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rachelramirez

Russian Sports Agent and U.S. Marathon Officials Under Federal Investigation - The New ... - 0 views

  • Russian Sports Agent and U.S. Marathon Officials Under Federal Investigation
  • Officials are scrutinizing the agent, Andrey Baranov, for bribery and corruption, according to several people familiar with the case who requested anonymity because the investigation was continuing.
  • The investigators are looking into whether Mr. Baranov conspired with American marathon organizers — including New York City Marathon officials — to allow athletes using banned substances to compete in their events.
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  • Mr. Baranov has not been charged with any crimes, and he has in the past been depicted as a whistle-blower who exposed cheating and corruption in track and field.
  • The investigation is part of the Department of Justice’s broader inquiry into doping schemes that have already led to penalties against scores of Russian athletes and officials.
  • Grigory Rodchenkov, the former longtime head of Russia’s antidoping laboratory, had told The Times that the Russian government ran an elaborate program to help the country’s athletes use banned, performance-enhancing drugs and go undetected.
  • three dozen Eastern Europeans disciplined in recent months, after retests of their urine samples from the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games.
  • United States law enforcement officials have focused on the agents behind those athletes, and the money they may have routed through American banks
  • Mr. Baranov told sports ethics investigators in 2014 that Ms. Shobukhova had been subjected to extortion and paid half a million dollars to top track and field officials to conceal her doping violations, enabling her to compete in the 2012 Olympics
  • The New York City Marathon spokesman said that no Russian athletes were registered to run on Sunday, in keeping with guidelines from global officials who have barred Russian athletes from competition.
anonymous

Boston Marathon Bomber Death Sentence Case To Be Heard By The Supreme Court : NPR - 0 views

  • The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will consider whether to reinstate the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.The 2013 bombing, which Tsarnaev carried out with his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed three people and injured 264 others. The Chechen immigrant was convicted of all 30 charges brought against him in 2015, and a court imposed six death sentences and 11 concurrent life sentences.
  • But last year, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston threw out the death penalty sentences after finding that the trial judge had failed to ensure proper questioning of prospective jurors, including whether their opinions had been influenced by the wall-to-wall press coverage of the bombing.The Trump administration then appealed to the Supreme Court, seeking to revive the capital sentences. And on Monday the justices, in a one-sentence order, agreed to consider reinstating Tsarnaev's death sentences. They will not hear arguments in the case until the next term.
  • Tsarnaev's defense team has not denied that he participated in the attack, in which two pressure cooker bombs were detonated as runners crossed the race's finish line. But they argued that he was under the strong influence of his older brother, who was killed during the massive manhunt that locked down most of the Boston metropolitan area in the days after the attack.Tsarnaev, 27, is being held at the high-security supermax federal prison near Florence, Colo.
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  • A decision in favor of Tsarnev would put President Biden in a difficult position. The initial decision to seek the death penalty in Tsarnaev's case was made by Barack Obama's administration — during Biden's tenure as vice president. But Biden pledged during his presidential campaign to push for the elimination of the death penalty in the federal system.
  • The appeals panel said the judge who presided over Tsarnaev's trial, U.S. District Judge George A. O'Toole, had rejected the defense team's request for a more distant trial venue, one where prospective jurors might be less likely to be biased against Tsarnaev than in eastern Massachusetts, and the panel maintained the judge committed other important trial errors that barred adequate screening of prospective jurors.
  • Appeals Judge Juan Torruella, who died late last year, said that the district judge stopped Tsarnaev's counsel from asking prospective jurors questions such as what they knew about the case before coming to court or what stood out to them from the media coverage they had seen about the bombing and its aftermath.
  • Torruella wrote that the district judge had relied on "self-declarations of impartiality" by prospective jurors, some of whom admitted before the trial that they were convinced Tsarnaev was guilty.For example, Torruella noted that the woman who became the jury's foreperson withheld from the court dozens of relevant social media comments that mourned the death of an 8-year-old victim, praised law enforcement officers and called Tsarnaev "a piece of garbage."
  • The ruling from last July ordered the District Court to impanel a new jury to hold a sentencing retrial for the death penalty convictions. But the appeals panel noted that Tsarnaev, who told the courtroom on the day of his sentencing that he was "guilty of this attack," would remain in prison for the rest of his life regardless of whether the death sentence is imposed.
  • The Trump administration prioritized carrying out federal executions in its final year — resuming a practice that had been paused for nearly two decades and prompting pushback from activists and lawmakers.In the final six months of the administration, 13 people on death row in the federal system were executed, including three in the week before Biden took office.
liamhudgings

Nipsey Hussle Marathon Book Club creates a space for black men - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

  • DeRon Cash, his tattooed forearms resting on his knees, curled a paperback revered by the late Nipsey Hussle in his hand.
  • Once a month, Cash and a group of men come together for The Marathon Book Club — one of several chapters across the country that were founded after Hussle was killed outside his South Los Angeles clothing store in March.
  • They include professors, entrepreneurs, corporate executives, investment bankers and at least one former athlete
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  • All those fancy titles and statuses are left at the door, though
  • All of those were steps in a larger plan to revitalize his Crenshaw district in South L.A. — plans that were cut short when Hussle was gunned down outside his store in broad daylight on March 31.
  • And on this warm summer morning, as so often happens, the book club quickly turned into therapy.
  • These books all educated and empowered Hussle — to release albums, start a record label and hire people with felony records to work at his shop, Slauson Tees, which later became The Marathon Clothing Store.
  • Here, they can be themselves
  • For years, black men rarely discussed mental health, even among themselves. But recently there has been a shift that has coincided with the maturation of hip-hop.
  • It was an hour and a half into the meeting before anyone mentioned Hussle’s name. The conversation had turned to sacrifice, and what one must do to move to the next level in their careers, relationships and other areas of their lives
  • He spoke of waiting tables while he taking acting classes and waiting on his big break. Hussle did something similar, Cash insisted, as he pivoted from street hustler to a Grammy-nominated musician.
  • The men examined their mortality. They discussed plans to live each day with purpose.
  • The men then packed up their belongings and returned to the outside world with the teachings of Hussle guiding them.
grayton downing

