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Contents contributed and discussions participated by ethanshilling

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ethanshilling

The Trump Presidency Is History. They're Writing the First Draft. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...administration-historians.html

trump history

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  • From the day he took office, Donald J. Trump had America’s historians on high alert, as they took to news programs, Op-Ed pages and social media to help contextualize every norm-busting twist and turn (and tweet).
  • But last Friday, a group of 17 historians sat down for a calmer, more deliberate project: taking a first cut at writing a scholarly history of the administration.
  • And before the discussion began, Julian E. Zelizer, a professor at Princeton and the project’s organizer, laid out a basic difficulty.
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  • “The challenge with President Trump is understanding the foundational elements of his presidency as deeply rooted in basic features of American history,” he said
  • Four years ago, a similar group met at Princeton to prepare a volume about the Obama presidency (as one had for the Bush administration before it).
  • That this year’s gathering was happening virtually was a different reminder of the contingencies of history. Had it not been for the administration’s chaotic response to Covid-19, more than one participant speculated, Mr. Trump might well have handily triumphed in November — and this past-tense assessment wouldn’t be happening at all.
  • One thread running through the discussion was how to find the main narrative lines amid four years of near-constant chaos — including two impeachments — and parse out actual policies and on-the-ground impacts from the blizzard of President Trump’s words.
  • Merlin Chowkwanyun, a medical historian at Columbia University, said that reading Smith’s paper had left him “intrigued, and a little bit unnerved.”
  • But perhaps evaluating the Trump Covid-19 response through the usual lens of “efficacy and competence,” Chowkwanyun said, is “missing the point.”
  • Beverly Gage, a historian at Yale whose chapter was tentatively subtitled “How Trump Tried to Undermine the F.B.I. and Deconstruct the Administrative State,” noted the unexpected transformation of people like James B. Comey into liberal heroes.
  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a historian at Princeton who contributed a chapter on Black Lives matter, noted that the “first iteration” of the movement had participated in a government commission and made use of President Obama’s “open door” policy with activists.
  • In the end, the two days of discussion, not surprisingly, raised more questions than it definitively answered, including an unspoken one: Would the group be meeting to consider the Biden administration in the past tense in four years, or in eight?
  • “They don’t represent half the people,” she said. “There is going to be a lot of struggle in the years ahead for a more democratic view of America. I don’t think that chapter has been written yet.”
ethanshilling

Boulder Shooting: Live News and Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...boulder-colorado-shooting

US shooting

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  • The suspect was prone to angry outbursts, according to former classmates.
  • The suspect charged in the murders of 10 people at a Boulder, Colo., grocery store — the second mass shooting to shake the country in less than a week — is a 21-year-old man from a nearby Denver suburb who used an AR-15 type of assault rifle, law enforcement officials said.
  • Among the victims of the massacre on Monday was Officer Eric Talley, 51, with the Boulder Police Department, who had responded to a “barrage” of 911 calls about the shooting, Chief Maris Herold said.
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  • A police affidavit made public on Tuesday said that last week he bought a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic pistol, though it is not clear that weapon was involved in the shooting on Monday.
  • On Tuesday he was taken to a jail in Boulder and was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder. Officials gave no indication of a motive.
  • Court records show he was born in Syria in 1999, as did a Facebook page that appeared to belong to the suspect, giving his name as Ahmad Al Issa
  • The shooting came just six days after another gunman’s deadly shooting spree at massage parlors in the Atlanta area.
  • A video streamed live from outside of the grocery store on Monday had appeared to show a suspect — handcuffed, shirtless and with his right leg appearing to be covered in blood — being taken from the building by officers.
  • “I thought I was going to die,” said Alex Arellano, 35, who was working in the store’s meat department when he heard a series of gunshots and saw people running toward an exit.
ethanshilling

As Europe's Covid Lockdowns Drag On, Police and Protesters Clash More - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rus-europe-police-bristol.html

pandemic europe police

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  • In Bristol, an English college town where the pubs are usually packed with students, there were fiery clashes between the police and protesters.
  • In Kassel, a German city known for its ambitious contemporary art festival, the police unleashed pepper spray and water cannons on anti-lockdown marchers.
  • From Spain and Denmark to Austria and Romania, frustrated people are lashing out at the restrictions on their daily lives.
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  • In Bristol, the trigger for the clashes was sweeping new legislation that would empower the police to sharply restrict demonstrations.
  • Right-wing politicians who bridle at lockdown restrictions are as angry as the left-wing climate protesters who regularly clog Trafalgar Square in London as part of the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations.
  • In Britain, where the rapid pace of vaccinations has raised hopes for a faster opening of the economy than the government is willing to countenance, frustration over recent police conduct has swelled into a national debate over the legitimacy of the police
  • The mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, harshly criticized the violence, blaming much of it on outsider agitators who he said had seized on a peaceful demonstration as an excuse to pick a fight with the establishment.
  • The violent clashes in Bristol, which left two police vans charred and 20 officers injured — one with a punctured lung — are deeply frustrating to Mr. Rees, who is the son of a Jamaican father and an English mother.
  • This time, however, he fears that the images of shattered windows and burned police vehicles will help Prime Minister Boris Johnson pass the police law, which has already cleared two key hurdles in Parliament.
ethanshilling

