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Contents contributed and discussions participated by delgadool

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New York Reaches a Deal to Legalize Recreational Marijuana - The New York Times - 0 views

  • paving the way for a potential $4.2 billion industry that could create tens of thousands of jobs and become one of the largest markets in the country.
  • end years of racially disproportionate policing that saw Black and Hispanic people arrested on low-level marijuana charges far more frequently than white people.
  • The deal was crafted with an intense focus on making amends in communities impacted by the decades-long war on drugs.
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  • legalizing marijuana could generate about $350 million in yearly tax revenue once the program was fully implemented, which could take years.
  • “A percentage of revenue that is raised will get invested into the communities where the people who suffered mass incarceration come from and still live in many cases,”
  • Millions of dollars in tax revenue from cannabis sales would be reinvested in minority communities each year, and a sizable portion of business licenses would be reserved for minority business owners.
  • received an unexpected boost from Mr. Cuomo’s recent political scandals.
  • It turned out, however, that striking a deal to legalize cannabis became a higher priority for Mr. Cuomo, as several lawmakers and lobbyists surmised that the governor may have wanted to shift attention away from his compounding crises. Marijuana legalization was both a headline-grabbing issue and a policy measure popular with voters.
  • Forty percent of most tax revenues would be reinvested in communities disproportionately affected by the war on drugs; 40 percent would be steered to public education; and the remaining 20 percent would go toward drug treatment, prevention and education.
  • The legislation will seek to improve the state’s existing medical marijuana program, which for years has been criticized as too restrictive.
  • The cannabis market in New York is currently estimated to be $4.6 billion and is expected to grow to $5.8 billion by 2027, according to a recent study commissioned by the New York Medical Cannabis Industry Association.
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In Nevada, Unemployed Workers Wait for Aid That Will Still Not Be Enough - The New York... - 0 views

  • No state’s work force has been battered as badly by the coronavirus pandemic as Nevada’s, and people are especially struggling in Las Vegas, a boom-and-bust city where tourist dollars and lavish tips have given way to shuttered hotels and weed-strewn parking lots.
  • Las Vegas has the highest unemployment rate among large cities, with more than 10 percent out of work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and over the last year the work force in Nevada has lost more income than in any other state.
  • “I feel pretty scared every day, right now, whenever I think about my bills,”
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  • Roughly one million Nevada residents, some 45 percent of adults in the state, have fallen behind on basic household expenses, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group.
  • “I struggle so much, I lie awake in bed calculating what I can pay this time, what can wait a little longer?” she said.
  • Even as infection rates decline, there are signs that the economy could sour again — nearly 100,000 fewer residents in the state had jobs last month compared to February of last year. Employment is even worse for low-wage workers, dropping some 23 percent among residents who earn less than $27,000 a year, according to the Center for American Progress. Claims for unemployment insurance are more than triple what they were in 2019, the study found.
  • “I have not asked for much my entire life, but now we need the help,” Ms. Rodriguez said.
  • The short bursts of cash from stimulus checks create a cyclical living experience, as the relief of being able to make some payments or buy food gives way to the anxiety of bills to come.
  • “I came here to work, and I devoted my life to this community,” she said, as tears streaked her cheeks. “This is our life that we have, and we cannot always rely on handouts.”
delgadool