Foreign Students Will Face New Checks When Entering United States - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The Department of Homeland Security has ordered new security checks for all foreign students entering the United States,
  • The new check was added after the authorities discovered that a foreign friend of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, had left the United States and returned in January using a student visa that should have been canceled
  • arriving students now will also be checked through a database known as the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System,
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  • A lapse occurred because Customs and Border Protection inspectors did not have the latest information on Mr. Tazhayakov, officials said. The new entry checks, which were first reported by The Associated Press, would give airport customs officers the most recent
jlessner

Western Relations Frosty, Russia Warms to North Korea - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Russia’s relations with many Western nations, including the United States, may be at their worst levels since the Cold War, but its relationship with North Korea is blooming faster than the famously lush flower beds of Moscow’s Alexander Garden.
  • On Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced an agreement to designate 2015 a “Year of Friendship” with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which is regarded by much of the world as a pariah state.
  • Tellingly, news of the Year of Friendship came on the same day that Berlin officials said that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, had declined Mr. Putin’s invitation to attend the ceremony. The German government cited Russia’s policies in Ukraine, where the Kremlin has annexed Crimea and backed violent separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, as the reason for her refusal to attend.
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  • The Foreign Ministry in its statement said that the Year of Friendship would also commemorate the 70th anniversary of North Korea’s liberation, and was intended to bring relations “in the political, economic, humanitarian and other areas to a new level.”
  • but the closer ties to North Korea may serve only to reinforce his image as increasingly isolated from the world’s more established powers.
  • North Korea, meanwhile, has taken at least one step to reduce its own isolation. Last week, the country said it was reopening its borders, which had been closed to foreigners for four months over fears of Ebola, just in time to allow international participants in the Pyongyang marathon next month. It is only the second year that foreigners have been allowed to participate in the race in the North Korean capital.
  • Russia is one of just four countries — the others being Venezuela; Nicaragua; and Nauru, an eight-square-mile island in the South Pacific — to recognize Abkhazia as an independent nation.
clairemann

Justices will decide whether to reinstate death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber - SC... - 0 views

  • the Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would review the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to death for his role in the 2013 bombings.
  • The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit threw out his death sentences last year, ruling that the district court should have asked potential jurors what media coverage they had seen about Tsarnaev’s case
  • Federal law gives district courts the discretion to order someone who is in that district to give testimony or produce documents “for use in a foreign or international tribunal.” In Servotronics, the justices will decide whether that discretion extends to discovery for use in a private foreign arbitration.
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  • The justices once again did not act on a high-profile petition from the state of Mississippi asking the court to review the constitutionality of a state law that bans virtually all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Lower courts struck down the law.
  • Obama relied on the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows the president to declare national monuments on “land owned or controlled by the federal government.” The designation resulted in a ban on most commercial fishing, prompting a group of commercial-fishing associations to go to court, where they argued that the designation as a monument went beyond Obama’s power under the Antiquities Act because submerged land in the ocean is not land “controlled” by the federal government.
  • . Sotomayor stressed that Longoria’s case “implicates an important and longstanding split among the Courts of Appeals over the proper interpretation of” the commentary, with most circuits concluding that “a suppression hearing is not a valid basis for denying the reduction.”
  • The Sixth Amendment guarantees “the right to a speedy and public trial.” In Smith v. Titus, the Supreme Court on Monday turned down the case of a Minnesota man who was convicted of murder for the shooting deaths of two people who had broken into his home.
  • Smith argued that the decision to close the courtroom violated his rights under the Sixth Amendment. The Minnesota Supreme Court rejected that argument, and federal courts turned down Smith’s requests for post-conviction relief. Smith came to the Supreme Court in November, contending that the state supreme court’s ruling was contrary to clearly established Supreme Court decisions – the standard for relief under federal post-conviction laws.
tsainten

Death penalty: Biden vowed to end capital punishment. Activists are demanding action as... - 0 views

shared by tsainten on 27 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • While there haven't been any federal or state executions since Biden took office, about 2,500 men and women sit on death row in federal and state prisons across the country -- and advocates say that, in the absence of an executive order from the White House, a state can at any moment schedule executions or the Justice Department can decide to calendar a federal inmate's death date.
  • a promise to pass legislation eliminating the death penalty on the federal level and to "incentivize states to follow the federal government's example. These individuals should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole."
  • The President has not directly addressed the death penalty since taking office -- though White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in March that Biden continues to have "grave concerns" about the practice.
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  • Abolishing the death penalty statute through Congress would prevent a future administration from restarting federal executions -- as former President Donald Trump did -- but members of Congress, former and current law enforcement as well as civil and human rights groups are urging Biden to use his executive pen to pause the federal death penalty.
  • Former Attorney General William Barr lifted a moratorium on the federal death penalty in July 2019, setting off a cascade of lethal injection executions -- 13 in total -- at the Terre Haute, Indiana, federal prison.
  • The President only has the power to pause the federal death penalty, according to Daniel S. Medwed, a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.
  • Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland reaffirmed at his confirmation hearings in February that the new administration is committed to reversing Trump's approach. "The data is clear that it has been enormously disparate impact on Black Americans and members of communities of color, and exonerations also that something like half of the exonerations had to do with Black men. So all of this has given me pause," Garland said.
  • "I don't think citizens want the death penalty anymore or a moratorium. Now, it's a matter of dismantling the system so it cannot come back and function in a knee jerk reaction where 13 people can get executed like under Trump,"
  • "would come with great resistance." The CJLF is a nonprofit organization that advocates for equal justice for victims of crimes including pursuing the death penalty.
  • I don't want someone killed in my name," Mikey Bogart, a Boston Marathon bombing survivor, wrote in a statement after the Supreme Court decided in March to review whether to reinstate Tsarnaev's death sentence. "I hope the Biden Administration will reconsider pursuing a death sentence. Mr. Tsarnaev will spend the rest of his life in prison no matter what."
Javier E

As the Coronavirus Surges, a New Culprit Emerges: Pandemic Fatigue - The New York Times - 0 views