'I've Lost a Lot of Faith': Suburban Parents Push Schools to Reopen Faster - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-jersey-schools-reopening.html

us schools biden pandemic

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  • Frustration over pandemic reopening plans is growing in New Jersey’s affluent suburbs, where taxes are high and many students are barely in classrooms.
  • “I’ve lost a lot of faith in the district,” said Ms. Walker, who participated in a recent sit-in outside her 7-year-old son’s elementary school. “We’ve been stopped and started a dozen times.”
  • Most districts in New Jersey have partially reopened, but one in four children still live in a district where public schools are closed.
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  • As the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines has accelerated and President Biden has signaled a push for broader reopenings, frustration among parents has grown
  • These parents have filed federal lawsuits, held protests, created online petitions and stormed virtual board of education meetings to demand expanded in-person instruction.
  • The pressure to open schools more fully comes as the infection rate in New Jersey, which is small and densely populated, remains stubbornly high
  • After lawsuits and the intervention of a mediator, some of the district’s youngest children restarted school in person on March 15, but most students have not been back in class since the start of the pandemic.
  • Anger at the pace of reopening has led some families who can afford it to enroll their children in private schools, start home-schooling them or move.
  • In Princeton, where schools are among the best in the state, hundreds of middle and high school parents have joined webinars and school board meetings, many asking for additional face-to-face teaching.
  • The first lady, Jill Biden, traveled to New Jersey last week to promote the $1.9 trillion stimulus package, which includes $130 billion for schools.
  • Two days after Dr. Biden’s visit, Gov. Philip D. Murphy offered his most unambiguous comments yet about school reopenings, suggesting a shift away from the largely hands-off approach he had maintained since September.
  • “It is time to stem this tide before more students fall away,” Mr. Murphy said. “A full year out of their classrooms is not how students move forward or how our world-class extraordinary educators move forward in their professions, for that matter.”
  • Marie Blistan, a close ally of Mr. Murphy who leads the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, said expanded vaccination access for educators and the infusion of federal funding had put schools in a better position to reopen more fully.
ethanshilling

Senate Panel to Debate Gun Control After Two Mass Shootings - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...senate-gun-control.html

us Politics guns

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  • The Senate Judiciary Committee will examine gun control measures at a hearing on Tuesday morning, in the wake of two mass shootings in the past week that left at least 18 people dead and created mounting pressure for Congress to break a decades-long cycle of inaction on gun violence.
  • House Democrats passed two bills this month aimed at expanding and strengthening background checks for gun buyers, by applying them to all gun buyers and extending the time the F.B.I. has to vet those flagged by the national instant check system.
  • But the twin pieces of legislation passed in the House have been deemed too expansive by most Republicans — only eight House Republicans voted to advance the universal background check legislation
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  • The renewed focus on gun control is expected to cast attention back on Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, who opposes dismantling the legislative filibuster but has long labored — fruitlessly — to pass a bipartisan control proposal.
  • Following the 2012 shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Manchin brokered a deal with Senator Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, to close legal loopholes that allow people who purchase firearms at gun shows or on the internet to avoid background checks
ethanshilling

Meet Wyoming's New Black Sheriff, the First in State History - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-black-sheriff-appelhans.html

us wyoming culture police

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  • “I don’t necessarily represent or identify with everybody in law enforcement,” said Sheriff Appelhans, who was appointed as sheriff of Albany County, Wyo., in December. “I come in with some different ideas of how to go about doing things.”
  • Sheriff Appelhans, a Black man, is now at the helm of one of the most historically white law enforcement institutions in Wyoming, one of the country’s whitest states.
  • He is the first Black sheriff in the 131 years that Wyoming has been a state.
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  • Sheriff Appelhans, 39, is inheriting a troubled department plagued by the kinds of problems that have been documented in sheriff’s offices across the region.
  • A Colorado native, Sheriff Appelhans carries little of the stiff formality often associated with sheriffs’ offices.
  • Sheriff Appelhans’s approach is a stark departure for a Wyoming sheriff, a storied, sometimes archaic institution central to the lore of a disappearing American West.
  • In Wyoming, sheriffs are elected to four-year terms with no limits; many hold office for decades.
  • “I think what he brings to the sheriff’s office is a calmness: He’s soft-spoken, but it doesn’t mean he’s a pushover,” said Linda Devine, a defense lawyer in Laramie who is a proponent of overhauling criminal justice.
  • In the meantime, he plans to embark on an aggressive approach to bringing cultural change in the sheriff’s office. He is leading an effort to coordinate police response with resources like shelters, mental health professionals and support groups.
  • Sheriff Appelhans said he has unilateral authority over hiring decisions at the department and is actively seeking applicants, adding that he intends to recruit more Black, Latino and female officers.
  • Sheriffs’ offices in Wyoming have a long history of racial bias, advocates say. The issue confronted Sheriff Appelhans early in his tenure: On his second day in office, a Wyoming state representative, Cyrus Western, tweeted a racist gif from the movie “Blazing Saddles” in reference to Sheriff Appelhans’s appointmen
ethanshilling

