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ethanshilling

San Francisco's Tech Workers Make the Big Move - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Rent was astronomical. Taxes were high. Your neighbors didn’t like you. If you lived in San Francisco, you might have commuted an hour south to your job at Apple or Google or Facebook.
  • Remote work offered a chance at residing for a few months in towns where life felt easier. Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events.
  • That’s where the story of the Bay Area’s latest tech era is ending for a growing crowd of tech workers and their companies. They have suddenly movable jobs and money in the bank — money that will go plenty further somewhere else.
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  • The No. 1 pick for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas, with other winners including Seattle, New York and Chicago, according to moveBuddha, a site that compiles data on moving.
  • The biggest tech companies aren’t going anywhere, and tech stocks are still soaring. Apple’s flying-saucer-shaped campus is not going to zoom away. Google is still absorbing ever more office space in San Jose and San Francisco. New founders are still coming to town.
  • But the migration from the Bay Area appears real. Residential rents in San Francisco are down 27 percent from a year ago, and the office vacancy rate has spiked to 16.7 percent, a number not seen in a decade.
  • Pinterest, which has one of the most iconic offices in town, paid $90 million to break a lease for a site where it planned to expand. And companies like Twitter and Facebook have announced “work from home forever” plans.
  • Now the local tech industry is rapidly expanding. Apple is opening a $1 billion, 133-acre campus. Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook have all either expanded their footprints in Austin or have plans to. Elon Musk, the Tesla founder and one of the two richest men in the world, said he had moved to Texas. Start-up investor money is arriving, too: The investors at 8VC and Breyer Capital opened Austin offices last year.
  • The San Francisco exodus means the talent and money of newly remote tech workers are up for grabs. And it’s not just the mayor of Miami trying to lure them in.
  • There are 33,000 members in the Facebook group Leaving California and 51,000 in its sister group, Life After California. People post pictures of moving trucks and links to Zillow listings in new cities.
  • If San Francisco of the 2010s proved anything, it’s the power of proximity. Entrepreneurs could find a dozen start-up pitch competitions every week within walking distance. If they left a big tech company, there were start-ups eager to hire, and if a start-up failed, there was always another.
  • No one leaving the city is arguing that a culture of innovation is going to spring up over Zoom. So some are trying to recreate it. They are getting into property development, building luxury tiny-home compounds and taking over big, funky houses in old resort towns.
aniyahbarnett

US Capitol riot: Police describe facing the pro-Trump mob - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • he knew a group of rioters were stripping him of his gear. They grabbed spare ammunition, ripped the police radio off his chest and even stole his badge.
  • who had just been Tasered several times in the back of the neck,
  • 'Kill him with his own gun,'" said Fanone, who's been a police officer for almost two decades.
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  • But Fanone, who said he'd rather be shot than be pulled into a crowd where he had no control, was suddenly in his biggest nightmare as an officer.
  • Fanone considered using deadly force.
  • And I just remember yelling out that I have kids. And it seemed to work
  • "Thank you, but f*** you for being there,"
  • still suffering the effects of a mild heart attack.
  • Investigators are now looking into the notion that here was some level of planning,
  • "We were getting chemical irritants sprayed. They had pipes and different metal objects, batons, some of which I think they had taken from law enforcement personnel. They had been striking us with those,"
  • with enough evidence to indicate that it was not just a protest that got out of control, l
  • "It was difficult to offer any resistance when you're only about 30 guys going up against 15,000."
  • "The individuals were pushing officers, hitting officers. They were spraying us with what we were calling, essentially, bear mace, because you use it on bears,"
  • crushed by a door.
  • The 32-year-old officer is seen in the clip with blood dripping through his teeth as he kept gasping for enough air so he could yell "Help" at the top of his lungs.
  • . What did surprise him was how the insurrectionists thought the police would be on their side.
  • "They say things like, 'Yeah, we've been supporting you through all this Black Lives Matter stuff, you should have our back' and they felt entitled."
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.
martinelligi

Trump Impeached By House Over Capitol Insurrection : House Impeachment Vote: Live Updat... - 0 views

  • The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to impeach President Trump for "high crimes and misdemeanors" — specifically, for inciting an insurrection against the federal government at the U.S. Capitol.
  • Just one week before he will leave office, Trump has now become the first U.S. president to be impeached twice.
  • . "The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution."
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  • The House voted 232-197 to impeach Trump, with four GOP abstentions, after a few hours of debate evenly divided between the parties. Because of the tight schedule, many lawmakers were only allotted a minute, or less, in which to state their positions.
  • Impeachment, Pelosi said, is "a constitutional remedy that will ensure that the republic will be safe from this man, who is so resolutely determined to tear down the things that we hold dear, and that hold us together."
  • "In light of reports of more demonstrations, I urge that there must be NO violence, NO lawbreaking and NO vandalism of any kind," Trump said. "That is not what I stand for, and it is not what America stands for. I call on ALL Americans to help ease tensions and calm tempers. Thank You."
  • If the Senate votes to convict Trump — an outcome that is far from certain — he likely would be barred from holding any federal office again. An impeachment trial will not begin before Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's office said Wednesday that the chamber, which Republicans currently hold, will not convene again until the transfer of power is complete.
  • "President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government, threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of government; and
  • "by such conduct, President Trump warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold U.S. office."
anonymous

U.S. Says Rioters At Capitol Aimed 'To Capture And Assassinate Elected Officials' : Ins... - 0 views

