Every one of my 30 second-graders raised their tiny hands. That was what they heard at night -- gunshots. And, I couldn't honestly calm their fears. We had lockdowns almost every month -- due to drive-by shootings or gang activity on the corner.
Group items tagged
11More
Let's Not Shelter in Place Anymore | Susan B. Katz - 0 views
-
-
While there, I got mugged in broad daylight, at gunpoint, by two young men. One pointed a sawed-off shotgun at me. It looked like a rifle as I stared down the barrel
-
I loved the kids, and the parents, but risking my life to go to work just didn't seem worth it. I can't imagine how the teachers at Sandy Hook or Columbine managed to return to work after those horrific massacres.
- ...8 more annotations...
-
The secretary and I could only shout to panicked parents through the mail slot, "No one is allowed on campus or off campus until further notice."
-
After several hours, when we'd been given the all clear, I read each child's name aloud and released five and six-year-olds to their sobbing parents.
-
They robbed a home across from the school then ran onto the schoolyard to mix into the crowds of students.
-
As in -- we feel empathy and outrage when the San Bernardino or Oregon shooting rampages happen but won't actually take action until it is in our neighborhood, at our local school.
-
And, yet, one of my best friend's parents were brutally murdered during an armed robbery at their store in Detroit when we were 14. Another friend accidentally shot his brother in his own backyard with his father's gun.
-
Can we not run errands anymore without risking driving through a war zone?
-
What is our country coming to? Children and teachers in classrooms across the country huddling together, shaking in fear, sheltering in place, locked down on a regular basis? How are our children's right to safety of less value than the right to own a gun? Just within the last ten years, a staggering 280,024 Americans were killed by guns. Not overseas, fighting a war, but struggling to survive on the streets of U.S. cities and while studying or teaching in our schools.
-
Let's take back our schools, our streets and our sense of safety with stricter gun laws, background checks and more modern technology like the fingerprint unlocking device that is standard on cell phones now.
14More
The VICE Morning Bulletin | VICE | United States - 0 views
-
The VICE Morning Bulletin
-
-
Two refugees from Iraq have been arrested on terrorism-related charges in California and Texas, accused of ties to jihadist groups.
-
The sheriff of the Oregon county where armed anti-government activists have occupied federal land has offered the protesters a "safe escort" out.
- ...10 more annotations...
-
. American officials have since been trying to get Cuba to return the laser-guided missile, which did not contain explosives
-
More than 70 small earthquakes rattling Oklahoma in the past week have raised concerns fracking is making the problem worse.
-
waste water.
-
An Islamic State militant has carried out a public execution of his mother because she asked him to leave the group, say the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
-
Police found traces of explosives, three handmade belts and a fingerprint of fugitive Salah Abdeslam, a French national
-
Anti-North Korea messages and K-Pop music were broadcast from loudspeakers at 11 sites along the border.—
-
The Palestinian death toll since the beginning of the unrest late last year increased to 149, and at least 20 Israelis have also died
-
The company's one-wheeled boards were seized after a US rival filed a patent infringement claim.
-
Ben Carson asked a bunch of fifth-graders to point out the worst student in their class, before telling the boy to "start reading."
-
was planning to build a $9 million mansion inspired by Tony Stark.
30More
As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants - The New York ... - 0 views
-
For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.
-
The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.
-
Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.
- ...27 more annotations...
-
Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users — control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.
-
Facebook has never sold its user data, fearful of user backlash and wary of handing would-be competitors a way to duplicate its most prized asset. Instead, internal documents show, it did the next best thing: granting other companies access to parts of the social network in ways that advanced its own interests.
-
Zuckerberg, the chief executive, assured lawmakers in April that people “have complete control” over everything they share on Facebook.
-
the documents, as well as interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners, reveal that Facebook allowed certain companies access to data despite those protections
-
Data privacy experts disputed Facebook’s assertion that most partnerships were exempted from the regulatory requirements
-
“This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” said David Vladeck, who formerly ran the F.T.C.’s consumer protection bureau. “I don’t understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.
-
“I don’t believe it is legitimate to enter into data-sharing partnerships where there is not prior informed consent from the user,” said Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook. “No one should trust Facebook until they change their business model.”
-
Few companies have better data than Facebook and its rival, Google, whose popular products give them an intimate view into the daily lives of billions of people — and allow them to dominate the digital advertising market
-
The partnerships were so important that decisions about forming them were vetted at high levels, sometimes by Mr. Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, Facebook officials said. While many of the partnerships were announced publicly, the details of the sharing arrangements typically were confidential
-
as the social network has disclosed its data sharing deals with other kinds of businesses — including internet companies such as Yahoo — Facebook has labeled them integration partners, too
-
Among the revelations was that Facebook obtained data from multiple partners for a controversial friend-suggestion tool called “People You May Know.”
-
The feature, introduced in 2008, continues even though some Facebook users have objected to it, unsettled by its knowledge of their real-world relationships. Gizmodo and other news outlets have reported cases of the tool’s recommending friend connections between patients of the same psychiatrist, estranged family members, and a harasser and his victim.
-
Facebook, in turn, used contact lists from the partners, including Amazon, Yahoo and the Chinese company Huawei — which has been flagged as a security threat by American intelligence officials — to gain deeper insight into people’s relationships and suggest more connections, the records show.
-
agreements with about a dozen companies did. Some enabled partners to see users’ contact information through their friends — even after the social network, responding to complaints, said in 2014 that it was stripping all applications of that power.
-
Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit privacy research group, said that Facebook would have little power over what happens to users’ information after sharing it broadly. “It travels,” Ms. Dixon said. “It could be customized. It could be fed into an algorithm and decisions could be made about you based on that data.”
-
Facebook’s agreement with regulators is a result of the company’s early experiments with data sharing. In late 2009, it changed the privacy settings of the 400 million people then using the service, making some of their information accessible to all of the internet. Then it shared that information, including users’ locations and religious and political leanings, with Microsoft and other partners.