Hope as a Public Health Tool - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The early coronavirus mistakes were mostly mistakes of excessive optimism.
  • But overoptimism isn’t the only type of error in public health. Pessimism can also do damage.
  • Difficult truths can sometimes be a vital public-health tool. But so can optimism. Optimism can help people to get through tough times and make sacrifices, in the belief that better days are ahead.
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  • “If we do all this, if we do our part, if we do this together, by July the 4th, there’s a good chance you, your families and friends, will be able to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day,” he said, standing alone at a podium in the White House’s East Room. “Finding light in the darkness is a very American thing to do.”
  • “Over a year ago, no one could have imagined what we were about to go through,” Biden said. “But now we’re coming through it.”
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Biden Grants Protections for Venezuelans to Remain in U.S. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The immigrants also will be allowed to work legally in the United States as part of the temporary protective status the administration issued as it considers the next steps in a yearslong American pressure campaign to force Mr. Maduro from power.
  • Venezuela is mired in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises under Mr. Maduro, who, through a mix of corruption and neglect, oversaw the decay of the country’s oil infrastructure that had propped up its economy. The United Nations has estimated that up to 94 percent of Venezuela’s population lives in poverty, with millions of people bereft of regular access to water, food and medicine.
  • The United States has been at the fore of an international campaign to force Mr. Maduro from power since disputed elections in 2018. It is one of the few foreign policy priorities that has been advanced by both the Biden and Trump administrations, each of which recognizes Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader and former head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, as the country’s legitimate leader.
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  • Roberto Marrero, a Venezuelan opposition leader who moved to Florida after spending a year and a half in jail in Venezuela, called Monday’s decision a “bittersweet victory.”
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Taking on Child Poverty - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Twenty-two years ago, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced an ambitious plan to fight child poverty in Britain. At the time, more than 25 percent of British children lived in poverty.
  • The campaign by Blair and the Labour Party radically changed the situation. Eight years after his announcement, the child poverty rate had fallen by half. “It’s not rocket science,”
  • the child benefit was “the most transformational thing” in the legislation.
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  • The idea of a child benefit has gained support from both progressives and conservatives. Many on the political left see it as a way to reduce economic inequality and increase opportunity. On the political right, Jason explains:
  • younger conservatives are especially supportive of the idea. People under 50, he explains, are “the ones feeling the brunt of the brutal slowdown in real wage growth that started in the 1970s.”
  • “You can’t live on it,” Megan Curran, a research scientist at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, told me.
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Laws used to fight pandemic are in some cases weakening democracies, report says. - The... - 0 views

  • The coronavirus pandemic has weakened democracy across Europe, according to a human rights group that looked into 14 countries.
  • increasing threats to journalists, limits on freedom to protest, and the weakening independence of the judicial systems, among other developments.
  • Fears over the misuse of such prerogatives by governments in Eastern Europe have been widely documented, and in its report, the Berlin-based Civil Liberties Union for Europe said that countries such as Hungary, Poland or Slovenia had used the pandemic to strengthen their hold on power and limit criticism of the government.
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  • “No E.U. country is immune to threats to democracy and more concrete efforts are badly needed to revert worrying trends,” the group said.
delgadool

Fully vaccinated people in the U.S. now have more guidance from the C.D.C. on activitie... - 0 views

  • the agency continues to warn Americans against traveling in general.
  • “We know that after mass travel, after vacations, after holidays, we tend to see a surge in cases,” Dr. Walensky said Monday night on MSNBC. “And so, we really want to make sure — again with just 10 percent of people vaccinated — that we are limiting travel.”
  • To the frustration of airlines and others in the travel industry, the latest guidance comes as students and families are considering spring break plans almost a year after wide swaths of the United States first shut down, and a growing share of Americans tentatively book travel for later in the year.
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  • “As more people are vaccinated, they’ll look at ways to ease additional restrictions.”
  • The Biden administration said Tuesday that it is shipping 15.8 million additional vaccine doses to states, tribes and territories, with another 2.7 million first doses to pharmacies, Ms. Psaki said. Currently, there are 2.17 million vaccine shots being administered a day on average, she said.
  • In a Monday letter to President Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, Jeffrey D. Zients, a coalition of travel and tourism trade groups asked to work with the White House on federal guidance for temporary virus “health credentials,” which could be used to securely and uniformly verify test results or vaccination status. Such guidance could also yield benefits beyond aviation, they argued.
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Honduran Leader Vowed to Help Flood U.S. With Cocaine, Prosecutor Says - The New York T... - 0 views

  • The allegation against President Juan Orlando Hernández came in opening arguments at an accused drug trafficker’s trial.
  • “They would — as the president put it — ‘shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,’” said the prosecutor, Jacob Harris Gutwillig, an assistant U.S. attorney in New York.
  • The trial is also something of a referendum on Mr. Hernández, who has been dogged for years by accusations of possible connections to drug traffickers. He has not been charged, but in court documents filed earlier this year, American prosecutors revealed for the first time that they were investigating the Honduran president.
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  • In a series of Twitter posts on Monday, as jury selection in Mr. Fuentes’s trial got underway in Manhattan, Mr. Hernández again declared his innocence, saying that “with my election, the party ended” for drug traffickers.
  • During his brother’s trial, witnesses and prosecutors said Mr. Hernández had accepted millions of dollars for his and his party’s political campaigns in exchange for protecting drug traffickers.
  • Mr. Hernández is a key United States ally in the region, and the investigation could jeopardize the bilateral relationship and complicate the Biden administration’s efforts to invest $4 billion in Central America to address violence and corruption, reduce poverty and bolster the rule of law in an effort to stem migration to the United States.
  • Mr. Gutwillig, the prosecutor, did not mince words in his opening arguments on Tuesday: He called Honduras “a narco-state.”
  • Mr. Fuentes developed a relationship with Mr. Hernández, who took office in 2014, in a series of secret meetings in 2013 and 2014 during which the men “plotted to send as much cocaine as possible to the United States,” the prosecutor said. Mr. Fuentes paid Mr. Hernández $25,000 for the help.
  • The president also said he was embezzling aid money from the United States using fraudulent organizations, and siphoning money from the country’s Social Security system, according to the documents, which do not mention Mr. Hernández by name, describing him as “CC-4” — meaning co-conspirator 4 — though his identity is clear.
  • Mr. Hernández offered up the services of the Honduran armed forces and the attorney general’s office to facilitate cocaine transportation, and noted his own interest in accessing Mr. Fuentes’s cocaine laboratory, which was near Puerto Cortés, a major commercial shipping port, prosecutors said.
  • “The United States cannot remain silent in the face of deeply alarming corruption and human rights abuses being committed at the highest levels of the Honduran government,” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, said in a statement.
delgadool

