Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged prime-time-address

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Opinion | We Can End Homelessness In Our Cities - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...affordable-housing-cities.html

housing homeless crisis politics policy culture

shared by Javier E on 16 May 20 - No Cached
  • The federal government could render homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring. The cure for homelessness is housing, and, as it happens, the money is available: Congress could shift billions in annual federal subsidies from rich homeowners to people who don’t have homes.
  • Instead, Americans have taken to treating homelessness as a sad fact of life, as if it were perfectly normal that many thousands of adults and children in the wealthiest nation on earth cannot afford a place to live.
  • Government programs focus on palliative care: Annual spending on shelters has reached $12 billion a year
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Rather than provide housing for the homeless, cities offer showers, day care centers and bag checks.
  • We have decided to live with the fact that some of our fellow Americans will die on the streets.
  • “There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen,” Leilani Farha, then the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, said after a 2018 visit to Northern California.
  • “I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve done outreach on every continent,” Dame Louise Casey, who directed homeless policy for several British prime ministers, said after touring homeless encampments in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other American cities.
  • almost 40 percent of workers in households making less than $40,000 a year have lost work. Women in Need NYC, which runs shelters, warned this week that New York faces a “mass increase” in homelessness
  • Countries confronting homelessness with greater success than the United States, including Finland and Japan, begin by treating housing as a human right
  • the first law of real estate applies to homelessness, too: Location, location, location. The nation’s homeless population is concentrated in New York, the cities of coastal California and a few other islands of prosperity.
  • Well-educated, well-paid professionals have flocked to those places, driving up housing prices. And crucially, those cities and their suburbs have made it virtually impossible to build enough housing to keep up.
  • The government calculates $600 is the most a family living at the poverty line can afford to pay in monthly rent while still having enough money for food, health care and other needs. From 1990 to 2017, the number of housing units available below that price shrank by four million.
  • While there are roughly 80,000 homeless people in New York on any given night, more than 800,000 New Yorkers — more than 10 times as many people — are scraping by, spending more than half their income on rent.
  • According to one analysis, a $100 increase in the average monthly rent in a large metro area is associated with a 15 percent increase in homelessness.
  • In 2018, eight out of every 10,000 Michigan residents were homeless. In California, it was 33 per 10,000. In New York, it was 46 per 10,000.
  • in recent decades, wealth and homelessness have both increased — a stark illustration of the inequalities that pervade American life.
  • Having failed to address homelessness during the longest economic expansion in American history, the nation now faces a greater challenge under more difficult circumstances
  • The federal government already provides housing vouchers to help some lower-income families. The families pay 30 percent of their monthly income toward rent; the government pays the rest. But instead of giving vouchers to every needy family, the government imposes an arbitrary cap. Three in four eligible families don’t get vouchers.
  • The program costs about $19 billion a year. Vouchers for all eligible households would cost another $41 billion a year
  • Where to get the money? Well, the government annually provides more than $70 billion in tax breaks to homeowners, including a deduction for mortgage interest payments and a free pass on some capital gains from home sales. Let’s end homelessness instead of subsidizing mansions.
  • Without a significant expansion in the supply of housing, adding vouchers would be like adding players to a game of musical chairs without increasing the number of chairs.
  • Market-rate construction can help: More housing would slow the upward march of housing prices. New York and San Francisco are the nation’s most tightly regulated markets for housing construction,
  • Tokyo, often cited as an international model for its permissive development policies, has expanded its supply of homes by roughly 2 percent a year in recent years, while New York’s housing supply has expanded by roughly 0.5 percent a year. Over the last two decades, housing prices in Tokyo held steady as New York prices soared.
  • In California, for example, construction of a five-story apartment building that meets minimum standards costs an average of $425,000 per unit,
  • Without public aid, the apartments would need to be rented for several times more than the $600 a month affordable to a family living at the poverty line.
  • Proposals for a big increase in affordable housing construction inevitably call to mind the troubled public housing projects of the mid-20th century. They offer one clear lesson: Avoid housing that concentrates poverty
  • there is a solution — to build subsidized housing as part of mixed-income developments and to spread the developments out, putting them not just in cities but also in the surrounding suburbs.
  • Helsinki, Finland, a city of just 600,000 people, builds about 7,000 units of mixed-income housing a year. That’s a big reason Finland is the rare European country where homelessness is in decline.
  • Extending this approach to the entire homeless population would be expensive. To take one example, King County, which encompasses Seattle, would need to increase annual spending on homelessness to roughly $410 million from $196 million to help each of the county’s 22,000 homeless families, according to a study by McKinsey. That’s about $19,000 per family.
  • Even if the cost per person were twice as high, the nation’s homeless population could be housed for $10 billion a year — less than the price of one aircraft carrier.
  • there is worse to come. Homelessness rises during recessions, the federal funding is temporary and state and local governments face huge drops in tax revenue.
  • Reframing the debate — asking what is necessary to end homelessness — is an important first step for New York and for other places that are failing this basic test of civic responsibility.
  • Americans must decide whether we are willing to let elementary school students spend nights in guarded parking lots
  • We must decide whether it’s worth spending just a little of this nation’s vast wealth to ensure that no 60-year-old woman needs to sleep on the same bench in downtown Santa Monica
Javier E

No, America is Not Experiencing a Version of China's Cultural Revolution - by Nicholas ... - 0 views