  • Members of the pro-Trump mob that staged an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last week intended "to capture and assassinate elected officials,
  • It notes Chansley's status as a "shaman" within QAnon, which the prosecutors variously define as "a dangerous extremist group ... founded on an imaginary conspiracy theory," and a cult that "preaches debunked and fictitious anti-government conspiracy theories that a deep state is out to take down the current administration."
  • The note was left at the spot where, moments earlier, Pence had been poised to preside over a joint session to certify President-elect Joe Biden's victory over President Trump. Chansley told the FBI he believes Pence is a "child-trafficking traitor."
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  • The U.S. attorney's office in Arizona filed the memorandum Thursday as part of its argument against releasing Chansley while his case proceeds.
  • Chansley is charged with two felonies: obstructing the conduct of a law enforcement officer and obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors say that as he committed those actions, Chansley was also carrying a dangerous weapon – specifically, "a six-foot spear."
  • Prosecutors say Chansley should remain in custody for a variety of reasons, including his part in the riot and his avowed intent to return to Washington to protest Biden's upcoming inauguration.
  • The U.S. attorney's office also says that Chansley would not likely conform to court-imposed conditions on his release, noting that while in custody, he has refused to eat anything other than organic food. Prosecutors also note that Chansley has shown he can travel without being traced. And because he is widely associated with the horns-and-fur costume and face paint he wore at the Capitol, prosecutors say, Chansley "is virtually unidentifiable when not wearing it."
  • The memorandum, like other documents prosecutors have filed in Chansley's case, notes he refers to himself and other rioters as "patriots."
  • Chansley wore horns, face paint and fur as he stood on the Senate dais – where he left a threatening note for Vice President Pence, prosecutors say."It's only a matter of time, justice is coming,"
  • "Strong evidence, including Chansley's own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States Government. "
  • Prosecutors also note that Chansley sought to mislead officials about his drug use. While he allegedly claimed to be a weekly user of marijuana, they note, he has described using peyote and mushrooms in his podcast (on which he uses the name "Jake Angeli"),
  • "Chansley has spoken openly about his belief that he is an alien, a higher being, and he is here on Earth to ascend to another reality."
  • Chansley and dozens of others who breached security at the Capitol have been arrested in the past week. In many cases, they have been identified by citizens and authorities from photos and videos taken inside lawmakers' offices and other areas in the congressional complex.
  • The attack on the Capitol has been linked to five deaths, including U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick and a woman whom police shot as she climbed up a barricaded door.
  • "Media and FBI reports have detailed carefully-planned insurrection attempts scheduled throughout the country in the coming weeks at every state capital, including the [Arizona] capitol."
  • Arguing that Chansley poses a flight risk, the court filing says he does not have a stable job that would require him to remain in Arizona.
aidenborst

Times Square's business leaders weigh in on what's to come in 2021 - CNN - 0 views

  • New York City tourism and real estate officials are hoping Thursday night's New Year's Eve celebration will mark a turning point for Times Square, the Manhattan neighborhood that has become a symbol of sorts for the economic ills of the Covid-19 economy.
  • Commerce among the more than 1,500 businesses in the tourist destination and business district — centrally located between major public transportation hubs — has been decimated by the pandemic. However, business leaders still expect the area to make a full economic recovery once Covid-19 vaccines become widely distributed.
  • "We wanted to send a message that New York is still here. It's not going away," Tompkins told CNN Business.
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  • Officials have differing opinions about how much change Times Square may be in for over the next few years — as new businesses inevitably replace old ones — and how long its full recovery will take. Real estate and tourism officials say estimates range between one and four years.
  • "2021 is certainly going to feel more upbeat than 2020 did, but I think there will also be some disappointment,"
  • Douglas Hercher, managing director at RobertDouglas, a private real estate investment bank. "If people are thinking Times Square, by the summer, is going to look like the Times Square we all know and love, that's probably not going to be the case."
  • A Times Square Alliance study found foot traffic in the neighborhood's busiest block on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues was down 70% from the previous year.
  • Tompkins says about 43% of Times Square's street-level businesses are currently closed, down from 87% in the spring. Hercher estimates 25%-30% of retail rental spaces in Midtown have "gone dark" due to tenants shuttering indefinitely.
  • "You're going to see those retailers reducing their footprint to bring their costs in line with their sales. ... I think rental rates are going to have to come down tremendously to attract tenancy to those spaces."
  • Krispy Kreme, for example, opened its new flagship Times Square location in September, a few months after Covid-19 lockdowns caused a 78% drop in Manhattan retail sales activity, according to the Metro Manhattan Office Space blog.
  • Tompkins says the pandemic hasn't changed Times Square's appeal to retailers looking to create more-engaging shopping experiences for their customers. Luxury real estate developer L&L Holding Company has continued construction of its TSX Broadway experiential retail complex throughout the pandemic.
  • L&L managing director David Orowitz says the pandemic hasn't shaken the developer's faith in the $2.5 billion project, which is still set to open at the end of 2022.
  • "We've been really fortunate in that we raised the original capital for the project prior to Covid," Orowitz said. "At the end of the day, from the perspective of an entertainment and tourism Mecca, I think Times Square continues to evolve and will continue to be what it always was."
  • the normalizing of remote work options across business sectors this year has already led many companies to scale back on office space, which some analysts have predicted will be a permanent shift in the commercial real estate market.
  • "We've definitely seen in the residential market, rents have dropped 10-15% this year in Manhattan," he said. "That's probably a little bit of the canary in the coal mine."
  • Only 8% of Manhattan's estimated 1 million office employees returned to their offices for work by mid-August, according to a survey conducted by the Partnership for New York City.
  • "There's talk about whether it makes sense to make those into residential usage," he said. "The name of the game here in the Covid era is flexibility."
anonymous

House To Take Up Impeachment For Trump's Role In Capitol Mob : NPR - 0 views

  • With just nine days left before President Trump's term comes to an end, the House of Representatives is forging ahead with plans to try to remove the president from office following his role in his supporters' violent attack on the U.S. Capitol last week.
  • In a letter to her Democratic caucus Sunday evening, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the House would attempt to pass a resolution on Monday calling on Vice President Pence to mobilize the Cabinet and invoke the 25th Amendment, thereby relieving Trump of his duties.
  • it is expected that a Republican lawmaker will object. Should there be an objection, Pelosi told her members the House will seek to debate and vote on the resolution on Tuesday.
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  • Pelosi said she's asking Pence to respond within 24 hours, and then Democrats would proceed with impeachment legislation, which would arrive more than a year after they impeached Trump for his role in the Ukraine affair.
  • House Democrats already have an impeachment resolution drafted, which cites both Trump's incitement of his supporters on Wednesday and his call to Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump encouraged the official to "find" enough votes to overturn the election in the state.
  • it was likely the House would take up the vote on Tuesday or Wednesday but suggested it could be months before the impeachment measure, should it pass, is sent to the Senate — a move that would enable the upper chamber to begin acting on President-elect Joe Biden's early legislative agenda and confirm his Cabinet nominees before undertaking a trial.
  • removing Trump from office is unlikely — if not impossible. If the narrowly divided Senate still sought to vote to convict Trump, it could also seek to bar him from holding office in the future.
  • The effort to remove Trump from office was set in motion on Jan. 7, when Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., lambasted Trump for his role in the violence and pandemonium the day before, and called for his removal via the 25th Amendment.
  • He later described it as "a heinous attack," without acknowledging or taking responsibility for the role he played in inciting the crowd.
  • Trump's actions prompted immediate calls for his removal from both political opponents and some Republicans once considered allies.
  • Pelosi and Schumer called on Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and said if he failed to do so, Congress was prepared to move forward with impeachment.
  • Judd Deere has called the impeachment effort "politically motivated" and said it would "only serve to further divide our great country."
martinelligi