AstraZeneca Vaccine Under More Scrutiny After Denmark Death - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-astrazeneca-side-effects.html

vaccine world pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 21 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Denmark reported on Saturday that two people had experienced brain hemorrhages after receiving the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, one of whom died.
  • A spokesperson for the Capital Region of Denmark confirmed the death, and the Danish Ritzau news agency reported that the other person, a female civil servant in her 30s, was critically ill.
  • Millions of people in dozens of countries have received the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine with few reports of ill effects, but the European Medicines Agency, the continent’s top drug regulator, conducted a review after several countries paused the use of the vaccine.
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  • On Thursday, the agency said that it considered the vaccine safe, although it would continue to watch for any connections to blood disorders.
  • Some of the continuing caution has been driven by preliminary findings from medical experts in Norway and Germany that suggested a possible link between the vaccine and the extremely rare blood disorders.
  • This is the second death in Denmark after a person was given the AstraZeneca vaccine. Norway is examining the deaths of two people who received the vaccine.
  • “Right now we are examining whether this is the exact same disease picture with multiple blood clots, a low count of platelets and hemorrhages,” Tanja Erichsen, a director at the Danish Medicines Agency
  • Dr. James Bussel, an expert on platelet disorders and a professor emeritus at Weill Cornell Medicine, said the occurrence of abnormal clotting and low platelets in people under 50 is uncommon.
  • Researchers in both Germany and Norway will continue investigating and in Germany, where the vaccine is again being administered, doctors are now warning anyone receiving an AstraZeneca shot to see a doctor immediately if they have headaches, dizziness or blurred vision more than three days afterward.
ethanshilling

Traffic Cops Return to Rome's Landmark Piazza - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-traffic-officers.html

Rome pandemic

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  • If, as it’s said, all roads lead to Rome, then they intersect at Piazza Venezia, the downtown hub of the Italian capital, watched over by a traffic officer on a pedestal who choreographs streamlined circulation out of automotive chaos.
  • “Every person of note who comes to Rome has to pass through Piazza Venezia — you can’t avoid it.”
  • “In this difficult period, I think that it was seen as a sign of something returning to normal,” said Fabio Grillo, 53, who, with 16 years under his belt, is the senior member of the team of four or five municipal police officers who direct traffic from the Piazza Venezia pedestal.
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  • Apart from regular traffic, Piazza Venezia is also a crossroads that leads to City Hall, the Parliament, Italy’s presidential palace and a national monument where visiting heads of state routinely pay homage — which all contributes to the chaos at the hub.
  • “This piazza is the aortic epicenter of the country,” said Angelo Gallicchio, 62, who has managed a newspaper kiosk in the square since 1979.
  • For many Romans and tourists alike, those traffic controllers are as much a symbol of the Eternal City as the Colosseum or the Pantheon.
  • It’s notable that Romans in particular should feel so friendly toward someone paid to punish traffic infractions, which are notoriously frequent in the Italian capital.
  • Until the 1970s, every Jan. 6, the feast day of Epiphany, Italians would express their gratitude to the officers by covering traffic pedestals with gifts. The loot was then given to charity, Mr. Grillo said.
  • That affection has not been without some criticism, however. The image of the municipal police, of which the traffic officers are a part, has been tarnished in recent years by investigations into possible wrongdoing — like closing an eye to illegal construction and taking kickbacks
  • Today, Piazza Venezia has the only traffic pedestal left in the city. “It is part of the architecture of the piazza,” said Mr. Gallicchio, the kiosk owner.
  • Now, with the work done on the piazza this year, the officers say they are keen to get back to a job they love and hopefully, become a focus of tourists’ cameras again after the pandemic passes.
ethanshilling

