State leaders are scrambling to make up major gaps in critical medical equipment they need to combat coronavirus as the outbreak spreads rapidly across the country, saying the federal government still isn't fully addressing their pleas for millions of masks, ventilators and other supplies.
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States are desperate for supplies and out of patience as coronavirus needs increase - C... - 0 views
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"Our problem has been exacerbated because we're still not getting what we need from the federal government," Whitmer, a Democrat, said.
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Illinois said Monday it had received just a fraction of the supplies it was seeking from the federal government, beyond a face-shield request that was mostly fulfilled. But Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a target of Trump's Twitter attacks Sunday along with Whitmer, said the state had secured a contract from the federal government for 2.5 million in N95 respirator masks and other vital supplies -- though he wouldn't share the price tag.
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When Your Friend Ignores Social Distancing - The Atlantic - 0 views
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It’s common for people to perceive input or feedback from their friends as criticism, she told me—and to take that perceived criticism as a personal insult, even if it’s not meant as one. “We tend to see it as criticism not just that we’re doing something wrong, but that we’re inherently bad,”
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Plus, in this situation, the subtext of You’re doing this wrong is coupled with the heavy accusation that you’re endangering people’s lives—which, well, you could be.
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you can find first-person accounts of what it’s like to hear from a friend or relative that you haven’t taken social distancing seriously enough.)
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when people are anxious about the future and worried about their loved ones, it’s much harder to forgive and forget. In the current situation, “we’re all feeling increasingly irritable and frustrated, lonely, anxious, and bored,” Kirmayer said. “So we then have less patience for those around us
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In her group of eight close girlfriends, Stanley told me, only she and one other friend have been practicing social distancing. The other six have reportedly been driving together to Dunkin’ Donuts to drink coffee and then hanging out at one another’s houses.
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Instead of enjoying the end of her senior year, Stanley is staying home and watching her friend group unravel from afar.
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Of course, no disagreement over social distancing is just about following rules. In a pandemic, whether you follow the guidelines recommended by medical authorities has a direct bearing on whether others catch a deadly disease
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ignoring public-health guidance can be especially disruptive to friendships, she explained. Social distancing works best if everyone does it; when you protect yourself, you’re protecting others; in turn, other people’s self-protection protects you. If some people opt out of the collective effort, you may feel like they’ve explicitly declined to have your back, even if you still have theirs. “Reciprocity is a core expectation of our friendships,” Kirmayer said.
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when friends are at odds over social distancing, Kirmayer recommends preserving those friendships when possible, and using empathy rather than shaming to resolve the conflict.
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She encourages her clients to avoid accusatory or blaming language like “You shouldn’t do that” or “I don’t like it that you do this,” and to start with an open-ended question like “What value is [this measure you don’t follow] conflicting with?”
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And it’s important, she added, to emphasize that you’re concerned for your friend’s safety as well as your own.
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Acknowledging the feelings that inform a friend’s opinions can make a conversation less confrontational.
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Perhaps that means acknowledging circumstances that make coping with the pandemic harder, such as a friend who lives alone, or is single, or has lost income, or has a less-than-desirable home situation. “Those kinds of statements can really be disarming, and can help our friends to hear our message more clearly,”
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actively help the friend in question with whatever it is that makes social distancing so hard for them. “Offer to do things to make it easier for a friend to take it seriously. Like, ‘Can I help? Can I support you in this in any way?’
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In a pandemic, everyday life is harder by an order of magnitude because people can’t physically be together. But we can try to metaphorically meet our friends where they are.
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Trump is the demagogue that our Founding Fathers feared - The Washington Post - 1 views
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Who is really to blame for Donald Trump? The proximate answer is a durable plurality in the Republican primary electorate, concentrated among non-college-educated whites but not limited to them. They are applying Trump like a wrecking ball against the old political order. And it clearly does not matter to them if their instrument is qualified, honest, stable, knowledgeable, ethical, consistent or honorable.
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The theory that voters, like customers, are always right has little to do with the American form of government. The founders had little patience for “pure democracy,” which they found particularly vulnerable to demagogues. “Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs,” says Federalist 10, “may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”
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“The question is not ‘Why Trump now?’ ” argues constitutional scholar Matthew J. Franck, “but rather ‘Why not a Trump before now?’ Perhaps some residual self-respect on the part of primary voters has driven them, up to now, to seek experience, knowledge of public policy, character, and responsibility in their candidates. The Trump phenomenon suggests that in a significant proportion of the (nominally) Republican electorate, this self-respect has decayed considerably.”
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With the theory of a presidential nominee as a wrecking ball, we have reached the culmination of the founders’ fears: Democracy is producing a genuine threat to the American form of self-government.
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Trump, in Japan, talks tough on the 'menace' of North Korea, trade - The Washington Post - 0 views
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President Trump continued his tough line on both North Korea and trade Monday, standing alongside Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe and promising to work in solidarity with Japan to confront “the North Korean menace.”