Prosecutors Announce No Charges Will Be Filed Against Officer Who Shot Jacob Blake : NPR - 0 views

  • A Wisconsin prosecutor announced that no charges will be brought against the white Kenosha police officer who shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, several times at close range in August.
  • Kenosha police officer Rusten Sheskey, who is white, shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back after Blake slowly walked away from officers and toward the driver's side of a parked vehicle. He opened the door and leaned inside. Investigators later said a knife was recovered from the floorboard of the driver's side.
  • The activation of the Wisconsin Guard also on the heels of Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian and police Chief Daniel Miskinis announcing what they called "precautionary community safety measures" designed to keep the public and demonstrators safe and guard against "unlawful activity."
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  • "Officer Sheskey fired seven shots into an unarmed man's back, on a block where our children walk to school and our families go to church," she continued, according to Wisconsin Public Radio. "All of us — Black, white, brown, native and newcomer — deserve to be safe in our own neighborhoods, and that means holding police officers accountable when they brutalize us."
anonymous

4 Dead, Dozens Arrested After U.S. Capitol Siege : Insurrection At The Capitol: Live Up... - 0 views

  • Washington, D.C., officials say four people have died, including one in a shooting inside the U.S. Capitol, and more than a dozen police officers were injured after a mob of supporters of President Trump stormed the nation's legislative building, temporarily shutting down a vote to certify his successor's win.
  • Police arrested 70 people on charges related to unrest from Wednesday through 7 a.m. Thursday, Washington's Metropolitan Police Department said. Most of those arrests were for violating curfew, with many also facing charges of unlawful entry
  • As Congress began debate over the certification of Electoral College ballots that would finalize President-elect Joe Biden's victory, a large mob decked in red "Make America Great Again" hats and carrying "Trump 2020" and Tea Party flags burst through barricades, overcame Capitol Police and entered the legislative chambers.
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  • Numerous videos shared online showed how the noise of protesters could be heard from inside the Senate and House chambers. In an hours-long siege, the rioters tore through the building, breaking windows, attacking police and ransacking lawmakers' offices. Lawmakers, staffers, reporters and other Capitol building workers were forced into hiding while heavily armed police and federal agents rallied a response.
  • D.C. officials said one woman was shot by a Capitol Police officer amid the chaos. Three others died after separate medical emergencies,
  • Police also responded to reports of suspicious packages discovered on Capitol grounds and in other areas of the city. Two pipe bombs left at the Republican National Committee headquarters and the Democratic National Committee headquarters were discovered by police and safely detonated, police said.
  • Yet, there were few arrests in relation to the scope of the unrest as of Wednesday night, despite clear evidence on video of hundreds of rioters gaining access to the Capitol and damaging government property.
  • At least four people were arrested for carrying a pistol without a license and having a large capacity ammunition feeding device, including one instance of possessing a firearm on Capitol grounds.
  • D.C. police will be releasing information later Thursday asking the public's help identifying individuals who breached the Capitol so that they "can be held accountable," he said.
  • Videos taken of the chaos appeared to show, at best, an unprepared police force easily overrun by rioters or, at worst, one that appeared to acquiesce to the mob. Unverified videos shared on social media showed a police officer taking selfies with some rioters who entered the Capitol, and another appeared to show officers moving barricades to allow a large crowd of people to approach the building.
  • According to D.C. law, Metropolitan Police can only make arrests on Capitol grounds with the consent or at the request of Capitol Police.
  • Lawmakers already promised a full investigation into the actions by Capitol Police Wednesday.
  • The FBI has set up a tip line website for information tied to the riots. The agency said it's seeking information to "assist in identifying individuals who are actively instigating violence in Washington, D.C."
  • Stephanie Grisham, the chief of staff for first lady Melania Trump, submitted her resignation effective immediately. As did White House social secretary Anna Cristina Niceta and White House press aide Sarah Matthews.Deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger reportedly also resigned Wednesday, according to Bloomberg News.
aidenborst

Trump impeachment: Democrats promise quick move to impeachment if 25th Amendment push f... - 0 views

