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Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The planned sanctions were an attempt to punish Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad after a chemical weapons attack earlier this month. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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five years after her escape from the Cleveland home of Ariel Castro, who held her and two others captive for over a decade, Michelle Knight (now known as Lily Rose Lee) joins Megyn Kelly TODAY to talk about her ordeal and her new memoir, “Life After Darkness.” She talks about her recent marriage and her prospects for having a child.","title":"Cleveland kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight talks about new life, marriage","thumbnail":"https://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Video/201804/tdy_mk_news_michelle_knight_180430.today-vid-rail.jpg","socialTitle":"Cleveland kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight talks about new life, marriage","seoHeadline":"Cleveland kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight talks about new life, 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. NBC’s Keir Simmons reports for TODAY from London. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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  • North Korea to close down nuclear test site in May
brickol

Fact check: Trump makes another round of misstatements during coronavirus briefing - CN... - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump on Friday continued the false and misleading claims that have become a part of White House briefings on coronavirus, wrapping up a week in which the number of confirmed cases across the country topped 100,000.
  • Trump claimed that 22 days ago, "everything was going beautifully" before the US got hit by what he calls "the invisible enemy."
  • While the market had previously set all-time records under Trump, on March 5, 22 days before Trump's comments, the Dow dropped 3.6% or 970 points, then its fifth-worst single-day point drop on record, adding to a 3,000-point drop since its peak on February 12.
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  • Multiple times throughout Friday's press briefing, the President claimed the current situation was unprecedented and unforeseen. According to Trump, "nobody was prepared for this," not even past presidents. He added, "In all fairness to all of the former presidents, none of them ever thought a thing like this could happen."
  • This is false. The US intelligence community and public health experts had warned for years that the country was at risk from a pandemic. Experts had also warned that the country would face shortages of critical medical equipment, such as ventilators, if a pandemic occurred.
  • Trump said of the coronavirus: "You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus, you know you can call it many different names. I'm not sure anybody even knows what it is."
  • You cannot accurately call the coronavirus "a flu." They are, simply, different viruses with different characteristics, though they share some symptoms the coronavirus has a much higher mortality rate.
  • it's significantly more serious" -- with a mortality rate approximately 10 times higher than the 0.1% for the flu. It's also obviously untrue that there is not "anybody" who knows what the coronavirus is.
Javier E

Warnings Ignored: A Timeline of Trump's COVID-19 Response - The Bulwark - 0 views

  • the White House is trying to establish an alternate reality in which Trump was a competent, focused leader who saved American people from the coronavirus.
  • it highlights just how asleep Trump was at the switch, despite warnings from experts within his own government and from former Trump administration officials pleading with him from the outside.
  • Most prominent among them were former Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb, and Director for Medical and Biodefense Preparedness at the National Security Council Dr. Luciana Borio who beginning in early January used op-eds, television appearances, social media posts, and private entreaties to try to spur the administration into action.
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  • what the administration should have been doing in January to prepare us for today.
  • She cites the delay on tests, without which “cases go undetected and people continue to circulate” as a leading issue along with other missed federal government responses—many of which are still not fully operational
  • The prescient recommendations from experts across disciplines in the period before COVID-19 reached American shores—about testing, equipment, and distancing—make clear that more than any single factor, it was Trump’s squandering of out lead-time which should have been used to prepare for the pandemic that has exacerbated this crisis.
  • What follows is an annotated timeline revealing the warning signs the administration received and showing how slow the administration was to act on these recommendations.
  • The Early Years: Warnings Ignored
  • 2017: Trump administrations officials are briefed on an intelligence document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” That’s right. The administration literally had an actual playbook for what to do in the early stages of a pandemic
  • February 2018: The Washington Post writes “CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak.” The meat of the story is “Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.”
  • May 2018: At an event marking the 100 year anniversary of the 1918 pandemic, Borio says “pandemic flu” is the “number 1 health security issue” and that the U.S. is not ready to respond.
  • One day later her boss, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer is pushed out of the administration and the global health security team is disbanded
  • Beth Cameron, former senior director for global health security on the National Security Council adds: “It is unclear in his absence who at the White House would be in charge of a pandemic,” Cameron said, calling it “a situation that should be immediately rectified.” Note: It was not
  • January 2019: The director of National Intelligence issues the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of threats to national security. Among its findings:
  • A novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat, with pathogens such as H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”
  • Page 21: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”
  • September, 2019: The Trump Administration ended the pandemic early warning program, PREDICT, which trained scientists in China and other countries to identify viruses that had the potential to turn into pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, “field work ceased when funding ran out in September,” two months before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan Province, China.
  • 2020: COVID-19 Arrives
  • anuary 3, 2020: The CDC is first alerted to a public health event in Wuhan, China
  • January 6, 2020: The CDC issues a travel notice for Wuhan due to the spreading coronavirus
  • Note: The Trump campaign claims that this marks the beginning of the federal government disease control experts becoming aware of the virus. It was 10 weeks from this point until the week of March 16 when Trump began to change his tone on the threat.
  • January 10, 2020: Former Trump Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert warns that we shouldn’t “jerk around with ego politics” because “we face a global health threat…Coordinate!”
  • January 18, 2020: After two weeks of attempts, HHS Secretary Alex Azar finally gets the chance to speak to Trump about the virus. The president redirects the conversation to vaping, according to the Washington Post. 
  • January 21, 2020: Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the CDC tells reporters, “We do expect additional cases in the United States.”
  • January 27, 2020: Top White House aides meet with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to encourage greater focus on the threat from the virus. Joe Grogan, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council warns that “dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.”
  • January 28, 2020: Two former Trump administration officials—Gottlieb and Borio—publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal imploring the president to “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic.” They advocate a 4-point plan to address the coming crisis:
  • (1) Expand testing to identify and isolate cases. Note: This did not happen for many weeks. The first time more than 2,000 tests were deployed in a single day was not until almost six weeks later, on March 11.
  • (3) Prepare hospital units for isolation with more gowns and masks. Note: There was no dramatic ramp-up in the production of critical supplies undertaken. As a result, many hospitals quickly experienced shortages of critical PPE materials. Federal agencies waited until Mid-March to begin bulk orders of N95 masks.
  • January 29, 2020: Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro circulates an internal memo warning that America is “defenseless” in the face of an outbreak which “elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”
  • January 30, 2020: Dr. James Hamblin publishes another warning about critical PPE materials in the Atlantic, titled “We Don’t Have Enough Masks.”
  • January 29, 2020: Republican Senator Tom Cotton reaches out to President Trump in private to encourage him to take the virus seriously.
  • Late January, 2020:  HHS sends a letter asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.
  • Trump’s Chinese travel ban only banned “foreign nationals who had been in China in the last 14 days.” This wording did not—at all—stop people from arriving in America from China. In fact, for much of the crisis, flights from China landed in America almost daily filled with people who had been in China, but did not fit the category as Trump’s “travel ban” defined it.
  • January 31, 2020: On the same day Trump was enacting his fake travel ban, Foreign Policy reports that face masks and latex gloves are sold out on Amazon and at leading stores in New York City and suggests the surge in masks being sold to other countries needs “refereeing” in the face of the coming crisis.
  • February 4, 2020: Gottlieb and Borio take to the WSJ again, this time to warn the president that “a pandemic seems inevitable” and call on the administration to dramatically expand testing, expand the number of labs for reviewing tests, and change the rules to allow for tests of people even if they don’t have a clear known risk factor.
  • Note: Some of these recommendations were eventually implemented—25 days later.
  • February 5, 2020: HHS Secretary Alex Azar requests $2 billion to “buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment.” He is rebuffed by Trump and the White House OMB who eventually send Congress a $500 million request weeks later.
  • February 4 or 5, 2020: Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, and other intelligence officials brief the Senate Intelligence Committee that the virus poses a “serious” threat and that “Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives.”
  • February 5, 2020: Senator Chris Murphy tweets: Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.
  • February 9, 2020: The Washington Post reports that a group of governors participated in a jarring meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield that was much more alarmist than what they were hearing from Trump. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.
  • the administration lifted CDC restrictions on tests. This is a factually true statement. But it elides that fact that they did so on March 3—two critical weeks after the third Borio/Gottlieb op-ed on the topic, during which time the window for intervention had shrunk to a pinhole.
  • February 20, 2020: Borio and Gottlieb write in the Wall Street Journal that tests must be ramped up immediately “while we can intervene to stop spread.”
  • February 23, 2020: Harvard School of Public Health professor issues warning on lack of test capability: “As of today, the US remains extremely limited in#COVID19 testing. Only 3 of ~100 public health labs haveCDC test kits working and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.
  • February 24, 2020: The Trump administration sends a letter to Congress requesting a small dollar amount—between $1.8 billion and $2.5 billion—to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. This is, of course, a pittance
  • February 25, 2020: Messonier says she expects “community spread” of the virus in the United States and that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump is reportedly furious and Messonier’s warnings are curtailed in the ensuing weeks.
  • Trump mocks Congress in a White House briefing, saying “If Congress wants to give us the money so easy—it wasn’t very easy for the wall, but we got that one done. If they want to give us the money, we’ll take the money.”
  • February 26, 2020: Congress, recognizing the coming threat, offers to give the administration $6 billion more than Trump asked for in order to prepare for the virus.
  • February 27, 2020: In a leaked audio recording Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee and author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) and the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act (reauthorization of PAHPA), was telling people that COVID-19 “is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”
  • March 4, 2020: HHS says they only have 1 percent of respirator masks needed if the virus became a “full-blown pandemic.”
  • March 3, 2020: Vice President Pence is asked about legislation encouraging companies to produce more masks. He says the Trump administration is “looking at it.”
  • March 7, 2020: Fox News host Tucker Carlson, flies to Mar-a-Lago to implore Trump to take the virus seriously in private rather than embarrass him on TV. Even after the private meeting, Trump continued to downplay the crisis
  • March 9, 2020: Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser, publishes an op-ed saying it is “now or never” to act. He advocates for social distancing and school closures to slow the spread of the contagion.
  • Trump says that developments are “good for the consumer” and compares COVID-19 favorably to the common flu.
  • March 17, 2020: Facing continued shortages of the PPE equipment needed to prevent healthcare providers from succumbing to the virus, Oregon Senators Jeff Merkeley and Ron Wyden call on Trump to use the Defense Production Act to expand supply of medical equipment
  • March 18, 2020: Trump signs the executive order to activate the Defense Production Act, but declines to use it
  • At the White House briefing he is asked about Senator Chuck Schumer’s call to urgently produce medical supplies and ventilators. Trump responds: “Well we’re going to know whether or not it’s urgent.” Note: At this point 118 Americans had died from COVID-19.
  • March 20, 2020: At an April 2nd White House Press Conference, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was made ad hoc point man for the coronavirus response said that on this date he began working with Rear Admiral John Polowczyk to “build a team” that would handle the logistics and supply chain for providing medical supplies to the states. This suggestion was first made by former Trump Administration officials January 28th
  • March 22, 2020: Six days after calling for a 15-day period of distancing, Trump tweets that this approach “may be worse than the problem itself.”
  • March 24, 2020: Trump tells Fox News that he wants the country opened up by Easter Sunday (April 12)
  • As Trump was speaking to Fox, there were 52,145 confirmed cases in the United States and the doubling time for daily new cases was roughly four days.
Javier E