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Trump said, “the era of strategic patience is over,” and promised to counter “the dangerous aggressions”
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In his own remarks, Abe affirmed Trump’s stance, saying Japan supports the president’s previous comments that “all options are on the table” and similarly favors an approach of increasing pressure on North Korea rather than continuing dialogue with the nation.
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Trump largely avoided a question about whether his tough stance on trade puts him on a collision course with China. But he did say the U.S. was facing a “very unfair trade situation” with China, which he visits later this week, and reiterated his belief that “reciprocal” trade between the U.S. and any nation is his preference.
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When Silicon Valley Took Over the 'New Republic' - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Dependence generates desperation—a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media outlets to sign terrible deals that look like self-preserving necessities: granting Facebook the right to sell their advertising, or giving Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. In the end, such arrangements simply allow Facebook and Google to hold these companies ever tighter.
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What makes these deals so terrible is the capriciousness of the tech companies. Quickly moving in a radically different direction may be great for their bottom line, but it is detrimental to the media companies that rely on the platforms. Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or ideologically pleasing propaganda to more-objective accounts of events—and so it will de-emphasize the written word or hard news in its users’ feeds.
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The problem isn’t just financial vulnerability, however. It’s also the way tech companies dictate the patterns of work; the way their influence can affect the ethos of an entire profession, lowering standards of quality and eroding ethical protections.
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t the beginning of this century, journalism was in extremis. Recessions, coupled with readers’ changing habits, prodded media companies to gamble on a digital future unencumbered by the clunky apparatus of publishing on paper. Over a decade, the number of newspaper employees dropped by 38 percent. As journalism shriveled, its prestige plummeted. One report ranked newspaper reporter as the worst job in America. The profession found itself forced to reconsider its very reasons for existing. All the old nostrums about independence suddenly seemed like unaffordable luxuries.
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My master was Chartbeat, a site that provides writers, editors, and their bosses with a real-time accounting of web traffic, showing the flickering readership of each and every article. Chartbeat and its competitors have taken hold at virtually every magazine, newspaper, and blog. With these meters, no piece has sufficient traffic—it can always be improved with a better headline, a better approach to social media, a better subject, a better argument
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Upworthy would write 25 different headlines, test all of them, and determine the most clickable of the bunch. Based on these results, it uncovered syntactical patterns that almost ensured hits. Classic examples: “9 out of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact” and “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.” These formulas became commonplace on the web, until readers grew wise to them.
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The core insight of Upworthy, BuzzFeed, Vox Media, and other emerging internet behemoths was that editorial success could be engineered, if you listened to the data. This insight was embraced across the industry and wormed its way into the New Republic.
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Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, had put this way: R = ßz. (In epidemiology, ß represents the probability of transmission; z is the number of people exposed to a contagious individual.) The equation supposedly illustrates how a piece of content could go viral. But although Peretti got the idea for his formula from epidemiology, the emerging science of traffic was really a branch of behavioral science: People clicked so quickly, they didn’t always fully understand why. These decisions were made in a semiconscious state, influenced by cognitive biases. Enticing a reader entailed a little manipulation, a little hidden persuasion.
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The new generation of media giants has no patience for the old ethos of detachment. It’s not that these companies don’t have aspirations toward journalistic greatness. BuzzFeed, Vice, and the Huffington Post invest in excellent reporting and employ first-rate journalists—and they have produced some of the most memorable pieces of investigative journalism in this century. But the pursuit of audience is their central mission. They have allowed the endless feedback loop of the web to shape their editorial sensibility, to determine their editorial investments
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this is just a digitally enhanced version of an old-fashioned media pile-on. But social media amplify the financial incentive to join the herd. The results are highly derivative. Joshua Topolsky, a founder of The Verge, has bemoaned this creeping homogenization: “Everything looks the same, reads the same, and seems to be competing for the same eyeballs.”
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Donald Trump is the culmination of the era. He understood how, more than at any other moment in recent history, the media need to give the public the circus that it desires. Even if the media disdained Trump’s outrages, they built him up as a plausible candidate, at which point they had no choice but to cover him. Stories about Trump yielded the sort of traffic that pleased the data gods and benefited the bottom line.
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We were idealistic about our shared idealism. But my vision of the world was moralistic and romantic; his was essentially technocratic. He had faith in systems—rules, efficiencies, organizational charts, productivity tools
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Makers of magazines and newspapers used to think of their product as a coherent package—an issue, an edition, an institution. They did not see themselves as the publishers of dozens of discrete pieces to be trafficked each day on Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
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Thinking about bundling articles into something larger was intellectually liberating. Editors justified high-minded and quixotic articles as essential for “the mix.
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Journalism has performed so admirably in the aftermath of Trump’s victory that it has grown harder to see the profession’s underlying rot. Now each assignment is subjected to a cost-benefit analysis—will the article earn enough traffic to justify the investment? Sometimes the analysis is explicit and conscious, though in most cases it’s subconscious and embedded in euphemism. Either way, it’s this train of thought that leads editors to declare an idea “not worth the effort” or to worry about whether an article will “sink.”