  • Pelosi said the House will attempt to pass a resolution by unanimous consent Monday morning calling for Pence and Trump's Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from office.
  • The resolution will call on Pence to respond within 24 hours and, if not, the House would move to impeach the President.
  • "In protecting our Constitution and our Democracy, we will act with urgency, because this President represents an imminent threat to both. As the days go by, the horror of the ongoing assault on our democracy perpetrated by this President is intensified and so is the immediate need for action," Pelosi said.
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  • House Democrats are still discussing whether a vote to impeach Trump could be Tuesday or Wednesday, per aides.
  • "We'll take the vote that we should take in the House, and (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) will make the determination as to when is the best time to get that vote and get the managers appointed and move that legislation over to the Senate," Clyburn told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union."
  • "It just so happens that if it didn't go over there for 100 days, it could -- let's give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running, and maybe we'll send the articles sometime after that," the South Carolina Democrat added.
  • By impeaching and removing Trump, even at this late stage of his term, the Senate could subsequently vote to disqualify him from ever holding federal office again, taking an extraordinary action against a former president.
  • The comments from Clyburn come as Democrats grapple with how impeaching Trump for a second time could impact Biden's early days in office, when he is working to get administration appointments approved in the Senate and tackling legislative priorities, like another coronavirus relief package.
  • Pelosi said in a interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" set to air Sunday evening that she liked the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment "because it gets rid of him," but explained, "one of the motivations people have for advocating for impeachment" is to prevent Trump from holding office again.
  • "There's strong support in the Congress for impeaching the President a second time," she said.
  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell previously made clear in a memo that even if the House moved in the coming days to impeach Trump, the Senate would not return to session before January 19. That would place the start of the trial on January 20 -- the date of Biden's inauguration.
  • Democrats plan to introduce their impeachment resolution, which already has more than 190 co-sponsors, on Monday and sources tell CNN that the party is looking at having votes no sooner than Wednesday but they are still sorting out their plans.
  • "The train has left the station on impeachment," an official close to Biden told CNN. "Trying to stop it would not only fail, but put Biden on the wrong foot with progressives and most Democrats across the party."
  • Already, several congressional Republicans have joined Democrats in making clear they want Trump to leave office, though not all agree that impeachment is the right option.
  • Sen. Pat Toomey told Tapper Sunday that he thinks Trump should resign. The Pennsylvania Republican -- now the second Republican US senator to call for Trump's resignation -- had previously said he thinks Trump "committed impeachable offenses," but that he wasn't sure removing him this close to the end of his term was the right course of action.
  • Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Friday that the President should step down from office, telling the Anchorage Daily News of Trump, "I want him out. He has caused enough damage."
  • Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, meanwhile, has endorsed invoking the 25th Amendment, which would force Trump's removal.
mimiterranova

Walter Wallace Jr.'s Death Raises Questions About Police Response To Mental Health Cris... - 0 views

  • Walter Wallace Jr., 27, was shot and killed by police officers who responded to an emergency call Monday afternoon. Wallace’s family says he was in the midst of a mental health crisis.
  • “Police officers are trained to defuse and de-escalate situations, or they should be trained to defuse and de-escalate situations. There could have been something else done before you take a person’s life,” Wallace’s cousin Sam White told NBC10 Philadelphia.
  • Police on the scene of Wallace’s psychological episode should have kept their distance and waited for an ambulance to arrive, he says. Given that Wallace’s mother was present, trying to de-escalate the situation and not in immediate danger, the officers could have strategically retreated, he says, “but instead, they have this force neutralization mindset that unfortunately leads actually to the escalation of violence.”
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  • Political leadership in Philadelphia has refused to fund non-police based mental health services and crisis response teams,
  • But with many departments across the country still lacking mental health response teams and training, police are often the only resource for people to call in difficult situations. For this to change, city councils and mayors need to get on board and overhaul the notion that police are the be-all and end-all to our problems, he says.
  •  
    Tthis makes me so angry! 1. police could have shot him in a non-fatal area where they could've dis-armed his knife. 2. People are trying to justify this murder! We need to hold police officers accountable when there are other options than death. 3. I understand that the police officers warned him many times to put the knife down but he was going through a mental health episode. we need a better solution, this has been a problem far too long. Whether it's more training or specialized services, suicide by police cannot be the answer. It's sad to know that people know they will be shot to death by a police officer in a situation like this.
anonymous

Justice Barrett Joins Supreme Court Arguments For The First Time : NPR - 1 views

  • she asked questions in turn in a set of cases that presented difficult procedural questions but no headlines.
  • Barrett could well be forgiven for bowing out of the court's work last week, with six days to prep before her Monday debut.
  • Barrett's choice to forgo participating last week meant she did not vote in two significant cases decided by the court in opinions released Monday.
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  • even if his role in leading the protest onto the highway was negligent, it couldn't make him personally liable for the actions of an individual whose only association to him was attendance at the protest.
  • On Monday, the Supreme Court threw out the suit for now, declaring that the 5th Circuit's interpretation of state law "is too uncertain a premise on which to address" the question currently at issue.
  • any reasonable officer should have realized that Taylor's conditions of confinement offended the Constitution,
  • whether Louisiana would permit such a suit.
  • In a second case — involving cruel and unusual punishment of a prisoner — the justices also repudiated a 5th Circuit decision.
  • the prison officers responsible for this treatment could not be sued because the law "wasn't clearly established" that "prisoners "couldn't be housed in cells teaming with human waste" "for only six days." Thus, the 5th Circuit granted the officers qualified immunity from being sued.
  • The constitutional question — namely whether such a suit violated the First Amendment guarantee of free speech — is only raised if Louisiana law in fact permits such a suit in the first place,
  • The telephone format allows each justice only a few minutes to ask questions so there was no way to compare Barrett's questioning with other newbies in recent years.
  • New Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett heard her first oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Monday. Participating by phone with the other justices
  • Barrett could well be forgiven for bowing out of the court's work last week, with six days to prep before her Monday debut. But Chief Justice John Roberts also had just six days to prepare in 2005
  • Barrett's choice to forgo participating last week meant she did not vote in two significant cases decided by the court in opinions released Monday.
  • In an important First Amendment case involving a Black Lives Matter protest, the court sided with activist DeRay Mckesson in his effort to avoid a lawsuit by a police officer who was severely injured by an unknown assailant.
  • On Monday, the Supreme Court threw out the suit for now, declaring that the 5th Circuit's interpretation of state law "is too uncertain a premise on which to address"
  • Acknowledging these "exceptional circumstances," the high court, in essence, then asked the Louisiana Supreme Court to decide what the state law actually is — in short, whether Louisiana would permit such a suit.
  • This one involved a Texas state prisoner, Trent Taylor, who alleged that for six days in 2013 he was held in what the court called "shockingly unsanitary cells."
  • Taylor did not eat or drink for nearly four days. Correctional officers then moved Taylor to a second, frigidly cold cell, which was equipped with only a clogged drain in the floor to dispose of bodily wastes.
  • Because the cell lacked a bunk, and because Taylor was confined without clothing, he was left to sleep naked in sewage."
  • the Supreme Court noted that the 5th Circuit "properly held that such conditions ... violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment."
  • went on to say that the prison officers responsible for this treatment could not be sued because the law "wasn't clearly established" that "prisoners "couldn't be housed in cells teaming with human waste" "for only six days."
aleija