The Coming Software Apocalypse - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Our standard framework for thinking about engineering failures—reflected, for instance, in regulations for medical devices—was developed shortly after World War II, before the advent of software, for electromechanical systems. The idea was that you make something reliable by making its parts reliable (say, you build your engine to withstand 40,000 takeoff-and-landing cycles) and by planning for the breakdown of those parts (you have two engines). But software doesn’t break. Intrado’s faulty threshold is not like the faulty rivet that leads to the crash of an airliner. The software did exactly what it was told to do. In fact it did it perfectly. The reason it failed is that it was told to do the wrong thing.
  • Software failures are failures of understanding, and of imagination. Intrado actually had a backup router, which, had it been switched to automatically, would have restored 911 service almost immediately. But, as described in a report to the FCC, “the situation occurred at a point in the application logic that was not designed to perform any automated corrective actions.”
  • This is the trouble with making things out of code, as opposed to something physical. “The complexity,” as Leveson puts it, “is invisible to the eye.”
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  • Code is too hard to think about. Before trying to understand the attempts themselves, then, it’s worth understanding why this might be: what it is about code that makes it so foreign to the mind, and so unlike anything that came before it.
  • Technological progress used to change the way the world looked—you could watch the roads getting paved; you could see the skylines rise. Today you can hardly tell when something is remade, because so often it is remade by code.
  • Software has enabled us to make the most intricate machines that have ever existed. And yet we have hardly noticed, because all of that complexity is packed into tiny silicon chips as millions and millions of lines of cod
  • The programmer, the renowned Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra wrote in 1988, “has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before.” Dijkstra meant this as a warning.
  • “The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors.” When you’re writing code that controls a car’s throttle, for instance, what’s important is the rules about when and how and by how much to open it. But these systems have become so complicated that hardly anyone can keep them straight in their head. “There’s 100 million lines of code in cars now,” Leveson says. “You just cannot anticipate all these things.”
  • What made programming so difficult was that it required you to think like a computer.
  • The introduction of programming languages like Fortran and C, which resemble English, and tools, known as “integrated development environments,” or IDEs, that help correct simple mistakes (like Microsoft Word’s grammar checker but for code), obscured, though did little to actually change, this basic alienation—the fact that the programmer didn’t work on a problem directly, but rather spent their days writing out instructions for a machine.
  • “The problem is that software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to,” says Leveson, the MIT software-safety expert. The reason is that they’re too wrapped up in getting their code to work.
  • As programmers eagerly poured software into critical systems, they became, more and more, the linchpins of the built world—and Dijkstra thought they had perhaps overestimated themselves.
  • a nearly decade-long investigation into claims of so-called unintended acceleration in Toyota cars. Toyota blamed the incidents on poorly designed floor mats, “sticky” pedals, and driver error, but outsiders suspected that faulty software might be responsible
  • software experts spend 18 months with the Toyota code, picking up where NASA left off. Barr described what they found as “spaghetti code,” programmer lingo for software that has become a tangled mess. Code turns to spaghetti when it accretes over many years, with feature after feature piling on top of, and being woven around
  • Using the same model as the Camry involved in the accident, Barr’s team demonstrated that there were actually more than 10 million ways for the onboard computer to cause unintended acceleration. They showed that as little as a single bit flip—a one in the computer’s memory becoming a zero or vice versa—could make a car run out of control. The fail-safe code that Toyota had put in place wasn’t enough to stop it
  • . In all, Toyota recalled more than 9 million cars, and paid nearly $3 billion in settlements and fines related to unintended acceleration.
  • The problem is that programmers are having a hard time keeping up with their own creations. Since the 1980s, the way programmers work and the tools they use have changed remarkably little.
  • “Visual Studio is one of the single largest pieces of software in the world,” he said. “It’s over 55 million lines of code. And one of the things that I found out in this study is more than 98 percent of it is completely irrelevant. All this work had been put into this thing, but it missed the fundamental problems that people faced. And the biggest one that I took away from it was that basically people are playing computer inside their head.” Programmers were like chess players trying to play with a blindfold on—so much of their mental energy is spent just trying to picture where the pieces are that there’s hardly any left over to think about the game itself.
  • The fact that the two of them were thinking about the same problem in the same terms, at the same time, was not a coincidence. They had both just seen the same remarkable talk, given to a group of software-engineering students in a Montreal hotel by a computer researcher named Bret Victor. The talk, which went viral when it was posted online in February 2012, seemed to be making two bold claims. The first was that the way we make software is fundamentally broken. The second was that Victor knew how to fix it.
  • Though he runs a lab that studies the future of computing, he seems less interested in technology per se than in the minds of the people who use it. Like any good toolmaker, he has a way of looking at the world that is equal parts technical and humane. He graduated top of his class at the California Institute of Technology for electrical engineering,
  • WYSIWYG (pronounced “wizzywig”) came along. It stood for “What You See Is What You Get.”
  • “Our current conception of what a computer program is,” he said, is “derived straight from Fortran and ALGOL in the late ’50s. Those languages were designed for punch cards.”
  • in early 2012, Victor had finally landed upon the principle that seemed to thread through all of his work. (He actually called the talk “Inventing on Principle.”) The principle was this: “Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating.” The problem with programming was that it violated the principle. That’s why software systems were so hard to think about, and so rife with bugs: The programmer, staring at a page of text, was abstracted from whatever it was they were actually making.
  • Victor’s point was that programming itself should be like that. For him, the idea that people were doing important work, like designing adaptive cruise-control systems or trying to understand cancer, by staring at a text editor, was appalling.
  • With the right interface, it was almost as if you weren’t working with code at all; you were manipulating the game’s behavior directly.
  • When the audience first saw this in action, they literally gasped. They knew they weren’t looking at a kid’s game, but rather the future of their industry. Most software involved behavior that unfolded, in complex ways, over time, and Victor had shown that if you were imaginative enough, you could develop ways to see that behavior and change it, as if playing with it in your hands. One programmer who saw the talk wrote later: “Suddenly all of my tools feel obsolete.”
  • hen John Resig saw the “Inventing on Principle” talk, he scrapped his plans for the Khan Academy programming curriculum. He wanted the site’s programming exercises to work just like Victor’s demos. On the left-hand side you’d have the code, and on the right, the running program: a picture or game or simulation. If you changed the code, it’d instantly change the picture. “In an environment that is truly responsive,” Resig wrote about the approach, “you can completely change the model of how a student learns ... [They] can now immediately see the result and intuit how underlying systems inherently work without ever following an explicit explanation.” Khan Academy has become perhaps the largest computer-programming class in the world, with a million students, on average, actively using the program each month.
  • . In traditional programming, your task is to take complex rules and translate them into code; most of your energy is spent doing the translating, rather than thinking about the rules themselves. In the model-based approach, all you have is the rules. So that’s what you spend your time thinking about. It’s a way of focusing less on the machine and more on the problem you’re trying to get it to solve.
  • “Everyone thought I was interested in programming environments,” he said. Really he was interested in how people see and understand systems—as he puts it, in the “visual representation of dynamic behavior.” Although code had increasingly become the tool of choice for creating dynamic behavior, it remained one of the worst tools for understanding it. The point of “Inventing on Principle” was to show that you could mitigate that problem by making the connection between a system’s behavior and its code immediate.
  • In a pair of later talks, “Stop Drawing Dead Fish” and “Drawing Dynamic Visualizations,” Victor went one further. He demoed two programs he’d built—the first for animators, the second for scientists trying to visualize their data—each of which took a process that used to involve writing lots of custom code and reduced it to playing around in a WYSIWYG interface.
  • Victor suggested that the same trick could be pulled for nearly every problem where code was being written today. “I’m not sure that programming has to exist at all,” he told me. “Or at least software developers.” In his mind, a software developer’s proper role was to create tools that removed the need for software developers. Only then would people with the most urgent computational problems be able to grasp those problems directly, without the intermediate muck of code.
  • Victor implored professional software developers to stop pouring their talent into tools for building apps like Snapchat and Uber. “The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems,” he wrote. Instead, they should focus on scientists and engineers—as he put it to me, “these people that are doing work that actually matters, and critically matters, and using really, really bad tools.”
  • “people are not so easily transitioning to model-based software development: They perceive it as another opportunity to lose control, even more than they have already.”
  • In a model-based design tool, you’d represent this rule with a small diagram, as though drawing the logic out on a whiteboard, made of boxes that represent different states—like “door open,” “moving,” and “door closed”—and lines that define how you can get from one state to the other. The diagrams make the system’s rules obvious: Just by looking, you can see that the only way to get the elevator moving is to close the door, or that the only way to get the door open is to stop.
  • Bantegnie’s company is one of the pioneers in the industrial use of model-based design, in which you no longer write code directly. Instead, you create a kind of flowchart that describes the rules your program should follow (the “model”), and the computer generates code for you based on those rules
  • “Typically the main problem with software coding—and I’m a coder myself,” Bantegnie says, “is not the skills of the coders. The people know how to code. The problem is what to code. Because most of the requirements are kind of natural language, ambiguous, and a requirement is never extremely precise, it’s often understood differently by the guy who’s supposed to code.”
  • On this view, software becomes unruly because the media for describing what software should do—conversations, prose descriptions, drawings on a sheet of paper—are too different from the media describing what software does do, namely, code itself.
  • for this approach to succeed, much of the work has to be done well before the project even begins. Someone first has to build a tool for developing models that are natural for people—that feel just like the notes and drawings they’d make on their own—while still being unambiguous enough for a computer to understand. They have to make a program that turns these models into real code. And finally they have to prove that the generated code will always do what it’s supposed to.
  • tice brings order and accountability to large codebases. But, Shivappa says, “it’s a very labor-intensive process.” He estimates that before they used model-based design, on a two-year-long project only two to three months was spent writing code—the rest was spent working on the documentation.
  • uch of the benefit of the model-based approach comes from being able to add requirements on the fly while still ensuring that existing ones are met; with every change, the computer can verify that your program still works. You’re free to tweak your blueprint without fear of introducing new bugs. Your code is, in FAA parlance, “correct by construction.”
  • The ideas spread. The notion of liveness, of being able to see data flowing through your program instantly, made its way into flagship programming tools offered by Google and Apple. The default language for making new iPhone and Mac apps, called Swift, was developed by Apple from the ground up to support an environment, called Playgrounds, that was directly inspired by Light Table.
  • The bias against model-based design, sometimes known as model-driven engineering, or MDE, is in fact so ingrained that according to a recent paper, “Some even argue that there is a stronger need to investigate people’s perception of MDE than to research new MDE technologies.”
  • “Human intuition is poor at estimating the true probability of supposedly ‘extremely rare’ combinations of events in systems operating at a scale of millions of requests per second,” he wrote in a paper. “That human fallibility means that some of the more subtle, dangerous bugs turn out to be errors in design; the code faithfully implements the intended design, but the design fails to correctly handle a particular ‘rare’ scenario.”
  • Newcombe was convinced that the algorithms behind truly critical systems—systems storing a significant portion of the web’s data, for instance—ought to be not just good, but perfect. A single subtle bug could be catastrophic. But he knew how hard bugs were to find, especially as an algorithm grew more complex. You could do all the testing you wanted and you’d never find them all.
  • An algorithm written in TLA+ could in principle be proven correct. In practice, it allowed you to create a realistic model of your problem and test it not just thoroughly, but exhaustively. This was exactly what he’d been looking for: a language for writing perfect algorithms.
  • TLA+, which stands for “Temporal Logic of Actions,” is similar in spirit to model-based design: It’s a language for writing down the requirements—TLA+ calls them “specifications”—of computer programs. These specifications can then be completely verified by a computer. That is, before you write any code, you write a concise outline of your program’s logic, along with the constraints you need it to satisfy
  • Programmers are drawn to the nitty-gritty of coding because code is what makes programs go; spending time on anything else can seem like a distraction. And there is a patient joy, a meditative kind of satisfaction, to be had from puzzling out the micro-mechanics of code. But code, Lamport argues, was never meant to be a medium for thought. “It really does constrain your ability to think when you’re thinking in terms of a programming language,”
  • Code makes you miss the forest for the trees: It draws your attention to the working of individual pieces, rather than to the bigger picture of how your program fits together, or what it’s supposed to do—and whether it actually does what you think. This is why Lamport created TLA+. As with model-based design, TLA+ draws your focus to the high-level structure of a system, its essential logic, rather than to the code that implements it.
  • But TLA+ occupies just a small, far corner of the mainstream, if it can be said to take up any space there at all. Even to a seasoned engineer like Newcombe, the language read at first as bizarre and esoteric—a zoo of symbols.
  • this is a failure of education. Though programming was born in mathematics, it has since largely been divorced from it. Most programmers aren’t very fluent in the kind of math—logic and set theory, mostly—that you need to work with TLA+. “Very few programmers—and including very few teachers of programming—understand the very basic concepts and how they’re applied in practice. And they seem to think that all they need is code,” Lamport says. “The idea that there’s some higher level than the code in which you need to be able to think precisely, and that mathematics actually allows you to think precisely about it, is just completely foreign. Because they never learned it.”
  • “In the 15th century,” he said, “people used to build cathedrals without knowing calculus, and nowadays I don’t think you’d allow anyone to build a cathedral without knowing calculus. And I would hope that after some suitably long period of time, people won’t be allowed to write programs if they don’t understand these simple things.”
  • Programmers, as a species, are relentlessly pragmatic. Tools like TLA+ reek of the ivory tower. When programmers encounter “formal methods” (so called because they involve mathematical, “formally” precise descriptions of programs), their deep-seated instinct is to recoil.
  • Formal methods had an image problem. And the way to fix it wasn’t to implore programmers to change—it was to change yourself. Newcombe realized that to bring tools like TLA+ to the programming mainstream, you had to start speaking their language.
  • he presented TLA+ as a new kind of “pseudocode,” a stepping-stone to real code that allowed you to exhaustively test your algorithms—and that got you thinking precisely early on in the design process. “Engineers think in terms of debugging rather than ‘verification,’” he wrote, so he titled his internal talk on the subject to fellow Amazon engineers “Debugging Designs.” Rather than bemoan the fact that programmers see the world in code, Newcombe embraced it. He knew he’d lose them otherwise. “I’ve had a bunch of people say, ‘Now I get it,’” Newcombe says.
  • In the world of the self-driving car, software can’t be an afterthought. It can’t be built like today’s airline-reservation systems or 911 systems or stock-trading systems. Code will be put in charge of hundreds of millions of lives on the road and it has to work. That is no small task.
katherineharron