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Kim's Rejoinder to Trump's Rocket Man: 'Mentally Deranged U.S. Dotard' - The New York T... - 0 views
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Responding directly for the first time to President Trump’s threat at the United Nations to destroy nuclear-armed North Korea, its leader called Mr. Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” on Friday and vowed the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”
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“A frightened dog barks louder,” Mr. Kim said in a statement, referring to Mr. Trump’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday in which he vowed to annihilate North Korea if the United States were forced to defend itself or its allies against it.
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“He is surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire, rather than a politician,” Mr. Kim said.
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Mr. Kim’s foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, who arrived in New York on Wednesday to attend the General Assembly, also called Mr. Trump “a dog barking.”
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Asked by reporters in New York what Mr. Kim might have meant by the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure,” Mr. Ri said that only Mr. Kim would know, but that he thought the North might be considering the largest test of a hydrogen bomb ever in the Pacific Ocean, according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap.
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“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” he said.
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In his United Nations speech on Tuesday, Mr. Trump called North Korea’s autocracy a “band of criminals” and Mr. Kim a “Rocket Man” on “a suicide mission.”
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Mr. Trump on Friday responded with some name-calling of his own. On Twitter, the president called Mr. Kim “obviously a madman.”
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Although Mr. Kim is often quoted by official North Korean news media, it is highly unusual for him to issue a statement in his name. In North Korea, the supreme leader’s statement carries a weight that surpasses any other formal document.
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Mr. Kim, who has been accelerating his country’s development of nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles in defiance of the United Nations, Washington and its allies, said Mr. Trump’s remarks had convinced him that “the path I chose is correct and that it is the one I have to follow to the last.”
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“Now that Trump has denied the existence of and insulted me and my country in front of the eyes of the world and made the most ferocious declaration of a war in history that he would destroy” North Korea, Mr. Kim said, “we will consider with seriousness exercising of a corresponding, highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”
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The great dealmaker? Lawmakers find Trump to be an untrustworthy negotiator. - The Wash... - 0 views
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President Trump campaigned as one of the world’s greatest dealmakers, but after nine months of struggling to broker agreements, lawmakers in both parties increasingly consider him an untrustworthy, chronically inconsistent and easily distracted negotiator .
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The president’s propensity to create diversions and follow tangents has kept him from focusing on his legislative agenda and forced lawmakers who might be natural allies on key policies into the uncomfortable position of having to answer for his behavior and outbursts.
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Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Trump called him one morning that same week, interrupting his workout at the gym to tell him, “Let’s do some bipartisan work on health care!”
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But this past week, Trump created whiplash. On Monday — just moments after Alexander and Murray released the blueprint for a short-term authorization of federal subsidies that help lower-income Americans afford coverage but that the administration had just halted — Trump said he supported the effort.
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Corker said his fellow Tennessean has “the patience of Job” to negotiate with Trump, referring to the biblical prophet who suffers one curse after another but keeps his faith.
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“The expectation that you will stand by what you said you would do is higher in politics than it is in the cutthroat world of real estate,” Schwartz added. “That’s a brutal environment in which misdirection and bullying and making one offer and changing it later are all common practice.”
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Trump’s lack of ideological roots makes him an unusual figure in Washington, where most lawmakers adhere rigidly to their party’s agendas.
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Trump has been traveling the country to pitch his plan for broad tax cuts, targeting in particular Manchin and other Democratic senators up for reelection in 2018 in states Trump won last year. The president boasted this past week of being able to easily pass tax legislation this fall, even though a bill has not been introduced.
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Schumer said the key to getting things done on Capitol Hill is for the president to take a back seat.
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Schwartz said playing to Trump’s ego, as Graham has with his golf compliments, is an effective way to manage him. His advice to those seeking to make deals with Trump: Find the most persuasive way to portray one’s agenda as a personal victory for the president, and be the last person to talk to him. “Trump is motivated by the same concern in all situations, which is to dominate and to be perceived as having won,” Schwartz said. “That supersedes everything, including ideology.”
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Ted Cruz: A Pressure Point for North Korea - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ure-point-for-north-korea.html
Trump Obama Kim jong-un Jon-il Us north korea politics history
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On Oct. 31, the State Department faces a critical decision in our relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
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The Iran-Russia-North Korea sanctions bill enacted in August included legislation I introduced that requires the secretary of state to decide whether to relist North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism within 90 days.
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Look at the accusations against Pyongyang: the unspeakable treatment of Otto Warmbier; the assassination of a member of the Kim family with chemical weapons on foreign soil; collusion with Iran to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles; cyberattacks on American film companies; support for Syria’s chemical weapons program; arms sales to Hezbollah and Hamas; and attempts to assassinate dissidents in exile. Given this, the decision should be easy.