The key to President Biden's successful vaccination campaign? Underpromise and overdeli... - 0 views

  • When President Biden pledged last week to amass enough shots by late May to inoculate every American adult, the pronouncement was greeted as a triumphant acceleration of a vaccination campaign that seemed only weeks earlier to be faltering.
  • A closer look at the ramp-up announced last week offers a more mixed picture, one in which the new administration expanded and bulked up a vaccine production effort whose key elements were in place when Mr. Biden took over for President Donald J. Trump. Both administrations deserve credit, although neither wants to grant much to the other.
  • At a White House vaccine “summit” on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Biden will announce that he intends to secure an additional 100 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson single-shot vaccine by the end of this year, with the goal of having enough on hand to vaccinate children and, if necessary, administer booster doses or reformulate the vaccine to combat emerging variants of the virus.
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  • All this enabled Mr. Biden to announce that his administration would have enough doses in hand by the end of May to cover all 257 million adults, two months earlier than he had promised just a few weeks earlier.
  • Carefully calibrated goals “avoid losses,” said David Axelrod, the senior strategist for President Barack Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012. The Biden administration, he added, “must have learned that lesson from watching Trump.”
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Two variants may account for half of New York City's virus cases, analysis finds. - The... - 0 views

  • “Unfortunately we have found that the new variants of Covid-19 are continuing to spread. And when you combine the variant of concern, B.1.1.7., the one first reported in the U.K., and the new variant of interest, B.1.5.2.6., that was first reported here in New York, together these new variants account for 51 percent of all cases that we have in the city right now. So for the variant of interest, B.1.5.2.6., that was reported here first in New York, our preliminary analysis indicates that it is probably more infectious than older strains of the virus. You know, what I referred last week to ‘Covid Classic.’ It may be similar in infectiousness to the B.1.1.7., the U.K. strain, but we’re not certain about this yet.
  • Genetic analysis suggests that roughly half of coronavirus cases in New York City now are caused by two new forms of the pathogen, city officials reported on Wednesday.
  • Another more contagious variant, B.1.1.7, first discovered in Britain, also is spreading steadily in the city, accounting for 12 percent of cases analyzed in the last week of February, up from 8 percent the prior week. B.1.1.7 may be more lethal than earlier versions of the virus.
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  • The variant was detected in about one-quarter of samples analyzed by the two academic groups in mid-February, one led by a group at Caltech, the other by researchers at Columbia University.
  • Dr. Anthony West, a computational biologist at Caltech, said in an interview on Wednesday that his ongoing research also showed that the B.1.526 variant was “increasing at a considerable pace in New York City” but that it remained “fairly localized” in the area.
  • “What we’ve seen in Europe when we hit that 50 percent mark, you’ll see cases surge,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. He urged the public not to let up on health measures and to get vaccinated as quickly as possible.
  • “It’s anybody’s guess, given the vaccine, the competition among the variants and everything we are trying to do to keep the virus low,” he said.
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Maryland Lifts Many Covid Restrictions - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Across Maryland on Wednesday, mayors, county executives, business owners and public health officials were parsing Gov. Larry Hogan’s surprise Tuesday announcement that he was loosening statewide Covid restrictions.
  • “With the pace of vaccinations rapidly rising and our health metrics steadily improving, the lifting of these restrictions is a prudent, positive step in the right direction and an important part of our economic recovery,” Mr. Hogan said. He was joined at his announcement by Dr. Robert R. Redfield, a former director the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who is now a senior adviser to the governor.
  • “I was shocked, I thought it was a joke,” said Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University and former Baltimore health commissioner.
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  • Baltimore County Executive John A. Olszewski, Jr., said, “leaders across Maryland have been forced to scramble to meet with our legal teams, health officials, and neighboring jurisdictions to understand how this impacts our own executive orders and to determine if and how to use our own local authority moving forward.”
  • Maryland ranks in the middle of states in the percentage of its people who have been given at least one vaccine dose, according to a New York Times database, and somewhat above average in the number of new cases it has been reporting lately relative to its population — 13 per 100,000 residents. All three of the variants of the virus that are being tracked by the C.D.C. have been reported there, but only one in significant numbers: B.1.1.7, which was first identified in Britain and is more transmissible and possibly more lethal than earlier versions of the virus.
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Meghan and Harry Interview Divides U.K. Press Over Race - The New York Times - 0 views