Trump's post-presidency: On the attack with the help of the Fox and Newsmax propaganda ... - 0 views

  • Former President Donald Trump was audible, if not visible, all day long on Monday — and the effect is to keep him front and center in the Republican Party conversation.
  • His unwillingness, or inability, to lay low is exactly what many Trump observers expected
  • when broadcaster Rush Limbaugh died, Trump resumed his old habit of calling into TV networks, with two calls to Fox and one call each to Newsmax and One America News.
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  • Lately Trump has been doing what comes naturally to him — dictating tweet-like statements, calling into conservative talk shows, and generally stirring up trouble. "I like this better than Twitter," he claimed on Newsmax. "Actually they did us a favor. This is better."
  • Trump has shown no courtesy to President Joe Biden since leaving the White House.
  • On the phone with one of his biggest sycophants, Newsmax's Greg Kelly, on Monday evening, Kelly speculated about Biden's mental faculties, prompting Trump to say "there's something" going on with Biden. Trump then questioned "whether or not he understands what he's signing" when bills cross his desk.
  • Trump is the first US president to lose re-election in nearly thirty years.
  • Trump, of course, proudly stands as the GOP antithesis of Bush 41. President 45, as some of his allies now call him, lest they identify him as "former," was uncharacteristically quiet upon leaving the White House. But he set up an office in Florida within days and began issuing statements that were widely picked up by the media — a cheap replacement for his account on Twitter, which banned him in the wake of the Capitol riot.
  • "The code of the presidents club is to get out of the way and let the new commander in chief have a year or two," CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said.
  • Since then, he has gradually increased his visibility, with emails to members of the media from "45 Office" so far in March, twice as many as in February
  • "Trump's unique in that he wants to make a lot of racket and garner attention after leaving the White House,"
  • Trump said "people have seen some silence" from him, "but actually, if you take a look at what's happened over the last period of time, we're sending out releases. They're getting picked up much better than any tweet."
  • Trump also teased plans for "our own platform,"
  • Trump told Boothe that he now believes official statements to the public are "much more elegant than a tweet, and I think it gets picked up better. You're seeing that."
  • "Picked up" was the key phrase. The need for pickup — meaning attention from the American news media — is at the heart of Trump's post-presidential actions.
  • And he is continuing to push the incendiary claims that led up to the January 6 riot, about winning the 2020 election and Biden stealing it from him, despite pleas even from within his own party to stop lying.
  • Trump seemed self-aware about his media approach during a podcast taping with Lisa Boothe, which was released on Monday morning. Trump was Boothe's inaugural guest — which means the podcast does not yet have a high profile or a massive following. Trump said in a statement that she has been doing "an outstanding job" on Fox, so perhaps he wanted to give her new podcast a boost.
  • Brinkley likened Trump to "an active political hand grenade, ready to blow up the US political system any way he can.
  • Last week Trump called into Fox for a live interview with Maria Bartiromo. The next day his comments to Bartiromo were in heavy rotation on other right-wing networks and outlets.
  • To Kelly, he hedged about the possibility of a new social platform, saying that "something will happen with social media if I want it to happen."
anonymous

A Year After Breonna Taylor's Killing, Family Says There's 'No Accountability' : NPR - 0 views

  • Before Breonna Taylor's name became synonymous with police violence against Black Americans, she was an emergency medical technician in Louisville, Ky.The 26-year-old Black woman's friends and family say she was beloved, and relished the opportunity to brighten someone else's day.
  • Exactly one year ago, Louisville police gunned her down in her home. Now, her name is a ubiquitous rallying cry at protests calling for police reforms, and many social justice advocates point to her story as an example of how difficult it can be to hold police accountable for violent acts. The Louisville incident unfolded during a botched narcotics raid, when officers forced their way into her apartment in the early morning hours of March 13, 2020. Taylor was not the target of the raid and the suspect police were searching for was not at Taylor's home.
  • A year after Taylor's death, none of the officers who fired their service weapons — a total of 32 rounds — face criminal charges directly over Taylor's killing. At least three officers with connections to the raid have been terminated from the force.
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  • Some advocates are calling for Kentucky's Republican-controlled legislature to pass "Breonna's Law," which would ban no-knock warrants statewide. The Kentucky Senate passed a bill late last month restricting such warrants in certain situations, which many activists and Democratic lawmakers say does not go far enough. They had introduced a similar bill in the House in August, called "Breonna's Law," but the House Judiciary Committee voted on Wednesday to move forward with the Republican-sponsored proposal, according to WFPL.
  • But many advocates believe justice has not been done, citing the lack of criminal charges and saying they want to see broader criminal justice reform. Demonstrators plan to gather in downtown Louisville on Saturday to mark the anniversary of Taylor's death, member station WFPL reported. Activists say they hope to keep her memory alive and renew calls for justice, after the winter dampened on-the-ground protests.
  • In September, the city of Louisville announced a $12 million settlement in the wrongful death lawsuit filed by Taylor's family, which also included several police reforms.
  • Louisville Democratic Rep. Attica Scott, the primary sponsor of Breonna's Law, told NPR's All Things Considered on Friday that committee officials have said they will consider proposed amendments that would bring the two bills further into alignment.She also said she had written a letter to newly-confirmed Attorney General Merrick Garland this week, asking him to fully investigate Taylor's killing.
  • Ju'Niyah Palmer, Taylor's sister, wrote on Instagram earlier this year that her heart was "heavy because we are only 2 months away from me not hearing, seeing or cuddling you for a whole year." Her mother, Tamika Palmer, recently filed complaints with the police department's professional standards unit against six officers for their role in the investigation that included the raid. In an Thursday interview with a Louisville CBS affiliate, Palmer expressed her frustration with the lack of accountability in the case and called on the community to continue demanding justice.
  • Last September, after months of protests in and around Louisville, the city was braced to hear whether a grand jury would hand down criminal indictments for LMPD officers Brett Hankison, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove. At a press briefing Sept. 23, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced no charges directly tied to Taylor's death. The grand jury handed down three criminal counts of wanton endangerment to Hankison, over shooting through Taylor's apartment into a neighboring residence.
  • The grand jury did not charge Mattingly, who shot six times, and Cosgrove, who fired a total of 16 rounds, including what federal investigators determined to be the round that ultimately killed Taylor.
  • Cameron, whose office took over as special prosecutor in the case in May, said at the press conference that both Mattingly and Cosgrove "were justified in their use of force."After the two officers forced their way into Taylor's apartment, her boyfriend Kenneth Walker fired on them. Walker, a licensed gun owner, has maintained that he did not hear the officers announce themselves before entering and mistook them for intruders. He fired a shot, which hit Mattingly in the leg.
  • Cameron, Kentucky's first Black attorney general, told reporters that "evidence shows that officers both knocked and announced their presence at the apartment." He cited the officers' statements and one additional witness as evidence, but also acknowledged there is no video or body camera footage of the officers executing the search warrant.
  • Cameron's announcement sparked fresh outrage and demonstrations in Louisville, Atlanta, Denver, and Portland, among other cities. It added fuel to an already tense period in American society, where national protests focusing on racial justice inequities became a near-daily occurrence following high-profile police incidents with Black Americans, including George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Jacob Blake, Daniel Prude and others who were killed or seriously injured.
  • Days after Cameron's press conference, Taylor's mother, Palmer, said she was "reassured ... of why I have no faith in the legal system, in the police, in the law. ... They are not made to protect us Black and brown people."
  • In that same press conference, Crump raised questions about what evidence Cameron presented on behalf of Taylor to the grand jury. He also publicly called for the release of the transcripts of the proceedings, something that is extremely rare in grand jury cases. The court did so several weeks later, after some jurors took issue with Cameron's explanation for why no officer was directly charged in Taylor's death.
  • Hankison was terminated from LMPD in June, after the department found he fired "wantonly and blindly" into Taylor's apartment. In January, some nine months after Taylor's killing, the department formally terminated Cosgrove and another officer connected to the incident.
  • Both Cosgrove and Detective Joshua Jaynes, who secured the warrant for the raid on Taylor's home, were found to have violated department protocols, according to the termination letters made public on Jan. 6.
  • LMPD officials said that for Jaynes, "the evidence in this case revealed a sustained untruthfulness violation based on information included in an affidavit completed by you and submitted to a judge."LMPD said Cosgrove violated the department's protocols on use of deadly force and failed to activate his officer-worn body camera.
  • In that same batch of documents, LMPD also said that Mattingly, who was shot during the raid, was exonerated on both counts of violating department procedures on use of deadly force and de-escalation. It added, "no disciplinary action taken and the complaint will be dismissed." The disciplinary documents were released the same day Fischer, the Louisville mayor, formally announced that Erika Shields would be the city's next permanent police chief.
  • Shields resigned her post as Atlanta's police chief in the immediate aftermath of the killing of Rayshard Brooks, a Black man who was shot in the back during an encounter with white officers in a Wendy's parking lot in June.
hannahcarter11

Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy | TheHill - 0 views

  • Publicly, House Democrats are largely united behind a simple message surrounding COVID-19 vaccines: Get one as soon as you can and take whichever one is offered.   
  • Speaker Nancy PelosiNancy PelosiGOP senator applauds restaurant stimulus money after voting against relief bill McCarthy calls on Pelosi to return Capitol to pre-pandemic operations Jayapal asks for ethics investigation into Boebert, Gosar, Brooks MORE (D-Calif.) has sided with those Black Caucus leaders, arguing on a recent conference call that underserved communities, including Black and brown populations, should get to pick which vaccine they receive, according to sources on the call.  
  • Rep. Kim SchrierKimberly (Kim) Merle SchrierThe Hill's Morning Report - Presented by the National Shooting Sports Foundation - At 50 days in charge, Democrats hail American Rescue Plan as major win Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy Democrats point fingers on whether Capitol rioters had inside help MORE (D-Wash.), a pediatrician, issued a stern warning to her colleagues that demanding choice would not only buck the advice of public health experts and muddle the Democrats’ vaccine message, it would also heighten the the doubts of many Americans already skeptical about taking vaccines — doubts that threaten the arrival of herd immunity and a return to social normalcy.
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  • The Democrats’ message, Schrier said, should be clear and simple: All vaccines are good. And the best thing American can do to protect themselves and their loved ones is to get a shot.
  • Pelosi spokesman Henry Connelly said the Speaker was simply reflecting concerns in her diverse caucus about whether minority communities were being treated equitably in the aggressive push to vaccinate all Americans.
  • That disparity has been attributed, in part, to the fact that the earlier Moderna and Pfizer vaccines each require two shots and colder refrigeration, complicating storage and distribution. That’s created additional barriers for getting the vaccine to poorer, historically underserved populations and rural communities.
  • Black people are nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than white people and nearly two times more likely to die from the disease; Hispanics are more than three times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than whites and 2.3 times more likely to die. 
  • White people have been vaccinated for COVID-19 at two times the rate of Black people, according to a New York Times analysis. The figures are worse for Hispanics. 
  • The disagreement among Democrats comes during a pivotal moment in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic as states like Texas and Mississippi end their mask mandates and lift restrictions on businesses, and health experts worry about a surge in cases driven by COVID-19 variants.
  • Because the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires only one shot and regular refrigeration levels, some officials like New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) have ordered that shipments of that vaccine be prioritized for harder-to-reach Black and brown communities. 
  • But while Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have an overall efficacy of about 95 percent in preventing moderate to severe disease, that number for the Johnson & Johnson version is just 66 percent — though experts point out the J&J vaccine was being tested after more contagious variants had begun spreading in the U.S., unlike the Pfizer and Moderna versions. 
  • That's led to some in those minority communities voicing concerns in recent days that they are being given a less-effective vaccine than more affluent, white communities.
  • Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), another CBC member, noted that those suspicions have historic roots, pointing to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study — a deadly federal research project that targeted poor Black people in rural Alabama in 1930s — as evidence of the "painful history" of biomedical mistreatment of African Americans in the United States. 
  • Despite such reservations, the broad consensus in the caucus appears to favor efforts to maximize vaccinations in the shortest possible time, regardless which shot is available in a given community.
  • On Wednesday, Kelly is set to join Rep. Joyce BeattyJoyce Birdson BeattyDemocrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy Black Caucus backs Biden's pick to head DOJ Civil Rights Division Sole GOP vote on House police reform bill says he 'accidentally pressed the wrong voting button' MORE (D-Ohio), head of the Black Caucus, in an online forum with medical experts designed to educate minority communities on best vaccine practices. 
  • Rep. Anthony BrownAnthony Gregory BrownOvernight Defense: Pentagon chief to press for Manchin's support on Colin Kahl | House Dems seek to limit transfer of military-grade gear to police Democrats spar over COVID-19 vaccine strategy 140 lawmakers call for Biden administration to take 'comprehensive' approach to Iran MORE (D-Md.) said officials should monitor the distribution of vaccines to identify “patterns” that might indicate prejudices in the dispensation. But he’s also encouraging all of his constituents to get whatever vaccine is available first, and he highlighted the advantages of the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot, particularly in hard-to-reach populations like the homeless. 
anonymous

Cuomo Says He Will Not Resign Despite Calls From Schumer And Other Top N.Y. Democrats :... - 0 views

  • New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday afternoon that he would not resign, despite mounting pressure from prominent New York U.S. representatives calling for him to step down.
  • His announcement followed a cascade of statements Friday morning from Democratic members of the state's congressional delegation asking for his resignation in the face of multiple sexual misconduct allegations and an ongoing investigation into the state's reporting of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.
  • Just hours earlier, at least a dozen of the state's prominent House Democrats, including Rep. Jerry Nadler, said the challenges the governor faces make him unable to lead effectively.
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  • Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that Cuomo had "lost the confidence of the people of New York." "The repeated accusations against the Governor, and the manner in which he has responded to them, have made it impossible for him to govern at this point," he said.
  • Nadler's statement and others came after more accusers stepped forward, including an unidentified female aide who said Cuomo groped her at the governor's mansion last year.
  • Another woman, Jessica Bakeman, alleged in a New York Magazine essay published Friday that the governor touched her inappropriately while she was working as a statehouse reporter several years ago.
  • Bakeman, who now works at an NPR member station in Florida, recounted a time when Cuomo "humiliated" her at a holiday party he hosted for the Albany press corps in 2014
  • U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman also called for the governor to resign in a joint statement Friday.
  • U.S. Reps. Grace Meng, Yvette Clarke, Antonio Delgado, Nydia Velázquez, Brian Higgins, Mondaire Jones, Carolyn Maloney, Sean Patrick Maloney and Adriano Espaillat are also calling for Cuomo to step down.
  • In pointed remarks Friday afternoon, Cuomo seemed to respond to these calls by criticizing "politicians" for weighing in "without knowing any facts or substance."
  • The speaker of the New York Assembly on Thursday authorized the Judiciary Committee to begin an impeachment investigation into the misconduct allegations against the governor.Cuomo added that he would not give in to "cancel culture" and that he wants the ongoing inquiries into his behavior to proceed.
katherineharron

House to vote on resolution calling to remove President Trump from office by the 25th A... - 0 views

  • The House of Representatives is expected to vote Tuesday on a measure calling for President Donald Trump to be removed from office through the 25th Amendment in the wake of the violent siege of the US Capitol last week.
  • The resolution, brought forward by Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, calls on Vice President Mike Pence "to immediately use his powers under section 4 of the 25th Amendment to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments in the Cabinet to declare what is obvious to a horrified nation: That the President is unable to successfully discharge the duties of his office."
  • Approval of the resolution by the Democratic-led House will stand as a symbolic rebuke to the President as many lawmakers are furious and reeling from the deadly attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
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  • It comes as House Democrats are now moving rapidly toward impeaching the President for a second time as a result of the insurrection, which Trump incited after repeatedly making false claims that the election had been stolen from him
  • House Democrats plan to vote Wednesday to impeach Trump
  • Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, told colleagues on a conference call Monday evening that Wednesday's impeachment vote is a "vote of conscience,"
  • The House will vote Tuesday evening on the resolution urging Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump, and then will plan to vote Wednesday at 9 a.m. ET on the impeachment resolution, Hoyer said.
  • Invoking the 25th Amendment would require Pence and a majority of the Cabinet to vote to remove Trump from office due to his inability to "discharge the powers and duties of his office" -- an unprecedented step. Pence has so far given no indication that he would take that action.
  • Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called Pence a day after the Capitol attack to discuss the 25th Amendment -- but Pence never took the call after they were on hold for 25 minutes.
  • In her statement on Monday, Pelosi said that as a "next step," House Democrats "will move forward with bringing impeachment legislation to the Floor."
  • Pelosi accused House Republicans of "enabling the President's unhinged, unstable and deranged acts of sedition to continue," adding, "Their complicity endangers America, erodes our Democracy, and it must end."
hannahcarter11

Third bank cuts ties with Trump after Capitol riot | TheHill - 0 views

  • A third bank declared its plans to cut ties with President TrumpDonald TrumpGrowing number of GOP lawmakers say they support impeachment YouTube temporarily bars uploading of new content on Trump's channel House passes measure calling on Pence to remove Trump MORE and the Trump Organization on Tuesday in the aftermath of the raid on the Capitol last week.
  • Florida-based Professional Bank, which once provided Trump with an $11 million mortgage, announced that it won’t conduct future business with the president or his organization.
  • The Florida bank represents the third bank to end its relationship with Trump and the Trump Organization after a pro-Trump mob breached and vandalized the Capitol building last week in an attempt to disrupt Congress’s certification of President-elect Joe BidenJoe BidenGrowing number of GOP lawmakers say they support impeachment House passes measure calling on Pence to remove Trump Disney, Walmart say they will block donations to lawmakers who objected to Electoral College results MORE’s Electoral College win.
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  • The New York-based Signature Bank announced that it would close down Trump’s personal accounts that have about $5.3 million due to the “displeasure and shock” management experienced following the Capitol riots. 
  • Earlier this week, Bloomberg News reported that Deutsche Bank would not conduct future business with Trump or his company besides monitoring the payment of existing loans amounting to more than $300 million. 
  • The deadly riots resulted in at least five deaths, including a Capitol Police officer and a woman shot by a plain clothes Capitol Police officer.
  • The New York bank also called on the president to resign and said it would not make future agreements with lawmakers who contested the Electoral College results after the riots.
  • “We witnessed the President of the United States encouraging the rioters and refraining from calling in the National Guard to protect the Congress in its performance of duty,” the statement continued.
  • Eric TrumpEric TrumpLet's make Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021 the day Trumpism died Ivanka Trump urges 'patriots' storming Capitol to 'stop immediately' in now-deleted tweet Eric Trump warns of primary challenges for Republicans who don't object to election results MORE, one of the president’s sons put in charge of day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization, told The Associated Press that banks and other companies ending their relationship with the business after the riots exemplifies a liberal “cancel culture.”
  • “If you disagree with them, if they don’t like you, they try and cancel you.”
  • Several companies, in addition to the banks, have distanced themselves from the president after last week’s events, including Shopify, which took down trumpstore.com, and PGA of America, which moved a 2022 championship away from Trump property.
  • New York City declared on Wednesday that it would end contracts with the Trump Organization to run attractions in the city’s park, with Mayor Bill de BlasioBill de BlasioRepublican Staten Island candidate apologizes for Hitler reference New York City considering ending business contracts with Trump Columnist Ross Barkan discusses the slow vaccination process in the state of New York MORE (D) saying, “New York City doesn’t do business with insurrectionists.”
hannahcarter11