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In fact, Americans could be forgiven for wondering why North Korea is not already designated as a sponsor of terrorism.
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Aside from the many stringent limitations a terrorism-sponsor designation imposes on a state, the label serves as a formal indication from the United States that any positive development of diplomatic relations is contingent on abandoning the financing and support of terrorism.
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On Feb. 13, 2007, the State Department signed a deal with North Korea in pursuit of a grand bargain: exchanging Pyongyang’s promise of eventual denuclearization for Washington’s guarantees for full diplomatic recognition.
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Standing in the way, however, was a decision President Ronald Reagan made nearly 20 years earlier, designating North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism largely in response to its complicity in a 1987 plane bombing that killed 115 people.
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It used to be — and the story behind the decision to remove that designation nearly 10 years ago is the key to understanding America’s failed assumptions about North Korea, how they led to Pyongyang obtaining its nuclear arsenal, and why the United States needs to reverse its approach and relist Pyongyang immediately.
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Indeed, the State Department linked Pyongyang’s ties to terrorist groups and its nuclear program as a rationale for maintaining the terror designation in 2005.
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wo years later, Israel destroyed a nuclear reactor believed to have been built with North Korean help in Syria, a designated state sponsor of terrorism. Although all this was understood at the time, the United States elected to delist North Korea in 2008 — and in so doing, again fell back into its pattern of misunderstanding rogue regimes.
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When North Korea reneged on its promise to forgo nuclear weapons in the early 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s administration put together the “Agreed Framework” that paved Pyongyang’s path to nuclearization. When North Korea’s leader at the time, Kim Jong-il, withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 2003, confirming that he intended to build a nuclear weapon, President George W. Bush pushed for the China-led six-party talks with North Korea.
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When the country tested its second nuclear weapon in 2009, President Barack Obama opted for “strategic patience.”
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shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 21
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How a Rising Religious Movement Rationalizes the Christian Grasp for Power - The French... - 0 views
frenchpress.thedispatch.com/...eligious-movement-rationalizes
christian christianist dominionism politics crisis culture
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The origin of the Seven Mountain Mandate rests with an alleged divine revelation shared by Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, Loren Cunningham, founder of Youth With a Mission, and the theologian and philosopher Francis Schaeffer
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In its distilled essence, the Seven Mountain concept describes seven key cultural/religious institutions that should be influenced and transformed by Christian believers to create “Godly change” in America. The key to transforming the nation rests with reaching the family, the church, education, media, arts, the economy, and the government with the truth of the Gospel.
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To put it another way: If God asks mankind to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God,” He does not intend that those virtues be confined to church. The fruits of the spirit—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control”—are not mere Sunday School values. They should pervade our interactions with the wider world.
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Moreover, if and when those seven key institutions become instruments of injustice, Christians should respond. To take some obvious examples, if the “mountain” of government turns against its citizens, Christians have an obligation to stand with the oppressed. If the mountain of popular culture transforms the beauty of art into the perversion of porn, Christians must resist. And if the mountain of education teaches falsehoods, Christians have an obligation to tell the truth.
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But there is an immense and important difference between seeking justice and seeking power. In fact, the quest for power can sideline or derail the quest for justice. And that’s where we get to the real problem—the difference between a Seven Mountain concept and a Seven Mountain mandate or Seven Mountain dominionism.
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In 2013, Bethel Church pastor Bill Johnson and author Lance Wallnau co-authored a short book called Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate. In that book, here’s how Wallnau described the stakes:
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Each of these seven mountains represents an individual sphere of influence that shapes the way people think. These mountains are crowned with high places that modern-day kings occupy as ideological strongholds. These strongholds are, in reality, houses built out of thoughts. These thought structures are fortified with spiritual reinforcement that shapes the culture and establishes the spiritual climate of each nation. I sensed the Lord telling me, “He who can take these mountains can take the harvest of nations.” (Emphasis added.)
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Wallnau went on to describe the importance of “mountain kings”—those individuals who have a “position in a high place” and who wield influence over “their own sphere directly and other spheres indirectly.” It is thus of urgent importance for Christians to reach, influence, or even become these “mountain kings.”
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At its most extreme edges, Seven Mountain dominionism holds that Christ will not return unless and until the church successfully invades or “occupies” each of the seven key spheres of life.
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Astute readers will by now have noticed two things. First, you’ll note the extent to which the heart of this strategy (or mandate) isn’t based on clear scriptural commands but rather on claimed special revelations from God. Second, you’ll note how much it emphasizes the importance of placing people in positions of power and control
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The business of shifting culture or transforming nations does not require a majority of conversions.” What does it require? “We need more disciples in the right places, the high places.”
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What is the alternative to the pursuit of power? I prefer the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr. “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.”
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Christians can never forget that they live in what my pastor once called an “upside-down kingdom.” The last shall be first. If you want to save your life, you’ll lose it, but if you lose your life for Christ, you’ll save it. And don’t forget, the Son of God himself spent his entire life on earth far from the mountaintop.