-
But the privacy program faced some internal resistance from the start, according to four former Facebook employees with direct knowledge of the company’s efforts. Some engineers and executives, they said, considered the privacy reviews an impediment to quick innovation and growth. And the core team responsible for coordinating the reviews — numbering about a dozen people by 2016 — was moved around within Facebook’s sprawling organization, sending mixed signals about how seriously the company took it, the ex-employees said.
-
Microsoft officials said that Bing was using the data to build profiles of Facebook users on Microsoft servers. They declined to provide details, other than to say the information was used in “feature development” and not for advertising. Microsoft has since deleted the data, the officials said.
-
For some advocates, the torrent of user data flowing out of Facebook has called into question not only Facebook’s compliance with the F.T.C. agreement, but also the agency’s approach to privacy regulation.
-
“We brought Facebook under the regulatory authority of the F.T.C. after a tremendous amount of work. The F.T.C. has failed to act.
-
The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.
-
Facebook records show Yandex had access in 2017 to Facebook’s unique user IDs even after the social network stopped sharing them with other applications, citing privacy risks. A spokeswoman for Yandex, which was accused last year by Ukraine’s security service of funneling its user data to the Kremlin, said the company was unaware of the access
-
In October, Facebook said Yandex was not an integration partner. But in early December, as The Times was preparing to publish this article, Facebook told congressional lawmakers that it was
-
But federal regulators had reason to know about the partnerships — and to question whether Facebook was adequately safeguarding users’ privacy. According to a letter that Facebook sent this fall to Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat, PricewaterhouseCoopers reviewed at least some of Facebook’s data partnerships.
-
The first assessment, sent to the F.T.C. in 2013, found only “limited” evidence that Facebook had monitored those partners’ use of data. The finding was redacted from a public copy of the assessment, which gave Facebook’s privacy program a passing grade over all.
-
Mr. Wyden and other critics have questioned whether the assessments — in which the F.T.C. essentially outsources much of its day-to-day oversight to companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers — are effective. As with other businesses under consent agreements with the F.T.C., Facebook pays for and largely dictated the scope of its assessments, which are limited mostly to documenting that Facebook has conducted the internal privacy reviews it claims it had
-
Facebook officials said that while the social network audited partners only rarely, it managed them closely.
7More
shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 17
- No Cached
Professors like me can't stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses - The Wash... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html
free speech campus political correctness Culture
shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 17
- No Cached
-
At Reed College in Oregon, where I work, a group of students began protesting the required first-year humanities course a year ago. Three times a week, students sat in the lecture space holding signs — many too obscene to be printed here — condemning the course and its faculty as white supremacists, as anti-black, as not open to dialogue and criticism, on the grounds that we continue to teach, among many other things, Aristotle and Plato.
-
In the interest of supporting dissent and the free exchange of ideas, the faculty and administration allowed this.
-
Those who felt able to do so lectured surrounded by those signs for the better part of a year. I lectured, but dealt with physical anxiety — lack of sleep, nausea, loss of appetite, inability to focus — in the weeks leading up to my lecture. Instead of walking around or standing at the lectern, as I typically do, I sat as I tried to teach students how to read the poetry of Sappho. Inadvertently, I spoke more quietly, more timidly.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
Some colleagues, including people of color, immigrants and those without tenure, found it impossible to work under these conditions. The signs intimidated faculty into silence, just as intended, and these silenced professors’ lectures were quietly replaced by talks from people willing and able to carry on teaching in the face of these demonstrations.
-
I think obscuring these acts of silencing was a mistake that resulted in an escalation of the protesters’ tactics.
-
This academic year, the first lecture was to be a panel introduction of the course: Along with two colleagues, I was going to offer my thoughts on the course, the study of the humanities and the importance of students’ knowing the history of the education they were beginning.
-
We introduced ourselves and took our seats. But as we were about to begin, the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture.
10More
James Fallows on the Reinvention of America - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
After a several-year immersion in parts of the country that make the news mainly after a natural disaster or a shooting, or for follow-up stories on how the Donald Trump voters of 2016 now feel about Trump, I have a journalistic impulse similar to the one that dominated my years of living in China. That is the desire to tell people how much more is going on, in places they had barely thought about or even heard of, than they might have imagined.
-
At the time Deb and I were traveling, sociologists like Robert Putnam were documenting rips in the social fabric. We went to places where family stories matched the famous recent study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton, showing rising mortality among middle-aged whites without a college degree for reasons that include chronic disease, addiction, and suicide. In some of the same cities where we interviewed forward-moving students, civic leaders, and entrepreneurs, the photographer Chris Arnade was portraying people the economy and society had entirely left behind. The cities we visited faced ethnic and racial tensions, and were struggling to protect local businesses against chain stores and to keep their most promising young people from moving away. The great majority of the states and counties we spent time in ended up voting for Donald Trump.
-
Serious as the era’s problems are, more people, in more places, told us they felt hopeful about their ability to move circumstances the right way than you would ever guess from national news coverage of most political discourse. Pollsters have reported this disparity for a long time. For instance, a national poll that The Atlantic commissioned with the Aspen Institute at the start of the 2016 primaries found that only 36 percent of Americans thought the country as a whole was headed in the right direction. But in the same poll, two-thirds of Americans said they were satisfied with their own financial situation, and 85 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with their general position in life and their ability to pursue the American dream. Other polls in the past half-dozen years have found that most Americans believe the country to be on the wrong course—but that their own communities are improving.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
I make no pretense that our proposed answers to those questions are precise or scientific. We traveled as broadly as we could. We listened; we learned. We were looking for civic success stories, and we found them. But we also ended up in places where well-intentioned efforts had failed. So we steadily adjusted our conclusions. We ended up convinced that the national prospect is more promising than we’d felt before we started—full of possibilities that the bleak trench warfare of national politics inevitably obscures.
-
America is becoming more like itself again. More Americans are trying to make it so, in more places, than most Americans are aware. Even as the country is becoming worse in obvious ways—angrier, more divided, less able to do the basic business of governing itself—it is becoming distinctly better on a range of other indicators that are harder to perceive. The pattern these efforts create also remains hidden. Americans don’t realize how fast the country is moving toward becoming a better version of itself.