  • With no end in sight, many people are flocking to bars, family parties, bowling alleys and sporting events much as they did before the virus hit, and others must return to school or work as communities seek to resuscitate economies. And in sharp contrast to the spring, the rituals of hope and unity that helped people endure the first surge of the virus have given way to exhaustion and frustration.
  • In parts of the world where the virus is resurging, the outbreaks and a rising sense of apathy are colliding, making for a dangerous combination. Health officials say the growing impatience is a new challenge as they try to slow the latest outbreaks, and it threatens to exacerbate what they fear is turning into a devastating autumn.
  • The issue is particularly stark in the United States
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  • But a similar phenomenon is sending off alarms across Europe, where researchers from the World Health Organization estimate that about half of the population is experiencing “pandemic fatigue.”
  • “Citizens have made huge sacrifices,” said Dr. Hans Kluge, the W.H.O.’s regional director for Europe. “It has come at an extraordinary cost, which has exhausted all of us, regardless of where we live, or what we do.”
  • If the spring was characterized by horror, the fall has become an odd mix of resignation and heedlessness. People who once would not leave their homes are now considering dining indoors for the first time — some losing patience after so many months without, others slipping in a fancy meal before the looming winter months when the virus is expected to spread more readily
  • “In the spring, it was fear and a sense of, ‘We are all in it together,’” said Vaile Wright, a psychologist at the American Psychological Association who studies stress in the United States.“Things are different now,” she said. “Fear has really been replaced with fatigue.”
  • In some parts of the world, behavior has changed and containment efforts have been tough and effective
  • “We were doing sprints in the beginning, and now it’s a marathon. We’re a little tired.”
  • “We have very little backlash here against these types of measures,” said Siddharth Sridhar, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong. “If anything, there’s a lot of pushback against governments for not doing enough to contain the virus.”
  • The response in the United States and much of Europe has been far different. While residents willingly banded together in the spring, time has given rise to frustration and revolt.
  • Sick people are telling contact tracers they picked up the virus while trying to return to ordinary life. Beth Martin, a retired school librarian who is working as a contact tracer in Marathon County, Wis., said she interviewed a family that had become sick through what is now a common situation — at a birthday party for a relative in early October.
  • Mark Harris, county executive for Winnebago County, Wis., said he had been frustrated by the “loud minority” in his county that had been successfully pushing back against any public health measures to be taken against the pandemic.They have a singular frame of mind, he said: “‘This has been inconveniencing me long enough and I’m done changing my behavior.’”
  • There are growing signs that the ongoing stress is taking a toll. In the United States, alcohol sales in stores are up 23 percent during the pandemic, according to Nielsen, a figure that could reflect the nation’s anxiety as well as the drop in drinks being sold at restaurants and bars.
  • Overdose deaths, too, are on the rise in many cities. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland, there were recently 19 overdose deaths in a single week, far more than most weeks.
  • Infections have stayed relatively low for months in places like South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and China, where the virus first spread.
  • Dr. Michael Landrum, who treats coronavirus patients in Green Bay, Wis., said mask use is more widespread than in the spring, personal protective equipment is easier to come by for hospital workers and treatment of the virus is more sophisticated.
  • “The scary scenario is the number of patients who really just don’t know where they got it,” Dr. Landrum said. “That suggests to me that it’s out there spreading very easily.”
  • The challenge ahead, he said, would be convincing people that they need to take significant steps — all over again — to slow down spread that could be even worse than before.
  • “We’re trying to get people to change their behavior back to being more socially distanced and more restrictive with their contacts,” Dr. Landrum said. “There’s been a false sense of complacency. And now it’s just a lot harder to do that.”
izzerios

On the Trail With Gary Johnson - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president, will be on the presidential ballot in all 50 states
  • the first time a third-party candidate has managed that feat in 20 years
  • But Mr. Johnson, a 63-year-old former governor of New Mexico, is walking a lonely road. While his name may be familiar, his face is not
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  • Last week, he missed the chance to make his case to more than 80 million Americans, when he fell shy of the 15 percent polling average needed for inclusion in the first presidential debate.
  • To the extent that Mr. Johnson has managed to generate coverage of his candidacy, the headlines have typically not been confidence inspiring
  • A competitive triathlete who has run 20 marathons, climbed the tallest mountains on all seven continents and almost died — twice — on gas ballooning adventures, he is not easily deterred.
  • He defines himself as a social liberal, a fiscal conservative and a military isolationist.
  • This is not the first time Mr. Johnson has run a long-shot campaign for the presidency. He won just 1 percent of the popular vote as the Libertarian Party’s candidate in 2012, after first competing for the Republican nomination
  • He has even won a handful of newspaper endorsements — more, in fact, than Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee — including, most prominently, that of The Chicago Tribune.
  • Mr. Johnson is polling especially well in Ohio and Colorado, which could both still be up for grabs.
Javier E