  • the Society of Editors, was forced into an embarrassing about-face after objections from more than 160 journalists of color as well as the editors of both The Guardian and The Financial Times.
  • “The U.K. media is not bigoted,” and accused Meghan and Harry of an unfounded attack on the profession.
  • That measure of restraint may be the result of the Mail on Sunday and MailOnline website having lost a recent court case involving the couple.
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  • Meghan, he added, has “put a bomb under all that and everyone is panicking.”
  • “I remember saying to them that we couldn’t just talk about more people of color in the door, it’s also about the content that’s being put out,” she said.
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Biden Seeks Help on Border From Mexican President - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Mr. López Obrador won the admiration of President Donald J. Trump for cooperating with his hard-line immigration agenda, and the Mexican president praised Mr. Trump during a call with Mr. Biden, then the president-elect, in December.
  • Mr. Biden is now hoping that Mr. López Obrador will become a partner in preventing another cycle of out-of-control migration from Central America, but that he will do so without resorting to the full range of policies Mr. Trump embraced.
  • Mr. López Obrador recently called for a new guest worker program for Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States, although Mr. Biden’s press secretary said on Monday the move would require legislation from Congress.
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  • “The United States and Mexico are stronger when we stand together,” Mr. Biden said at the beginning of a virtual meeting with the Mexican president, while acknowledging that the countries have not been “perfect” neighbors. He said that during the Obama administration, “we looked at Mexico as an equal — you are equal.”
  • The conversation came after a tumultuous start between the two leaders
  • “What you do in Mexico and how you succeed affects the rest of the hemisphere,” Mr. Biden told him.
  • Mr. Biden is not using the rule to expel unaccompanied migrant children, a practice that under Mr. Trump caused families to scramble to find Central American children and violated a diplomatic agreement with Mexico. I
  • But even as Mr. Biden seeks to unwind those policies, Mr. Mayorkas acknowledged that the United States continued to rely, for now, on a measure at the heart of Mr. Trump’s approach: a public health rule that requires border agents to quickly deport border crossers to Mexico without a chance to request asylum.
  • The Biden administration has also formed a task force to unite parents separated from their children under Mr. Trump’s family separations policy
  • Republicans have already signaled that they intend to seize on Mr. Biden’s reversals of his predecessor’s immigration policies as a cornerstone in their efforts to take back Congress in 2022 and recapture the White House two years later.
  • While Mr. Biden is unwinding the Migrant Protection Protocols program that forced migrants to wait in Mexico for an adjudication in their asylum cases, he has kept another Trump-era rule in place that empowers border agents to swiftly expel migrants and turn them over to Mexican authorities.
  • Mr. Biden has made immigration one of his top legislative and diplomatic priorities, moving quickly to raise Trump-era limits on refugees who can be allowed into the United States and calling on Congress to pass a far-reaching bill that would give a path to citizenship to 11 million undocumented immigrants already living in the country.
  • Despite the emergency rule, border agents have for weeks released a limited number of families into communities in South Texas because of a change in Mexican law that has been the subject of internal discussions between Mexican and American government officials in recent weeks, according to a senior administration official.
  • At the same time, pandemic restrictions remain in place on nonessential travelers who have long stimulated the local economy along the border, he said.
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Mexico Passes Bill to Legalize Cannabis - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Lawmakers in Mexico approved a bill Wednesday night to legalize recreational marijuana, a milestone for the country, which is in the throes of a drug war and could become the world’s largest cannabis market, leaving the United States between two pot-selling neighbors.
  • The 316-to-129 vote in Mexico’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, came more than two years after the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that the country’s ban on recreational marijuana was unconstitutional and more than three years after the country legalized medicinal cannabis.
  • The measure, as of Wednesday night, would allow adults to smoke marijuana and, with a permit, grow a small number of cannabis plants at home. It would also grant licenses for producers — from small farmers to commercial growers — to cultivate and sell the crop.
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  • If enacted, Mexico would join Canada and Uruguay in a small but growing list of countries that have legalized marijuana in the Americas, adding further momentum to the legalization movement in the region. In the United States, Democrats in the Senate have also promised to scrap federal prohibition of the drug this year.
  • Critics say it is unlikely to make a serious dent in Mexico’s soaring rates of cartel-fueled violence, and argue that it is unwelcome in a country where nearly two-thirds of people oppose legalizing marijuana, according to recent polling.
  • Security experts agree that the law’s practical impact on violence will likely be minimal: With 15 American states having now legalized marijuana, they argue, the crop has become a relatively small part of the Mexican drug trafficking business, with cartels focusing on more profitable products like fentanyl and methamphetamines.
  • Legalization “is an important step toward building peace in a country like ours, where for at least a decade or more, we’ve been immersed in an absurd war,” said Lucía Riojas Martínez
  • “But this bill falls short of achieving that,” she added.
  • “Doing this right could give Mexico an economic surplus,” he said.
  • “It’s a law for the rich, and marijuana should be for everybody,” said Ivania Medina Rodríguez, 18, a local activist. “They’re going for business before rights.”
  • Some activists fear that the law will overly favor large corporations that could obtain what the bill terms an “integral license,” giving them access to the entire marijuana supply chain, from seed to sale, while leaving small-scale producers and vendors locked out of the lucrative market.
  • “We live in a country where corruption and extortion is the norm,” said Zara Snapp, co-founder of the RIA Institute, a Mexico-city based drug policy research and advocacy group.
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Mexico Set to Reshape Power Sector to Favor the State - The New York Times - 0 views