NYC Officer Suspended for Blaring 'Trump 2020' During Patrol | Time - 0 views

  • The New York Police Department said Sunday it has suspended an officer without pay a day after he was seen on video saying “Trump 2020” over a patrol vehicle’s loudspeaker, a violation of department rules.The suspension is effective immediately and the incident remains under investigation, the police department said.
  • Mayor Bill de Blasio promised swift action, tweeting: “ANY NYPD Officer pushing ANY political agenda while on duty will face consequences.
  • “Trump 2020,” the officer is heard saying, taunting someone on the street who was recording him. “Put it on YouTube. Put it on Facebook. Trump 2020.”
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  • The incident happened days after NYPD officials downplayed concerns that Trump’s support among law enforcement personnel, including a city police union’s endorsement, would impact how officers do their jobs—particularly when dealing with people voting or protesting against the president.
Javier E

Opinion | Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues
  • We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.”
  • Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.
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  • here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people
  • After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that “police actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.”
  • don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.
  • even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”
  • The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time.
  • Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades
  • The final report of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early on.
  • We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.
  • What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone.
  • In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days
  • When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder
  • As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.
  • People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.
katherineharron

Donald Trump's impeachment trial set to rock Washington and echo through the ages - CNN... - 0 views

  • The simple question posed by Donald Trump's second impeachment trial that begins Tuesday is whether a president who loses reelection can get away with a violent coup attempt in a desperate bid to stay in power.
  • The answer contained in the former commander-in-chief's likely acquittal for inciting a deadly mob assault on the Capitol will echo through generations and may influence the outcome of some unknowable future test of US democracy.
  • Events of the next week or so will inform the country's capacity to move on from a traumatic presidency that left it as divided as at any time since the Civil War.
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  • Even after his presidency ended, Washington is under siege from extremism, Trump's trashing of truth with false claims of election fraud and unhinged conspiracies that show the fight to save US democracy did not end on Inauguration Day.
  • A majority of Senate Republicans have indicated that they will not wrestle with Trump's behavior but will take refuge in a questionable argument that a President who was impeached while in office for seditious behavior cannot be tried after returning to private life.
  • That means there is a little chance of a two-thirds majority to convict Trump among 100 senators who will serve as jurors in the chamber that became a crime scene to which many of them were witnesses.
  • While the managers will likely fail to secure a prohibition on Trump serving in federal office in future, they hope to so damn him in public perception that a political comeback in 2024 will be impossible.
  • Video of Trump declaring to an angry crowd he had called to Washington on January 6 "if you don't fight like hell, we are not going to have a country anymore," followed by clips of rioters shouting "fight for Trump" as they smashed their way into the Capitol will have a powerful effect.
  • The price to be paid for deserting an ex-president who still dominates his party is being demonstrated by the backlash directed at 10 Republicans who voted to impeach in the House.
  • It's possible a handful of Senate Republicans will emulate Utah's Sen. Mitt Romney, the only member of his party to vote to convict Trump in his first trial. And Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who voted to impeach Trump, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post Monday encouraging Senate Republicans to vote to convict Trump, saying it "is necessary to save America from going further down a sad, dangerous road."
  • The claim that a former president cannot be tried after being impeached relies on a hyper-literal reading of the Constitution. Trump's supporters argue the trial is moot since impeachment is about removing a President from office and Trump has already left power.
  • The trial will consume hours a day over the next few weeks, but it will be only one half of a compelling political story that is unfolding in Washington.Biden, three weeks into his term, is intensifying his efforts to stand up his administration and to rescue the country with vaccines before new variants of Covid-19 trigger another deadly wave of infections.
  • The new commander-in-chief has steered clear of impeachment drama, leaving it to the new Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill to plow ahead.
  • Trump's hurriedly overhauled impeachment defense team on Monday laid out their strategy in pre-trial briefs.
  • "This was only ever a selfish attempt by Democratic leadership in the House to prey upon the feelings of horror and confusion that fell upon all Americans across the entire political spectrum upon seeing the destruction at the Capitol on January 6 by a few hundred people," the lawyers wrote.
  • The Trump defense will also revive one of the long-held tropes of the ex-President's apologists -- that his aggressive rhetoric should be taken figuratively not literally, with a claim that his call for the mob to "fight like hell" was metaphorical.
  • His team has also posited, despite multiple lawsuits and certifications of votes by states and Congress, that there is no evidence to disprove his false claims of voter fraud -- so prolonging the Big Lie that the election was stolen from the former President.
  • In a counter filling on the eve of the trial on Monday, Democratic House impeachment managers accused Trump's defense of indulging in "contortions" to support his discredited claims of a "rigged" and "stolen" election.
  • "President Trump violated his Oath of Office and betrayed the American people," the brief said. "His incitement of insurrection against the United States government -- which disrupted the peaceful transfer of power -- is the most grievous constitutional crime ever committed by a president."
  • The trial will begin just a month after a now infamous day, when Trump greeted a huge crowd in Washington already primed for revolt by his weeks of false claims of election fraud. The subsequent invasion of the US Capitol during a joint session of Congress to certify Biden's election victory led to five deaths and saw Trump fans parading unimpeded through the halls of the iconic building as lawmakers fled to safety.
  • "He wanted something to disrupt the electoral vote count that would mean he would no longer be President of the United States," Conway said."None of that is protected by the First Amendment. It's a flat out violation of his oath of office and it's impeachable and he should be punished by being barred from ever holding future federal office."
Javier E