Trump's actions in last days as President increase his legal jeopardy - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump's actions during his final days in office have significantly increased his exposure to potential criminal prosecution, lawyers say, complicating his life after the White House.
  • Over five days last week -- beginning with a phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State directing him to "find" votes to overturn the election to encouraging the pro-Trump crowd to "show strength" in their march to the Capitol -- lawyers say the President has put himself under the microscope of state and federal prosecutors.
  • The Manhattan district attorney's office has a broad criminal investigation looking into allegations of insurance fraud and tax fraud. The New York attorney general has a civil investigation into whether the Trump Organization improperly inflated the value of its assets.
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  • The new possible criminal exposure comes on top of ongoing New York state investigations into the President's finances and multiple defamation lawsuits related to Trump denying sexual assault accusations by women.
  • The New York criminal investigation has been slowed by a fight over the President's tax records, a scrum that is again before the Supreme Court.
  • Lawyers have speculated the court may be waiting for Trump's term to end next week before ruling.
  • Sandick and other lawyers, however, say that as alarming as Trump's recent statements have been, there are multiple hurdles for prosecutors to prove that the President violated election laws or those relating to incitement or sedition.
  • He is also facing a civil investigation from the New York attorney general's office, which is looking at whether the President improperly inflated the value of his assets to obtain loans or favorable tax benefits
  • Prosecutors have also not been in contact with Rosemary Vrablic, Trump's private banker at Deutsche Bank, which has loaned the President more than $300 million dollars, people familiar with the investigation said.
  • The President's actions this past week have already cost him financially -- the PGA of America said on Sunday night it would not hold its championship in 2022 at the Trump golf course in New Jersey and Deutsche Bank said it would not do business with him -- and the specter of ongoing criminal investigations may have a longer-term impact on his business prospects. New York City announced Wednesday that it is taking steps to cancel contracts with Trump Org for the Ferry Point golf course and carousel and ice skating rink in Central Park.
  • Trump's recent statements will present the Biden administration, which has made calls for unity, and his Justice Department with the dilemma of potentially prosecuting a former president.
  • "There's a long precedent of not prosecuting former presidents over policy differences," said Elliot Williams, a CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor. "The difference is we're not talking about policy difference here, and this is perhaps the most egregious conduct we've ever seen from a president while in office
  • Some former prosecutors say that a lot of the conduct is morally reprehensible, but it isn't clear if it will cross the line into violating the law. Investigators will need to prove the President intended to commit crimes, a high bar in criminal cases, not that he was encouraging lawful protests or truly believed that he won the election.
  • Like the riot, the legal liability for Trump's call to Georgia election officials will turn on his statements. Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, imploring him to "find" 11,780 votes to give him the edge to overturn the election. It followed a call in December in which Trump told a Georgia elections investigator he would be a "national hero" if he would "find the fraud," a source told CNN.
  • As the end of Trump's presidency nears, sources tell CNN Trump has considered pardoning himself, his family members and other allies from federal charges. Lawyers say it is not clear whether a self-pardon would hold up in court, but a presidential pardon has no bearing on state investigations.
katherineharron

Stimulus package: Here's what's in Biden's $1.9 trillion economic rescue plan - CNNPoli... - 0 views

  • Bigger stimulus checks. More aid for the unemployed, the hungry and those facing eviction. Additional support for small businesses, states and local governments. Increased funding for vaccinations and testing.
  • The new payments would go to adult dependents that were left out of the earlier rounds, like some children over the age of 17.
  • Billed as the American Rescue Plan, the package augments many of the measures in Congress' historic $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill from March and in the $900 billion legislation from December,
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  • Biden is pushing for the big steps he says are needed to address immediate needs and control the coronavirus pandemic. He also plans to lay out an economic recovery plan in coming weeks that aims to create jobs and combat the climate crisis, among other measures.
  • The plan calls for sending another $1,400 per person to eligible recipients. This money would be in addition to the $600 payments that were approved by Congress in December and sent out earlier this month -- for a total of $2,000
  • nother $5 billion would be set aside to help struggling renters to pay their utility bills.
  • Biden would increase the federal boost the jobless receive to $400 a week, from the $300 weekly enhancement contained in Congress' relief package from December.
  • He would also extend the payments, along with two key pandemic unemployment programs, through September. This applies to those in the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program who have exhausted their regular state jobless payments and in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which provides benefits to the self-employed, independent contractors, gig workers and certain people affected by the pandemic.
  • These are key parts of a $1.9 trillion proposal that President-elect Joe Biden unveiled Thursday evening.
  • The plan would provide $25 billion in rental assistance for low- and moderate-income households who have lost jobs during the pandemic. That's in addition to the $25 billion lawmakers provided in December.
  • Biden would extend the 15% increase in food stamp benefits through September, instead of having it expire in June.
  • The plan calls on Congress to create a $25 billion emergency fund and add $15 billion to an existing grant program to help child care providers, including family child care homes, to pay for rent, utilities, and payroll, and increased costs associated with the pandemic like personal protective equipment.
  • Biden wants to boost the Child Tax Credit to $3,600 for children under age 6 and $3,000 for those between ages 6 and 17 for a year.
  • Also, he wants Congress to provide $4 billion for mental health and substance use disorder services and $20 billion to meet the health care needs of veterans.
  • It also proposes making a $35 billion investment in some state, local, tribal, and non-profit financing programs that make low-interest loans and provide venture capital to entrepreneurs
  • Under Biden's proposal, people who are sick or quarantining, or caring for a child whose school is closed, will receive 14 weeks of paid leave. The government will reimburse employers with fewer than 500 workers for the full cost of providing the leave.
  • he plan calls for providing $15 billion to create a new grant program for small business owners, separate from the existing Paycheck Protection Program.
  • He wants to increase and expand the Affordable Care Act's premium subsidies so that enrollees don't have to pay more than 8.5% of their income for coverage -- which is also one of his campaign promises. (The law is facing a challenge from Republican-led states that is currently before the Supreme Court.)
  • Biden wants to send $350 billion to state, local and territorial governments to keep their frontline workers employed, distribute the vaccine, increase testing, reopen schools and maintain vital services.
  • Additional assistance to states has been among the most controversial elements of the congressional rescue packages, with Democrats looking to add to the $150 billion in the March legislation and Republicans resisting such efforts. The December package ultimately dropped an initial call to include $160 billion.
  • Biden's plan would also give $20 billion to the hardest-hit public transit agencies to help avert layoffs and the cutting of routes.
  • The plan would provide an additional $170 billion to K-12 schools, colleges and universities to help them reopen and operate safely or to facilitate remote learning.
  • It would also fund the hiring of 100,000 public health workers, nearly tripling the community health workforce.
  • The proposal would also invest $50 billion in testing, providing funds to purchase rapid tests, expand lab capacity and help schools implement regular testing to support reopening.
  • The plan calls for investing $20 billion in a national vaccination program, including launching community vaccination centers around the country and mobile units in hard-to-reach areas
  • Biden is calling on Congress to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and to end the tipped minimum wage and the sub-minimum wage for people with disabilities.
carolinehayter