  • MEXICO CITY — President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has never been short of criticisms about his predecessor’s legacy. But he has reserved a special contempt for the sweeping overhaul that opened Mexico’s tightly held energy industry to the private sector.
  • The measure, which was recently approved by Mexico’s Congress with the forceful support of Mr. López Obrador, would also limit the participation of private investors in the energy sector. Both effects are central to his long-held aim of restoring energy self-sufficiency and safeguarding Mexican sovereignty.
  • Opponents of the legislation say that it would not only fail to resuscitate the energy sector or help achieve energy independence but that it would also violate Mexico’s international commitments to reducing carbon emissions, run afoul of trade agreements and further chill foreign investment in Mexico just as the nation is struggling to regain economic momentum amid the pandemic.
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  • has faced almost universal criticism from opposition legislators, environmentalists, industry analysts, Mexican and international business groups and even Mexico’s antitrust watchdog.
  • But the new legislation effectively restores preferences for state-run, fossil-fuel-driven plants that generate power at higher costs and produce greater carbon emissions.
  • “I think the impact of this reform is a major reversal,” said Lourdes Melgar, who was a top energy official in the administration of Mr. López Obrador’s predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto. The Mexican president, she said, “has had a very nationalistic view of how to utilize resources.”
  • Gas-fired plants generate more than half of Mexico’s power; the vast majority of the natural gas is imported, with most of it coming from the United States, according to the Mexican government.
  • “This doesn’t have any economic logic,” said Víctor Ramírez Cabrera, spokesman for the Mexico, Climate and Energy Platform, a research group in Mexico City. He called the new model for power sourcing “absurd.”
  • “There is no way to comply with the Paris Agreement under these conditions,” Mr. Ramírez said. “Just give it up for dead.”
  • “Investment levels are dropping, and nobody wants to invest here,” said Israel Tello, a legal analyst at Integralia, a Mexico City-based consultancy group. “Legal uncertainty is the most lethal weapon against investment.”
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The D.C.C.C. Blacklist Is No More - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Consultants who work with challengers are no longer barred from receiving Democratic campaign money.
  • After she upset Mr. Crowley in a landslide, her team of techies gave their new tool a name, Reach, and they formed a company to assist other progressive campaigns. But one place where they found their services weren’t wanted was at the very top: the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
  • But apparently the committee’s leadership — which changed hands after the 2020 elections — has been listening. Its new chairman, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, officially reversed the policy on Tuesday.
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  • Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said she believed lifting the ban would open up the Democratic Party to some of the best digital campaigners in the country.
  • “That happened to some of the best digital vendors in the country,” he said. “They work on a lot of progressive primary campaigns, and they can’t work for the party’s handpicked candidates.”
  • “Once the party got more formally involved, we were booted from the account,” Gustavo Sanchez, a principal at Data for Progress, said in an interview. “It’s not because the campaign wanted us gone. It was more that the campaign is forced to make a choice as to whether it wants to get money from the party or use us as a vendor.”
  • He added, “We didn’t really do much House work after that because we know the campaigns have to choose.”
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Inflation Fear Lurks, Even as Officials Say Not to Worry - The New York Times - 0 views