grossman.arcdigital.media/...-america-is-not-experiencing-a

Cultural Revolution woke liberalism free speech Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • The first institution Maoists captured was not the academy, it was the state. The seeds of the Cultural Revolution were not in the academy, but in the perceived weakness of the communist party in China, and Mao’s position within the party, after the failures of the Great Leap Forward. Maoists took over the state first, and 17 years later launched a campaign to force cultural change in the academy and elsewhere.
  • Cultural power, and related concepts like “privilege,” aren’t nothing, but they’re vaguer and less impactful than the state, which can credibility threaten, authorize, excuse, and utilize force.
  • State-backed violence made the Cultural Revolution, and if you think the social justice movement is similar, you misunderstand it.
  • ...59 more annotations...
  • Terrorism, public health, and police violence are all life-and-death issues, and all involve the state, so they’re more consequential than the criticism, shunning, and loss of professional opportunities associated with cancel culture. But that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t a problem.
  • We can, and should, care about more than one thing at a time, and many things that aren’t the worst problem deserve attention.
  • Nevertheless, it’s important to assess problems accurately.
  • Michael Hobbes calls all this worrying about wokeness a “moral panic.” That’s a term some use online to wave away serious concerns, but Hobbes uses it the way sociologist Stanley Cohen did in the 1970s, as a phenomenon where something becomes “defined as a threat to societal values and interests” based on media accounts that “exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm.”
  • The point here is not that stranger abductions never happened, but that they didn’t happen nearly as much as the media, concerned parents, and lawmakers thought. And because stranger kidnappings were not a national crisis, but treated as one, the “solution” made things worse.
  • Along similar lines, Hobbes argues that anti-woke alarm-bell-ringing relies on a relatively small number of oft-repeated anecdotes. Some don’t stand up to scrutiny, and some of those that do are low-stakes. The resulting moral panic fuels, among other things, a wave of red state legislation aimed at banning “critical race theory” that uses vague language and effectively cracks down on teaching about racism in American history.
  • For that, we should look to data, and here again the problem looks smaller than anti-woke liberals make it out to be
  • In the universe of cancel culture cases, I find more incidents concerning than Hobbes and fewer concerning than Young, but “this one incident wasn’t actually bad” vs. “yes it really was” doesn’t answer the question about size and scope. It doesn’t tell us what, if anything, society should do about it.
  • In Liberal Currents, Adam Gurri cites the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which documented 426 “targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education” since 2015 and 492 “disinvitation attempts” since 1998
  • The organization Canceled People lists 217 cases of “cancellation” since 1991, while the National Association of Scholars (NAS) lists 194 cancellations in academia since 2004 (plus two in the 20th century).
  • Based on these numbers, Gurri concludes, “If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved.”
  • There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. U.S. News’ 2021 rankings of the best schools lists 1,452. Using that smaller number and NAS’s figure of 194 academic cancellations since 2004, the chance of a college or university experiencing a cancellation in a given year is less than 0.8 percent.
  • There are some concerning cases in the NAS database too, in which professors were fired for actions that should be covered under a basic principle of academic freedom — for example, reading aloud a Mark Twain passage that included a racial slur, even after giving students advance notice — so this isn’t a total non-issue. But the number of low stakes and relatively unobjectionable cases means the risk is lower than 0.8 percent (and it’s even lower than that, since NAS includes Canada and my denominator is ranked schools in the United States).
  • Similarly, FIRE classifies about 30 percent of the attempted disinvitations in its database as from the right. About 60 percent are from the left — the other 10 percent N/A — so if you want to argue that the left does this more, you’ve got some evidence. But still, the number of cases from the left is lower than the total. And more than half of FIRE’s attempted disinvitations did not result in anyone getting disinvited.
  • Using U.S. News’ ranked schools as the denominator, the chance of left-wing protestors trying to get a speaker disinvited at a college or university in a given year is about 0.5 percent. The chance of an actual disinvitation is less than 0.25 percent. And that’s in the entire school. To put this in perspective, my political science department alone hosts speakers most weeks of the semester.
  • Two things jump out here:
  • Bari Weiss and Anne Applebaum both cite a Cato study purporting to show this effect:
  • even if we assume these databases capture a fraction of actual instances — which would be surprising, given the media attention on this topic, but even so — the data does not show an illiberal left-wing movement in control of academia.
  • The number agreeing that the political climate prevents them from saying things they believe ranges from 42% to 77%, which is high across political views. That suggests self-censorship is, to a significant degree, a factor of the political, cultural, and technological environment, rather than caused by any particular ideology.
  • Conservatives report self-censoring more than liberals do.
  • The same study shows that the biggest increase in self-censorship from 2017 to 2020 was among strong liberals (+12), while strong conservatives increased the least (+1).
  • If this data told a story of ascendent Maoists suppressing conservative speech, it would probably be the opposite, with the left becoming more confident of expressing their views — on race, gender, etc. — while the right becomes disproportionately more fearful. Culture warriors fixate on wokeness, but when asked about the political climate, many Americans likely thought about Trumpism
  • Nevertheless, this data does show conservatives are more likely to say the political climate prevents them from expressing their beliefs. But what it doesn’t show is which beliefs or why.
  • Self-censoring can be a problem, but also not. The adage “do not discuss politics or religion in general company” goes back to at least 1879. If someone today is too scared to say “Robin DiAngelo’s conception of ‘white fragility’ does not stand up to logical scrutiny,” that’s bad. If they’re too scared to shout racial slurs at minorities, that isn’t. A lot depends on the content of the speech.
  • When I was a teenager in the 1990s, anti-gay slurs were common insults among boys, and tough-guy talk in movies. Now it’s a lot less common, one of the things pushed out of polite society, like the n-word, Holocaust denial, and sexual harassment. I think that’s a positive.
  • Another problem with the anti-woke interpretation of the Cato study is media constantly tells conservatives they’re under dire threat.
  • Fox News, including Tucker Carlson (the most-watched show on basic cable), Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino (frequently among the most-shared on Facebook), and other right-wing outlets devote tons of coverage to cancel culture, riling up conservatives with hyperbolic claims that people are coming for them
  • Anti-woke liberals in prestigious mainstream outlets tell them it’s the Cultural Revolution
  • Then a survey asks if the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe, and, primed by media, they say yes.
  • With so many writers on the anti-woke beat, it’s not especially plausible that we’re missing many cases of transgender servers getting people canceled for using the wrong pronoun in coffee shops to the point that everyone who isn’t fully comfortable with the terminology should live in fear. By overstating the threat of cancellation and the power of woke activists, anti-woke liberals are chilling speech they aim to protect.
  • a requirement to both-sides the Holocaust is a plausible read of the legal text. It’s an unsurprising result of empowering the state to suppress ideas in an environment with bad faith culture warriors, such as Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, advocating state censorship and deliberately stoking panic to get it.
  • Texas, Florida, and other states trying to suppress unwanted ideas in both K-12 and higher ed isn’t the Cultural Revolution either — no state-sanctioned mass violence here — but it’s coming from government, making it a bigger threat to speech and academic freedom.
  • To put this in perspective, antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi has called for an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment,” which would “make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” and establish a Department of Anti-Racism to enforce it. It’s a terrible proposal that would repeal the First Amendment and get the state heavily involved in policing speech (which, even if well-intentioned, comes with serious risks of abuse).
  • It also doesn’t stand the slightest chance of happening.
  • It’s fair to characterize this article as anti-anti-woke. And I usually don’t like anti-anti- arguments, especially anti-anti-Trump (because it’s effectively pro). But in this case I’m doing it because I reject the binary.
  • American politics is often binary.
  • Culture is not. It’s an ever-changing mishmash, with a large variety of influential participants
  • There have been unmistakable changes in American culture — Western culture, really — regarding race and gender, but there are way more than two sides to that. You don’t have to be woke or anti-woke. It’s not a political campaign or a war. You can think all sorts of things, mixing and matching from these ideas and others.
  • I won’t say “this is trivial” nor “this stuff is great,” because I don’t think either. At least not if “this” means uncompromising Maoists seeking domination.
  • I think that’s bad, but it’s not especially common. It’s not fiction — I’m online a lot, I have feet in both media and academia, I’ve seen it too — but, importantly, it’s not in control
  • I think government censorship is inherently more concerning than private censorship, and that we can’t sufficiently counter the push for state idea-suppression without countering the overstated fears that rationalize it.
  • I think a lot of the private censorship problem can be addressed by executives and administrators — the ones who actually have power over businesses and universities — showing a bit of spine. Don’t fold at the first sign of protest. Take some time to look into it yourself, and make a judgment call on whether discipline is merited and necessary. Often, the activist mob will move on in a few days anyway.
  • I think that, with so much of the conversation focusing on extremes, people often miss when administrators do this.
  • I think violence is physical, and that while speech can be quite harmful, it’s better to think of these two things as categorically different than to insist harmful speech is literally violence.
  • at a baseline, treating people as equals means respecting who they say they are. The vast majority are not edge cases like a competitive athlete, but regular people trying to live their lives. Let them use the bathroom in peace.
  • I think the argument that racism and other forms of bigotry operate at a systemic or institutional, in addition to individual, level is insightful, intuitive, and empirically supported. We can improve people’s lives by taking that into account when crafting laws, policies, and practices.
  • I think identity and societal structures shape people’s lives (whether they want it to or not) but they’re far from the only factors. Treating them as the only, or even predominant, factor essentializes more than it empowers.
  • I think transgender and non-binary people have a convincing case for equality. I don’t think that points to clear answers on every question—what’s the point of gender segregated sports?
  • I think free association is an essential value too. Which inherently includes the right of disassociation.
  • I think these situations often fall into a gray area, and businesses should be able to make their own judgment calls about personnel, since companies have a reasonable interest in protecting their brand.
  • I think free speech is an essential value, not just at the legal level, but culturally as well. I think people who would scrap it, from crusading antiracists to social conservatives pining for Viktor Orban’s Hungary, have a naively utopian sense of how that would go (both in general and for them specifically). Getting the state involved in speech suppression is a bad idea.
  • I think America’s founding was a big step forward for government and individual liberty, and early America was a deeply racist, bigoted place that needed Amendments (13-15; 19), Civil Rights Acts, and landmark court cases to become a liberal democracy. I don’t think it’s hard to hold both of those in your head at the same time.
  • I think students learning the unvarnished truth about America’s racist past is good, and that teaching students they are personally responsible for the sins of the past is not.
  • I think synthesis of these cultural forces is both desirable and possible. Way more people think both that bigotry is bad and individual freedom is good than online arguments lead you to believe.
  • I don’t think the sides are as far apart as they think.
  • I think we should disaggregate cancel culture and left-wing identity politics. Cancellation should be understood as an internet phenomenon.
  • If it ever was just something the left does, it isn’t anymore.
  • I think a lot of us could agree that social media mobbing and professional media attention on minor incidents is wrong, especially as part of a campaign to get someone fired. In general, disproportionally severe social and professional sanctions is a problem, no matter the alleged cause.
  • I think most anti-woke liberals really do want to defend free speech and academic freedom. But I don’t think their panic-stoking hyperbole is helping.
Javier E