How the White House Coronavirus Response Went Wrong - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • oping with a pandemic is one of the most complex challenges a society can face. To minimize death and damage, leaders and citizens must orchestrate a huge array of different resources and tools.
  • I have heard military and intelligence officials describe some threats as requiring a “whole of nation” response, rather than being manageable with any one element of “hard” or “soft” power or even a “whole of government” approach. Saving lives during a pandemic is a challenge of this nature and magnitude.
  • “If he had just been paying attention, he would have asked, ‘What do I do first?’ We wouldn’t have passed the threshold of casualties in previous wars. It is a catastrophic failure.”
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  • Aviation is safe in large part because it learns from its disasters. Investigators from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board go immediately to accident sites to begin assessing evidence. After months or even years of research, their detailed reports try to lay out the “accident chain” and explain what went wrong
  • with respect to the coronavirus pandemic, it has suffered by far the largest number of fatalities, about one-quarter of the global total, despite having less than one-20th of the world’s population.
  • What if the NTSB were brought in to look at the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic? What would its investigation conclude?
  • This was a journey straight into a mountainside, with countless missed opportunities to turn away. A system was in place to save lives and contain disaster. The people in charge of the system could not be bothered to avoid the doomed course.
  • Timelines of aviation disasters typically start long before the passengers or even the flight crew knew anything was wrong, with problems in the design of the airplane, the procedures of the maintenance crew, the route, or the conditions into which the captain decided to fly. In the worst cases, those decisions doomed the flight even before it took off. My focus here is similarly on conditions and decisions that may have doomed the country even before the first COVID-19 death had been recorded on U.S. soil.
  • What happened once the disease began spreading in this country was a federal disaster in its own right: Katrina on a national scale, Chernobyl minus the radiation. It involved the failure to test; the failure to trace; the shortage of equipment; the dismissal of masks; the silencing or sidelining of professional scientists; the stream of conflicting, misleading, callous, and recklessly ignorant statements by those who did speak on the national government’s behalf
  • As late as February 26, Donald Trump notoriously said of the infection rate, “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.” What happened after that—when those 15 cases became 15,000, and then more than 2 million, en route to a total no one can foretell—will be a central part of the history of our times.
  • 1. The Flight Plan
  • the most important event was the H5N1 “bird flu” outbreak, in 2005. It originated in Asia and was mainly confined there, as the SARS outbreak had been two years earlier. Bush-administration officials viewed H5N1 as an extremely close call. “
  • Shortly before Barack Obama left office, his administration’s Pandemic Prediction and Forecasting Science and Technology Working Group—yes, that was a thing—released a report reflecting the progress that had been made in applying remote-sensing and AI tools since the early days of Global Argus. The report is freely available online and notes pointedly that recent technological advances “provide opportunities to mitigate large-scale outbreaks by predicting more accurately when and where outbreaks are likely to occur, and how they will progress.”
  • “Absolutely nothing that has happened has been a surprise. We saw it coming. Not only did we see it, we ran the models and the gaming exercises. We had every bit of the structure in place. We’ve been talking about a biohazard risk like this for years. Anyone who says we did not see this coming has their head in the sand, or is lying through their teeth.”
  • The system the government set up was designed to warn not about improbable “black swan” events but rather about what are sometimes called “gray rhinos.” These are the large, obvious dangers that will sooner or later emerge but whose exact timing is unknown.
  • other U.S. leaders had dealt with foreign cover-ups, including by China in the early stages of the SARS outbreak in 2002. Washington knew enough, soon enough, in this case to act while there still was time.
  • During the Obama administration, the U.S. had negotiated to have its observers stationed in many cities across China, through a program called Predict. But the Trump administration did not fill those positions, including in Wuhan. This meant that no one was on site to learn about, for instance, the unexplained closure on January 1 of the city’s main downtown Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a so-called wet market
  • “It was in the briefings by the beginning of January,” a person involved in preparing the president’s briefing book told me. “On that there is no dispute.” This person went on: “But knowing it is in the briefing book is different from knowing whether the president saw it.” He didn’t need to spell out his point, which was: Of course this president did not.
  • To sum up: The weather forecast showed a dangerous storm ahead, and the warning came in plenty of time. At the start of January, the total number of people infected with the virus was probably less than 1,000. All or nearly all of them were in China. Not a single case or fatality had been reported in the United States.
  • 2. The Air Traffic Controllers
  • In cases of disease outbreak, U.S. leadership and coordination of the international response was as well established and taken for granted as the role of air traffic controllers in directing flights through their sectors
  • in normal circumstances, its location in China would have been a plus. Whatever the ups and downs of political relations over the past two decades, Chinese and American scientists and public-health officials have worked together frequently, and positively, on health crises ranging from SARS during George W. Bush’s administration to the H1N1 and Ebola outbreaks during Barack Obama’s.
  • One U.S. official recalled the Predict program: “Getting Chinese agreement to American monitors throughout their territory—that was something.” But then the Trump administration zeroed out that program.
  • “We had cooperated with China on every public-health threat until now,” Susan Shirk, a former State Department official and longtime scholar of Chinese affairs at UC San Diego, told me. “SARS, AIDS, Ebola in Africa, H1N1—no matter what other disputes were going on in the relationship, we managed to carve out health, and work together quite professionally. So this case is just so anomalous and so tragic.” A significant comparison, she said, is the way the United States and the Soviet Union had worked together to eliminate smallpox around the world, despite their Cold War tensions. But now, she said, “people have definitely died because the U.S. and China have been unable to cooperate.”
  • What did the breakdown in U.S.-Chinese cooperation mean in practice? That the U.S. knew less than it would have otherwise, and knew it later; that its actions brought out the worst (rather than the merely bad) in China’s own approach to the disease, which was essentially to cover it up internally and stall in allowing international access to emerging data; that the Trump administration lost what leverage it might have had over Chinese President Xi Jinping and his officials; and that the chance to keep the disease within the confines of a single country was forever lost.
  • In addition to America’s destruction of its own advance-warning system, by removing CDC and Predict observers, the Trump administration’s bellicose tone toward China had an effect. Many U.S. officials stressed that a vicious cycle of blame and recrimination made public health an additional source of friction between the countries, rather than a sustained point of cooperation, as it had been for so many years.
  • “The state of the relationship meant that every U.S. request was met with distrust on the Chinese side, and every Chinese response was seen on the American side as one more attempt to cover up,”
  • Several officials who had experience with China suggested that other presidents might have called Xi Jinping with a quiet but tough message that would amount to: We both know you have a problem. Why don’t we work on it together, which will let you be the hero? Otherwise it will break out and become a problem for China and the whole world.
  • “It would have taken diplomatic pressure on the Chinese government to allow us to insert our people” into Wuhan and other disease centers, Klain said. “The question isn’t what leverage we had. The point is that we gave up leverage with China to get the trade deal done. That meant that we didn’t put leverage on China’s government. We took their explanations at face value.”
  • 3. The Emergency Checklist
  • The president’s advance notice of the partial European ban almost certainly played an important part in bringing the infection to greater New York City. Because of the two-day “warning” Trump gave in his speech, every seat on every airplane from Europe to the U.S. over the next two days was filled. Airport and customs offices at the arrival airports in the U.S. were unprepared and overwhelmed. News footage showed travelers queued for hours, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be admitted to the U.S. Some of those travelers already were suffering from the disease; they spread it to others. On March 11, New York had slightly more than 220 diagnosed cases. Two weeks later, it had more than 25,000. Genetic testing showed that most of the infection in New York was from the coronavirus variant that had come through Europe to the United States, rather than directly from China (where most of the early cases in Washington State originated).
  • Aviation is safe because, even after all the advances in forecasting and technology, its culture still imagines emergencies and rehearses steps for dealing with them.
  • Especially in the post-9/11 era of intensified concern about threats of all sorts, American public-health officials have also imagined a full range of crises, and have prepared ways to limit their worst effects. The resulting official “playbooks” are the equivalent of cockpit emergency checklists
  • the White House spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany, then claimed that whatever “thin packet of paper” Obama had left was inferior to a replacement that the Trump administration had supposedly cooked up, but which has never been made public. The 69-page, single-spaced Obama-administration document is officially called “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents” and is freely available online. It describes exactly what the Trump team was determined not to do.
  • What I found remarkable was how closely the Obama administration’s recommendations tracked with those set out 10 years earlier by the George W. Bush administration, in response to its chastening experience with bird flu. The Bush-era work, called “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” and publicly available here, differs from the Obama-era playbook mainly in the simpler forms of technology on which it could draw
  • consider the one below, and see how, sentence by sentence, these warnings from 2005 match the headlines of 2020. The topic was the need to divide responsibility among global, national, state, and community jurisdictions in dealing with the next pandemic. The fundamental premise—so widely shared that it barely needed to be spelled out—was that the U.S. federal government would act as the indispensable flywheel, as it had during health emergencies of the past. As noted, it would work with international agencies and with governments in all affected areas to coordinate a global response. Within its own borders it would work with state agencies to detect the potential for the disease’s spread and to contain cases that did arise:
  • Referring to the detailed pandemic playbooks from the Bush and Obama administrations, John R. Allen told me: “The moment you get confirmation of a problem, you would move right to the timeline. Decisions by the president, actions by the secretary of defense and the CDC, right down the list. You’d start executing.”Or, in the case of the current administration, you would not. Reading these documents now is like discovering a cockpit checklist in the smoking wreckage.
  • 4. The Pilot
  • a virtue of Sully is the reminder that when everything else fails—the forecasts, the checklists, the triply redundant aircraft systems—the skill, focus, and competence of the person at the controls can make the difference between life and death.
  • So too in the public response to a public-health crisis. The system was primed to act, but the person at the top of the system had to say, “Go.” And that person was Donald Trump.
  • n a resigned way, the people I spoke with summed up the situation this way: You have a head of government who doesn’t know anything, and doesn’t read anything, and is at the mercy of what he sees on TV. “And all around him, you have this carnival,”
  • “There would be some ballast in the relationship,” this person said. “Now all you’ve got is the trade friction”—plus the personal business deals that the president’s elder daughter, Ivanka, has made in China,
  • 5. The Control Systems
  • The deadliest airline crash in U.S. history occurred in 1979. An American Airlines DC-10 took off from O’Hare Airport, in Chicago—and just as it was leaving the ground, an incorrectly mounted engine ripped away from one of the wings. When the engine’s pylon was pulled off, it cut the hydraulic lines that led from the cockpit to the control surfaces on the wings and tail. From that point on, the most skillful flight crew in the world could not have saved the flight.
  • By the time the pandemic emerged, it may have already been too late. The hydraulic lines may already have been too damaged to transmit the signals. It was Trump himself who cut them.
  • The more complex the organization, the more its success or failure turns on the skill of people in its middle layers—the ones who translate a leader’s decision to the rest of the team in order to get results. Doctors depend on nurses; architects depend on contractors and craftsmen; generals depend on lieutenants and sergeants
  • Because Donald Trump himself had no grasp of this point, and because he and those around him preferred political loyalists and family retainers rather than holdovers from the “deep state,” the whole federal government became like a restaurant with no cooks, or a TV station with stars but no one to turn the cameras on.
  • “There is still resilience and competence in the working-level bureaucracy,” an intelligence-agency official told me. “But the layers above them have been removed.”
  • Traditionally, the National Security Council staff has comprised a concentration of highly knowledgeable, talented, and often ambitious younger figures, mainly on their way to diplomatic or academic careers.
  • “There is nobody now who can play the role of ‘senior China person,’” a former intelligence official told me. “In a normal administration, you’d have a lot of people who had spent time in Asia, spent time in China, knew the goods and bads.” Also in a normal administration, he and others pointed out, China and the United States would have numerous connective strands
  • The United States still possesses the strongest economy in the world, its military is by far the most powerful, its culture is diverse, and, confronted with the vicissitudes of history, the country has proved resilient. But a veteran of the intelligence world emphasized that the coronavirus era revealed a sobering reality. “Our system has a single point-of-failure: an irrational president.” At least in an airplane cockpit, the first officer can grab the controls from a captain who is steering the aircraft toward doom.
  • Every president is “surprised” by how hard it is to convert his own wishes into government actions
  • Presidents cope with this discovery in varying ways. The people I spoke with had served in past administrations as early as the first George Bush’s. George H. W. Bush came to office with broad experience in the federal government—as much as any other president. He had been vice president for eight years, a CIA director, twice an ambassador, and a member of Congress. He served only four years in the Oval Office but began with a running start. Before he became president, Bill Clinton had been a governor for 12 years and had spent decades learning and talking about government policies. A CIA official told me that Clinton would not read his President’s Daily Briefs in the morning, when they arrived, but would pore over them late at night and return them with copious notes. George W. Bush’s evolution from dependence on the well-traveled Dick Cheney, in his first term, to more confident control, in his second, has been well chronicled. As for Obama, Paul Triolo told me: “By the end of his eight years, Obama really understood how to get the bureaucracy to do what he wanted done, and how to get the information he needed to make decisions.” The job is far harder than it seems. Donald Trump has been uninterested in learning the first thing about it.
  • In a situation like this, some of those in the “regular” government decide to struggle on. Others quit—literally, or in the giving-up sense
  • The ‘process’ is just so chaotic that it’s not a process at all. There’s no one at the desk. There’s no one to read the memos. No one is there.”
  • “If this could happen to Fauci, it makes people think that if they push too hard in the wrong direction, they’ll get their heads chopped off. There is no reason in the world something called #FireFauci should even exist. The nation’s leaders should maintain high regard for scientific empiricism, insight, and advice, and must not be professionally or personally risk averse when it comes to understanding and communicating messages about public safety and health.”
  • Over nearly two decades, the U.S. government had assembled the people, the plans, the connections, and the know-how to spare this nation the worst effects of the next viral mutation that would, someday, arise. That someday came, and every bit of the planning was for naught. The deaths, the devastation, the unforeseeable path ahead—they did not have to occur.
  • The language of an NTSB report is famously dry and clinical—just the facts. In the case of the pandemic, what it would note is the following: “There was a flight plan. There was accurate information about what lay ahead. The controllers were ready. The checklists were complete. The aircraft was sound. But the person at the controls was tweeting. Even if the person at the controls had been able to give effective orders, he had laid off people that would carry them out. This was a preventable catastrophe.”
Javier E