What We Know About Security Response At Capitol on January 6 : NPR - 0 views

  • The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a security failure, an intelligence failure — or both. How could security forces in the nation's capital be so swiftly and completely overwhelmed by rioters who stated their plans openly on a range of social media sites? President Trump had even tweeted on Dec. 19: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!"
  • In a letter to the Justice Department, Bowser says "we are mindful" of events in 2020 — likely referencing the June 1 clearing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square by Park Police and other federal law enforcement that not answerable to the city.
  • And then there is the National Guard. In the 50 states and Puerto Rico, the Guard is under the command of the governor. In Washington, D.C., however, the Guard is under the command of the president, though orders to deploy are typically issued by the secretary of the Army at the request of the mayor.
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  • The Department of Homeland Security produces a threat assessment — but it is an overview, a DHS spokesperson told NPR, focusing on the "heightened threat environment during the 2020-2021 election season, including the extent to which the political transition and political polarization are contributing to the mobilization of individuals to commit violence."
  • This raw intelligence — bits and pieces of information scraped from various social media sites — indicates that there will likely be violence when lawmakers certify the presidential election results on Jan. 6.
  • But the DHS and the FBI do not create an intelligence report focused specifically on the upcoming pro-Trump rally.
  • These threat assessments or intelligence bulletins are typically written as a matter of course ahead of high-profile events. It's not clear why this didn't happen.
  • The Metropolitan Police Department arrests Enrique Tarrio, leader of the far-right Proud Boys group. He is charged with destruction of property and possession of high-capacity firearm magazines. He's released the next day and told to leave Washington.
  • U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund asks permission from House and Senate security officials to request that the D.C. National Guard be placed on standby in case the protest gets out of control. The Washington Post reports: "House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving said he wasn't comfortable with the 'optics' of formally declaring an emergency ahead of the demonstration, Sund said. Meanwhile, Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger suggested that Sund should informally seek out his Guard contacts, asking them to 'lean forward' and be on alert in case Capitol Police needed their help."
  • The FBI Field Office in Norfolk, Va., issues an explicit warning that extremists have plans for violence the next day, as first reported by the Post. It releases its advisory report after FBI analysts find a roster of troubling information including specific threats against members of Congress, an exchange of maps of the tunnel system under the Capitol complex and organizational plans like setting up gathering places in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and South Carolina so extremists can meet to convoy to Washington.
  • The head of the FBI's Washington Field Office, Steven D'Antuono, later says that information is shared with the FBI's "law enforcement partners" through the bureau's Joint Terrorism Task Force. That includes the U.S. Capitol Police, U.S. Park Police, D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and other agencies.
  • Officials convene a conference call with local law enforcement to discuss the Norfolk warning.
  • Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser announces that the MPD will be the lead law enforcement agency and will coordinate with the Capitol Police, Park Police and Secret Service.
  • The Metropolitan Police Department has jurisdiction on city streets; the U.S. Park Police on the Ellipse, where Trump's rally took place; the U.S. Secret Service in the vicinity of the White House; and the U.S. Capitol Police on the Capitol complex.
  • That day appears to have profoundly influenced the mayor's approach to the Jan. 6 events. In her letter, Bowser describes the difficulty and confusion of policing large crowds while working around other law enforcement personnel without proper coordination and identification.
  • Bowser requests, and receives, a limited force from the D.C. National Guard. The soldiers number 340, though they are unarmed and their job is to help with traffic flow — not law enforcement — which is to be handled by D.C. police.
  • Trump begins to address the crowd at the Ellipse, behind the White House. He falsely claims that "this election was stolen from you, from me, from the country." Trump calls on his supporters at the rally to march on the U.S. Capitol, saying he will walk with them. Instead, he returns to the White House.
  • "We see this huge crush of people coming down Pennsylvania Ave. toward the Capitol," reports NPR's Hannah Allam. "We follow the crowd as it goes up to the Hill, toward the Capitol. There's scaffolding set up for the inauguration already," she adds. "But as far as protection, all we really saw were some mesh barriers, some metal fencing and only a small contingent of Capitol Police. And we watched them being quickly overwhelmed." The FBI says multiple law enforcement agencies receive reports of a suspected pipe bomb at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. Fifteen minutes later, there are reports of a similar device at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
  • Mayor Bowser asks Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy for additional Guard forces
  • Capitol Police Chief Sund speaks with the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard Maj. Gen. William Walker by phone and requests immediate assistance.
  • White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany says on Twitter that the National Guard is on its way at Trump's direction.
  • Capitol Police send an alert that all buildings in the Capitol complex are on lockdown due to "an external security threat located on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol Building. ... [S]tay away from exterior windows and doors. If you are outside, seek cover."
  • The House and Senate abruptly go into recess.
  • On a conference call with Pentagon officials, D.C. Mayor Bowser requests National Guard support and Capitol Police Chief Sund pleads for backup.
  • Trump tweets criticism of Vice President Pence: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!"
  • From inside the House chamber come reports of an armed standoff at the door to the chamber. Police officers have their guns drawn on someone trying to get in.
  • Acting Defense Secretary Miller determines that all available forces of the D.C. National Guard are required to reestablish security of the Capitol complex.
  • Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam tweets that his team is working closely with Mayor Bowser, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to respond to the situation.
  • Moving to the Senate terrace, they see protesters smashing the door of the Capitol to gain entry, as Capitol Police inside work to push them back.
  • rump tweets a video downplaying the events of the day, repeating false claims that the election was stolen and sympathizing with his followers, saying: "I know your pain, I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. ... You're very special. You've seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel, but go home, and go home in peace."
  • Acting Defense Secretary Miller authorizes the mobilization of up to 6,200 National Guard troops from Maryland, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, according to the Pentagon.
  • Trump tweets a message to his supporters. "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"
  • Capitol Police, MPD and the D.C. National Guard establish a perimeter on the west side of the Capitol.
  • The Capitol is declared secure. Members of Congress return to complete the opening and counting of the Electoral College votes.
  • Pence affirms that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have won the Electoral College: "Joseph R. Biden Jr. of the state of Delaware has received for president of the United States, 306 votes. Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 232 votes."
  • The FBI formally warns local law enforcement that armed protests are being planned for all 50 statehouses and the U.S. Capitol. The warning says an unidentified group is calling on others to help it "storm" state, local and federal courthouses, should Trump be removed as president before Inauguration Day.
  • Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, says two Capitol Police officers have been suspended. One of the suspended officers took a selfie with a rioter. The other put on a MAGA hat "and started directing people around," says Ryan.
  • The U.S. Justice Department says it has received more than 100,000 pieces of digital information in response to its call for tips about those responsible for the Capitol riot. The Justice Department says MPD acted on its intelligence to arrest the Proud Boys' Tarrio before the protest, and federal officials interrupted travel of others who planned to go to D.C.
  • The secretary of the Army announces that as many as 20,000 National Guard troops are expected to be deployed to D.C. for the inauguration. Some will be armed, while others will have access to their weapons but will not carry them.
  • FBI Director Christopher Wray says the bureau has identified more than 200 suspects from the Capitol riots and arrested more than 100 others in connection with the violence. "We know who you are if you're out there — and FBI agents are coming to find you," he warns.
  • U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz announces his office will begin "a review to examine the role and activity of DOJ and its components in preparing for and responding to the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021." Horowitz said his review will coordinate with IG reviews in the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Interior.
nrashkind

Graham calls for swift end to impeachment trial, warns Dems against calling witnesses |... - 0 views

  • Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., announced that his initial plan of a pre-trial dismissal of the impeachment case against President Trump is now unlikely to happen
  • he is pushing for the trial to begin and end as quickly as possible.
  • The Senate trial is set to begin Tuesday.
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  • Graham had previously floated the idea that the GOP majority could immediately vote to dismiss the case before hearing any arguments, but now he states that this does not appear to be a possibility given the lack of sufficient Republican support for such action.
  • “Yeah that’s dead for practical purposes,
  • Graham remains confident that Republicans are still united enough to acquit Trump at the conclusion of the trial.
  • t Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans on keeping the Senate in session for 12 hours a day so that House Democrats would be done presenting their arguments Wednesday.
  • Senators Ted Cruz, R-Texas; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; and Susan Collins, R-Maine, are among a small group of Republicans who have yet to completely shut the door on new witnesses
  • “If we call one witness, we’re going to call all the witnesses,” Graham said.
anonymous

Ex-Capitol Police Chief Says Requests For National Guard Denied 6 Times In Riots : NPR - 0 views

  • The former chief of U.S. Capitol Police says security officials at the House and Senate rebuffed his early requests to call in the National Guard ahead of a demonstration in support of President Trump that turned into a deadly attack on Congress.
  • Former chief Steven Sund -- who resigned his post last week after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for him to step down
  • Sund's superiors said previously that the National Guard and other additional security support could have been provided, but no one at the Capitol requested it.
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  • Sund told the Post that House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving was concerned with the "optics" of declaring an emergency ahead of the protests and rejected a National Guard presence.
  • Sund says he requested assistance six times ahead of and during the attack on the Capitol. Each of those requests was denied or delayed, he says.
  • Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser also wanted a light police presence at the Capitol.
  • During Wednesday's violence, Bowser requested, and received, a limited force of 340 from the D.C. National Guard. Those troops were unarmed and their job was to help with traffic flow — not law enforcement, which was meant to be handled by D.C. police.
  • When the mob reached the Capitol complex at about 12:40 p.m. ET on Wednesday, it took about 15 minutes for the west side perimeter of the building to be breached, he says. The Capitol Police contingent, which numbered around 1,400 that day, was quickly overrun by the estimated 8,000 rioters.
  • Sund says during a conference call with several law enforcement officials at about 2:26 p.m., he asked the Pentagon to provide backup.
  • Senior Army official Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, director of the Army Staff, said on the call he couldn't recommend that Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy authorize deployment,
  • "I don't like the visual of the National Guard standing a police line with the Capitol in the background,
kaylynfreeman

Trump Winning Michigan, Florida and Arizona? This Pollster Says So - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Robert Cahaly’s polls have Arizona, Michigan and Florida in the president’s column. It’s hard to find another pollster who agrees with him. But they didn’t believe him in 2016 either.762
  • Trafalgar does not disclose its methods, and is considered far too shadowy by other pollsters to be taken seriously. Mostly, they dismiss it as an outlier. But for Mr. Cahaly, “I told you so” is already a calling card.
  • Is it possible to believe a guy whose polls consistently give Mr. Trump just enough support for a narrow lead in most swing states, and who refuses to reveal much of anything about how he gets his data?
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      I think it was just a lucky guess last election. It's impossible to know what's gonna happen this election especially with the mail in ballots and covid.
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  • In 2016, its first time publicly releasing polls, Trafalgar was the firm whose state surveys most effectively presaged Mr. Trump’s upset win. A veteran Republican strategist, Mr. Cahaly even called the exact number of Electoral College votes that Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton would receive — 306 to 227 — although his prediction of which states would get them there was just slightly off.
  • “People do not seem embarrassed to support Mr. Trump,” Mr. Cox said. In the past four years, studies seeking to quantify a so-called “shy Trump” effect in surveys have generally found little evidence to support it.
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      I read another article that says otherwise
  • ut he’s not saying what they are. Mr. Cahaly releases almost no real explanation of his polling methodology; the methods page on Trafalgar’s website contains what reads like a vague advertisement of its services and explains that its polls actively confront social desirability bias, without giving specifics as to how. He says that he uses a mixture of text messages, emails and phone calls — some automated, and some by live callers — to reach an accurate representation of the electorate.
  • “social desirability bias”: the tendency for respondents to say what they think an interviewer wants to hear, not what they actually believe.
  • “It is wildly inappropriate not to tell me, not only what modes you use to draw your sample, but how specifically you did it,” he said. His general rule: “If somebody’s not transparent you can generally assume they’re crap.”
  • In 2010, Mr. Cahaly was arrested and taken to court for violating a law against using automatic calling machines — known as robocalling — to conduct polls. The charges against him were eventually dropped, and he later successfully sued a state law enforcement agency, causing South Carolina’s prohibition on robocalls to be declared unconstitutional.
  • Mr. Cahaly said he was doing legitimate polling, aimed at truly understanding voters’ opinions — and getting what he called “dead-on” results. During the 2016 Republican primaries, he was early to spot a surge of enthusiasm from many working-class voters who had long felt alienated from politics and helped power Mr. Trump’s ascent.
  • “I kept getting these stories about people who showed up to vote and didn’t know how to use the voting machines, they hadn’t voted in so long,” Mr. Cahaly said. So he began to look into who those people might be, and used data available online to create a list of roughly 50 lifestyle characteristics — including, for instance, whether they owned a fishing license — to identify the sorts of low-engagement voters who were turning out in droves. He used that data to make sure he was reaching the right kinds of respondents as he polled off the voter file in advance of the general election.
  • Mr. Cahaly feels no need to reveal his techniques, despite the near-universal doubt about his work from his peers. “I’ve given away enough; I’m not giving away any more,” he said, arguing that it had been a mistake to even tell the public about his “neighbor question,” which some other firms have since adopted in their own surveys.
Javier E

Opinion | Call it the cultural left. Do not call it liberal. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • news outlets and social media are crackling with a debate over the value of free speech vs. the rooting out of systemic bias.
  • It’s past time we stopped attaching labels such as “liberal” or “progressive” to a movement that is anything but.
  • whether I agree with anything Pinker says — whether any of us do, really — is beside the point. What struck me most, reading about the coordinated attack on his integrity, is something Pinker said in his own defense.
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  • “I have a mind-set that the world is a complex place we are trying to understand,” he said. “There is an inherent value to free speech, because no one knows the solution to problems a priori.”
  • Oh, right, it’s what we used to call liberalism.
  • Liberals are supposed to believe that the freedom to dissent is an essential part of a functioning democracy. More points of view lead to a better grasp of complex problems. Liberals believe that the price of that freedom is the tolerance of ideas we may find self-evidently wrong, or even odious.
  • But this cultural leftism that has been emboldened in the Trump moment — call it wokeism, I guess — espouses the opposite
  • The new leftism holds that free speech is often a tool of oppression, an elitist principle wielded by white men whose speech counts for more than everybody else’s. Ezra Klein, the founder of Vox, recently echoed this argument, tweeting: “A lot of debates that sell themselves as being about free speech are actually about power.”
  • We in the media should make sure all sides of this debate are heard. But when we allow the cultural left to refer to itself as a “liberal” or “progressive” movement, we do a profound disservice to generations of political activists who stood up for a decidedly different set of principles
Javier E