Trump's bad ideas, like ingesting bleach to fight covid-19, tax resources - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ngest-bleach-trump-coronavirus

trump ideas ignorance qualification

shared by Javier E on 27 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • During his three years as president, Trump has regularly expressed confidence that he knows more than the experts. That confidence is matched only by the ignorance he actually displays about a vast array of topics.
  • Repeatedly, he has sent government officials scrambling on foolish missions, leading them to spend time and personal capital persuading him not to follow through on schemes that are invariably wasteful, ineffective, unrealistic or dangerous.
  • Consider, for example, some presidential guidance in 2017: Trump — who has no nautical, military or engineering experience — decided the electromagnetic catapults the Navy planned to install on aircraft carriers to launch airplanes into the sky were technically inferior to the steam catapults used in older-generation ships.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Though experts say the move would cost billions of dollars and degrade the carriers’ capabilities, Trump has repeatedly returned to the topic in the years since, forcing Navy officials to put on their best game face in public pronouncements about the president’s off-the-wall comments.
  • A favorite object of Trump’s expertise remains the wall he is attempting to build along the southern border
  • Officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the Army Corps of Engineers have spent months constructing prototypes and convincing the commander in chief to abandon impractical, expensive and constantly changing demands.
  • During meetings to discuss hurricane response, the president has asked why the government doesn’t just drop a nuclear bomb on hurricanes before they make landfall. Despite the fact that nuking a hurricane would be banned by treaty, would spread radioactive fallout along the hurricane’s path and would do nothing to actually stop the storm, an administration official reportedly told the president, “Sir, we’ll look into that.”
  • he repeatedly pushed advisers to consider whether the United States could purchase Greenland from the government of Denmark. When news of his plan leaked and the Danish prime minister publicly responded that Greenland was not for sale, Trump publicly pouted by abruptly canceling a planned meeting with her.
  • Officials spend time and resources that should be directed toward addressing actual problems instead of studying Trump’s worst ideas and convincing him to back down.
  • We now have a Space Force, a new branch of the armed services that cost billions to establish and serves no discernible purpose that wasn’t already being handled elsewhere.
  • Trump’s obsession with the trappings of military pomp eventually got him the Fourth of July gathering he’d long sought, even if the tanks he wanted to parade down the Mall ended up merely parked there instead.
  • most concerning is the obvious issues these flights of fancy raise about Trump himself and his fitness for public office of any kind, let alone the presidency. Those questions have been apparent throughout his term, as when he claimed that windmills cause cancer (they don’t) or that the F-35 stealth fighter is literally invisible (it’s not)
  • The president of the United States has trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. He believes he knows more than anyone in the room when in fact he knows less. He can’t admit a mistake, even when doing so would be the smartest way out of the holes he invariably digs for himself.
  • Those traits were harmful enough when the country was riding high on relative peace and prosperity. During a global pandemic and a disastrous economic downturn, they can prove catastrophic.
aleija

Biden Expands Available Avenues to Get the Vaccine - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...den-expands-vaccine-sites.html

Politics Pandemic US history vaccine

shared by aleija on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden on Thursday dramatically expanded the ways Americans can get vaccinated and the pool of people who can administer shots, moves enabled in part by new funding in the American Rescue Plan. The changes, he pledged in a prime-time address to the nation, would mean “no more searching day and night for an appointment for you and your loved ones.”Here’s a look at what the Biden administration is doing to offer more access.
  • By May 1, when Mr. Biden directed that states should have opened up eligibility for every adult in the United States, the federal government will debut a vaccine finder website that guides people to sites near them offering shots.
  • In the next six weeks, the administration will send vaccines to up to 700 more community health centers that typically serve lower-income patients, bringing the total number of those sites serving as vaccination centers to 950.More than 20,000 pharmacies will now administer the shots as part of the federal government’s pharmacy vaccine program, double the number that have so far participated.The administration is more than doubling the number of federally run mass vaccination sites, settings that the White House said would now be able to administer hundreds of thousands of shots a day under the aegis of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the military and other agencies. At least 4,000 more active duty troops are to be deployed to help the effort.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Beginning Friday, a dramatically larger pool of people trained in injections will be eligible to give Covid-19 shots, including dentists, medical students, midwives, optometrists, paramedics, podiatrists and veterinarians.
Javier E