Opinion | Trump taking the Fifth should disqualify him from office - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • taking the Fifth — especially concerning his alleged misconduct related to the attempted coup — should disqualify him from the presidency.
  • a president “has a constitutional as well as a moral duty to see to it that the laws are faithfully executed — not just a passive duty to avoid violating the law, a duty everyone of course shares, but an active duty to ensure that the law is fully enforced as well as complied with. That active duty arguably includes an obligation to avoid invoking various otherwise available privileges — including the privilege to withhold criminally incriminating information.”
  • “In that special sense, a president or a former president, more than any other public official or private citizen, arguably betrays his or her duty to the American people by taking the Fifth.”
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  • “Fealty to the law meant nothing to him. The country’s interests meant nothing to him. The only oath he has taken is to his own greed and self-preservation.” But that does not mean voters can ignore the obvious conflict that occurs when someone simultaneously thwarts a government investigation and pledges to enforce the Constitution.
  • Tribe notes that Article VI of the Constitution specifies that public officials must take an oath “not just to obey the Constitution and laws of the United States but ‘to support this Constitution.’ ”
  • In other words, should members of Congress implicated in the plot to overturn the 2020 election choose to take the Fifth, they would be setting up a conflict between their self-interest and the interest in upholding and supporting the Constitution
  • True, the Constitution spells out no disqualifications for federal office, other than conviction through impeachment and Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars a person from office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
  • voters certainly should consider the underlying conflict when a candidate for office takes the Fifth, especially when the issue goes to the core of our democracy.
  • Defenders might insist that Trump has not been convicted of any crime. But voters are allowed to draw their own conclusions about not only his underlying conduct but also his refusal to testify.
  • there is a “bond” between an official and the people of the nation, which is “created by election or appointment and also cemented by the oath of office.” Just as a civil jury can draw an adverse conclusion from Trump’s refusal to answer questions, “it should be disqualifying for Trump if he seeks to run again.”
  • Taking the Fifth is their prerogative, but it is the prerogative of voters to hold it against them as evidence that they are putting themselves above the interests of the country.
zachcutler