Spectators From Overseas Are Barred From Tokyo Olympics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tokyo-olympics-spectators.html

world olympics pandemic

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  • Spectators from overseas will not be allowed to attend the Summer Olympics in Japan, organizers said on Saturday, making a major concession to the realities of Covid-19 even as they forged ahead with plans to hold the world’s largest sporting event.
  • The Tokyo Games, which begin in July, were originally scheduled for 2020 but were delayed by a year because of the pandemic.
  • Seiko Hashimoto, president of the Tokyo committee, promised at a news conference on Saturday that the lack of international spectators would not spoil the Games.
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  • The organizing committees will now have the enormous headache of arranging refunds for ticket buyers. Overseas buyers purchased 600,000 tickets to Olympic events, as well as 30,000 tickets to the Paralympic Games starting in August, organizers said.
  • Officials said on Saturday that they would meet again in April to discuss how many spectators would be allowed into Olympic venues.
  • Thomas Bach, the president of the I.O.C., has encouraged national organizing committees to secure vaccines for athletes, and he announced this month that China had offered to provide vaccinations for participants who required one ahead of the Games.
  • Japanese fans could take up some of the slack. Local demand for tickets far outstripped the supply, at least before the pandemic.
  • Japan declared a widespread state of emergency in early January after a rise in infections. Since then, most areas have lifted the declaration. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced this week that it would be ended in Tokyo.
  • Barring foreign spectators is unlikely to allay the public’s concerns about the Games, given that thousands of athletes, coaches, officials and journalists will still come for the event.
  • “Since we are being barred, it is only right for them to make everyone whole and refund all of the money paid,” Mr. Brown said before the announcement was made.
  • “It would be real painful watching this at home on TV and knowing they have the money, and not knowing when you’re going to get it back.”
ethanshilling

Democrats Confront a Surge at the Border - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-biden-border-immigration.html

Politics biden immigration

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  • The Democratic-led House on Thursday passed bills that would offer a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, including so-called Dreamers, and eventually grant legal status to almost a million farmworkers and their families.
  • Democratic lawmakers hoped to draw a clear line between themselves and Republicans on some of the more popular and uncontroversial elements of Biden’s broader immigration plan.
  • A flood of asylum seekers and other migrants has arrived since the start of the Biden administration, drawn in part by the new president’s more accommodating tone compared with his predecessor’s.
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  • Republicans have seized upon the surge, labeling it the “Biden border crisis” in a new series of political ads and splashing coverage across conservative media.
  • Mr. Biden and his homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, are balancing their desire to reject Trump’s uncompromising approach — particularly with regard to unaccompanied minors, who have arrived at the border this month at a rate of roughly 400 people a day
  • A month ago, immigration didn’t register as a top concern for most Americans. A Pew Research Center poll in early February found that just 38 percent of the country thought that “reducing illegal immigration” should be a major priority among the United States’ foreign policy goals.
  • But in a CNN poll released last week, immigration was the only issue, from a list of seven, on which Americans gave Mr. Biden meaningfully negative reviews.
  • Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee this week, Mr. Mayorkas acknowledged that the situation at the border “is undoubtedly difficult,” and sought to manage expectations.
ethanshilling

House Votes to Avert Deep Medicare Cuts to Pay for $1.9 Trillion Stimulus Plan - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...care-stimulus-coronavirus.html

us Politics pandemic

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  • The House voted on Friday to avert an estimated $36 billion in cuts to Medicare next year and tens of billions more from farm subsidies and other social safety net programs, moving to stave off deep spending reductions that would otherwise be made to pay for the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill enacted last week.
  • In passing the virus aid plan, Democrats used a fast-track budget process to push past Republican opposition, arguing that urgent needs brought on by the pandemic outweighed concerns about running up the national debt.
  • Democrats remained confident that, even though they opposed the stimulus package, Republican senators would eventually support legislation to avoid cutting Medicare, farm subsidies and social services block grants to pay for it.
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  • In remarks on the House floor, Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the chairman of the Budget Committee, described the bill as “a loose end we have to tie up before our work is finished.”
  • The politically unpopular specter of drastic Medicare cuts during a pandemic is likely to prod lawmakers to a deal before the year is out.
  • The debate over paying for the stimulus stems from a 2010 law called the Statutory Pay-as-You-Go Act that requires certain deficit spending to be automatically offset by cuts to federal programs.
  • Many mandatory spending programs could be completely defunded, including social services block grants, a Justice Department program that provides aid to crime victims, and the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.
  • “We need to be working together, as we did for you when you were giving tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans,” Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, said in a comment directed at Republicans.
  • Conservatives see the confrontation as an opportunity to criticize overspending by the Democrats.
ethanshilling