-
During the Pennsylvania part of Romney’s tour, which then went on to Ohio, we stayed in a cheap motel in the hard-luck coal-country town of Hazleton, where the median household income, in the low $30,000s, was much less than the national level of more than $50,000 and the unemployment rate, about 15 percent at the time, was much greater. The few visible signs of after-dark life were bodegas on downtown Wyoming Street, serving the city’s growing Latino population. When we got back from dinner at a small Mexican restaurant, we channel surfed to a local-access TV station and saw Lou Barletta, the longtime Republican mayor of Hazleton who had recently made it into Congress as part of the 2010 Tea Party wave, warn that ongoing immigration was a threat to Hazleton’s safety and quality of life. As mayor, Barletta had been a proto-Trump, championing a city ordinance that, among other anti-immigrant provisions, declared English the “official language” of Hazleton and required that official city business be conducted in English only. The measures were eventually tossed by federal courts.
-
Were we mistaking anecdotes and episodes for provable trends? This is the occupational hazard of journalism, and everyone in the business struggles toward the right balance of observation and data. But the logic of reporting is that something additional comes from traveling, asking, listening, seeing. This is particularly true in detecting a sense of changed course. A political movement, a new technological or business possibility—I have learned through the decades that enthusiasm in any of these realms does not guarantee world-changing success, but it’s an important marker. (The visionary California entrepreneurs I wrote about in the 1980s were confident that their Osborne and Kaypro computers would change the world. They were wrong. The visionary California entrepreneurs I met at Apple in those same years were confident that their dreams would come true. They were right.) And enthusiasm is what we have seen.
-
“Across the country, we’re seeing significant growth in local officials’ training for civic engagement, and the appearance of many new online platforms and other tools to connect citizens and their governments,” Pete Peterson, the dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, in California, told me. Peterson ran down a list of cities illustrating the effects of a new emphasis on engagement—starting, to my surprise, with the Los Angeles–area city of Bell. In 2010, Bell was the object of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times showing corruption in the city’s administration top to bottom. (For instance, the city manager of this small, low-income city had engineered pay for himself of well over $1 million a year.) The series was followed by arrests, trials, and prison sentences. “That city has seen nothing less than a civic renaissance, with new leadership and a public much more involved in the future of the city,” Peterson said. “It’s an amazing before-and-after illustration of what happens when people get engaged”—for example, involving citizens in decisions about what had been a notably secretive city-budgeting process.
-
In Wichita, Kansas; in Bend, Oregon; in Duluth, Minnesota; in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; in Fresno, we found people who had already worked in the most expensive and “elite” cities or who had been recruited for opportunities there, and decided instead that the overall life balance was better someplace smaller and less expensive. Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL and now the CEO of the technology-investment firm Revolution, has for several years led “Rise of the Rest” tours across the country to promote new tech businesses and support existing ones in places other than the famous tech centers. “For half a century, there’s been a brain drain, as people who grew up in the ‘rest of America’ left their hometowns for better opportunities elsewhere,” Case told me recently. Case himself grew up in Hawaii but built his companies in the Washington, D.C., area. “We’re starting to see less of that brain drain. We’re seeing more graduates stay in place, in cities like Pittsburgh or Columbus, and a boomerang of people returning to where they’re from—for lifestyle reasons, and because they can see that their communities are rising and opportunities are increasing, and they’d like to be part of what’s going on.”
-
There is of course evidence that this has happened, in the form of the bigotry that has been unleashed since 2017. In the months after Donald Trump took office, we checked back with communities where we’d met immigrants and refugees. Some places had seen a nasty shift, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and police became newly aggressive and local racists felt empowered. A few months before the election, we interviewed Catholic nuns and secular volunteers in Garden City, Kansas, who were bringing surplus food and medical supplies to poor households, many of whose members were immigrants working in the area’s vast beef-packing complex. A few months after the election, a white-extremist hate group in Garden City was arrested while plotting to blow up an apartment building where African immigrants and refugees lived. In Dodge City, we met and wrote about a rising, respected young city-government official named Ernestor de la Rosa. His parents had brought him to the U.S. from Mexico when he was a child, and he had stayed in the country as a “Dreamer,” on a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals waiver, while working toward an advanced degree at Wichita State. Trump carried Dodge City more than two to one. But people we spoke with there after the election said they never intended their preference in national politics to lead to the removal of trusted figures like de la Rosa.
6More
Congress tries to cool partisan fever on Russia - POLITICO - 0 views
-
Top Russia investigators in Congress are straining to salvage some bipartisan cooperation amid acrimony that has come to threaten the credibility of their probes. Partisan anger has unsettled Russia inquiries by the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Intelligence Committee, but senior members of those panels say they hope to restore a sense of trust within their ranks. And Senate intelligence committee leaders are stressing their relative political unity in an increasingly hostile environment.
-
n a small but important example, the judiciary panel’s top Democrat, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, offered an olive branch to an infuriated Republican colleague last week. Feinstein expressed “regret” for failing to notify her GOP counterpart, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, in person before she released a committee interview transcript with a key witness that Republicans had wanted kept private. The move had upset Grassley, who called it a breach of trust.
-
Meanwhile, Rep. Adam Schiff, the top House intelligence Committee Democrat and a frequently harsh critic of his Republican colleagues, struck a notably conciliatory tone in a briefing with reporters last week. Noting that Republicans hadn't yet shut down his committee’s 10-month-old probe — despite some reports that they might do so by now — the Californian praised his GOP counterpart, Texas Rep. Mike Conaway, for striving to keep a spirit of collaboration alive. "Obviously there have been hurdles to overcome — and we've had more than our share on the House intel committee — but we continue to make progress," Schiff said in a Thursday interview.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
onaway said he hopes to conclude the House Intelligence Committee probe quickly, talk that angers Democrats who believe Republicans are trying to rush the panel’s investigation to a premature conclusion. "The sooner I can get this thing done, the better," he said. "The American people deserve an answer to these questions."