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He Honors Black New Yorkers. Not All Black Activists Are Thrilled. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Last March, a crowd gathered in Downtown Brooklyn to celebrate a new name for Gold Street: Ida B. Wells Place. Jacob Morris, the tireless activist behind the renaming effort, addressed the group.
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A force behind the renaming of some 40 streets and monuments in New York after prominent Black New Yorkers, including the performer Paul Robeson, the civil rights activist Ella Baker and the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, he likes to talk and he likes to nudge, both of which come in handy when dealing with community boards and city bureaucracies.
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For more than 15 years, Mr. Morris has been on a mission to increase Black representation in public spaces. The end result tends to look impressive, but the work itself is tedious, requiring hundreds of hours at local government meetings that few have the patience to attend, much less engage in.
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“Almost every month Jacob finds a reason to be agitated, excited, outraged and militant, and usually he’s quite right in his concerns,” said David Levering Lewis, a Black historian who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his biographical work on W.E.B. Du Bois
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Getting a street renamed can take months, if not years. Though the process varies slightly in each district, proposals generally require petitions signed by 100 or more community members, accompanied by a detailed biography of the individual to be honored and a description of the person’s relationship to the area.
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Any city resident can propose renaming a street, but few do. “Maybe he is taking up all the airtime, but he doesn’t have competition,” Mr. Singletary said.
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And although Mr. Morris’s work is largely appreciated — and any antics at least tolerated with some humorous discomfort — he does have at least one detractor, in Central Harlem. An active resident there, Julius Tajiddin, took issue with how Mr. Morris planned to collaborate with Touro College, Mr. Morris’s former employer, to commemorate the country’s first Black pharmacy owner with a street renaming in Harlem.
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Starting in the 1970s, Mr. Morris got into real estate development, owning several buildings, as well as the Rare Bird video store chain, all in SoHo.
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He got his first taste of local politics when Lincoln was in middle school, and Mr. Morris realized that the city’s public schools were not required to count the test scores of students with learning disabilities toward their official averages.
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He also learned about famous Black figures with little-known footprints in New York City, like Frederick Douglass, who, during his escape from slavery, had landed by boat at the Chambers Street dock in Manhattan.
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At a higher level of city government, Mayor Bill de Blasio has rushed to reassign commemorative sites around the city to diverse figures without problematic biographies.
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Three years ago, farther north in Central Park, the De Blasio administration removed a statue of J. Marion Sims, a gynecological pioneer who made breakthroughs by operating without anesthesia on enslaved women.
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Mr. Morris hopes either would give a fair hearing to the many initiatives he is pushing. Those include: Establishing a freedom trail linking abolitionist sites in Manhattan
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Mr. Morris has been working on some of these projects for over a decade. “If I’m responsible for New York City having a freedom trail,” he said, “that’ll be huge.” He paused. “That’ll be a legacy thing for me.
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Covid-19 vaccine: Vaccinated Americans allowed to taste freedom - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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Exactly one horrific, demoralizing and family-splitting year since darkness descended on America, top public health officials arrived at a (virtual) White House coronavirus strategy briefing on Monday armed with tangible hope.In announcing new US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines on how fully vaccinated citizens can begin to pick up their lives, they struck a momentous turning point in a pandemic that has killed more than 525,000 Americans.
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As is the way in the worst public health disaster in 100 years, good news is heavily caveated. Those in the long lines for the vaccine must not let up. Travel, even for those who've been vaccinated, is advised against -- though some prominent medical experts said the CDC is being overly cautious. And the threat of pernicious Covid-19 variants may be about to inflict another surge of death and sickness, again testing the patience of a weary nation
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While new Covid cases have come down sharply -- they are hovering at around 60,000 a day -- the elevated plateau guarantees many thousands more deaths, especially as more states defy science and risk the return of normality by lifting mask mandates and restrictions before the virus is properly suppressed.
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The new President, Joe Biden, will deliver his first prime-time address on Thursday to mark the yearlong mark in the country's struggle with the coronavirus. In addition to giving the country a morale boost and highlighting the light on the horizon, he will hope to showcase his $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, expected to finally pass Congress the day before.
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Under the new protocols, vaccinated people can visit other vaccinated people indoors without masks or physical distancing. They can also see unvaccinated people from a single household without either precaution if those yet to get the injection are at low risk for severe disease.
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These guidelines will allow a real -- if qualified -- return of freedoms once taken for granted for millions of people. They apply two weeks after a second dose of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and 14 days after the single-dose Johnson & Johnson injection.
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Already, 60 million Americans know that moment of euphoria that comes with getting a first dose. And more than 30 million are fully protected -- a figure that has just overtaken the total number of US Covid-19 cases.
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The announcement on Monday could have an important public health impact in itself. To the majority of Americans who are still waiting, the glimpse of post-vaccination liberation could offer a new incentive to buckle down with social distancing and masking for just a few months longer.