The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal. But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion. Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two.
  • If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.
  • What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?
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  • At fifty-nine, Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent, enmeshed in changing conditions through time.
  • She has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society
  • Because she brings together ideas from both the left and the right to battle increasing inequality, Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life. She builds a democratic frame for a society in which people come from different places and are predisposed to disagree.
  • she sketched out the entry-level idea that one basic way to expand equality is by expanding the range of valued fields within a society.
  • The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?” She paused. “That is what it is to be free.”
  • How do you move from a basic model of egalitarian variety, in which everybody gets a crack at being a star at something, to figuring out how to respond to a complex one, where people, with different allotments of talent and virtue, get unequal starts, and often meet with different constraints along the way?
  • The problem, she proposed, was that contemporary egalitarian thinkers had grown fixated on distribution: moving resources from lucky-seeming people to unlucky-seeming people, as if trying to spread the luck around.
  • Egalitarians should agree about clear cases of blameless misfortune: the quadriplegic child, the cognitively impaired adult, the teen-ager born into poverty with junkie parents. But Anderson balked there, too. By categorizing people as lucky or unlucky, she argued, these egalitarians set up a moralizing hierarchy.
  • In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to.
  • By letting the lucky class go on reaping the market’s chancy rewards while asking others to concede inferior status in order to receive a drip-drip-drip of redistributive aid, these egalitarians were actually entrenching people’s status as superior or subordinate.
  • To the ugly and socially awkward: . . . Maybe you won’t be such a loser in love once potential dates see how rich you are.
  • . To the stupid and untalented: Unfortunately, other people don’t value what little you have to offer in the system of production. . . . Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we productive ones will make it up to you: we’ll let you share in the bounty of what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities. . . 
  • she imagined some citizens getting a state check and a bureaucratic letter:
  • This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions.
  • To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest).
  • Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences.
  • A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,”
  • Her first book, “Value in Ethics and Economics,” appeared that year, announcing one of her major projects: reconciling value (an amorphous ascription of worth that is a keystone of ethics and economics) with pluralism (the fact that people seem to value things in different ways).
  • Philosophers have often assumed that pluralistic value reflects human fuzziness—we’re loose, we’re confused, and we mix rational thought with sentimental responses.
  • She offered an “expressive” theory: in her view, each person’s values could be various because they were socially expressed, and thus shaped by the range of contexts and relationships at play in a life. Instead of positing value as a basic, abstract quality across society (the way “utility” functioned for economists), she saw value as something determined by the details of an individual’s history.
  • Like her idea of relational equality, this model resisted the temptation to flatten human variety toward a unifying standard. In doing so, it helped expand the realm of free and reasoned economic choice.
  • Anderson’s model unseated the premises of rational-choice theory, in which individuals invariably make utility-maximizing decisions, occasionally in heartless-seeming ways. It ran with, rather than against, moral intuition. Because values were plural, it was perfectly rational to choose to spend evenings with your family, say, and have guilt toward the people you left in the lurch at work.
  • The theory also pointed out the limits on free-market ideologies, such as libertarianism.
  • In ethics, it broke across old factional debates. The core idea “has been picked up on by people across quite a range of positions,” Peter Railton, one of Anderson’s longtime colleagues, says. “Kantians and consequentialists alike”—people who viewed morality in terms of duties and obligations, and those who measured the morality of actions by their effects in the world—“could look at it and see something important.”
  • Traditionally, the discipline is taught through a-priori thought—you start with basic principles and reason forward. Anderson, by contrast, sought to work empirically, using information gathered from the world, identifying problems to be solved not abstractly but through the experienced problems of real people.
  • “Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual,”
  • In 2004, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy asked Anderson to compose its entry on the moral philosophy of John Dewey, who helped carry pragmatist methods into the social realm. Dewey had an idea of democracy as a system of good habits that began in civil life. He was an anti-ideologue with an eye for pluralism.
  • She started working with historians, trying to hone her understanding of ideas by studying them in the context of their creation. Take Rousseau’s apparent support of direct democracy. It’s rarely mentioned that, at the moment when he made that argument, his home town of Geneva had been taken over by oligarchs who claimed to represent the public. Pragmatism said that an idea was an instrument, which naturally gave rise to such questions as: an instrument for what, and where, and when?
  • In “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Anderson had already started to drift away from what philosophers, following Rawls, call ideal theory, based on an end vision for a perfectly just society. As Anderson began a serious study of race in America, though, she found herself losing faith in that approach entirely.
  • Broadly, there’s a culturally right and a culturally left ideal theory for race and society. The rightist version calls for color blindness. Instead of making a fuss about skin and ethnicity, its advocates say, society should treat people as people, and let the best and the hardest working rise.
  • The leftist theory envisions identity communities: for once, give black people (or women, or members of other historically oppressed groups) the resources and opportunities they need, including, if they want it, civil infrastructure for themselves.
  • In “The Imperative of Integration,” published in 2010, Anderson tore apart both of these models. Sure, it might be nice to live in a color-blind society, she wrote, but that’s nothing like the one that exists.
  • But the case for self-segregation was also weak. Affinity groups provided welcome comfort, yet that wasn’t the same as power or equality, Anderson pointed out. And there was a goose-and-gander problem. Either you let only certain groups self-segregate (certifying their subordinate status) or you also permitted, say, white men to do it,
  • Anderson’s solution was “integration,” a concept that, especially in progressive circles, had been uncool since the late sixties. Integration, by her lights, meant mixing on the basis of equality.
  • in attending to these empirical findings over doctrine, she announced herself as a non-ideal theorist: a philosopher with no end vision of society. The approach recalls E. L. Doctorow’s description of driving at night: “You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
  • or others, though, a white woman making recommendations on race policy raised questions of perspective. She was engaging through a mostly white Anglo-American tradition. She worked from the premise that, because she drew on folders full of studies, the limits of her own perspective were not constraining.
  • Some philosophers of color welcomed the book. “She’s taking the need for racial justice seriously, and you could hardly find another white political philosopher over a period of decades doing that,”
  • Recently, Anderson changed the way she assigns undergraduate essays: instead of requiring students to argue a position and fend off objections, doubling down on their original beliefs, she asks them to discuss their position with someone who disagrees, and to explain how and why, if at all, the discussion changed their views.
  • The challenge of pluralism is the challenge of modern society: maintaining equality amid difference in a culture given to constant and unpredictable change.
  • Rather than fighting for the ascendancy of certain positions, Anderson suggests, citizens should fight to bolster healthy institutions and systems—those which insure that all views and experiences will be heard. Today’s righteous projects, after all, will inevitably seem fatuous and blinkered from the vantage of another age.
  • Smith saw the markets as an escape from that order. Their “most important” function, he explained, was to bring “liberty and security” to those “who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors.”
  • Anderson zeroed in on Adam Smith, whose “The Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776, is taken as a keystone of free-market ideology. At the time, English labor was subject to uncompensated apprenticeships, domestic servitude, and some measure of clerical dominion.
  • Smith, in other words, was an egalitarian. He had written “The Wealth of Nations” in no small part to be a solution to what we’d now call structural inequality—the intractable, compounding privileges of an arbitrary hierarchy.
  • It was a historical irony that, a century later, writers such as Marx pointed to the market as a structure of dominion over workers; in truth, Smith and Marx had shared a socioeconomic project. And yet Marx had not been wrong to trash Smith’s ideas, because, during the time between them, the world around Smith’s model had changed, and it was no longer a useful tool.
  • mages of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
  • Today, people still try to use, variously, both Smith’s and Marx’s tools on a different, postindustrial world:
  • The unnaturalness of this top-heavy arrangement, combined with growing evidence of power abuses, has given many people reason to believe that something is fishy about the structure of American equality. Socialist and anti-capitalist models are again in vogue.
  • Anderson offers a different corrective path. She thinks it’s fine for some people to earn more than others. If you’re a brilliant potter, and people want to pay you more than the next guy for your pottery, great!
  • The problem isn’t that talent and income are distributed in unequal parcels. The problem is that Jeff Bezos earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a minute, while Amazon warehouse employees, many talented and hardworking, have reportedly resorted to urinating in bottles in lieu of a bathroom break. That circumstance reflects some structure of hierarchical oppression. It is a rip in the democratic fabric, and it’s increasingly the norm.
  • Andersonism holds that we don’t have to give up on market society if we can recognize and correct for its limitations—it may even be our best hope, because it’s friendlier to pluralism than most alternatives are.
  • we must be flexible. We must remain alert. We must solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using society’s ears and eyes and the best tools that we can find.
  • “You can see that, from about 1950 to 1970, the typical American’s wages kept up with productivity growth,” she said. Then, around 1974, she went on, hourly compensation stagnated. American wages have been effectively flat for the past few decades, with the gains of productivity increasingly going to shareholders and to salaries for big bosses.
  • What changed? Anderson rattled off a constellation of factors, from strengthened intellectual-property law to winnowed antitrust law. Financialization, deregulation. Plummeting taxes on capital alongside rising payroll taxes. Privatization, which exchanged modest public-sector salaries for C.E.O. paydays. She gazed into the audience and blinked. “So now we have to ask: What has been used to justify this rather dramatic shift of labor-share of income?”
  • It was no wonder that industrial-age thinking was riddled with contradictions: it reflected what Anderson called “the plutocratic reversal” of classical liberal ideas. Those perversely reversed ideas about freedom were the ones that found a home in U.S. policy, and, well, here we were.
Javier E