Seeking Academic Edge, Teenagers Abuse Stimulants - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.
  • “Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.
  • Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to their parents and doctors to get prescriptions.
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  • “It’s throughout all the private schools here,” said DeAnsin Parker, a New York psychologist who treats many adolescents from affluent neighborhoods like the Upper East Side. “It’s not as if there is one school where this is the culture. This is the culture.”
  • The D.E.A. lists prescription stimulants like Adderall and Vyvanse (amphetamines) and Ritalin and Focalin (methylphenidates) as Class 2 controlled substances — the same as cocaine and morphine — because they rank among the most addictive substances that have a medical use.
  • The number of prescriptions for A.D.H.D. medications dispensed for young people ages 10 to 19 has risen 26 percent since 2007, to almost 21 million yearly, according to IMS Health, a health care information company — a number that experts estimate corresponds to more than two million individuals.
  • While these medicines tend to calm people with A.D.H.D., those without the disorder find that just one pill can jolt them with the energy and focus to push through all-night homework binges and stay awake during exams afterward. “It’s like it does your work for you,”
  • But abuse of prescription stimulants can lead to depression and mood swings (from sleep deprivation), heart irregularities and acute exhaustion or psychosis during withdrawal, doctors say. Little is known about the long-term effects of abuse of stimulants among the young
  • the pills eventually become an entry to the abuse of painkillers and sleep aids.
  • “Once you break the seal on using pills, or any of that stuff, it’s not scary anymore — especially when you’re getting A’s,” said the boy who snorted Adderall in the parking lot. He spoke from the couch of his drug counselor, detailing how he later became addicted to the painkiller Percocet and eventually heroin.
  • “Children have prefrontal cortexes that are not fully developed, and we’re changing the chemistry of the brain. That’s what these drugs do
  • merely giving a friend an Adderall or Vyvanse pill is the same as selling it and can be prosecuted as a felony.
  • Doctors and teenagers from more than 15 schools across the nation with high academic standards estimated that the portion of students who do so ranges from 15 percent to 40 percent.
  • “These are academic steroids. But usually, parents don’t get the steroids for you.”
  • “They’re the quote-unquote good kids, basically.”
  • After 30 minutes, the buzz began, she said: laser focus, instant recall and the fortitude to crush any test in her path.
  • “It wasn’t that hard of a decision. Do I want only four hours of sleep and be a mess, and then underperform on the test and then in field hockey? Or make the teachers happy and the coach happy and get good grades, get into a good college and make my parents happy?”
  • Madeleine estimated that one-third of her classmates at her small school, most of whom she knew well, used stimulants without a prescription to boost their scholastic performance. Many students across the United States made similar estimates for their schools, all of them emphasizing that the drugs were used not to get high, but mostly by conscientious students to work harder and meet ever-rising academic expectations.
  • Every school identified in this article was contacted regarding statements by its students and stimulant abuse in general. Those that responded generally said that they were concerned about some teenagers turning to these drugs, but that their numbers were far smaller than the students said.
  • This is one of the more vexing problems with stimulants in high schools, experts said — the drugs enter the schools via students who get them legally, if not legitimately.
  • Newer long-lasting versions like Adderall XR and Vyvanse allow parents to give children a single dose in the morning, often unaware that the pills can go down a pants pocket as easily as the throat. Some students said they took their pills only during the week and gave their weekend pills to friends.
  • She said many parents could push as hard for prescriptions as their children did, telling her: “My child is not doing well in school. I understand there are meds he can take to make him smarter.”
  • “They’re the A students, sometimes the B students, who are trying to get good grades,”
  • Asked if the improper use of stimulants was cheating, students were split. Some considered that the extra studying hours and the heightened focus during exams amounted to an unfair advantage. Many countered that the drugs “don’t give you the answers” and defended their use as a personal choice for test preparation, akin to tutoring.
  • One consensus was clear: users were becoming more common, they said, and some students who would rather not take the drugs would be compelled to join them because of the competition over class rank and colleges’ interest.
  • “Junior and senior year is a whole new ballgame,” the boy said. “I promised myself I wouldn’t take it, but that can easily, easily change. I can be convinced.”
Javier E

What Machines Can't Do - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. So will being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.
  • what human skills will be more valuable?
  • In the news business, some of those skills are already evident.
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  • Technology has rewarded sprinters (people who can recognize and alertly post a message on Twitter about some interesting immediate event) and marathoners (people who can write large conceptual stories), but it has hurt middle-distance runners (people who write 800-word summaries of yesterday’s news conference).
  • Technology has rewarded graphic artists who can visualize data, but it has punished those who can’t turn written reporting into video presentations.
  • More generally, the age of brilliant machines seems to reward a few traits.
  • First, it rewards enthusiasm. The amount of information in front of us is practically infinite; so is that amount of data that can be collected with new tools. The people who seem to do best possess a voracious explanatory drive, an almost obsessive need to follow their curiosity.
  • Second, the era seems to reward people with extended time horizons and strategic discipline.
  • a human can provide an overall sense of direction and a conceptual frame. In a world of online distractions, the person who can maintain a long obedience toward a single goal, and who can filter out what is irrelevant to that goal, will obviously have enormous worth.
  • Third, the age seems to reward procedural architects. The giant Internet celebrities didn’t so much come up with ideas, they came up with systems in which other people could express ideas: Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.
  • One of the oddities of collaboration is that tightly knit teams are not the most creative. Loosely bonded teams are, teams without a few domineering presences, teams that allow people to think alone before they share results with the group. So a manager who can organize a decentralized network around a clear question, without letting it dissipate or clump, will have enormous value.
  • Fifth, essentialists will probably be rewarded.
  • creativity can be described as the ability to grasp the essence of one thing, and then the essence of some very different thing, and smash them together to create some entirely new thing.
  • In the 1950s, the bureaucracy was the computer. People were organized into technocratic systems in order to perform routinized information processing.
  • now the computer is the computer. The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract attention and linger in the mind.
  • Unable to compete when it comes to calculation, the best workers will come with heart in hand.
Ellie McGinnis

Talks With Iran Fail to Produce a Nuclear Agreement - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Marathon talks between major powers and Iran failed on Sunday to produce a deal to freeze its nuclear program, puncturing days of feverish anticipation and underscoring how hard it will be to forge a lasting solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
  • “A lot of concrete progress has been made, but some differences remain,” Ms. Ashton said at a news conference early Sunday.
  • “I think it was natural that when we started dealing with the details, there would be differences.”
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  • not only divisions between Iran and the major powers that prevented a deal, but fissures within the negotiating group.
  • France objected strenuously that the proposed deal would do too little to curb Iran’s uranium enrichment or to stop the development of a nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium.
  • “What I was looking for was the political determination, willingness and good faith in order to end this,” he said. “I think we’re all on the same wavelength, and that’s important.”
  • Iranian officials had promoted the possibility of a deal for days, generating an expectant atmosphere that swelled when Secretary of State John Kerry cut short a tour of the Middle East on Friday to join the talks. He was joined by the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and Russia and a vice foreign minister from China.
  • “It takes time to build confidence between countries that have really been at odds with each other for a long time now.”
  • The proposal under consideration in Geneva was to have been the first stage of a multipart agreement. It called for Iran to freeze its nuclear program for up to six months to allow negotiations on a long-term agreement without the worry that Iran was racing ahead to build a bomb. In exchange, the West was to have provided some easing of the international sanctions that have battered Iran’s economy.
  • .Despite the diplomats’ insistence on progress, the failure to clinch an agreement raised questions about the future of the nuclear talks, given the fierce criticism that the mere prospect of a deal whipped up in Israel and among Republicans and some Democrats in Congress.
qkirkpatrick