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The proven promise of vaccines and the accelerating pace that they are going into American arms -- at a rate of about 2 million or more a day -- offers something like the prospect of a normal summer.
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"There is so much that's critical riding on the next two months," CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Monday. "How quickly we will vaccinate versus whether we will have another surge really relies on what happens in March and April."
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"The good news is that it was coming down. The sobering news is that it's starting to plateau a bit," Fauci told a National League of Cities Conference. "The history with this virus has told us when you start to plateau at a level as high as this, which is about 60 to 70,000 cases a day, that you are by no means out of the woods."
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"I actually would go further and say that people who are fully vaccinated should be able to travel -- should be encouraged to travel, and that's one of those incentives that we can give as a way for restoring freedoms, that you now are able to travel and go visit your loved ones and go to museums and cultural institutions once you're fully vaccinated," Wen said.
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"I think they really haven't gone far enough," Reiner told CNN's Erin Burnett, while suggesting that the CDC was worried about sending a message that might convince non-vaccinated Americans to start taking to the skies.
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South Korea Will Pay More for U.S. Troop Presence - The New York Times - 0 views
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South Korea said on Wednesday that it had agreed to increase its share in covering the cost of the American military presence by 13.9 percent this year, removing a prolonged dispute in the alliance ahead of a joint visit by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III.
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Differences over how to share the cost of keeping 28,500 American troops in South Korea have kept the allies at odds for years. The issue became particularly contentious under former President Donald J. Trump, who demanded that South Korea drastically increase its payments —
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Over the weekend, the United States and South Korea agreed to a five-year deal to increase the military payments, subject to legislative approval in both capitals. Under the agreement, South Korea will pay $1 billion this year, 13.9 percent more than its annual payments in 2019 and 2020, officials said on Wednesday. From next year through 2025, South Korea will increase its portion annually at the same rate it boosts its defense budget — at an average of 6.1 percent per year until 2025.
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“By smoothly addressing the key pending alliance issue early on after the launch of the Biden administration, South Korea and the United States demonstrated the robustness of the firm alliance,”
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North Korea has long campaigned for the American troops’ withdrawal, arguing that the threat they posed, including their joint war games with the South Korean military, had forced it to develop nuclear weapons.
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How to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table will be a key topic when Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin visit South Korea next Wednesday and Thursday, meeting President Moon Jae-in and other senior South Korean officials. North Korea has yet to react to their planned visit or the joint military drill by Washington and Seoul.
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Mr. Moon’s government hopes that the Biden administration will follow up on the diplomacy started by Mr. Trump rather than going back to former President Obama’s policy of “strategic patience,” which focused on squeezing North Korea with sanctions.
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A presidential loathing for Ukraine is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry - The Wa... - 0 views
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“Many Americans feel strongly about supporting Ukraine because it’s the little guy and is fighting for values we consider fundamentally American,” said Molly Montgomery, who served on Vice President Pence’s staff and now works for the Albright Stonebridge Group. “But it’s clear that Trump doesn’t share that empathy. He’s more attracted generally to the powerful party in any dispute.”
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Since his first days in office, Trump has made clear that he has little patience for alliances or anything that commits the United States to defending a weaker ally. He has repeatedly questioned the utility of NATO and harangued Europeans for not contributing more to the common defense. U.S. officials describe Trump’s mind-set as short term and transactional. Instead of looking for allies, Trump is forever in search of a deal, they say.
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“The whole episode is sadly unsurprising,” said a senior U.S. official familiar with U.S. policy on Ukraine. “It’s the epitome of impulsive, self-serving decision-making at the top that has undermined American power.”
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In the end, most U.S. officials agreed that Trump’s anger with Ukraine, like many of his grievances, was connected with the 2016 election and his feeling that Ukraine was responsible for the humiliating fall of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman. Trump’s hatred, they concluded, was ingrained, irrational and possibly irreversible.
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'The disappeared': searching for 40,000 missing victims of Mexico's drug wars | World n... - 0 views
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It has been six months since José Barajas was snatched from his home near the US border, for reasons that remain obscure.
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Jesse, the eldest of seven siblings, said US-based relatives had implored José to join them north of the border as the cartels tightened their grip on a region notorious for the smuggling of drugs and people.
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We told him how big a monster is organised crime. It is a huge monster that nobody knows where it is hiding
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He was a man that believed in Mexico,” said Jesse, who left Mexico as an undocumented migrant aged 14 and is now a US citizen. “He chose to stay here because he thought that he could change things, you know?
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The disappeared are perhaps the dirtiest secret of Mexico’s drug conflict, which has shown no sign of easing since leftist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power last December promising a new era of peace.
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In August Mexican authorities, who after years of public pressure are beginning to demonstrate greater interest in investigating such crimes, acknowledged over 3,000 clandestine burial sites. More than 500 had been discovered since López Obrador took power.