-
Democrats were also furious earlier this month when Grassley, joined by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), suggested the FBI consider criminal charges against the author of the Fusion GPS dossier, Christopher Steele, whom they said may have lied to federal officials. Feinstein had been especially angry about the move, and many observers believed her decision to release Simpson’s transcript was an act of payback that suggested a downward spiral for the committee’s leading members. Another Democrat on the intelligence panel, Ron Wyden, offered a more direct warning Thursday as he pushed back against "this idea that gets bandied about" that the committee's Russia investigation should wind down by any certain date.
-
The Oregon Democrat insisted that Trump’s son-in-law and eldest son should make return appearances before the Senate Intelligence Committee to answer what he called unresolved questions about the Trump organization's finances. “For me, I’m going to push back with everything I have if somebody tries to say this is over without Jared Kushner or Donald Trump Jr. coming to the committee to answer questions,” Wyden said.
3More
Coronavirus map of the US: latest cases state by state | World news | The Guardian - 0 views
-
The number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 continues to grow in the US. Mike Pence, the vice-president, is overseeing the US response to the coronavirus.
-
Confirmed cases 85,919 (Today: +2,083) Deaths 1,297 (Today: +88)
-
State/territory Confirmed cases Deaths New York 39,140 461 New Jersey 6,876 81 California 4,040 82 Washington 3,207 150 Michigan 2,844 61 Illinois 2,542 26 Florida 2,484 29 Massachusetts 2,417 25 Louisiana 2,304 83 Pennsylvania 1,813 18 Texas 1,658 24 Georgia 1,642 56 Colorado 1,430 19 Tennessee 1,097 3 Connecticut 1,012 21 Ohio 870 15 North Carolina 755 3 Wisconsin 728 10 Indiana 657 17 Maryland 583 4 Nevada 536 10 Alabama 531 1 Missouri 520 9 Arizona 508 8 Mississippi 485 6 Virginia 468 10 South Carolina 456 9 Utah 396 1 Arkansas 349 2 Minnesota 344 2 Oregon 317 11 District of Columbia 267 3 Oklahoma 248 7 Kentucky 247 5 Idaho 191 3 Iowa 179 1 Kansas 172 3 Rhode Island 165 0 Vermont 158 9 Maine 155 0 New Hampshire 154 1 Delaware 143 1 New Mexico 136 1 Hawaii 106 0 Montana 90 1 Nebraska 82 0 West Virginia 76 0 Puerto Rico 64 2 North Dakota 57 0 Alaska 56 1 Wyoming 56 0 South Dakota 46 1 Guam 45 1 Virgin Islands 17 0
3More
A state-by-state breakdown of US coronavirus cases - CNN - 0 views
-
(CNN)The first US case of the coronavirus was reported January 21 -- a Washington state man who had recently returned from China. Now, the country has at least 82,250 cases across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
-
Alabama: 531 (including one death)Alaska: 69 (including one death)Arizona: 508 (including eight deaths) Arkansas: 349 (including three deaths)California: 3,006 (including 65 deaths)Colorado: 1,430 (including 24 deaths)Connecticut: 1,012 (including 21 deaths)Delaware: 143 (including one death)District of Columbia: 267 (including three deaths)Florida: 2,353 (including 28 deaths)Georgia: 1,643 (including 56 deaths)Guam: 45 (including one death)Hawaii: 106 Idaho: 189 (including three deaths)Illinois: 2,538 (including 26 deaths)Indiana: 645 (including 17 deaths)Iowa: 179 (including one death)Kansas: 168 (including three deaths)Kentucky: 248 (including five deaths)Louisiana: 2,305 (including 83 deaths)Maine: 155Maryland: 580 (including four deaths)Massachusetts: 2,417 (including 25 deaths)Michigan: 2,856 (including 60 deaths)Minnesota: 346 (including two deaths)Mississippi: 485 (including five deaths)Missouri: 502 (including eight deaths)Montana: 90Nebraska: 73Nevada: 535 (including 10 deaths)New Hampshire: 137 (including one death)New Jersey: 6,876 (including 81 deaths)New Mexico: 136 (including one death)New York: 37,258 (including 385 deaths)North Carolina: 636 (including two deaths)North Dakota: 52Ohio: 867 (including 15 deaths)Oklahoma: 248 (including seven deaths)Oregon: 316 (including 11 deaths)Pennsylvania: 1,687 (including 16 deaths)Puerto Rico: 64 (including two deaths)Rhode Island: 165South Carolina: 456 (including nine deaths)South Dakota: 46 (including one death)Tennessee: 957 (including three deaths)Texas: 1,424 (including 18 deaths)US Virgin Islands: 17Utah: 402 (including one death)Vermont: 158 (including nine deaths)Virginia: 460 (including 13 deaths)Washington: 3,207 (including 149 deaths)West Virginia: 76Wisconsin: 707 (including eight deaths)Wyoming: 55Repatriated cases: 70
-
CORRECTIONS: A previous version of this story included an incorrect number of cases for Florida. That number has been corrected. On March 14, CNN revised the US death count, taking it down by one after discovering a double count of one death. This article also has been updated with the correct number of deaths for Hawaii, and cases for Wisconsin, Alabama.
10More
April Bills Loom. The Economy Hangs on How Many Are Left Unpaid. - The New York Times - 0 views
-
On Wednesday, as on the first day of any month, many companies and households will have bills to pay. This time, a lot will simply pile up.
-
The trajectory of the U.S. economy will largely rest on how many payments go unmade, which bills are put ahead of others and the terms on which they are settled.
-
The $2 trillion relief package passed by Congress amounts to a grand attempt to flush the economy with cash so that the obligations of corporations and minimum-wage-earning tenants alike can be met as usual.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
But much of the money will take weeks to arrive
-
Should a significant portion be curtailed through negotiation or absorbed by the government altogether
-
a coronavirus recession could be followed by a robust recovery in which commercial life looks something like normal.
-
Consider the metal lockboxes in the 110 apartment buildings owned by Bridge Housing,
-
a nonprofit affordable-housing developer that manages about 12,000 subsidized units in California, Oregon and Washington.
-
On Wednesday, Bridge’s 30,000 tenants, most of them hourly workers with little or no financial cushion, will start dropping their April rent checks in the boxes.