Opinion: The 'bionic men' of World War I - CNN.com - 0 views

  • World War I slaughtered and mutilated soldiers on a scale the world had never seen. It's little wonder that its vast numbers of returning crippled veterans led to major gains in the technology of prosthetic limbs.
  • Virtually every device produced today to replace lost body function of soldiers returning from our modern wars -- as well as accident victims, or victims of criminal acts, such as the Boston Marathon bombings -- has its roots in the technological advances that emerged from World War I.
  • Thanks to better surgery, many now survived. On the German side alone, there were 2 million casualties, 64 percent of them with injured limbs. Some 67,000 were amputees. Over 4,000 amputations were performed on U.S. service personnel according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
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  • Glass eyes and a variety of facial prostheses allowed those with defacing injuries to appear in public. For example, a galvanized and painted copper plate could fill in the missing eye socket and neighboring maxillary bone.
  • The image of men tied to their work resonates unsettlingly with Karl Marx's prediction that the urban proletariat would one day become a mere "appendage of the machine." It's an example of how military and industrial conceptions of the body were extended to dehumanize the body itself.
  • In 2008 runner Oscar Pistorius, a double-leg amputee, sought to compete in the Bejing Olympics, but his running blades, made of carbon fiber and modeled after a cheetah's leg, were seen by some as an unfair advantage. Four years later in London, he did compete in the Olympics, embodying a development that had its origins 100 years earlier, in World War I.
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    After WWI, there were thousands of veterans that had lost limbs and other body parts. This lead to a rise in prosthetic technology.
malonema1

Germany edges closer to new coalition - POLITICO - 0 views

  • BERLIN — Germany inched toward installing a new government as Angela Merkel’s conservatives and leaders of the Social Democrats (SPD) reached agreement on the outline of a legislative agenda after marathon talks. After negotiating non-stop for 24 hours to conclude exploratory talks, the parties agreed on a 28-page position paper, laying out their policy priorities for the coming years. The parties devoted the first three pages of the document to Europe but offered little more than platitudes about the importance of further reform and their support for deeper integration. While they signaled a willingness to spend more on Europe and to work together closely with France, the parties offered no specifics on how much Berlin would be willing to spend and on what.
  • Though the paper is quite specific in some areas, such as the number of refugees Germany is willing to accept per year (220,000), it is vague in others and contains few surprises. “The results include a number of compromises and few substantial reforms,” said Marcel Fratzscher, the head of the Berlin-based DIW economic research institute. “What’s missing is a clear vision and courageous reforms that will prepare Germany for the future.” While Friday’s agreement boosts the chances for a renewal of a “grand coalition” between the center-left and center-right, negotiators face a circuitous path towards a final deal. Before they can proceed to formal talks, the SPD leadership needs to secure the agreement of a special party convention, scheduled for January 21.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Kanye West and the Question of Freedom - 0 views

  • in our current culture, it’s precisely the elites who seem to be driving tribal identity and thought, and doubling down on ideological and affectional polarization
  • “The more highly educated also tend to be more strongly identified along political lines.” He quoted from her book: Political knowledge tends to increase the effects of identity as more knowledgeable people have more informational ammunition to counter argue any stories they don’t like
  • Much of the growth in ideological consistency has come among better educated adults — including a striking rise in the share who have across-the-board liberal views, which is consistent with the growing share of postgraduates who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.”
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  • our elite debate has become far less focused on individual issues as such, and the complicated variety of positions, left, right and center, any thinking individual can take. It has become rather an elaborate and sophisticated version of “Which side are you on?”
  • An analysis of American National Election Studies data from 1964 to 2012 shows that education is related to decreases in interethnic/interracial prejudice, but also to increases in ideological (liberal vs. conservative) prejudice
  • But even this doesn’t capture the emotional intensity of it all, or the way it compounds over time
  • In their 2015 paper, “Losing Hurts: The Happiness Impact of Partisan Electoral Loss,” the authors found that the grief of Republican partisans after their party lost the presidential election in 2012 was twice that of “respondents with children” immediately after “the Newtown shootings” and “respondents living in Boston” after “the Boston Marathon bombings.”
  • That’s an intense emotion, and it’s that intensity, it seems to me, that is corroding the norms of liberal democracy
  • I find myself instinctually siding with the independent artist in these cases, perhaps because I’ve had to fight for my own individuality apart from my own various identities, most of my life. It wasn’t easy being the first openly gay editor of anything in Washington when I was in my 20s. But it was harder still to be someone not defined entirely by my group, to be a dissident within it, a pariah to many, even an oxymoron, because of my politics or my faith.
  • Friendly dissidents are no longer interesting or quirky; as the stakes appear to rise, they come to seem dangerous, even contagious
  • And before we even know it, we live in an atmosphere closer and closer to that of The Crucible, where politics merges into a new kind of religious warfare, dissent becomes heresy, and the response to a blasphemer among us is a righteous, metaphorical burning at the stake
  • I think that’s the real context for understanding why magazines and newspapers and websites of opinion are increasingly resistant to ideological diversity within their own universes
  • The dynamic here is deeply tribal. It’s an atmosphere in which the individual is always subordinate to the group, in which the “I” is allowed only when licensed by the “we.
  • Hence the somewhat hysterical reaction, for example, to Kanye West’s recent rhetorical antics. I’m not here to defend West. He may be a musical genius (I’m in no way qualified to judge) but he is certainly a jackass, and saying something like “slavery was a choice” is so foul and absurd it’s self-negating
  • And yet. There was something about the reaction that just didn’t sit right with me, something too easy, too dismissive of an individual artist’s right to say whatever he wants, to be accountable to no one but himself. It had a smack of raw tribalism to it, of collective disciplining, of the group owning the individual, and exacting its revenge for difference.
  • It has been made far, far worse by this president, a figure whose election was both a symptom and a cause of this collective emotional unraveling, where the frontal cortex is so flooded by tribal signals that compromise feels like treason, opponents feel like enemies, and demagogues feel like saviors
  • I’m not whining about this experience, just explaining why I tend to side reflexively with the individual when he is told he isn’t legit by the group. In that intimidating atmosphere, I’m with the dissenter, the loner, and the outlier.
  • I believed in an identity politics that would aim to leave identity behind, to achieve a citizenship without qualification.
  • I never believed that the gay rights movement was about liberating people to be gay; I believed it was about liberating people to be themselves, in all their complexity and uniqueness.
  • I bristle because, of course, Coates is not merely subjecting West to “expectation and scrutiny” which should apply to anyone and to which no one should object; he is subjecting West to anathematization, to expulsion from the ranks.
  • Just as a Puritan would suddenly exclaim that a heretic has been taken over by the Devil and must be expelled, so Coates denounces West for seeking something called “white freedom”: … freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
  • Leave aside the fact that the passage above essentializes and generalizes “whiteness” as close to evil, a sentiment that applied to any other ethnicity would be immediately recognizable as raw bigotry.
  • Leave aside its emotional authenticity and rhetorical dazzle.
  • Notice rather that the surrender of the individual to the we is absolute.
  • That “we” he writes of doesn’t merely influence or inform or shape the individual artist; it “dictates” to him.
  • it’s at that point that I’d want to draw the line. Because it’s an important line, and without it, a liberal society is close to impossible.
  • I understand that the freedom enjoyed by a member of an unreflective majority is easier than the freedom of someone in a small minority, and nowhere in America is that truer than in the world of black and white.
  • But that my own freedom was harder to achieve doesn’t make it any less precious, or sacrosanct. I’d argue it actually makes it more vivid, more real, than it might be for someone who never questioned it.
  • And I am never going to concede it to “straightness,” the way Coates does to “whiteness.”
  • As an individual, I seek my own freedom, period. Being gay is integral to who I am, but it doesn’t define who I am. There is no gay freedom or straight freedom, no black freedom or white freedom; merely freedom, a common dream, a universalizing, individual experience.
  • “Liberation from the dictates of the we” is everyone’s birthright in America, and it is particularly so for anyone in the creative fields of music or writing.
  • A free artist owes nothing to anyone, especially his own tribe. And if you take the space away from him to be exactly what he wants to be, in all his contradictions and complexity, you are eradicating something critical to a free and healthy society.
  • Freedom, in this worldview, does not and cannot unite Americans of all races; neither can music. Because there is no category of simply human freedom possible in America, now or ever. There is only tribe. And the struggle against the other tribe. And this will never end.
  • And that, of course, is one of the most dangerous aspects of our elite political polarization: It maps onto the even-deeper tribalism of race, in an age when racial diversity is radically increasing, and when the racial balance of power is shifting under our feet.
  • That makes political tribalism even less resolvable and even more combustible.
  • It makes a liberal politics that rests on a common good close to impossible. It makes a liberal discourse not only unachievable but increasingly, in the hearts and minds of our very elites, immoral.
  • The promise of Obama — the integrating, reasoned, moderate promise of incremental progress — has become the depraved and toxic zero-sum culture of Trump.
Javier E