Georgia Attacks Prompt a Muted Reaction in Asia - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...asia-reaction-atlanta.html

georgia asia

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  • When six of the eight victims of this week’s shootings at Atlanta-area spas were confirmed to be of Asian descent, the news reopened wrenching debates in the United States about anti-Asian violence, bigotry and misogyny.
  • The South Korean consulate in Atlanta has said that four of the people who died in the attacks on three massage parlors on Tuesday were of Korean descent.
  • The two others of Asian descent are believed to have been of Chinese descent.
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  • In South Korea, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Thursday that the government was paying close attention to the situation in Georgia, “with high interest for the safety of South Koreans living abroad.”
  • On social media, some users in South Korea expressed concern for friends or relatives in the United States. Others tagged posts with the hashtag #stopAsianHate.
  • Other South Korean users pushed back against the comments by a law enforcement official in Georgia, who said after the attacks — using the gunman’s own words — that the man’s actions were “not racially motivated” but caused by “sexual addiction.”
  • In China, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry on Thursday condemned the apparent rise in anti-Asian hate incidents and accused “some politicians in the last U.S. administration and some anti-China forces inside the U.S.” for fanning racism and hatred with anti-China rhetoric.
  • On Chinese social media platforms, some users said that the Georgia attacks were not surprising in light of longstanding discrimination against Asian-Americans in the United States.
  • Some people in South Korea, China and elsewhere in Asia may have been less likely to take the Georgia victims’ deaths seriously because of stigmas associated with massage parlors, said Madeline Y. Hsu, a professor of Asian-American history
  • Stories about gun violence and racially motivated hate crimes in America often go viral in China, for example, in part because that country’s state-controlled media likes to highlight dysfunctional aspects of American society.
  • Hu Zhaoying, a university student in the southern Chinese province of Hunan, said the general lack of empathy for the Atlanta victims in China was not surprising.
ethanshilling

Police Mishandled Black Lives Matter Protests, Reports Say - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sts-policing-george-floyd.html

us crisis police protests

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  • For many long weeks last summer, protesters in American cities faced off against their own police forces in what proved to be, for major law enforcement agencies across the country, a startling display of violence and disarray.
  • In Philadelphia, police sprayed tear gas on a crowd of mainly peaceful protesters trapped on an interstate who had nowhere to go and no way to breathe.
  • In Chicago, officers were given arrest kits so old that the plastic handcuffs were decayed or broken. Los Angeles officers were issued highly technical foam-projectile launchers for crowd control, but many of them had only two hours of training
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  • Now, months after the demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in May, the full scope of the country’s policing response is becoming clearer.
  • In city after city, the reports are a damning indictment of police forces that were poorly trained, heavily militarized and stunningly unprepared for the possibility that large numbers of people would surge into the streets
  • The New York Times reviewed reports by outside investigators, watchdogs and consultants analyzing the police response to protests in nine major cities, including four of the nation’s largest.
  • Almost uniformly, the reports said departments need more training in how to handle large protests.
  • Those first days of protest after Mr. Floyd’s killing presented an extraordinary law enforcement challenge, experts say, one that few departments were prepared to tackle.
  • The reports are strikingly similar, a point made by the Indianapolis review, which said that officers’ responses “were not dissimilar to what appears to have occurred in cities around the country.”
  • Departments also were criticized for not planning for protests, despite evidence that they would be large
  • As with the protests in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 that culminated in the Capitol riot, police also did not understand how angry people were, in some cases because they lacked resources devoted to intelligence and outreach that would have put them in better touch with their communities.
  • On May 29, Indianapolis police showed up with helmets, face shields, reinforced vests and batons. Protesters told investigators this “made the police look militarized and ready for battle.”
  • The reports repeatedly blamed police departments for escalating violence instead of taming it. At times, police looked as if they were on the front lines of a war.
  • In Portland, where protests continued nightly, police officers used force more than 6,000 times during six months, according to lawyers with the U.S. Department of Justice
  • In Denver, officers used similar “less lethal” weapons against people who yelled about officers’ behavior. Officers also improperly fired projectiles that hit or nearly hit heads and faces, according to the report by the city’s independent police monitor.
  • For decades, criminal justice experts have warned that warrior-like police tactics escalate conflict at protests instead of defusing it.
  • The independent report on the Los Angeles police, commissioned by the City Council, said officers who may have had insufficient training in how to use the weapons fired into dynamic crowds. “To be precise takes practice,” it said.
  • The Chicago police response on the night of May 29, when hundreds of people marched through the streets, “was marked by poor coordination, inconsistency, and confusion,” the city’s Office of Inspector General found.
  • Chicago police also did not have enough computers to process large numbers of arrestees. In Los Angeles, police did not have enough buses to transport arrested people — a problem the department has had for a decade
  • All told, the reports suggest the likelihood of problems in the event of future protests. The trial now underway in Minneapolis of the officer facing the most serious charges in Mr. Floyd’s death, Derek Chauvin, is one potential trigger.
ethanshilling