Three Lessons Israel Should Have Learned in Lebanon - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675924

israel lessons lebanon

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • he ferocity of Israel’s response to the murder of more than 1,400 Israeli citizens has been such that international concern for the Palestinians of Gaza—half of whom, or more than 1 million, are children under the age of 15—has now largely eclipsed any sympathy that might have been felt for the victims of the crimes that precipitated the war in the first place.
  • Israel has a right to defend itself, and it has a right to seek to destroy, or at least severely degrade, the primary perpetrator of the attacks of October 7,
  • I am worried that Israel has staked out maximalist objectives, not for the first time, and will, as it did in 2006 against Hezbollah in Lebanon, fall far short of those objectives, allowing the enemy to claim a victory—a Pyrrhic victory, to be sure, but a victory nonetheless.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • I had gone to graduate school in Lebanon, then moved back there in an attempt to better understand how Hezbollah had evolved into Israel’s most capable foe. My research revealed as much about Israeli missteps and weaknesses as it did about Hezbollah’s strengths.
  • If Israel is going to have any strategic success against Hamas, it needs to do three things differently from conflicts past.
  • Hezbollah took everything Israel could throw at it for a month and was still standing.
  • As noted earlier, Israel has an unfortunate tendency to lay out maximalist goals—very often for domestic consumption—that it then fails to meet
  • In 2006, for example, Israel’s then–prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told the country he was going to destroy Hezbollah, return the bodies of two Israeli prisoners, and end the rocket attacks on Israel.
  • Israel did none of the three. And although Lebanon was devastated, and Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly apologized for the raid that started the conflict, most observers had little doubt about who had won the conflict.
  • Strategic Humility
  • As Eliot Cohen has pointed out, the other side also has maximalist goals. Hamas and Hezbollah want nothing less than the destruction of Israel. But they are in no rush.
  • Nasrallah addressed the Arabic-speaking world for the first time since the start of this conflict on Friday. Significantly, he declared that although fighting still rages, Hamas became the conflict’s winner as soon as Israel claimed that it would destroy the militant group, which he confidently predicted it would not.
  • Hezbollah clearly does not want to enter this conflict in any meaningful way. It knows that the pressure will grow to do so if Israel has any real success in Gaza, but for the moment, it doubts that Israel will accomplish any such thing.
  • that Israel will destroy Hamas. That just isn’t going to happen, especially because no one has any idea who, or what, should replace Hamas in Gaza. So tell the world what will happen—and how it will make Israel and the region safer.
  • Communications Discipline
  • One of the things that struck me was the almost profane way in which Israeli military spokespeople would often speak, to international audiences no less, about non-Israeli civilians
  • “Now we are at the stage in which we are firing into the villages in order to cause damage to property … The aim is to create a situation in which the residents will leave the villages and go north.”
  • The callousness with which Israeli spokespeople too often describe the human suffering on the other side of the conflict, the blunt way in which they described what many Americans would consider war crimes, never fails to offend international audiences not predisposed to have sympathy with Israeli war aims.
  • much like right-wing American politicians, who sometimes use inflammatory rhetoric about real or perceived U.S. enemies, Israeli officials often resort to language about adversaries and military operations that can be exceptionally difficult for their allies to defend on the international stage:
  • One minister casually muses about using nuclear weapons on Gaza; another claims that the Palestinians are a fictional people. One can safely assume that people will continue accusing the Israeli government of including genocidal maniacs when they can point to officials in that government talking like, well, genocidal maniacs.
  • Israel needs to develop a clear communications plan for its conflicts and to sharply police the kind of language that doesn’t go over as well in Johannesburg or Jordan as it does in Jerusalem.
  • Focus on Iran
  • Few people have any interest in a regional war. The economic consequences alone would be dire. But had I been in Israel’s position on October 8, I might have been sorely tempted to largely ignore Gaza—where even the best-trained military would struggle to dislodge Hamas without killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians—and focus my efforts much farther east
  • Israel nevertheless needs to find a way to change Iran’s strategic calculus. Otherwise, Hamas and Hezbollah will only grow stronger.
marleymorton

Speech gives 'new dynamic' to move House GOP Obamacare plan - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics us

shared by marleymorton on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • marleymorton on 02 Mar 17
     
    House leaders were feeling the wind at their backs after President Donald Trump's address to Congress, where the President endorsed some of the key principles of their plan in a prime-time speech Tuesday night. House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady told CNN Wednesday morning that there was a "new dynamic" after Trump spoke.
julia rhodes

Iraqi Tribes to Take Lead in Falluja Fight, U.S. Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-retake-control-us-says.html

iraqi tribes fight u s US history politics crisis policy economic obama culture

shared by julia rhodes on 06 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The Iraqi Army is planning to cordon off a key Sunni city now occupied by jihadists so that Sunni tribes can lead the mission to secure it one neighborhood at a time
  • Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said in a weekly address on Wednesday that “the battle is about to end in Anbar.” But Mr. McGurk told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that General Austin had been urging “patience and planning.”
  • As described by American officials, the Iraqi plan reflects a recognition that having the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army mount a frontal assault on a Sunni city that has long been wary of outsiders could lead to an especially violent round of urban warfare and fan sectarian tensions.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • On Jan. 26, Mr. McGurk said, the militant group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, captured about a dozen Iraqi soldiers near Falluja, paraded them through the city in a truck flying the black flag of Al Qaeda, then videotaped their execution the next day.
  • In 2004, American forces took control of Falluja from insurgent forces at a considerable cost in American lives. After the “surge” of American troops in 2007 and 2008, American officials portrayed the city as something of a success story.
  • American officials have been pressing the Maliki government to build ties with the tribes by giving them the same benefits that Iraqi soldiers receive and promising to integrate them into the security forces.
  • Another challenge is a military one. When Mr. Maliki’s forces took Basra in 2008, they did so with the help of American air power. But the Obama administration has not offered to assist the Iraqi forces that are preparing to retake Falluja with American-operated drones or airstrikes.
Javier E