What if Being a YouTube Celebrity Is Actually Backbreaking Work? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It’s been two years. Chamberlain now has 8 million YouTube followers. She brought in the editing tricks that first set her friends and family rolling on the floor, but now they take longer to perfect.
  • Chamberlain edits each video she makes for between 20 and 30 hours, often at stretches of 10 or 15 hours at a time. Her goal is to be funny, to keep people watching. It’s as if the comic value of each video is inversely proportional to how little humor she experiences while making it. During her marathon editing sessions, she said, she laughs for “maybe, maybe 10 seconds max.”
  • Like other professional social media users, the work has taken a physical toll on her. (She releases roughly one video a week.) She used to edit at a desktop, but she developed back pain. Now she works from her bed. She keeps blue mood lighting on, but her vision has deteriorated. She wears reading glasses “like I’m 85 years old, because my eyes do actually get really strained.”
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  • “It’s almost like when you’re doing your homework, you’re halfway through a math work sheet, you’re really in it right there. You can’t hear anything, you can’t see anything,” she said. “Or if you’re watching a movie and you’re so zoned in you don’t even remember what real life is. You just think you’re in the movie. That’s exactly how it is, but times five. I’m so zoned in. I have this weird mind-set where it’s me quickly analyzing every five seconds, ‘Is this boring, is this stupid, can I cut this? Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No.’”
  • Over these two years, Chamberlain invented the way people talk on YouTube now, particularly the way they communicate authenticity. Her editing tricks and her mannerisms are ubiquitous. There is an entire subgenre of videos that mimic her style, and a host of YouTubers who talk, or edit, just like her. The Atlantic recently noted this and declared she is “the most important YouTuber” working today.
  • I created this kind of style that was super cool to me and super exciting for me, and now that other people are doing it, now all of a sudden I’m unoriginal, which is something that I’ve always really tried to be. That’s what makes me feel good creatively. So when people started to say that, I kind of had a full, you know, not like mental breakdown, but we could also say that. Not a mental breakdown! But I definitely freaked out.”
  • Chamberlain’s parents have supported her unconventional choices, like dropping out of school in the beginning of her junior year and moving to Los Angeles to live by herself while still a teenager. She says that they were and are her best friends.
  • In June 2018, Chamberlain left the Bay Area to live alone in L.A. and fully immerse herself in YouTubeland.
  • Professional YouTubers are the children of reality television. The dramas of their videos are often inextricable from their lives. When Jake Paul and Tana Mongeau, two famous YouTubers, said they were engaged last month, it was impossible for fans to parse whether they were telling the truth. It barely mattered
  • YouTubers tend to bond and/or feud with one another constantly, because this is social media as much as it is performance art. They recreate the overheated dynamics of the high school environment that Chamberlain wanted to escape.
  • Chamberlain has now decided upon a new approach. “I’m just going to not stick to one thing so strictly,” she said.Her recent videos are less jittery, less edited. She has been trying to let her narrative and her scripts speak, with fewer interruptions than before.
  • Recently, she has tried anthologies and also stunts, like spending 24 hours on the balcony of her house
  • “I’m trying to make the stuff that I’m filming more dynamic so that when I’m editing there’s less pressure on me to kind of create something that’s not there,”
  • I’m starting to realize that editing is very personal, and 90 percent of the editing is just so that I’m not bored. So I don’t have to overdo it. I’m trying to find that balance right now, so that I don’t overwork myself
Javier E