-
Usually, no more than 3 percent of Bridge’s tenants fail to pay.
12More
Revealed: the true identity of the leader of an American neo-Nazi terror group | World ... - 0 views
-
Using encrypted apps, members of the highly organized group planned terror campaigns; vandalized synagogues; established armed training camps and recruited new members.
-
The US attorney for Maryland, Robert K Hur, speaking after the recent arrest of three members of the Base, said that they “did more than talk – they took steps to act and act violently on their racist views”.
-
Rinaldo Nazzaro has maintained a decidedly low profile: he has no visible presence on any major social media platforms, no published writings under his own name, and no profile in local or national media.
- ...9 more annotations...
-
The Guardian was able to unravel Nazzaro’s identity due to his 2018 activities in a remote corner of the Pacific north-west.
-
Last August, an Oregon-based antifascist group, Eugene Antifa, warned that the Base was planning a “hate camp” in the neighboring state of Washington, and claimed Nazzaro (operating under the alias of “Spear”) had purchased land in Stevens county for training purposes. This warning came after a leak of the Base’s internal chats.
-
Property record searches revealed that three 10-acre blocks of undeveloped land were purchased in December 2018 for $33,000 in the name of a Delaware LLC called “Base Global”. In a telephone conversation in late November, Manke confirmed that this was the block of land he had been referring to.
-
The location of the land is consistent with “Norman Spear’s” advocacy of a white supremacist strategy called the Northwest Territorial Imperative (NTI), which was promoted by the deceased white supremacist Harold Covington.
-
The strategy argues for the creation of a separatist ethnostate in the Pacific north-west and encourages white supremacists to move to the region.
-
The plan, he said, would trigger the relocation to the Pacific north-west of the white population in the United States.
-
Under the motto “there is no political solution”, the Base embraces an “accelerationist” ideology, which holds that acts of violence and terror are required in order to push liberal democracy towards collapse, preparing the way for white supremacists to seize power and institute an ethnostate.
-
Materials inspected and sources consulted by the Guardian indicate that Nazzaro, as “Spear”, has faced persistent suspicions from current and former members of the group that he is a “fed”, or the agent of a foreign government, or that the Base is a “honeypot” intended to lure neo-Nazis out into the open for the benefit of law enforcement agencies.
-
The Guardian has discovered that all of the business addresses associated with Nazzaro’s OSI LLCs are “virtual offices”. This describes a situation where a second company provides a business address, and sometimes meeting rooms and greeting services, for businesses who do not wish to maintain their own premises.
60More
shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 20
- No Cached
Warnings Ignored: A Timeline of Trump's COVID-19 Response - The Bulwark - 0 views
thebulwark.com/ne-of-trumps-covid-19-response
timeline trump response pandemic history policy politics
shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 20
- No Cached
-
the White House is trying to establish an alternate reality in which Trump was a competent, focused leader who saved American people from the coronavirus.
-
it highlights just how asleep Trump was at the switch, despite warnings from experts within his own government and from former Trump administration officials pleading with him from the outside.
-
Most prominent among them were former Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb, and Director for Medical and Biodefense Preparedness at the National Security Council Dr. Luciana Borio who beginning in early January used op-eds, television appearances, social media posts, and private entreaties to try to spur the administration into action.
- ...57 more annotations...
-
what the administration should have been doing in January to prepare us for today.
-
She cites the delay on tests, without which “cases go undetected and people continue to circulate” as a leading issue along with other missed federal government responses—many of which are still not fully operational
-
The prescient recommendations from experts across disciplines in the period before COVID-19 reached American shores—about testing, equipment, and distancing—make clear that more than any single factor, it was Trump’s squandering of out lead-time which should have been used to prepare for the pandemic that has exacerbated this crisis.
-
What follows is an annotated timeline revealing the warning signs the administration received and showing how slow the administration was to act on these recommendations.
-
The Early Years: Warnings Ignored
-
2017: Trump administrations officials are briefed on an intelligence document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” That’s right. The administration literally had an actual playbook for what to do in the early stages of a pandemic
-
February 2018: The Washington Post writes “CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak.” The meat of the story is “Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.”
-
May 2018: At an event marking the 100 year anniversary of the 1918 pandemic, Borio says “pandemic flu” is the “number 1 health security issue” and that the U.S. is not ready to respond.
-
One day later her boss, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer is pushed out of the administration and the global health security team is disbanded
-
Beth Cameron, former senior director for global health security on the National Security Council adds: “It is unclear in his absence who at the White House would be in charge of a pandemic,” Cameron said, calling it “a situation that should be immediately rectified.” Note: It was not
-
January 2019: The director of National Intelligence issues the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of threats to national security. Among its findings:
-
A novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat, with pathogens such as H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”
-
Page 21: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”
-
September, 2019: The Trump Administration ended the pandemic early warning program, PREDICT, which trained scientists in China and other countries to identify viruses that had the potential to turn into pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, “field work ceased when funding ran out in September,” two months before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan Province, China.
-
2020: COVID-19 Arrives
-
anuary 3, 2020: The CDC is first alerted to a public health event in Wuhan, China
-
January 6, 2020: The CDC issues a travel notice for Wuhan due to the spreading coronavirus
-
Note: The Trump campaign claims that this marks the beginning of the federal government disease control experts becoming aware of the virus. It was 10 weeks from this point until the week of March 16 when Trump began to change his tone on the threat.
-
January 10, 2020: Former Trump Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert warns that we shouldn’t “jerk around with ego politics” because “we face a global health threat…Coordinate!”
-
January 18, 2020: After two weeks of attempts, HHS Secretary Alex Azar finally gets the chance to speak to Trump about the virus. The president redirects the conversation to vaping, according to the Washington Post.
-
January 21, 2020: Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the CDC tells reporters, “We do expect additional cases in the United States.”
-
January 27, 2020: Top White House aides meet with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to encourage greater focus on the threat from the virus. Joe Grogan, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council warns that “dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.”