Bombing and Invading Gaza Is Israel's Peace Plan - The Daily Beast - 1 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...za-is-israel-s-peace-plan.html

israel palestine war moderate gaza

shared by Javier E on 21 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Previous statements and smokescreens that suggested Netanyahu could support a two-state solution were proved profoundly disingenuous when the prime minister proudly and explicitly declared last week: “I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.” In other words, there are now no circumstances under which Netanyahu would accept the Palestinians establishing sovereign control over the West Bank.
  • The ongoing game theory behind the Israeli air strikes and ground invasion is, in effect, “The Netanyahu Peace Plan.” It is just far easier to attack Gaza—in the name of fighting Hamas—than it is to sign a peace agreement with moderates such as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. And the latter has never been Netanyahu’s goal. Quite the contrary: By bombarding Gaza, Netanyahu can dismiss all Palestinian claims to sovereignty and self-determination—in the name of security.
  • The moderate Palestinian leadership had already accepted all the conditions Netanyahu demanded. They renounced violence, recognized the state of Israel, and embraced a demilitarized Palestinian state. But in response, the Israeli government made no concessions, the result of which was to effectively destroy the moderate leadership within Palestinian society.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Conversely, when Israel negotiated with Hamas and released more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Israel sent the perverse message that it only negotiates with those who engage in violence, while moderates such as Abbas, who attempt to negotiate in good faith, are humiliated and ignored. The recently reported “secret negotiations” between Hamas and Israel are in keeping with this policy.
  • in the background, a separate time-bomb is ticking for Israel. The ultimate existential threat to Israel will come from the inevitable demographic realities—and Israel’s refusal to address the question of what it will do with the millions of Palestinians living under its control in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.
  • Hamas has damaged the Palestinian cause more than anyone else, but Hamas exists as a byproduct of a military occupation, and it serves a clear purpose for Netanyahu’s Israel. Hamas represents the necessary excuse by which Israel can repeatedly avoid entertaining a Palestinian state—under the rubric of a national security threat.
  • What did this war achieve? It will have been another useless war, one in which hundreds of innocent civilians lost their lives, one that serves only to exasperate and radicalize Gazans further.
  • Every day the answer to this question is delayed, extremism rises on both sides, escalating the bigotry, racism, and violence, all of which serve to undermine what Israel holds most dear: its “Jewish-democratic” identity
  • While historically Palestinians were the most secular nation among Arabs, now both moderates and secularists are disappearing and are the main losers in these wars. Meanwhile, extremists and Israeli right-wingers will continue to write the political agenda.
Javier E

The collapse of the U.S.-led world order has done more harm than we realize - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8d53-eba0ed2371cc_story.html

world order diplomacy trump foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 16 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • What’s less evident is how far-reaching and consequential the collapse of American-led order has been in the 15 months since Trump took office.
  • In multiple miserable corners of the world, where U.S. envoys and aid would normally be helping victims, deterring malevolent actors and seeking political solutions, there is a void.
  • Start with the Western Hemisphere
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The region is watching one of the biggest crises it has experienced in modern times: the political and economic implosion of Venezuela, which has inflicted violence and hunger on tens of millions of people and caused more than 1 million to flee the country — the largest displacement of people in Latin American history.
  • Tens of thousands have been killed and more than 2 million driven out of the country; since last year the United Nations has said South Sudan is on the brink of famine.
  • Forget about an American envoy: Even the senior State Department post for the region has, as elsewhere, no permanent appointee.
  • The prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, Lobsang Sangay, was in Washington last week for a singular purpose: to try to persuade the Trump administration to fill the State Department post of special coordinator for Tibetan issues — which, of course, is vacant.
  • This U.S. official, he said, has been vital in getting other countries to attend meetings with his government, in channeling aid and in simply forcing China to address Tibet. Without the U.S. representative, he said, “the Tibet issue is not raised.” A little-noticed loss, perhaps, but one of many in a world without U.S. leadership
malonema1

The U.K. State Visit That Never Was - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550385

US trump UK

shared by malonema1 on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Long before Donald Trump was president of the United States, he was a real-estate mogul. So perhaps it’s fitting that, as president, he decided Friday to effectively cancel his long-anticipated visit to the United Kingdom over his displeasure with the location of the new U.S. embassy in London.
  • The president was expected to make his first official visit to London in early 2018  for the opening of the new American embassy, which had been moved from its previous location in Grosvenor Square in London’s Mayfair district to Nine Elms, just south of the River Thames. “I am not a big fan of the Obama administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for ‘peanuts,’ only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars,” Trump tweeted of the move, which in fact was initiated under the Bush administration, for both cost and security reasons, in 2008. “Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon—NO!”
  • The tweet put the U.S. ambassador in the remarkable position of publicly defending the location of the American embassy against the American president. In an op-ed for the Evening Standard, Woody Johnson, a Trump appointee and long-time friend of the president’s, wrote: “I agree with President Trump that Grosvenor Square, in the heart of London, was a perfect location for our embassy.” But he highlighted the security considerations behind the move and added that the new location “is one of the most advanced embassies we have ever built.” He concluded with a paean to the special relationship: “President Trump has told me he views the U.K. as one of the closest friends and partners of the American people we serve. Our new embassy reflects not just America’s special history with the U.K. but the special future ahead of us as we advance the prosperity and security of both our nations.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • While such behavior may not be enough to sever a more than two-century-old relationship, it has proven enough to force both sides to address the question that it could. “This is a long-term special relationship that we have,” May said of the U.K.-U.S. relationship following a terse exchange with Trump in November. “It is an enduring relationship that is there because it is in both our national interests for that relationship to be there. As Prime Minister, I am clear that that relationship with the United States should continue.”While a Trump visit to the U.K. appears to be ruled out for now, at least he’ll be there in spirit. Shortly after the president’s cancellation, the London-based Madame Tussaud’s wax museum offered their own replica of the president to take his place.
Javier E

Trump's Hard-Line Israel Position Exports U.S. Culture War Abroad - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...p-israel-us-conservatives.html