I Tried to Live Like Joe Rogan - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys.
  • His interview last fall with Elon Musk has been viewed more than 24 million times on YouTube, and his YouTube channel, PowerfulJRE, has 6 million subscribers. An indifferently received episode will tend to get somewhere around 1 million views.
  • there’s no real way to describe “Joe Rogan fans.” They’re not aligned around any narrow set of curiosities or politics. They’re aligned around Joe.
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  • He knows that he is privileged by virtue of his gender and his skin color, but in his heart he is sick of being reminded about it. Like lots of other white men in America, he is grappling with a growing sense that the term white man has become an epithet
  • The bedrock issue, though, is Rogan’s courting of a middle-bro audience that the cultural elite hold in particular contempt—guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw. Joe loves these guys
  • Why is he connecting so deeply with so many men, for such long stretches of time, at a moment when no one else can seem to hold anyone’s attention for more than two minutes?
  • the irony is that so many of the men who demonstrate a level of intelligence and empathy worth aspiring to—they’ve pretty much all been on Joe Rogan’s podcast
  • The hard truth for some of Rogan’s critics in the media is that he is much better at captivating audiences than most of us, because he has the patience and the generosity to let his interviews be an experience rather than an inquisition.
  • how many mainstream entertainers routinely expose their audiences to Harvard biologists? Or climate-change experts? (The Uninhabitable Earth author David Wallace-Wells, episode No. 1259.) Or biosocial scientists? (The Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, episode No. 1274.) Or ethical-leadership lecturers? (The NYU Stern business-school professor Jonathan Haidt, episode No. 1221.)
  • “Learn, learn, learn, ladies and gentlemen,” Joe said at the start of one podcast episode this winter, wrapping up an ad read for the online education platform Skillshare. “That’s what I’m getting out of this. I think it’s very important to continue to challenge your mind.”
  • He’s right! It is! And don’t we want men thirsting for knowledge? Don’t we want them striving, setting goals, learning, learning, learning? Don’t we want more Joes?
  • Plenty of the role models that men choose for themselves draw eye rolls from everyone else, or dire warnings, or #cancel tweets
  • if we’re all going to make it through this era alive, men do need alternatives to look up to
  • There’s a tendency right now to make every single thing about Donald Trump, but if you don’t see the dotted line connecting the president to a wave of men who feel thwarted and besieged and sentenced to an endless apology tour, then you’re not paying attention.
  • Free speech and its consequences, particularly the deplatforming of right-wing political provocateurs, is a push-button subject for Rogan, and it’s where he gets himself into the most trouble.
  • the same core stimulus: a plunging sense of self-worth caused by a rapidly changing society.
  • that’s not why people are obsessed with him. In reality, it’s because Joe Rogan is a tireless optimist, a grab-life-by-the-throat-and-bite-out-its-esophagus kind of guy, and many, many men respond to that.
  • The competitive energy, the drive to succeed, the search for purpose, for self-respect. Get better every day. Master your domain. Total human optimization
  • It’s a tough message for a very rich guy like Joe Rogan to sell, but he pulls it off because he has never stopped coming across as stubbornly normal. He’s from a middle-class Boston suburb, he’s bald, and for God’s sake, his name is Joe.
  • Rogan seems like a regular Joe, but he’s not. He is driven, inexhaustible, and an honest-to-goodness autodidact.
  • His brain is wicked absorbent, like Neo in The Matrix, uploading knowledge through a hot spear jammed into the back of his skull. He’s a freak of nature, and most of his fans cannot, in fact, be just like him.
  • a key thing Joe and his fans tend to have in common is a deficit of empathy. He seems unable to process how his tolerance for monsters like Alex Jones plays a role in the wounding of people who don’t deserve it.
  • At the very least, he shows too much compassion for bad actors, and not enough for people on the receiving end of their attacks.
  • In order to get at the truth of Joe’s beliefs, you have to ignore what he says and watch what he does. Rogan likes to say that he’s voted for a Democrat in every presidential election—aside from a brief ill-advised fling with Gary Johnson—and that he despises Trump.
  • More revealing is who he invites onto his podcast, and what subjects he chooses to feast on in his stand-up specials. And if you cast a wide enough net, clear patterns emerge. If there’s a woman or a person of color (or both) on Joe’s podcast, the odds are high that person is a fighter or an entertainer, and not a public intellectual.
  • if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies,
  • All the same, because of their core DNA and their comfort with getting booed, comedians still tend to be at the forefront of so many of these debates over language and identity, touching those electrical wires in ways other people wouldn’t dare. Joe touches them all the time
  • like lots of other men in America, not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word masculinity has become, by definition, toxic
  • Joe likes Jack. He likes Milo Yiannopoulos. He likes Alex Jones. He wants you to know that he doesn’t agree with much of what they say, but he also wants you to know that off camera they’re the nicest guys. If we all have fatal flaws, this is Joe’s: his insistence on seeing value in people even when he shouldn’t, even when they’ve forfeited any right to it, even when the harm outweighs the good.
  • It comes from a generous place, but it amounts to careless cruelty. He just won’t write people off, and then he compounds the sin by throwing them a lifeline at the moment when they least deserve it.
  • His invitation to Jones was indefensible, and his defense was even worse. I had assumed going in that Rogan would explain himself at the top, similar to what he’d done after booting the Jack Dorsey interview. But he didn’t. He went the other way. He promised a “fun” interview with Jones, as if it was a joyful, long-awaited reunion rather than offensive for even existing, and he assured his listeners that “you’re gonna love it.”
  • I’m glad, though, that the men of America have Joe Rogan to motivate and inspire and educate them in limitless ways, including how to recognize a moron
  • And yet I came away more comfortable with Joe’s vision of manhood—and more determined to do the exact opposite.
  • My Joe Rogan experience ended because he wore me out. He never shuts up. He talks and talks and talks. He doesn’t seem to grasp that not every thought inside his brain needs to be said out loud. It doesn’t occur to him to consider whether his contributions have value. He just speaks his mind. He just whips it out and drops it on the table.
  • Rogan’s podcast gushes like a mighty river of content—approximately three episodes a week, usually more than two hours per episode, consisting of one marathon conversation with a subject of his choosing. Over the course of about 1,400 episodes and counting, his roster of guests can be divided roughly three ways: (1) comedians, (2) fighters, and (3) “thinkers,”
katherineharron