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As Jesse marched on – shadowed by a rifle-toting police agent – the hidden perils that lay behind his brother’s disappearance became clear. Pickup trucks, apparently sent by cartel bosses to monitor the search party, rattled past on the country lane down which José’s abductors fled. “These assholes are halcones,” Jesse complained, using the Spanish slang word for lookouts.
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“We all have the same goal, which is finding our missing ones,” said Ocegueda who became a campaigner after his own son was taken, in 2007, and has recovered more than 120 bodies since.
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Opinion | What Americans Don't Understand About China's Power - The New York Times - 0 views
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Chinese leaders stretching back to Deng Xiaoping have often thought in terms of decades. A decade encompasses two of China’s famous five-year plans, and it’s a long-enough period to notice real changes in a country’s trajectory.
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Yes, it still has big problems, including the protests in Hong Kong. But by the standards that matter most to China’s leaders, the country made major gains during the 2010s. Its economy is more diversified. Its scientific community is more advanced, and its surveillance state more powerful. Its position in Asia is stronger. China, in short, has done substantially more to close the gap with the global power that it is chasing — the United States — than seemed likely a decade ago.
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Incomes, wealth and life expectancy in the United States have stagnated for much of the population, contributing to an angry national mood and exacerbating political divisions. The result is a semidysfunctional government that is eroding many of the country’s largest advantages over China. The United States is skimping on the investments like education, science and infrastructure that helped make it the world’s great power. It is also forfeiting the soft power that has been a core part of American pre-eminence.
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The current version of the United States doesn’t seem to know quite what it is — global democratic leader or parochial self-protector — and the confusion benefits China.
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Instead being fragmented among dozens of apps — one for Starbucks, others for Amazon and airlines and so on — much of Chinese commerce happens within one of two digital networks — WeChat Pay and Alipay. People open one app and can pay for almost anything, in stores or online. The simplicity encourages further retail innovations, and Facebook and Google are trying to mimic this model. It feels like the future of commerce
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More quietly, though, Nanjing embodies the growth of a middle-class consumer culture. The city’s subway system opened only 14 years ago and now transports one billion riders a year. It’s clean and bustling, and the trips I took each cost either 2 or 3 yuan (about 28 cents or 42 cents). Nationwide, almost 30 other cities have opened subways since Nanjing did, giving China the world’s largest subway ridership.
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“We Chinese people know very well what we have, what we want and what it takes,” Wang Qishan, China’s vice president, told the conference, the New Economy Forum. “We have the confidence, patience and resolve to realize our goal of great national rejuvenation.”China has now exceeded the world’s expectations for three decades in a row — which, of course, does not guarantee that the streak will continue in this new decade.
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Opinion | We're Living in a World of Walls. Here Is a Window to Escape. - The New York ... - 0 views
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A long time ago, I read of a torture technique that a journalist heard was used by Hamas on residents of Gaza suspected of being informants: The person is shown a wall onto which a staircase is drawn, and at the top is a drawing of a bicycle. The person is told to go up and get the bicycle. But it’s only a drawing, he says. He is told that if he doesn’t bring the bicycle down the stairs, he will be beaten. And when, again, he appeals to his torturer’s reason, to the reality in which both the staircase and the bicycle are drawings, he is hit.
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he part about the beautiful door is funny, but the really funny part, as far as my children are concerned, is when the late-night host gives the future president a chance to apologize to anyone he wants, and the president can’t think of anyone. No one at all? Nope, the president says.
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Those of us with homes have been told to take refuge there, to stay within the walls. As such, no one can reach anyone except via satellite, and our only shared reality is the news, and the numbers of infections and fatalities.
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Later, after we end our call, it occurs to me that at 46 I have almost certainly touched the wall in my life, but have none of the eagerness to be finished that the expression suggests
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There are 26 million refugees in the world and nearly 46 million internally displaced people. There is no patience left for this beautiful poem anymore, is what I think, shutting the book and replacing it on the shelf. Not in this burning, ravaged world.
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I click a button, and now I am looking out the window of a moving train outside of Moscow. In Lausanne, under a blue sky, a boat arrives. A sea in Albania. A kangaroo doing not much in Tasmania. So much wind, so much laundry drying. So many open doors with the keys still in the lock. So many sleeping cats. So much waiting. I fall asleep with the window open, and when I wake, it is raining in Norway.
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What Time Do the Polls Close? - The New York Times - 0 views
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The first polls will close at 6 p.m. Eastern time in parts of Indiana and Kentucky. Then there will be a steady stream of poll closings, every hour and sometimes every 30 minutes, until the last polls in Alaska shut down at 1 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday.
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But this is not a normal year. Because so many Americans are voting by mail, it’s very possible that we won’t know who won on election night, or even Wednesday morning.
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The keywords here are patience and caution. Do not expect states to be called quickly, and do not draw conclusions from partial results, which are likely to be misleading.
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But early returns will not say much, because the polls will be open for another hour in parts of western Kentucky and Indiana that are on Central time.