The Pandemic's Silver Lining? This Village May Have Been Saved by It. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pain-coronavirus-pyrenees.html

pandemic spain village

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  • The castle that crowns the hill above the village of Gósol used to be among the grandest along Spain’s border with France, with views of fertile farms and forests rich in timber that stretched up to the cloudy mountaintops.
  • But the castle is in ruins now, and until last year, Gósol had fallen on hard times, too. The town census had gone down in nearly every count since the 1960s.
  • It took a pandemic for Spaniards to heed his call.Among those who packed their bags was Gabriela Calvar, a 37-year-old who once owned a bar in a beach town near Barcelona, but watched it go under during last year’s lockdowns and decamped to the town in the mountains for a new start.
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  • It was the rare silver lining of a troubled time: About 20 or 30 newcomers to a dwindling town of 140 souls, where even the tiny school on the town plaza got a second chance after parents started enrolling their children there.
  • “If it weren’t for Covid, the school would have closed,” said Josep Tomás Puig, 67, a retired mail carrier in Gósol who spent his life watching the younger generation depart to Spain’s cities.
  • Rafael López, a former renewable energy entrepreneur whose business collapsed in Spain’s 2008 financial crisis, was interested. “My mom said she saw this on TV,” said Mr. López. “And I said, ‘Well, what do you say if we take the car and go have a look, see what’s there?’”
  • For decades in Spain, a landscape of walled cities, stone bridges and ancient winding roads has become mostly abandoned as generations of young people left for cities. La España Vacía, or “the Empty Spain,” is the phrase that was coined to describe the blight.
  • Yet tiny Gósol had fared better than many others, residents say.It sits in the wealthy autonomous region of Catalonia, in a majestic valley in the Pyrenees Mountains that brought tourists and part-time residents in the summer months.
  • By 2015, the situation had gotten critical. The number of permanent residents was 120 and falling. The mayor went on television warning, among other things, that the school was about to close because it was down to five students.
  • “And if the school closed, the town might as well have closed too.”
  • Over the next months, hundreds of people came to Gósol to kick the tires. They said they were impressed by the quaint homes and the ruined castle atop the hill.
  • As the coronavirus began to spread last year, Spain entered another economic crisis, this one on a scale even greater than the collapse that had brought Mr. López in 2008.
  • In Castelldefels, a seaside town southwest of Barcelona, life was starting to look upside-down for Ms. Calvar, the bar owner who came to Gósol in September.
  • The path seemed clear when, passing through Gósol one day, Ms. Calvar learned that the owner of the grocery store on the plaza was at looking to sell the business.
  • The schoolhouse sits along the plaza, a place of kid-sized chairs and tables, paper planets hanging from the ceiling and an incubator warming eggs.
  • Classes ended at 5 p.m. and Ms. Otero, the telecommuting web designer who had moved to Gósol from Barcelona last June, was waiting for two of her children, 6 and 7.
  • There was a note of regret in her voice when she thought about the end of the pandemic, and the pressure that she knew would inevitably build to return to Barcelona. She didn’t want Gósol to disappear yet, she said.
ethanshilling

US to Send Millions of Covid-19 Vaccine Doses to Mexico and Canada - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...exico-vaccine-coronavirus.html

Policy mexico canada pandemic

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  • The United States plans to send millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico and Canada, the White House said Thursday, a notable step into vaccine diplomacy just as the Biden administration is quietly pressing Mexico to curb the stream of migrants coming to the border.
  • Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said the United States was planning to share 2.5 million doses of the vaccine with Mexico and 1.5 million with Canada, adding that it was “not finalized yet, but that is our aim.”
  • Tens of millions of doses of the vaccine have been sitting in American manufacturing sites. While their use has already been approved in dozens of countries, including Mexico and Canada, the vaccine has not yet been authorized by American regulators.
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  • Mr. Biden asked President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico in a video call this month whether more could be done to help solve the problem, according to Mexican officials and another person briefed on the conversation.
  • Mexican officials acknowledge that relations between the United States and Mexico, which has suffered one of the world’s deadliest coronavirus epidemics, would be buoyed by a shipment of doses south.
  • Several European countries suspended use of the AstraZeneca vaccine this week, a precaution because some people who had received the shot later developed blood clots and severe bleeding.
  • Until Thursday, all of Canada’s vaccine supply had come from Europe or India, and Canada’s roll out has proceeded at a slow pace compared with the United States and many other countries.
  • A Biden administration official declined to comment further on the negotiations with Mexico, but noted that both countries shared a common goal of reducing migration by addressing its root causes, and said they were working closely to stem the flow of people streaming to the border.
  • Mexico has agreed to increase its presence on its southern border with Guatemala to deter migration from Central America, one of the government officials said,
  • The Biden administration’s appeal to do more against migration has put Mexico in a difficult position. While Mr. Trump strong-armed Mexico into militarizing the border, some Mexican officials argue that his harsh policies may have at times helped lessen their load by deterring migrants from attempting to make the journey north.
  • Many Canadians have expressed dismay that the United States had not shared any supplies with Canada, where no coronavirus vaccines are manufactured.
  • But on Thursday, Europe’s drug regulator declared the vaccine safe. AstraZeneca has also said that a review of 17 million people who received the vaccine found they were less likely than others to develop dangerous clots.
  • Beijing is shipping vaccines to dozens of countries, including some in Africa and Latin America. Russia has supplied its vaccine to Hungary and Slovakia.
  • Local government officials in Ciudad Juárez and shelter operators say Mexico is dialing up operations to capture and deport migrants along the northern border.
  • Despite the very public tensions with Mexico under Mr. Trump, Mr. López Obrador has been wary of the Biden administration, concerned that it might be more willing to interfere on domestic issues like labor rights or the environment.
  • The need for vaccines in Mexico is clear. About 200,000 people have died in the country from the virus — the third highest death toll in the world — and it has been relatively slow to vaccinate its population.
  • “Mexico needs cooperation from the U.S. in getting its economy jump-started and getting vaccines to get out of the health crisis,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
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Joe Biden and Kamala Harris plan to visit with Asian-American leaders in Atlanta. - The... - 0 views