  • proponents insisted that funneling $1.9 trillion to American households and businesses wouldn’t unshackle a long-vanquished monster: inflation.
  • nflation prospects increasingly influenced political commentary and Wall Street trading.
  • Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, is among those tracking the inflation threat. “There’s a very good chance you’re going to have a gangbuster economy for the rest of this year and easily into 2022, and the question is: Does that overheat everything?” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television last week.
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  • The volatile bond trading prompted several unnerving days on Wall Street last week. High-flying tech stocks — previously seen as a haven for those chasing market-beating yields — were particularly upended, though broad share indexes remain near record highs.
  • Rising bond yields have also caused an uptick in mortgage rates, threatening one of the brightest spots in the coronavirus economy, the housing market. Home prices have been surging, especially in the suburbs, but a sustained rise in borrowing costs would almost certainly undermine that trend.
  • Fed officials revised their framework for setting monetary policy last summer, saying that instead of shooting exactly for 2 percent inflation, they would aim for 2 percent on average — welcoming inflation that runs faster some of the time.
  • But those numbers are nothing like the staggering price increases of the 1970s, and evidence of renewed inflation is paltry so far.
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U.S. Allows Indoor Visits in Nursing Homes. Here's What to Know. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Biden administration published revised guidelines on Wednesday for nursing home visits during the coronavirus pandemic, allowing guests to go inside to see residents regardless of whether they or the residents have been vaccinated.
  • Federal officials said in the new guidance that outdoor visits were still preferable because of a lower risk of transmission, even when residents and guests have been fully vaccinated.
  • About 62.5 million people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, including about 32.9 million people who have been fully vaccinated by Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine or the two-dose series made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
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  • “C.M.S. recognizes the psychological, emotional and physical toll that prolonged isolation and separation from family have taken on nursing home residents and their families,” he said.
  • So-called compassionate care visits — when a resident’s health has severely deteriorated — should be allowed regardless of vaccination status or the county’s positivity rate, the guidance said.
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Facing Pressure, Biden Administration Scrambles to Shelter Migrant Children - The New Y... - 0 views

  • The Biden administration took steps on Wednesday to address surging migration to the border, restoring a program allowing some Central American children to apply from their home country for admission to the United States and searching for additional housing for the increasing number of young migrants who have been detained after crossing from Mexico.
  • That program and a $4 billion investment in Central America have been framed by the administration as crucial tools to addressing the poverty, persecution and corruption that have for years pushed vulnerable families to seek sanctuary in the United States
  • Officials apprehended a migrant along the border or at its entry ports more than 100,400 times in February, a roughly 28 percent increase from the prior month.
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  • Most of those migrants — more than 70,000 — were single adults rapidly turned back south under a pandemic emergency rule. The Biden administration has broken from the Trump administration in letting children into the United States to make good on the president’s promise to be more humane at the border.
  • By Monday, the number of children stuck in border detention facilities had tripled to more than 3,250,
  • More than 1,300 of those children were held longer than the three days allowed by law before they are required to be moved to shelters managed by the Health and Human Services Department.
  • Republicans are framing the situation as a crisis of Mr. Biden’s making, signaling an aim to use his immigration agenda as a political weapon against him in 2022.
  • Mr. Biden, however, has continued to use a Trump-era rule to rapidly turn away most migrants at the border, with the exception of unaccompanied minors.
  • the Biden administration is considering housing them at unused school buildings, military bases and even a NASA site, Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, Calif., according to a memo obtained by The Times.
  • “One of the things I think is important is we’ve seen surges before,” Ms. Jacobson said. “Surges tend to respond to hope. And there was a significant hope for a more humane policy.”
  • Ms. Jacobson also pointed to $4 billion in U.S. aid that will go to nonprofit and civil organizations as a way to bolster the region and keep Central Americans home.
  • But even if the approach eventually works, it will take time to reduce the number of migrants traveling to the United States
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