it allows Democrats to hold Trump accountable without the need to gather a bipartisan supermajority of senators, which lawmakers say is unlikely because Republican obstruction has defined nearly every effort to bind Trump to the rule of law.

As a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol last week clamoring to overturn the result of November’s presidential election, photographs captured a man in the crowd wearing a shirt emblazoned with “Camp Auschwitz,” a reference to the Nazi concentration camp.

The presence of anti-Semitic symbols and sentiment at the Capitol riot raised alarms among Jewish Americans and experts who track discrimination and see it as part of an ongoing, disturbing trend.

The insurrection was “not so much a tipping point” for anti-Semitism but rather “the latest explicit example of how (it) is part of what animates the narratives of extremists in this country,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.