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biden harris shooting atlanta

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  • President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will meet in Atlanta on Friday with community leaders and state lawmakers from the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community, and cancel a planned political event, the White House announced on Thursday.
  • “Given the tragedy in Georgia on Tuesday night, President Biden and Vice President Harris will postpone the evening political event in Georgia for a future date,” officials announced in a news release.
  • Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris had been scheduled to visit the city as part of a promotional tour for the $1.9 trillion economic relief package that Mr. Biden signed into law last week.
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  • On Thursday, Mr. Biden ordered that flags outside the White House, other public buildings, military posts and naval stations in the District of Columbia and throughout the country and its territories be flown at half-staff to honor the victims of the Atlanta spa shootings.
  • Mr. Biden said on Wednesday that “the question of motivation is still to be determined” in the Georgia shootings, while renewing his concerns over a recent surge in violence against Asian-Americans.
  • In his first prime-time speech as president last week, marking a year of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Biden denounced “vicious hate crimes against Asian-Americans, who have been attacked, harassed, blamed and scapegoated.”
  • Ms. Harris, the first woman and the first Asian-American to hold the office, expressed condolences for the families of the victims on Wednesday
  • “This speaks to a larger issue, which is the issue of violence in our country and what we must do to never tolerate it and to always speak out against it,” Ms. Harris said
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Liberals Grow Impatient With President Biden's Foreign Policy Decisions - The New York ... - 0 views

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biden Policy Politics

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  • Earlier this week, Biden administration officials passed around with bemusement some words of praise from an unexpected source: Jared Kushner.
  • In an opinion essay for The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Kushner, former President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser on Middle East issues, said that President Biden “did the right thing” and had “called Iran’s bluff” by refusing to make new concessions to lure Tehran into talks about restoring a nuclear deal abandoned by the Trump administration.
  • “I would take this in the Biden White House as a giant, blinking red light that maybe what I’m doing is not right because Jared Kushner is finding ways to praise it,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama who worked closely on the 2015 nuclear agreement
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  • Iran is just one of several foreign policy issues frustrating Mr. Biden’s base two months into his presidency.
  • The Middle East, which Biden officials hope to de-emphasize as they turn America’s attention to China, is the source of many complaints. Topping the list is Mr. Biden’s decision not to unilaterally rejoin the Iran nuclear deal by reversing harsh sanctions imposed on Tehran by Mr. Trump after he abandoned the agreement in 2018.
  • After seeing Mr. Biden deliver a transformational $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, progressives are asking why his foreign policy feels so conventional.
  • Some prominent liberals call those moves welcome, but also low-hanging fruit, and say that on matters requiring harder trade-offs and political courage, Mr. Biden is too risk-averse.
  • On Wednesday, Mr. Biden fueled the discontent when he conceded in an interview with ABC News that it would be “tough” to meet a May 1 deadline, set under the Trump administration, to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, a high priority for liberals impatient to end what they call “endless” American wars.
  • “The Biden administration has bought the Trump analysis that these sanctions give America leverage, even though the sanctions didn’t give Trump any leverage on Iran,” said Joseph Cirincione, a longtime arms control expert who consulted closely with Obama administration officials over the nuclear deal.
  • Critics of Mr. Biden’s early Middle East policy have focused their attention on Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the region.
  • Mr. McGurk helped shape Mr. Biden’s decision, decried on the left, not to directly punish Prince Mohammed even after the White House declassified an intelligence report that found that he, the de facto Saudi leader, approved the operation that led to the murder of Mr. Khashoggi in 2018.
  • Even before that disclosure, many liberals complained that “the Biden foreign policy team includes no one who has been a clear and consistent opponent of our disastrous interventions across the world,”
  • On Tuesday, a group of Democratic Senate and House members called for a $12 billion increase to the U.S. international affairs budget to fund diplomacy.
  • Ms. Lee is also among those weary of extended deadlines for withdrawals from Afghanistan like the one Mr. Biden hinted at on Wednesday.“We’ve got to bring our troops home,” she said, “and we’ve got to do that quickly.”
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NASA Suceeds in 2nd Test of New S.L.S. Moon Rocket - The New York Times - 0 views