Why Mark Zuckerberg (probably) won't run for office - Jan. 12, 2017 - 0 views

  • When a public figure hires a top political campaign manager and announces plans to tour the country, you assume he or she plans to run for office.
  • After a tumultuous last year, my hope for this challenge is to get out and talk to more people about how they're living, working and thinking about the future," Zuckerberg wrote in a post, sounding curiously like a politician.
  • Beyond that, Callahan doubts Zuckerberg is ready to put any public office ahead of Facebook.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Zuckerberg will be 36 in 2020, just barely old enough to legally serve as president. Apart from the age issue, Tusk questions whether the tech executive has the "temperament and personality" to wage a successful presidential campaign.
  • Yet Tusk think this probably isn't true for Zuckerberg because most political offices would be a step down for him.
  • "I like my current job at the Foundation better than I would being President. Also I wouldn't be good at doing what you need to do to get elected,"
  • The most likely politician in Facebook's C-Suite is COO Sheryl Sandberg.
  • During the presidential campaign, Sandberg was rumored to be on the short list to serve in Hillary Clinton's cabinet as Treasury Secretary.
malonema1

Advocates: Trump's Immigrant Crime Office Is Political Bait - NBC News - 0 views

  • Advocates: Trump’s Immigrant Crime Office Is Political Bait
  • Trump said he has ordered the creation of the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement, or VOICE to provide "a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests."
  • "The concern is there seems to be a repeated pattern of the Trump administration to link immigrants with criminality, using the emotions that come along with family members who have lost a loved one," Kelley said. "It's bait we don't want to take."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino, said Trump's speech was "the same dog whistle politics that got him elected."
  • The Office for Victims of Crime already exists in the Department of Justice. It was created by Ronald Reagan to focus on all types of crimes and all types of victims.
  • "I'm not sure why President Trump is creating a new office in a different department," she said. "I think that's going to create more bureaucracy."
anonymous

McMaster Was Rebuked in 2015 Over Handling of 2 Officers Accused of Sexual Assault - Th... - 0 views

  • McMaster Was Rebuked in 2015 Over Handling of 2 Officers Accused of Sexual Assault
  • WASHINGTON — A two-year-old report by the Army’s inspector general concluded that Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, now President Trump’s national security adviser, violated the service’s regulations in a case that involved two junior officers accused of sexual assault.
  • The report asserts that during an assignment as the commanding general at Fort Benning, Ga., General McMaster “improperly” decided to allow two second lieutenants to attend Ranger School even though they were under investigation on allegations that they had sexually assaulted a female officer as cadets at West Point.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, a Democrat and a member of the panel, has taken a strong interest in the role of women in the military and, an adviser said, pushed the Army to investigate why the junior officers were allowed to attend Ranger School.
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