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Florida and Georgia are expected to count ballots faster than other swing states — Florida especially so — and if Mr. Biden wins either of them, he will be in a formidable position.
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If Mr. Trump wins them, then we may be looking at a long wait for results in the Midwest to decide the race.
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orth Carolina and Ohio are key presidential swing states, but while they are expected to report a majority of results quickly, they will also continue to accept mail-in ballots for more than a week. That means in a close race, we might not know who won until mid-November.
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The last polls in Florida close at this time, as do all or most polls in three other important swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas.
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Michigan and Pennsylvania may take several days to count mail ballots, and the returns there on election night may be disproportionately Republican.
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There won’t be much to see at the statewide level in Arkansas, which is safe Republican territory for both Mr. Trump and Senator Tom Cotton.
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Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota and Wisconsin are the states in play here. Arizona, Minnesota and Wisconsin will be closely watched in the presidential race, and Democrats are hoping to flip Senate seats in Arizona and Colorado.
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There is probably nothing to watch in Alaska or Hawaii on election night. Hawaii will report its results very quickly but does not have any competitive races. And while Alaska’s Senate and House races may be competitive, the state will not start — you read that right, start — counting absentee ballots until Nov. 10.
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13 questions that the US election may start to answer - CNN - 0 views
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Anchors and reporters have been communicating all of the uncertainty that comes with a high turnout election and a huge increase in mail-in balloting.
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"What is critical is a transparency with the audience — letting viewers know this is what we know and how we know it, but that this is information right now and could change," CBS News president Susan Zirinsky said on Tuesday. "It's like being at a baseball game: You're in the 3rd inning, they give you the score, but you know there are other dynamics that could change the game. We want to be careful, not timid."
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Did journalists and local election officials sufficiently prepare the public for red shifts, blue shifts and potential delays?
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Were the major networks and The Associated Press able to practice what they preached, a/k/a patience?
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Can this election help the American media restore a little bit of the trust that's been eroded in recent years?
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Will the Trump presidency go down in history as a one-term, one-off fluke or a fundamental realignment of American politics? (Or maybe both?)
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Will QAnon adherents realize they were fooled when Trump does not win all 50 states, as a recent Q world narrative has claimed?
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If Biden wins, for how long after the election will the media uncover more wrongdoing from the Trump admin?
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My impression, as a reporter who covers the media industry every day, is that some journalists feel like they are limping to the finish line.
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As America Awaits a Winner, Trump Falsely Claims He Prevailed - The New York Times - 0 views
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The president made his unfounded claim even though no news organizations declared a winner between him and Joseph R. Biden Jr., and a number of closely contested states still had millions of mail-in ballots to count.
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Mr. Trump said, without offering any explanation, that “we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court,” and added: “We want all voting to stop.”
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Mr. Biden projected optimism but asked voters for patience. He pointed to Pennsylvania and Michigan, among other battlegrounds, as slow-counting states that he expected to win.
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“As I’ve said all along, it’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s the decision of the American people. But I’m optimistic about this outcome.”
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Vote-counting was moving relatively slowly in some battleground states on Tuesday night because of the scale of the turnout, a backlog of absentee ballots received by mail and scattered problems with processing the vote. And each state handled the counting and releasing of its ballots differently.
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While it was too early to say which party would control the chamber in January, Democrats faced disappointment in three solidly red states where they were making a bid to stretch the campaign map. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, easily defeated Jaime Harrison; Representative Roger Marshall of Kansas defended an open seat that Democrats had contested aggressively; and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa turned back a challenge from Theresa Greenfield.
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Mr. Biden, the former vice president, was outperforming Hillary Clinton in a number of the country’s large metropolitan areas, but Mr. Trump was reprising or enlarging his margins in many rural areas.
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For all the angst about a potential breakdown in voting procedures in advance of Election Day, there were no prominent reports of technological failures or chaos at the polls, nor was there any evidence of significant civil unrest midway through the evening.
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Mr. Biden, 77, appeared to be underperforming with Latino voters, especially in the critical battleground of Florida, where he led Mr. Trump by only single digits in the group, according to exit polls. Mrs. Clinton won Latinos in the state by a wider margin four years ago; Mr. Trump’s improvement appeared to reflect the success of his insistent anti-socialist message in South Florida, where Cuban-Americans and other immigrant communities are wary of far-left policies.
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Mr. Biden’s candidacy also had the potential to create a history-making moment for his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent; she was seeking to become the first woman on a winning presidential ticket. And Mr. Biden would be only the second Catholic president, along with John F. Kennedy.
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Mr. Biden’s coalition was more impressive for its breadth than its depth, and despite its size and diversity, most voters supporting him appeared more excited to reject Mr. Trump than to install Mr. Biden in his place.
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No American presidential race in half a century or more has featured the same scale of civil unrest and uncertainty about the legitimacy of the political process, and no modern campaign has been so defined by an incumbent president who seemed to relish both factors the way Mr. Trump has.