Stimulus package: White House, Senate reach historic $2 trillion deal amid growing coro... - 0 views

  • The White House and Senate leaders struck a major deal early Wednesday morning over a $2-trillion package to provide a jolt to an economy struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, capping days of marathon negotiations that produced one of the most expensive and far-reaching measures Congress has ever considered.
  • The full details have yet to be released. But over the last 24 hours, the elements of the proposal have come into sharper focus, with $250 billion set aside for direct payments to individuals and families, $350 billion in small business loans, $250 billion in unemployment insurance benefits and $500 billion in loans for distressed companies.
  • Under the plan as it was being negotiated, individuals who earn $75,000 in adjusted gross income or less would get direct payments of $1,200 each, with married couples earning up to $150,000 receiving $2,400 -- and an additional $500 per each child. The payment would scale down by income, phasing out entirely at $99,000 for singles and $198,000 for couples without children.
johnsonel7

Oregon Senate Republicans walk out over climate cap-and-trade bill - oregonlive.com - 0 views

  • SALEM — Republicans in the Oregon Senate fled the Capitol on Monday to stop Democrats’ bill to cap greenhouse gas emissions after the plan cleared a legislative budget committee earlier in the day.At Monday’s 11 a.m. Senate floor session, just one Republican showed up: Sen. Tim Knopp of Bend. Democrats waited as sergeants at arms searched Capitol offices to see if they could round up any other Republicans. But they were unable to find any, so Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, adjourned the chamber until Tuesday.
  • Under the state Constitution, a two-thirds majority of the Senate must be present to conduct business including voting on bills. That means Democrats, despite their supermajority, need at least two Republicans to be present. Courtney said he does not plan to ask the governor to send the state police looking for the Republicans, and Brown said without a request from Courtney she lacks the authority to do so.
  • “If (Senate Republicans) don’t like a bill, they need to show up and change it or show up and vote ‘no,’” Gov. Kate Brown said in a during a briefing with reporters. Instead, the senators “have chosen to take a taxpayer funded vacation … Oregonians should be outraged and I am, too.”
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  • Senate Bill 1530 would set a gradually more stringent cap on statewide carbon dioxide emissions and require polluters from the transportation fuels, utility and industrial sectors to acquire “emissions allowances” to cover every metric ton of their emissions.Democrats have made concessions to Republicans and other opponents of the bill, including exempting a geographically large portion of the state from fees on gas and diesel indefinitely. But Democrats, who hold supermajorities in both chambers, have also voted down numerous amendments proposed by Republicans.
  • Brown left open the possibility she might call lawmakers back in a special session, and Courtney said he’s holding out hope Republicans will return before the March 8 deadline in the current session and take up those important bills, as they did in 2019 during a marathon final weekend of the session. “I want to continue to work very hard on all these other things so that if we ever did come back, we could really run the budgets and run everything as fast as we could the way we did on that famous Sunday in the general session when we passed I don’t know how many bills in two hours.
andrespardo

Trump says China could have stopped Covid-19 and suggests US will seek damages | World ... - 0 views

  • “serious investigations”
  • The US president had stopped giving press briefings after his advisers reportedly warned him that his marathon news conferences, including his widely-ridiculed comments about disinfectant as a possible treatment for Covid-19 – were hurting his re-election campaign.
  • At the briefing Trump launched another forthright attack on China, saying there were “a lot of ways you can hold them accountable” for the pandemic.
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  • US criticism of China has intensified over the past week. Over the weekend Politico published details of a 57-page Republican party attack memo,
  • After a series of controversial shipments, China’s government introduced strict rules last month which required all medical equipment and testing kits to be approved by the national medical products administration and registered before they were exported. However, after some suppliers reportedly complained it was too difficult to get the domestic license required, the rules were scaled back on the weekend, with exports now only needing to meet the importing country’s standard.
  • “Germany is looking at things, we are looking at things,” he said. “We are talking about a lot more money than Germany’s talking about.” “We haven’t determined the final amount yet,” Trump said. “It’s very substantial.”
  • China has reacted strongly, denying any coverup over the virus. An editorial in the state-backed Global Times on Monday said “China’s achievement in the fight against Covid-19 is way better than that of the US”.
  • “This is a life-and-death matter, so it would spare no effort to smear China and mobilise all possible public opinion forces to do so to cover its selfishness.”
  • “like Australia”
  • Several countries on Tuesday began to ease lockdown restrictions, including New Zealand and Australia, which have both had significant success in controlling the virus. New Zealand moved down to level 3 restrictions on midnight on Monday, allowing some businesses to reopen.
  • In other developments: More than 3,041,700 people have been diagnosed with Covid-19, according to the John Hopkins Tracker, and at least 211,167 have died. Argentina’s number of reported cases surpassed 4,000 on Monday, with 111 new cases bringing the total to 4,003 infected persons and 197 deaths so far. Japanese media reported that 300,000 coronavirus masks sent to pregnant women as part of a government handout have been found to be faulty. New Zealand has ended its strictest lockdown phase and entered Level 3, with 400,000 Kiwis returning to work, restaurants and cafes reopening for takeaway, and fishing, surfing and swimming now permitted. China has reported six new coronavirus cases (three domestic and three from overseas) and no deaths, according to the country’s National Health Commission. More than 2,200 Indonesians have died from Covid-19, but were not recorded, according to an investigation from Reuters. The official death toll from the virus in the country is 765. The director general of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said he is concerned about people missing vaccines for diseases such as polio and measles because of the coronavirus pandemic. Mexico’s president declared the country had “tamed” its coronavirus outbreak, despite widespread suspicions that Covid-19 cases are being undercounted. WhatsApp claims to have cut viral messages by 70% after introducing a limit on the number of people to whom users could forward messages. Afghanistan recorded its biggest one-day rise in cases, triggered by a continued surge of transmission in Kandahar. Sydney’s Bondi Beach has reopened again, after it was shut for being too crowded.
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