israel trump politics culture war

shared by Javier E on 22 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • He is moving the idea of being “pro-Israel” even further right, separating it even from the Jewish support that is ostensibly critical to Israel’s long-term survival.
  • That began with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which divided Americans over issues of terrorism, torture and inclusion, particularly of Muslims.
  • Israeli leaders, seeking Washington’s support, encouraged Americans to see their conflicts as one and the same.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Being tough on terrorism became a core conservative value that was expressed, in part, as support for Israel — specifically, as support for harsh Israeli policies toward the conflict. This also aligned with increasingly negative attitudes toward Muslims. And an atmosphere of us-versus-them politics equated supporting Israelis with opposing Palestinians.
  • Though George W. Bush, then the president, encouraged both inclusion of Muslims and neutrality on Israel, polarization pulled some conservatives toward a zero-sum view of the conflict, in which maximally opposing Palestinians became a matter of identity. Photo
  • This opened a gap between the identity politics of the Republican base and the policies of its leaders — precisely the sort of gap that Mr. Trump would exploit in his presidential primary bid. As he rose by saying what others would not, he supercharged the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s salience to identity issues among what would become his base.
  • Mr. Trump advocated severe restrictions on legal and illegal immigration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries whose citizens he said posed a threat. In doing so, the president aligned fear of demographic change with fear of terrorism.
  • These policies meet rising conservative demands that the United States abandon its traditional neutrality on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and instead side overtly with Israel
  • While some say pro-Israel groups are responsible for this shift, Mr. Trump, who has had an icy relationship with those groups, in fact appears to be following the Republican base. In 2014, 51 percent of Republicans said the United States should lean toward Israel in peace talks. That number has since grown to 58 percent.
  • Mr. Trump represents the culmination of a trend that pro-Israel groups resisted for years: the loss of Jewish support. Even as Jews grew more liberal, many supported strongly pro-Israel policies. But as “pro-Israel” becomes synonymous with “conservative Republican,” Jews are drifting away. They oppose moving the embassy by almost 3-to-1.
  • Party politics started this process. In 2015, Republicans invited Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s right-wing prime minister, to address Congress in opposition to Mr. Obama’s policies on Iran. Though intended to turn American Jews and others against Mr. Obama, it had the opposite effect, polarizing them against Mr. Netanyahu.
  • Mr. Trump has taken it drastically further. He has indulged hard-core conservative instincts to a degree that, deliberately or not, attracted support from a white nationalist fringe that also tends to be hostile to Jews.
  • He is moving the idea of being “pro-Israel” even further right, separating it even from the Jewish support that is ostensibly critical to Israel’s long-term survival.
  • Javier E on 22 Jan 18
     
    Bookmark
Javier E

How Trump?s attempts to win the daily news cycle feed a chaotic coronavirus response - ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html

daily trump cycle response pandemic

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • But in Trump’s White House, certain symptoms remain: a president who governs as if producing and starring in a reality television show, with each day a new episode and each news cycle his own creation, a successive installment to be conquered.
  • Facing a global pandemic, Trump still seems to lurch from moment to moment, with his methods and messages each day disconnected from — and in some cases contradictory to — the ones just prior.
  • Trump has focused on his self-image — claiming credit wherever he believes it is owed, attempting to project strength and decisiveness, settling scores with critics, boasting about the ratings of his televised news conferences and striving to win the cable news and social media wars.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Lapan added that it is important for the president to address the public about a topic as serious as the pandemic but said Trump should quickly “turn it over to the experts and leave, and not turn it into this stream of consciousness of every topic he wants to talk about and the adoration that seems to be required from everybody else who participates.”
  • “Trump is a sales guy, and it’s all about point of sale,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican operative and frequent Trump critic. “It’s not about repeat customers and follow-ups. He wants to get the sale — that’s it — he wants to sell you the undercoating for your car, and it’s not his problem if the car breaks driving off of the lot.”
  • Trump’s mind at times was elsewhere. A few hours before his news conference, he took to Twitter to brag about the high television ratings of his coronavirus updates, noting that they were on par with the season finale of “The Bachelor,” an ABC reality hit.
  • At day’s end, when Trump strode into the White House press briefing room to deliver a coronavirus update, he turned over the presidential lectern to an array of business executives, who alternately praised him and pitched their products.
  • The potpourri quality of Trump’s message to a nation in crisis that day was a stark contrast to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who as president during the Great Depression and World War II offered his reassurances in a series of fireside chats broadcast nationally — and he limited them to have maximum impact.
  • “He only delivered these fireside chats every couple of months, when there was an essential moment for the president to speak,”
  • “Someone said to him, ‘Why don’t you go on the radio every night? Your speeches are so effective.’ He said, ‘If my speeches become routine they will lose their effectiveness.’ And he said, ‘It takes me three or four days to work on a fireside chat — and I have to run the country, too.”
  • By Tuesday, Trump had finally come to acknowledge the sheer magnitude of the crisis.
  • the president and his medical experts offered a somber and grim projection: In a best-case scenario, and with strict abidance by social distancing, between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans would die of the coronavirus.
  • The worst-case scenario was even more horrifying: Without community mitigation measures, the models presented by the White House predict 1.5 million to 2.2 million Americans could die.
  • Lockhart said that Tuesday’s news conference was a concerted effort by the administration to “rewrite history,” after two months of Trump playing down the threat of the virus. He added that there appeared to be a political calculation as well: By revealing specific projected fatalities, Trump laid the groundwork to be able to claim victory ahead of November’s election if the death toll is substantially less than predicted.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had developed new guidance to mitigate the coronavirus, recommending all Americans wear face masks, and as with many announcements by the federal government, Trump chose to unveil it himself.
  • But he risked diluting the effectiveness of the measure — designed to prevent asymptomatic carriers of the virus from spreading to others — by stressing it was voluntary and musing at Friday’s news conference that he wouldn’t be seen wearing a mask himself.
  • his vanity, it seemed, could not abide wearing a mask.Asked why he opposed covering his nose and mouth as the CDC recommends, Trump struggled to articulate his hesitation.“Somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk — the great Resolute Desk — I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”
Javier E

New Zealand isn't just flattening its coronavirus curve. It's squashing it. - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-a311-adb1344719a9_story.html

new zealand crisis response strategies

shared by Javier E on 08 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • It has been less than two weeks since New Zealand imposed a coronavirus lockdown so strict that swimming at the beach and hunting in bushland were banned
  • It took only 10 days for signs that the approach here — “elimination” rather than the “containment” goal of the United States and other Western countries — is working.
  • The number of new cases has fallen for two consecutive days, despite a huge increase in testing, with 54 confirmed or probable cases reported Tuesday. That means the number of people who have recovered, 65, exceeds the number of daily infections
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is adamant that New Zealand will complete four weeks of lockdown — two full 14-day incubation cycles — before letting up. She has, however, given the Easter Bunny special dispensation to work this weekend.
  • this heavily tourism-reliant country — it gets about 4 million international visitors a year, almost as many as its total population — did the previously unthinkable: It shut its borders to foreigners March 19.
  • Two days later, Ardern delivered a televised address from her office — the first time since 1982 that an Oval Office-style speech had been given — announcing a coronavirus response alert plan involving four stages, with a full lockdown being Level 4.
  • A group of influential leaders got on the phone with her the following day to urge moving to Level 4.
  • “It’s inevitable that we will have to shut down anyway, so we would rather it be sharp and short.”
  • On March 23, a Monday, Ar­dern delivered another statement and gave the country 48 hours to prepare for a Level 4 lockdown. “We currently have 102 cases,” she said. “But so did Italy once.”
  • with strict border control, restrictions could be gradually relaxed, and life inside New Zealand could return to almost normal.
  • From the earliest stages, Ar­dern and her team have spoken in simple language: Stay home. Don’t have contact with anyone outside your household “bubble.” Be kind. We’re all in this together.
  • there has been a sense of collective purpose. The police phone line for nonemergencies has been overwhelmed with people calling to “dob in,” as we say here, reporting others they think are breaching the rules.
  • The response has been notably apolitical. The center-right National Party has clearly made a decision not to criticize the government’s response — and in fact to help it.
  • After peaking at 89 on April 2, the daily number of new cases ticked down to 67 on Monday and 54 on Tuesday. The vast majority of cases can be linked to international travel, making contact tracing relatively easy, and many are consolidated into identifiable clusters.
  • The nascent slowdown reflected “a triumph of science and leadership,”
  • “Other countries have had a gradual ramp-up, but our approach is exactly the opposite,” he said. While other Western countries have tried to slow the disease and “flatten the curve,” New Zealand has tried to stamp it out entirely.
  • The government won’t be able to allow people free entry into New Zealand until the virus has stopped circulating globally or a vaccine has been developed
  • From that Wednesday night, everyone had to stay at home for four weeks unless they worked in an essential job, such as health care, or were going to the supermarket or exercising near their home.
  • Ardern has said her government is considering mandatory quarantine for New Zealanders returning to the country post-lockdown. “I really want a watertight system at our border,”
ethanshilling