-
January 28, 2020: Two former Trump administration officials—Gottlieb and Borio—publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal imploring the president to “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic.” They advocate a 4-point plan to address the coming crisis:
-
(1) Expand testing to identify and isolate cases. Note: This did not happen for many weeks. The first time more than 2,000 tests were deployed in a single day was not until almost six weeks later, on March 11.
-
(3) Prepare hospital units for isolation with more gowns and masks. Note: There was no dramatic ramp-up in the production of critical supplies undertaken. As a result, many hospitals quickly experienced shortages of critical PPE materials. Federal agencies waited until Mid-March to begin bulk orders of N95 masks.
-
January 29, 2020: Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro circulates an internal memo warning that America is “defenseless” in the face of an outbreak which “elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”
-
January 30, 2020: Dr. James Hamblin publishes another warning about critical PPE materials in the Atlantic, titled “We Don’t Have Enough Masks.”
-
January 29, 2020: Republican Senator Tom Cotton reaches out to President Trump in private to encourage him to take the virus seriously.
-
Late January, 2020: HHS sends a letter asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.
-
Trump’s Chinese travel ban only banned “foreign nationals who had been in China in the last 14 days.” This wording did not—at all—stop people from arriving in America from China. In fact, for much of the crisis, flights from China landed in America almost daily filled with people who had been in China, but did not fit the category as Trump’s “travel ban” defined it.
-
January 31, 2020: On the same day Trump was enacting his fake travel ban, Foreign Policy reports that face masks and latex gloves are sold out on Amazon and at leading stores in New York City and suggests the surge in masks being sold to other countries needs “refereeing” in the face of the coming crisis.
-
February 4, 2020: Gottlieb and Borio take to the WSJ again, this time to warn the president that “a pandemic seems inevitable” and call on the administration to dramatically expand testing, expand the number of labs for reviewing tests, and change the rules to allow for tests of people even if they don’t have a clear known risk factor.
-
Note: Some of these recommendations were eventually implemented—25 days later.
-
February 5, 2020: HHS Secretary Alex Azar requests $2 billion to “buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment.” He is rebuffed by Trump and the White House OMB who eventually send Congress a $500 million request weeks later.
-
February 4 or 5, 2020: Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, and other intelligence officials brief the Senate Intelligence Committee that the virus poses a “serious” threat and that “Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives.”
-
February 5, 2020: Senator Chris Murphy tweets: Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.
-
February 9, 2020: The Washington Post reports that a group of governors participated in a jarring meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield that was much more alarmist than what they were hearing from Trump. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.
-
the administration lifted CDC restrictions on tests. This is a factually true statement. But it elides that fact that they did so on March 3—two critical weeks after the third Borio/Gottlieb op-ed on the topic, during which time the window for intervention had shrunk to a pinhole.
-
February 20, 2020: Borio and Gottlieb write in the Wall Street Journal that tests must be ramped up immediately “while we can intervene to stop spread.”
-
February 23, 2020: Harvard School of Public Health professor issues warning on lack of test capability: “As of today, the US remains extremely limited in#COVID19 testing. Only 3 of ~100 public health labs haveCDC test kits working and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.
-
February 24, 2020: The Trump administration sends a letter to Congress requesting a small dollar amount—between $1.8 billion and $2.5 billion—to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. This is, of course, a pittance
-
February 25, 2020: Messonier says she expects “community spread” of the virus in the United States and that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump is reportedly furious and Messonier’s warnings are curtailed in the ensuing weeks.
-
Trump mocks Congress in a White House briefing, saying “If Congress wants to give us the money so easy—it wasn’t very easy for the wall, but we got that one done. If they want to give us the money, we’ll take the money.”
-
February 26, 2020: Congress, recognizing the coming threat, offers to give the administration $6 billion more than Trump asked for in order to prepare for the virus.
-
February 27, 2020: In a leaked audio recording Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee and author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) and the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act (reauthorization of PAHPA), was telling people that COVID-19 “is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”
-
March 4, 2020: HHS says they only have 1 percent of respirator masks needed if the virus became a “full-blown pandemic.”
-
March 3, 2020: Vice President Pence is asked about legislation encouraging companies to produce more masks. He says the Trump administration is “looking at it.”
-
March 7, 2020: Fox News host Tucker Carlson, flies to Mar-a-Lago to implore Trump to take the virus seriously in private rather than embarrass him on TV. Even after the private meeting, Trump continued to downplay the crisis
-
March 9, 2020: Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser, publishes an op-ed saying it is “now or never” to act. He advocates for social distancing and school closures to slow the spread of the contagion.
-
Trump says that developments are “good for the consumer” and compares COVID-19 favorably to the common flu.
-
March 17, 2020: Facing continued shortages of the PPE equipment needed to prevent healthcare providers from succumbing to the virus, Oregon Senators Jeff Merkeley and Ron Wyden call on Trump to use the Defense Production Act to expand supply of medical equipment
-
March 18, 2020: Trump signs the executive order to activate the Defense Production Act, but declines to use it
-
At the White House briefing he is asked about Senator Chuck Schumer’s call to urgently produce medical supplies and ventilators. Trump responds: “Well we’re going to know whether or not it’s urgent.” Note: At this point 118 Americans had died from COVID-19.
-
March 20, 2020: At an April 2nd White House Press Conference, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was made ad hoc point man for the coronavirus response said that on this date he began working with Rear Admiral John Polowczyk to “build a team” that would handle the logistics and supply chain for providing medical supplies to the states. This suggestion was first made by former Trump Administration officials January 28th
-
March 22, 2020: Six days after calling for a 15-day period of distancing, Trump tweets that this approach “may be worse than the problem itself.”
-
March 24, 2020: Trump tells Fox News that he wants the country opened up by Easter Sunday (April 12)
-
As Trump was speaking to Fox, there were 52,145 confirmed cases in the United States and the doubling time for daily new cases was roughly four days.
9More
'He's under attack': pro-Trump rallies battle chill and opposing protesters | US news |... - 0 views
-
'He's under attack': pro-Trump rallies battle chill and opposing protesters
-
Around 100 Donald Trump supporters gathered outside Trump Tower on Saturday afternoon, as part of a nationwide effort to show appreciation for the embattled president.