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us nasa

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  • On Thursday, NASA’s new big rocket, the Space Launch System, fired its engines for more than 8 minutes and did not go anywhere.
  • This test, called a hot fire, was a crucial step for the rocket, which has been in development for more than a decade.
  • The Space Launch System is the 21st-century equivalent of the Saturn 5 that took NASA astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s.
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  • The first time NASA attempted this hot fire test in January, the engines rumbled to life. But instead of firing for eight minutes, the rocket’s computer shut down the engines after only about one minute.
  • Although there are many other rockets available today, they are too small to launch spacecraft that can carry people to the moon.
  • Although the Space Launch System will be expensive — up to $2 billion a launch for a rocket that can be used only once — Congress has provided steadfast financial support for it so far.
  • “The reason why we test on the ground in that sort of environment is we want to control the system and monitor the system closely and make sure if we have a problem we can shut down,” said Steve Jurczyk, who is serving as NASA’s acting administrator as the agency waits for President Biden to name his nominee for the post
  • Because of the size of the Space Launch System core stage — more than 200 feet tall and 27.6 feet wide — the test stand has been modified with an additional steel superstructure.
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N.F.L. Signs Media Deals Worth Over $100 Billion - The New York Times - 0 views

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pandemic nfl

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  • The N.F.L. signed new media rights agreements with CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and Amazon collectively worth about $110 billion over 11 years, nearly doubling the value of its previous contracts.
  • The contracts, which will take effect in 2023 and run through the 2033 season, will cement the N.F.L.’s status as the country’s most lucrative sports league.
  • “Along with our recently completed labor agreement with the N.F.L.P.A., these distribution agreements bring an unprecedented era of stability to the League and will permit us to continue to grow and improve our game,” Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.
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  • Each of the broadcasters’ deals include agreements for their respective streaming platforms, while Amazon will show Thursday night games on its Amazon Prime Video service.
  • The jump in revenue will not initially change the fortunes of players, who are locked into a 10-year collective bargaining agreement narrowly ratified in March 2020
  • It will be the first major expansion to the N.F.L. season in more than four decades, when teams began playing 16 games, up from 14, in 1978
  • The league was able to fully complete its 2020 season on schedule in part because it worked hand-in-hand with the N.F.L. Players Association to hammer out Covid-19 protocols and a raft of other rules.
  • Before the coronavirus pandemic, many television and digital media executives said the N.F.L. had the upper hand in negotiating major increases in rights fees because the league had a long-term labor deal in place and because its programming took less of a ratings hit than other broadcasts of U.S.-based sports during the pandemic.
  • N.F.L. games are also the most watched programming on television by far, making up 76 of the 100 most watched television programs in 2020.
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Stimulus and Biden Administration News: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

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US politics biden trump

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Senate is set to debate President Biden’s nearly $2 trillion stimulus plan on Friday as Democrats prepare to barrel past widespread opposition from Republican lawmakers and approve billions of dollars in funding for unemployed Americans, vaccine distribution, small businesses, schools and hospitals.
  • Senators will reconvene with three hours of debate before engaging in a rapid-fire series of votes on proposed amendments.
  • The threat of yet another late night in the Senate comes after Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, demanded that a group of Senate clerks read all 628 pages of the legislation on the floor before debate could continue.
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  • But the efforts to slow action on the Senate floor to a crawl are expected to have little effect on the final legislation.
  • “The horrific events of January 6 were a direct and foreseeable consequence of the defendants’ unlawful actions,” asserts the civil suit, filed for Mr. Swalwell in Federal District Court in Washington. “As such, the defendants are responsible for the injury and destruction that followed.”
  • A House Democrat who unsuccessfully prosecuted Donald J. Trump at his impeachment trial last month sued him in federal court on Friday for acts of terrorism and incitement to riot
  • If the sweeping pandemic relief package makes it to Mr. Biden’s desk, it will mark the first major legislative accomplishment of his administration.
  • The suit brought by Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, accuses Mr. Trump and key allies of inciting the deadly attack and conspiring with rioters to try to prevent Congress from formalizing President Biden’s election victory.
  • Though not a criminal case, the suit charges Mr. Trump and his allies with several counts including conspiracy to violate civil rights, negligence, incitement to riot, disorderly conduct, terrorism and inflicting serious emotional distress
  • A majority of the Senate, including seven Republicans, voted to find Mr. Trump “guilty” based on the same factual record last month, but the vote fell short of the two-thirds needed to convict him.
  • In a statement, Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump, blasted Mr. Swalwell as a “a lowlife with no credibility” but did not comment on the merits of the case.
  • During the Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers flatly denied that he was responsible for the assault and made broad assertions that he was protected by the First Amendment when he urged supporters gathered on Jan. 6 to “fight like hell” to “stop the steal” he said was underway at the Capitol.
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