Canada Supreme Court Rules Federal Carbon Tax Is Constitutional - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...reme-court-carbon-pricing.html

canada carbon climate change politics tax

shared by ethanshilling on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • n a decision that marked an important victory for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate change agenda, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that the federal government’s imposition of carbon taxes in provinces that oppose them was constitutional.
  • “This matter is critical to our response to an existential threat to human life in Canada and around the world,” the court wrote in a 6-to-3 decision. “Climate change is real. It is caused by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities and it poses a grave threat to humanity’s future.”
  • The concept of carbon pricing has been widely endorsed by economists, and according to the World Bank, some form of it has been carried out or is in development in 64 countries, either through direct taxes on fossil fuels or through cap-and-trade programs.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Several U.S. states have carbon pricing programs, notably California.
  • But several people familiar with the forthcoming infrastructure package in the United States said that there were no plans currently to price carbon emissions. Instead, the president plans to greatly raise fuel efficiency standards for cars, forcing automakers toward electric vehicles through regulation, not legislation.
  • Court challenges by those three provinces of Mr. Trudeau’s carbon pricing law ultimately led to the Supreme Court’s decision.
  • Like Republicans in the United States, conservative premiers in the oil-producing provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan have long strenuously campaigned against carbon pricing.
  • Republicans in Congress remain firmly opposed to a carbon tax and have voted repeatedly and nearly unanimously over the years to bar the government from imposing one.
  • While the Supreme Court decision’s detailed the dangers of climate changes to Canada and its coastlines, Arctic region and Indigenous people in particular, none of the three provinces that started the legal challenges dispute its effects.
  • In 2019, Mr. Trudeau set a minimum price for carbon. It will become 40 Canadian dollars a metric ton on April 1 and will reach 170 dollars a ton in 2030.
  • The federal government has stepped in only when a province, like Ontario under Mr. Ford, refused to price carbon. In those cases, it placed a tax on fuel and set other fees for industrial emissions.
  • Jason Kenney, the premier of Alberta, who canceled his province’s program, told reporters that he was disappointed with the decision but declined to say whether his province would come up with a carbon pricing system to replace the federally imposed one.
  • The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law in part because the federal plan kicks in only if provinces do not set up their programs, thus maintaining the shared jurisdiction the two levels of government hold on environmental issues.
  • “Addressing climate change requires collective national and international action,” the court wrote. “This is because the harmful effects of GHGs are, by their very nature, not confined by borders.”
katherineharron

Covid-19 vaccine: Vaccinated Americans allowed to taste freedom - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "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.
  • "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.
ethanshilling

Japan to Start Releasing Radioactive Water From Fukushima in 2 Years - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ukushima-wastewater-ocean.html

japan fukushima

shared by ethanshilling on 13 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Japan said on Tuesday that it had decided to gradually release tons of treated wastewater from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the ocean, describing it as the best option for disposal despite fierce opposition from fishing crews at home and concern from governments abroad.
  • Disposal of the wastewater has been long delayed by public opposition and by safety concerns. But the space used to store the water is expected to run out next year, and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said during the cabinet meeting on Tuesday that disposing of the wastewater from the plant was “a problem that cannot be avoided.”
  • The Fukushima crisis was set off in March 2011 by a huge earthquake and tsunami that ripped through northeastern Japan and killed more than 19,000 people. The subsequent meltdown of three of the plant’s six reactors was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The government will “take every measure to absolutely guarantee the safety of the treated water and address misinformation,” he said, noting that the cabinet would meet again within a week to decide on the details for carrying out the plan.
  • Ten years later, the cleanup is far from finished at the disabled plant, which is operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company. To keep the three damaged reactor cores from melting, cooling water is pumped through them continuously.
  • There are now about 1.25 million tons of wastewater stored in more than 1,000 tanks at the plant site. The water continues to accumulate at a rate of about 170 tons a day, and releasing all of it is expected to take decades.
  • But the Japanese government’s plan faces strong opposition from local officials and fishing crews, who say that it would add to consumer fears about the safety of Fukushima seafood.
  • Responding to Japan’s decision, the U.S. State Department said in a statement, “In this unique and challenging situation, Japan has weighed the options and effects, has been transparent about its decision, and appears to have adopted an approach in accordance with globally accepted nuclear safety standards.”
mattrenz16

Covid-19 and Vaccine News: Live Global Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ovid-vaccine-coronavirus-cases

shared by mattrenz16 on 26 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The Biden administration, under intense pressure to address the devastating coronavirus crisis in India, intends to share up to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine with other nations, so long as the doses clear a safety review conducted by the Food and Drug Administration, officials said Monday.
  • The announcement, first reported by The Associated Press, came after President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, “committing that the United States and India will work closely together in the fight against Covid-19,” according to statement from the White House
  • Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, cautioned at a news conference that the donations of doses would not happen right away. She said about 10 million doses could be released “in the coming weeks” if the F.D.A. determines that the vaccine meets “our own bar and our own guidelines,” and that another 50 million doses are in various stages of production.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Mr. Biden, who has already released a total of 4 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to Canada and Mexico, said last week that he was considering sending more overseas: “We’re looking at what is going to be done with some of the vaccines that we are not using,” the president said. “We’ve got to make sure they are safe to be sent.”
katherineharron