-
In something of a blow for the expression of support, the pro-Trump rally was hampered by a dwindling turnout and a counter-protest.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
“I thought there’d be a little bit more people,” said Lance Lovejoy, from Maspeth in Queens. “But it’s a little bit cold out. And it wasn’t well put out either. I only found out about it yesterday.”
-
The anti-Trump group began chanting “T, R, U, M, P, are you fucking kidding me”, before moving on to “How much are they paying you?” – a reference to frequent claims by conservatives that liberal activists are being paid to protest.
-
The anti-Trump group began chanting “T, R, U, M, P, are you fucking kidding me”, before moving on to “How much are they paying you?” – a reference to frequent claims by conservatives that liberal activists are being paid to protest.
-
“They say that there’s a witch hunt out for them and I am the witch that is hunting them,” she said, gesturing to the Trump supporters.
-
“I would like to see America get its sense back again. I’d like to see these people realize they were lied to. He doesn’t care about the poor man. He only cares about his billionaire buddies.”
-
If anything, this weekend’s rallies seem to have galvanized the opposition. Anti-Trump protesters organized counter-protests across the country, gathering in Las Vegas , Lake Oswega in Oregon, Columbus in Ohio, Lansing in Michigan and elsewhere.
1More
Portland stabbing suspect involved in rant the day before? - 0 views
-
The man accused of stabbing to death two men who defended a 16-year-old and her Muslim friend as they traveled on a Portland, Oregon, train is scheduled to face a judge Tuesday afternoon.
3More
Anthony Doerr: We Were Warned - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Hour by hour, minute by minute, I make decisions that seem like the right things to do at the time, but which prevent me from reflecting on the most significant, most critical fact in my life: Every day I participate in a system that is weaponizing our big, gorgeous planet against our kids.
-
This month a new coalition of scientists, led by researchers at Oregon State University, published a new warning: “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice.”
-
It’s not as poetic as the first, unfortunately, but it’s just as grim. “Soon,” they write, “it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out.” Over 15,000 scientists have signed the new call to action; according to the Alliance of World Scientists, that’s the most people to ever co-sign and formally support a published journal article.
8More
Miami Beach Issues Curfew To Curb Swelling Spring Break Crowds : Coronavirus Updates : NPR - 0 views
-
Just as tens of thousands of revelers were dreaming of dancing the night away in Miami Beach on Saturday, the city abruptly declared a state of emergency. Local officials shut down traffic on the causeways leading into the beach mecca, ordered outdoor restaurants to suspend outdoor dining starting at 7 p.m. and banned strolling on the city's iconic Ocean Drive after 8 p.m. The announcement came after cheap flights, discounted hotel rooms and new rules rolling back state-mandated COVID-19 restrictions led to a surge of visitors into Miami Beach and other Florida hot spots just as U.S. colleges pause for spring break.
-
Gelber said he was imposing the 8 p.m. curfew and entry restrictions into Miami Beach preemptively before things get worse. Videos of the area show dense crowds of revelers, many of them maskless, drinking, dancing and ambling along Ocean Drive on Saturday night before police moved in to disperse them.Police say they arrested "at least a dozen" people for violating the state of emergency on Saturday night. This is actually fewer arrests than last week, when Miami Beach police detained nearly 100 people as cops tried to break up spring break crowds.
-
As in much of the U.S., COVID-19 numbers in Florida have dropped from a peak in January, but that previous nationwide surge followed soon after the Christmas and New Year's holidays. Public health officials are now warning that gatherings for spring break and the upcoming Easter holiday could again amplify coronavirus transmission as pandemic fatigue prompts people to let their guard down.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, echoed that sentiment in an interview with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly this month. Collins said Americans need to be patient and continue with masks and social distancing for a bit longer.
-
In another disruption to the national rites of spring, the pandemic blew out some March Madness brackets over the weekend. In the NCAA men's basketball tournament, a surreal score line of 1-0 popped up on tracking apps for the game between Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Oregon. VCU was forced to pull out of the event after reporting multiple positive coronavirus tests.
-
VCU coach Mike Rhoades said on a videoconference Saturday night announcing his team's withdrawal from the tournament.
-
Rhoades said there were "no dry eyes" when he told his players the news. "This is what you dream of as a college player and a coach, and to get it taken away like this is just a heartbreaking moment in their young lives."
-
But Rhoades added that all his squad did was lose a basketball game, while "500,000 people have lost their lives."
7More
shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 21
- No Cached
Not all 'anti-racist' ideas are good ones. The left isn't being honest about this. - Th... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...b-b8a9-b9467510f0fe_story.html
anti-racism equity structural racism cancel culture
shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 21
- No Cached
-
But the newly fashionable anti-racist thinking contains a mix of good ideas and bad ones — including some that are dangerously counterproductive for the people they are intended to help
-
By all means, let’s dispense with the frustrating and at times hypocritical meta-debate about “free speech” (in the context of racism) and “cancel culture.”
-
Bland agreement that “racism is bad” does not suffice when racism is reconceptualized as an abstract attribute of policies and systems, as opposed to bigoted individual behaviors.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
Understanding complicated social phenomena is difficult. Solving social problems, almost all of which involve race, is contentious. Liberals can’t respond by ceding huge swaths of the political landscape to the hardcore right — or to whichever activist happens to have most loudly proclaimed their own anti-racism.
-
But it would be a significant mistake for mainstream progressives to duck the substance of these controversies. After all, it is progressives who in recent years have attempted to increase the stigma attached to racist speech while also expanding the scope of what’s “racist.” That double move introduces complications into discussions of racism that should invite more argumentation, not less.
-
many progressives think they don’t have to engage with the argument that the left is too conformist and dogmatic on certain topics involving race. They don’t want to hear about the San Francisco Board of Education stripping Abraham Lincoln’s name from a high school, or Oregon teacher-training materials claiming that asking math students to “show their work” reinforces white supremacy.
-
More broadly, identifying a racial gap and declaring it to be racist is often insufficient. Such an approach impedes actually thinking about problems — particularly in media, academic and nonprofit circles, where the accusation of racism can carry severe consequences. And so to avoid controversy, people avoid important debates rather than risking offense.