He Was a Science Star. Then He Promoted a Questionable Cure for Covid-19. - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • In the 1990s, in an early repurposing experiment, he tested the effect of hydroxychloroquine on a frequently fatal condition known as Q fever, which is caused by an intracellular bacterium. Like viruses, intracellular bacteria multiply within the cells of their hosts; Raoult found that hydroxychloroquine, by reducing acidity within the host cells, slowed bacterial growth
  • He began treating Q fever with a combination of hydroxychloroquine and doxycycline and later used the same drugs for Whipple’s disease, another fatal condition caused by an intracellular bacterium. The combination is now considered to be a standard treatment for both diseases.
  • Chinese reports, however, appeared to confirm Raoult’s longstanding hopes for chloroquine. A deadly virus for which no treatment existed could evidently be stopped by an inexpensive, widely studied, pre-existing molecule, and one that Raoult knew well. A more heedful scientist might have surveyed the Chinese data and begun preparations for tests of his own. Raoult did this, but he also posted a brief, jubilant video on YouTube, under the title “Coronavirus: Game Over!”
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  • Chloroquine had produced what he called “spectacular improvements” in the Chinese patients. “It’s excellent news — this is probably the easiest respiratory infection to treat of all,” Raoult said. “The only thing I’ll tell you is, be careful: Soon the pharmacies won’t have any chloroquine left!”
  • Raoult wrote his first research paper, in 1979, on a tick-borne infection sometimes known as Marseille fever. The disease was also called “benign summer fever,” and more than 50 years of science said it was nonlethal. And yet one of the 41 patients in his data set had died.
  • Before submitting the paper, Raoult, who was then a young resident, gave it to a supervising professor for review. “And he takes it,” Raoult told me, “he doesn’t show it to me again, and he publishes it — and he’d taken out the death. Because he didn’t know how to make sense of the death.”
  • Raoult was disgusted, and the incident shaped his philosophy of scientific inquiry. “I learned that the people who wanted to follow the familiar path were prepared to cheat in order to do it,” he said.
  • In Raoult’s view, French science was a duchy of appearances, connections and self-reverence. “It was people saying” — he mimed the drone of an aristocrat — “ ‘Oh, him, yes, he’s very good.’ And this reputation, you don’t know what it’s based on, but it’s not the truth.”
  • “He was a ‘follower,’” Raoult said of the professor. “And these ‘followers’ are all cheaters. That’s what I thought. And it’s still what I think.”
  • He is, fundamentally, a contrarian. In Raoult’s view, little of consequence has been accomplished by researchers who endorse the habitual tools and theories of their age.
  • “I’ve spent my life being ‘against,’” he told me. “I tell young scientists: ‘You know, you don’t need a brain to agree. All you need is a spinal cord.’” He is thrilled by conflict. It is a matter both of philosophy — the influence, no doubt, of the thinker he refers to admiringly as “master Nietzsche” — and of temperament.
  • His peers shake their heads at this behavior but grant him a grudging respect. “You can’t knock him down,” said Mark Pallen, a professor of microbial genomics at the University of East Anglia. “In terms of his place in the canon, the sainthood of science, he’s pretty secure there.”
  • In 1985 and 1986, Raoult worked at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., where he discovered the Science Citation Index. The index, a tool that can be used to measure a scientist’s influence on the basis of his or her publication history, was relatively unknown in France. Raoult looked up the researchers reputed to be the best in Marseille. “It was really the emperor wears no clothes,” he said. “These people didn’t publish. There was one who hadn’t written a paper in 10 years.”
  • In subsequent work, he demonstrated that Marseille fever was indeed fatal in almost precisely one in every 41 cases.
  • Raoult’s name sits atop several thousand; in each of the past eight years, he has produced more than 100. In 2020, he has already published at least 54.
  • Like many doctors, Molina viewed Raoult’s study with skepticism, but he was also curious to see if his proposed treatment regimen might in fact work. He tested hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in 11 of his own patients. “We had severe patients, and we wanted to try something,” Molina told me. Within five days, one had died, and two others had been transferred out of his service to intensive care. In another patient, the treatment was suspended after the onset of cardiac issues, a known side effect of the drugs. Eight of the 10 surviving patients still tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 at the conclusion of the study period
  • Raoult is reputed to be an indefatigable worker, but he also achieves his extreme rate of publication by attaching his name to nearly every paper that comes out of his institute.
  • In recent years, Raoult has amused himself, it seems, by staking out tendentious scientific claims, sometimes in territories that are well beyond the scope of his expertise.
  • He is skeptical, for instance, of the utility of mathematical modeling in the realm of epidemiology.
  • The same logic has led him to conclude that climate modelers are no more than “soothsayers” for our “scientistic era” and that their dire predictions are mostly just an attempt to expiate our intense but irrational feelings of guilt.
  • Raoult’s most recent book, “Epidemics: Real Dangers and False Alerts,” was published in late March, by which time the W.H.O. had reported more than 330,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 worldwide and more than 14,500 deaths. “This anguish over epidemics,” he writes, “is completely untethered from the reality of deaths from infectious diseases.”
  • Testing had been scheduled to run for two weeks per patient, but after only six days, the results were so favorable that Raoult decided to end the trial and publish
  • Others might have proceeded with more caution or perhaps waited to confirm these results with a larger, more rigorous trial. Raoult likes to think of himself as a doctor first, however, with a moral obligation to treat his patients that supersedes any desire to produce reliable data.
  • For decades, Raoult has boasted of his prodigious rates of publication and citation, which, as objective statistics, he considers to be the best measure of his worth as a researcher.
  • This observation has come to be known as the parachute paradigm: We tend to accept the claim that parachutes reduce injury among people who leap from airplanes, but this effect has never been proved in a randomized study that compares an experimental parachute group to an unlucky parachuteless control.
  • “If you don’t have something that’s visible in 10 patients, or 30, it’s useless. It’s not of any consequence.” An effective treatment for a potentially lethal infectious disease will be visible to the naked eye.
  • There is much about Raoult that might make him, and by extension his proposed treatment, appealing to a man like Trump. He is an iconoclast with funny hair; he thinks almost everyone else is stupid, especially those who are typically regarded as smart; he is beloved by the angry and conspiracy-minded; his self-congratulation is more or less unceasing.
  • Raoult classified Trump’s psychology as that of an “entrepreneur,” by way of contrast with that of a “politician.” “Entrepreneurs are people who know how to decide, who know how to take risks,” he said. “And at a certain point, to decide is to take a risk. Every decision is a risk.”
  • The French waited far too long, in his estimation, to approve the use of hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19 patients. The authorization came only after Raoult announced in the press that he would continue, “in accordance with the Hippocratic oath” and effectively in defiance of the government, to treat patients with his combination therapy. “I’m convinced that in the end, everyone will be using this treatment,” Raoult told Le Parisien. “It’s just a matter of time before people agree to eat their hats.”
  • Raoult had already begun assembling data for a larger study, but he dismissed the need for anything particularly vast or lengthy. Like other critics of the R.C.T., he likes to point out that a number of self-evidently useful developments in the realm of human health have never been validated by such rigorous tests.
  • Raoult’s study had measured only viral load. It offered no data on clinical outcomes, and it was not clear if the patients’ actual symptoms had improved or indeed whether the patients lived or died. At the outset, 26 patients were assigned to receive hydroxychloroquine, six more than the 20 who appeared in the final results.
  • The six additional patients had been “lost in follow-up,” the authors wrote, “because of early cessation of treatment.” The reasons given were concerning. One patient stopped taking the drug after developing nausea. Three patients had to be transferred out of the institute to intensive care. One patient died. (Another patient elected to leave the hospital before the end of the treatment cycle.)
  • “So four of the 26 treated patients were actually not recovering at all,” noted Elisabeth Bik, a scientific consultant who wrote a widely circulated blog post on Raoult’s study. She paraphrased the sarcasm circulating on Twitter: “My results always look amazing if I leave out the patients who died.”
  • The report was also riddled with discrepancies and apparent errors.
  • This apparent sloppiness was unsurprising to many of those who have tracked Raoult’s work in the past. A prominent French microbiologist told me that, in terms of publication, Raoult’s reputation among scientists has been “long gone” for some time.
  • Beyond its apparent errors and omissions, the study’s design — its small size, its flawed control, the unrandomized assignment of patients to the treatment and control groups — was widely viewed to render its results meaningless. Fauci repeatedly called its results “anecdotal”;
  • Large, well-controlled randomized trials are by no means the only way to arrive at useful scientific insights. Their utility is that they enhance statistical signals such that, amid the noise of human variability and random chance, even the faint effect of some new treatment can be detected.
  • The results of his initial trial have yet to be replicated. “I think what he secretly hopes is that no one will ever be able to show anything,”
  • The prime statistical hurdle that any proposed treatment for Covid-19 will have to overcome — one that is delicate for even Raoult’s critics to make note of, amid the sorrow and fear of this pandemic — is that the signal is likely to be very faint, because the disease is, in the end, rarely fatal. Nearly everyone survives; an effective treatment will save the life of the one or so patients in every hundred who would not have lived without it.
  • “Alzheimer’s drugs, obesity drugs, cardiovascular drugs, osteoporosis drugs: Over and over, there have been what looked like positive results that evaporated on closer inspection. After you’ve experienced this a few times, you take the lesson to heart that the only way to be sure about these things is to run sufficiently powered controlled trials. No shortcuts, no gut feelings — just data.”
  • “I’ve invented 10 or so treatments in my life,” Raoult told me. “Half of them are prescribed all over the world. I’ve never done a double-blind study in my life, never. Never! Never done anything randomized, either.”
  • “When you tell the story, it’s extremely straightforward, no? It’s subject, verb, complement: You detect a disease; there’s a drug that’s cheap, whose safety we know all about because there’s two billion people who take it; we prescribe it, and it changes what it changes. It might not be a miracle product, but it’s better than doing nothing, no?”
  • Raoult had by then begun to lose his composure. He accused Lacombe of being a shill for the pharmaceutical industry; his fans sent her death threats. On Twitter, he called Bik, the consultant who wrote critically about the first study, a “witch hunter” and called a study that she tweeted — one of several published in April and May that seemed to suggest that Raoult’s treatment regimen was ineffectual or even harmful — “fake news.” The authors of another such study were accused of “scientific fraud.” “My detractors are children!” Raoult told an interviewer.
  • It is possible that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are an effective treatment for Covid-19. But Raoult’s study showed, at best, that 20 people who would almost certainly have survived without any treatment at all also survived for six days while taking the drugs Raoult prescribed.
  • In recent weeks, Raoult has in fact tempered his claims about the virtues of his treatment regimen. The published, peer-reviewed version of the final study noted that another two patients had died, bringing the total to 10. Where the earlier version called the drugs “safe and efficient,” they were now described merely as “safe.”
  • He has shown flickers of what appears to be doubt.
  • “I don’t trust popularity,” he told the interviewer. “When too many people think you’re wonderful, you should start to wonder.” His initial YouTube video, “Coronavirus: Game Over!” has also been renamed. The new language is more measured, and in place of the exclamation point there now stands a question mark.
hannahcarter11

Warnock leading Loeffler, other Georgia Senate runoff race deadlocked: poll | TheHill - 0 views

    • hannahcarter11
       
      It's interesting how race factors in here. The disparity in the poll points in the Black vote shows just how pivotal the Black vote is in Georgia.
  • Men gave Perdue a 10-point lead over Ossoff and Loeffler a 9-point lead over Warnock. Women gave Ossoff an 11-point lead over Perdue, as well as a 19-point advantage for Warnock.
  • . If either Republican wins, the GOP will retain control of the Senate.
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  • However, if both Democratic candidates win, the parties will be evenly split in the upper chamber, allowing Vice President-elect Kamala HarrisKamala HarrisBiden says GOP senators have called to congratulate him Biden says family will avoid business conflicts Biden says China must play by 'international norms' MORE to cast a tie-breaking vote on legislation.
  • Democrat the Rev. Raphael Warnock holds a lead over GOP Sen. Kelly LoefflerKelly LoefflerTop Senate GOP super PAC raises million ahead of Georgia runoffs Republican senators introduce bill to protect government workers from being targeted at home Republicans scramble to counter calls to boycott Georgia runoffs MORE (Ga.) in a poll of one of two Georgia runoff races that will determine the balance of the Senate.
  • Warnock leads Loeffler 52 percent to 45 percent
  • Democrat John Ossoff is narrowly leading Sen. David PerdueDavid PerdueRepublican senators introduce bill to protect government workers from being targeted at home Republicans scramble to counter calls to boycott Georgia runoffs Georgia Republicans push for photo ID for future absentee voting MORE (R-Ga.) 50 percent to the Republican’s 48 percent in the state’s other runoff election that will take place in January.
  • White voters in the Peach State gave Perdue a 43-point lead and Loeffler a 37-point lead, according to the poll.
  • Among Black voters, Ossoff led in his runoff race with an 87-point advantage and Warnock with an 83-point advantage.  
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