White House races to blunt potential Covid-19 surge - CNNPolitics - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 15 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The White House is racing to prevent and prepare for a potential fourth coronavirus surge as more transmissible coronavirus variants spread across the US
  • In what would be a first, the White House is drawing up plans to surge vaccines to emerging hotspots in an attempt to blunt the virus' trajectory and protect those at highest risk, two senior administration officials told CNN.
  • "Everything we do is with the thought in mind that there might be another surge," a senior administration official said, summing up the administration's efforts to combat the virus and prepare for a surge.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes the more transmissible B.1.1.7 variant, which was first identified in the United Kingdom, will be the dominant strain within weeks. There are also concerns about governors and local officials prematurely loosening public health restrictions in a slew of states.
  • A fourth surge would be the first on President Joe Biden's watch and a major test for the new administration
  • a half-dozen Biden administration officials told CNN they believe the federal government is better prepared than ever before to handle a surge.
  • the accelerating pace of vaccinations is helping to head off a potential surge. One in five people in the US have now gotten at least one shot, including nearly 65% of people 65 and older, who account for about 80% of all Covid-19 deaths in the US.
  • "While many indicators are going in the right direction and more and more people are being vaccinated every day, we need to be ready for wild cards and worsening.
  • A senior official said one example of this effort would involve vaccinating workers in high-risk settings such as a meat processing plant in areas where cases are beginning to surge.
  • To that end, the White House has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to boost surveillance testing and close testing supply gaps, including $200 million to boost genomic sequencing to track the spread of variants. The American Rescue Plan, which Biden signed into law on Thursday, invests another $47.8 billion in coronavirus testing measures. The bill also adds $7.66 billion to hire 100,000 public health workers to boost vaccination and contact tracing efforts.
  • One official said the administration is also considering administering monoclonal antibody treatments -- of which the administration bought another 100,000 doses in February -- in hotspots as a prophylaxis.
  • "A lot can happen. Conditions can change. The scientists have made clear that things may get worse again as new variants of the virus spread," Biden said during a prime-time address to the nation last Thursday. "If we don't stay vigilant and the conditions change, then we may have to reinstate restrictions to get back on track."
  • "We have more consistent messaging now around the interventions that we know work: masks, social distancing measures," said Schuchat, who also served as deputy CDC director during the Trump administration. "There's a strong commitment at CDC and in this administration to transparent communication -- if there's bad news, to share it, if there's good news, to be open and honest about it -- to make sure we can communicate clearly and consistently about what we think is going on and what we think needs to be done."
  • the administration has declined to change the game entirely, rejecting calls to prioritize getting more first doses of two-dose vaccines in Americans' arms and delaying the administration of second doses -- as the UK did.
  • the White House has prioritized giving full protection to fewer Americans
  • the White House has sought to work more closely with state and local officials.
  • Biden officials say they watched as Trump tried and failed to pressure states to adopt or discard certain public health measures and have sought to avoid putting themselves in a similar position
  • But even as the White House looks to prepare governors for a potential fourth surge, officials are also contemplating the possibility that a fourth surge will not strain hospitals or lead to as many deaths as previous surges."In 2020 we'd say, OK, we see a rising number of cases, we know we're going to see a rising number of hospitalizations and deaths," a senior administration official said. "But today ... it's not a very clear picture."
aidenborst

What Matters: What will Biden do first and how will he do it? - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics US Trump crisis Culture policy gop Biden inauguration impeachment

shared by aidenborst on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • With the drama of Donald Trump's last presidential gasps -- and the urgency of his pending post-presidential impeachment trial for inciting insurrection -- it's been easy to gloss over the fact that in four days there will be a new president with very different priorities.
  • He gave a prime-time address from Wilmington, Delaware, on Thursday and laid out the first of his relief plans: a $1.9 trillion package of temporary measures and help for the unemployed attached to a permanent hike in the minimum wage to $15 per hour.
  • A second speech on Friday outlined his plan to ramp up the production and distribution of vaccines.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • There are clear political ramifications to all this. Biden promised to administer 100 million shots in his first 100 days and his team knows they will be swiftly judged by their ability to hit that target.
  • The list of promises is long and ranges from climate change policy and union rights to trust in government and foreign policy issues like rejoining the Paris climate accord and rescinding Trump's targeted travel bans. Right now, it's a little unclear what exactly Biden will sign on Day One. What is clear: He made a lot of promises, so January 20 could be a very busy day.
  • He'll need Congress to help with that and other plans. He's also inheriting some headaches, especially when it comes to foreign policy. On Taiwan and China, Cuba and Yemen, the Trump administration is handing Biden major policy changes he doesn't agree with but that he'll have trouble undoing.
  • The plan would send $350 billion to state, local and territorial governments to stem public-sector job losses, add $15 billion to an existing grant program to help child care providers and provide $15 billion to create a new grant program for small business owners, but much of that is in response to the coronavirus crisis and less of a permanent response.
  • This stood out as a very un-Trumpian thing for Biden to say: "There will be stumbles," Biden said on Thursday of his Covid plan. "But I will always be honest with you about both the progress we're making and what setbacks we meet." Trump would never admit to failings of his own administration.
  • Biden privately resigned himself to the fact that impeachment will be yet another issue facing his incoming administration. It certainly seems like he would rather have avoided the issue, especially because he regularly promised to "turn the page" from Trump. But that ship has sailed, and now Biden is pushing for a bifurcated approach to impeachment -- meaning the Senate would focus on impeachment for half the day and confirming his top administrative posts for the other half of the day.
xaviermcelderry

New Coronavirus Variants: What Mutations Mean for the Pandemic - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617694

Covid pandemic

shared by xaviermcelderry on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In the final, darkest days of the deadliest year in U.S. history, the world received ominous news of a mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Scientists in the U.K. had identified a form of the virus that was spreading rapidly throughout the nation. Then, on January 4, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a lockdown that began almost immediately and will last until at least the middle of February.
  • he said in an address, noting that “our scientists have confirmed this new variant is between 50 and 70 percent more transmissible” than previous strains.
  • Each day, B.1.1.7 is being found in more people in more places, including all around the United States. Experts have raised dire warnings that a 70 percent more transmissible form of the virus would overwhelm already severely stretched medical systems. Daily deaths have already tripled in recent months, and the virus is killing more than 3,000 Americans every day. From a purely mathematical perspective, considering exponential growth, a significantly more transmissible strain could theoretically lead to tens of thousands of daily deaths, with hospital beds lining sidewalks and filling parking lots.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Almost all of these accidental mutations are inconsequential: The virus still looks and functions just as its parent before it did. Over time, though, sets of mutations can layer on top of one another and accumulate, and the virus begins to function differently. Some of these differences confer an advantage of one sort or another—for example, increased transmissibility.
  • He has been at the forefront of identifying and tracking the variant, but says huge questions remain unanswered. “There’s still considerable uncertainty as to the long-term consequences” of B.1.1.7, Pybus told me. “We don’t even know whether this lineage truly originated in the U.K., with so many countries not doing this surveillance.”
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 43 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page