11More
Honduran Leader Vowed to Help Flood U.S. With Cocaine, Prosecutor Says - The New York T... - 0 views
-
The allegation against President Juan Orlando Hernández came in opening arguments at an accused drug trafficker’s trial.
-
“They would — as the president put it — ‘shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,’” said the prosecutor, Jacob Harris Gutwillig, an assistant U.S. attorney in New York.
-
The trial is also something of a referendum on Mr. Hernández, who has been dogged for years by accusations of possible connections to drug traffickers. He has not been charged, but in court documents filed earlier this year, American prosecutors revealed for the first time that they were investigating the Honduran president.
- ...8 more annotations...
-
Mr. Hernández is a key United States ally in the region, and the investigation could jeopardize the bilateral relationship and complicate the Biden administration’s efforts to invest $4 billion in Central America to address violence and corruption, reduce poverty and bolster the rule of law in an effort to stem migration to the United States.
-
During his brother’s trial, witnesses and prosecutors said Mr. Hernández had accepted millions of dollars for his and his party’s political campaigns in exchange for protecting drug traffickers.
-
In a series of Twitter posts on Monday, as jury selection in Mr. Fuentes’s trial got underway in Manhattan, Mr. Hernández again declared his innocence, saying that “with my election, the party ended” for drug traffickers.
-
Mr. Gutwillig, the prosecutor, did not mince words in his opening arguments on Tuesday: He called Honduras “a narco-state.”
-
Mr. Fuentes developed a relationship with Mr. Hernández, who took office in 2014, in a series of secret meetings in 2013 and 2014 during which the men “plotted to send as much cocaine as possible to the United States,” the prosecutor said. Mr. Fuentes paid Mr. Hernández $25,000 for the help.
-
The president also said he was embezzling aid money from the United States using fraudulent organizations, and siphoning money from the country’s Social Security system, according to the documents, which do not mention Mr. Hernández by name, describing him as “CC-4” — meaning co-conspirator 4 — though his identity is clear.
-
Mr. Hernández offered up the services of the Honduran armed forces and the attorney general’s office to facilitate cocaine transportation, and noted his own interest in accessing Mr. Fuentes’s cocaine laboratory, which was near Puerto Cortés, a major commercial shipping port, prosecutors said.
-
“The United States cannot remain silent in the face of deeply alarming corruption and human rights abuses being committed at the highest levels of the Honduran government,” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, said in a statement.
6More
Biden Poised to Raise Taxes on Business and the Rich - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Now, under President Biden, they have a shot at ushering in the largest federal tax increase since 1942. It could help pay for a host of spending programs that liberal economists predict would bolster the economy’s performance and repair a tax code that Democrats say encourages wealthy people to hoard assets and big companies to ship jobs and book profits overseas.
-
he package, which follows on the heels of Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic aid bill, is central to the president’s long-term plan to revitalize American workers and industry by funding bridges and roads, universal pre-K, emerging industries like advanced batteries and efforts to invigorate the fight against climate change.Mr. Biden plans to finance that spending, at least in part, with tax increases that could raise upward of $2.5 trillion in revenue if his plan hews closely to what he proposed in the 2020 presidential campaign. Aides suggest his proposals might not be entirely paid for, with some one-time spending increases offset by increased federal borrowing.
-
iberal economists say this year could be different, thanks to the unique political and economic circumstances surrounding the recovery from the pandemic recession. With Mr. Biden’s signing of a $1.9 trillion economic relief bill, financed entirely by federal borrowing, forecasters now expect the economy to grow this year at its fastest annual clip since the 1980s. Republicans and some economists have begun to warn of overheating growth spurring runaway inflation, which could reduce the salience of warnings that tax increases would cause growth to stall.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
Mr. Biden has pledged not to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000.
-
“The purpose of the tax system is to both raise enough revenue for what the government wants to do, and to make sure that as we’re doing that we are encouraging activities that are in the national interest and discouraging ones that are not,” said Heather Boushey, a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers.Key Democrats are trying to bring the party to consensus. The top tax writer in the Senate, Ron Wyden of Oregon, is drafting a series of bills to raise taxes, many of them overlapping with Mr. Biden’s campaign proposals.
-
A report from the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation this month showed that multinational companies paid an average U.S. tax rate of less than 8 percent on their income in 2018, down from 16 percent in 2017. The report also found that those companies did not slow their practice of booking profits in low-tax havens like Bermuda.
6More
One and Done: Why People Are Eager for Johnson & Johnson's Vaccine - The New York Times - 0 views
-
In North Dakota this week, health officials are sending their first Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines to pharmacies and urgent care clinics, where people who don’t necessarily have a regular doctor can get the single jab. In Missouri, doses are going to community health centers and rural hospitals. And in North Carolina, health providers are using it to inoculate meatpacking, farm and grocery workers.
-
Since Johnson & Johnson revealed data showing that its vaccine, while highly protective, had a slightly lower efficacy rate than the first shots produced by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, health officials have feared the new shot might be viewed by some Americans as the inferior choice.
-
But the early days of its rollout suggest something different: Some people are eager to get it because they want the convenience of a single shot. And public health officials are enthusiastic about how much faster they could get a single shot distributed, particularly in vulnerable communities that might not otherwise have access to a vaccine.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
“There are circumstances in which it is going to be a really good option or maybe the best option,” said Dr. Matthew Daley, a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Colorado’s Institute for Health Research and a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent vaccine advisory committee.
-
One of Dr. Gaskin’s church’s members, Patricia Cooper, a teacher in Washington, D.C., said that President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to claim credit for a vaccine last year and the label “emergency use authorization” suggested to her that the federal government may have rushed its reviews of vaccines, leaving her jittery about their safety. But she said she was eager to get a vaccine, especially Johnson & Johnson’s.
-
Mr. Allen said that Oregon was creating similar distribution plans for Johnson & Johnson and Moderna because both vaccines can be stored in refrigerators for the short term. The state is treating the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as the one with “special considerations,” with its stricter shipping requirements and large packages of vials more suited to mass vaccination sites, he said.