Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by mariedhorne

Contents contributed and discussions participated by mariedhorne

mariedhorne

U.K. Delays Second Covid-19 Vaccine Dose as Europe Ponders How to Speed Up Immunization... - 0 views

  • The U.K. will focus on giving as many people as possible a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, even if this delays administering a second one, the government said Tuesday, despite a lack of data about the extent of the immunity conferred by a single dose.
  • A vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE was the first to be authorized in the West. It is now being unrolled globally after emergency authorizations by various regulators on the basis of a successful monthslong trial that involved giving two shots to more than 20,000 volunteers. The second injection was administered 21 days after the first.
  • While the trial data shows that the vaccine conferred immunity to over 50% of the participants after the first dose, marketing only one shot would require a new study in which only one dose would be administered to another set of volunteers, said BioNTech Chief Executive Uğur Şahin.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A vaccine developed by Moderna Inc., which was authorized in the U.S. and could be given a green light by the European Union regulator in January, also consists of two doses. A third vaccine, developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca PLC and authorized by the U.K. Wednesday, similarly has two doses.
  • Most scientists agree that well over 60% of a population would need to be immunized to achieve herd immunity, in which enough people are immune, either through vaccination or by contracting the disease, to stop the spread of a pathogen.
  • Pierre Van Damme, a senior member of the task force, said Monday that using only one shot would allow for the vaccination of the majority of Belgium’s 11.5 million inhabitants before the summer. A government spokesman said a decision would be made in the next two weeks
mariedhorne

Europe's Covid-19 Vaccination Campaign Off to Slow, Uneven Start - WSJ - 0 views

  • France has inoculated more than 45,000 people in more than two weeks since European regulators authorized the first coronavirus vaccine, made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE. Belgium launched mass vaccinations on Tuesday, while the Netherlands gave its first inoculations on Wednesday. Vaccinations in Italy stalled over the holidays and have recently started to pick up.
  • The U.S. has vaccinated more than five million people, the U.K. more than one million and Germany around 417,000. Israel has inoculated at least 16% of its population with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
  • “We lacked that kind of flexibility in our approach,” Mr. Rutte said. Dutch health-care workers started being inoculated as of Wednesday morning, with the government planning to increase vaccination to more than 60,000 a week.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • France is aiming to give 15 million people two vaccine doses by July 1, though it has placed orders for enough doses to vaccinate 27 million by then, officials said.
  • The French authorities are facing a population that is among the world’s most skeptical of vaccines. In a global Ipsos poll conducted in December, just 40% of French respondents said they wanted the vaccine, the lowest acceptance rate among the poll’s 15 countries, which also included the U.S., Germany and China.
  • On Wednesday, about 61,000 people were vaccinated, according to government figures. Italy must vaccinate about 300,000 people a day until April 1 to reach the government’s goal of having 13 million of the country’s 60 million residents vaccinated with the second shot at that point.
  • The European Commission is in talks with Pfizer to buy additional doses, on top of the existing order of 300 million doses that would inoculate a third of the bloc’s 450 million people. The commission has also preordered 160 million doses of Moderna Inc.’s vaccine, which the EU’s main drug regulator cleared for use on Wednesday.
mariedhorne

Covid-19 Hit Hardest Where Financial Crisis Led to Health-Care Cuts - WSJ - 0 views

  • Dr. Zanon, who until the end of December was the medical director at a hospital in Como in Italy’s hard-hit Lombardy region, says when the pandemic arrived he didn’t have enough doctors and nurses. Intensive-care unit beds were scarce and there wasn’t a large network of local clinics to help take the strain. With money tight, technology used in the hospital had also fallen behind.
  • Per capita private and public spending on health care, adjusted for inflation, fell by 2.6% in Italy between 2009 and 2019, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Greece, it plunged by almost a third. Health-care costs tend to rise faster than overall inflation, because of the rising health-care needs of aging populations as well as technological advances, so even keeping spending constant often requires cutting something, such as staff or services offered.
  • “There’s no doubt that if southern European countries had kept up with spending in recent years, their health-care systems would have had more capacity to respond to the pandemic and deaths would have been lower,” said Gavino Maciocco, a doctor and professor of public health at the University of Florence. “If you spend less, you will have worse outcomes for patients.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A law passed in the wake of the 2009 financial crisis forced Italian regions to reduce annual spending on health-care workers to 1.4% below the 2004 level. While the limit wasn’t always respected, there was a sharp reduction in the number of doctors and other medical personnel employed in the national health service because those who retired often weren’t replaced.
  • The U.S. has one of the highest per capita rates of deaths attributed to the virus. Yet the country’s health-care spending equaled 17% of gross domestic product in 2019, according to the OECD, compared with 8.7% in Italy and 11.7% in Germany.
mariedhorne

Switzerland to Hold Referendum on Covid-19 Lockdown - WSJ - 0 views

  • The landlocked Alpine nation of 8.5 million people is unusual in providing its people a say on important policy moves by offering referendums if enough people sign a petition for a vote. Last year, Swiss voted on increasing the stock of low-cost housing, tax allowances for children and hunting wolves
  • Now, the country is set for a referendum on whether to remove the government’s legal authority to order lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions after campaigners submitted a petition of some 86,000 signatures this week—higher than the 50,000 required—triggering a nationwide vote to repeal last year’s Covid-19 Act.
  • An opinion poll by the country’s Sotomo Research Institute also found that 55% of respondents worried that curfews and other measures impinged on their individual freedoms
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Supporters of the referendum, led in part by a group calling itself Friends of the Constitution, say they are trying to make sure the Covid-19 legislation doesn’t set a precedent for future emergencies
  • Still, the referendum has the potential to be a hard-fought campaign—perhaps as close as last year’s vote on whether to provide more leeway for hunters and farmers to kill wolves if they stray too close to pasture lands or villages. Swiss voted narrowly against more hunting, by 52% to 48%
mariedhorne

Europe's Schools Are Closing Again on Concerns They Spread Covid-19 - WSJ - 0 views

  • BERLIN—As U.S. authorities debate whether to keep schools open, a consensus is emerging in Europe that children are a considerable factor in the spread of Covid-19—and more countries are shutting schools for the first time since the spring.
  • In the U.S., measures have varied widely, with many districts extending remote learning recently while others moved to reopen classrooms despite record levels of infections and deaths related to Covid-19.
  • In Austria, a nationwide survey by universities and medical institutes found that children under 10 showed a similar rate of infection to those between 11 and 14, and that the children in general were getting infected as often as teachers, said Michael Wagner, a microbiologist at the University of Vienna who oversees the study.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • cientists also point to data from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, which conducts a weekly random survey of the population. Just before the Christmas break, when schools were still open, the positivity rate among children was higher than in most adult groups, especially in those older than 11.
  • At least 30 cases of the more contagious U.K. variant were discovered at an elementary school in the Dutch village of Bergschenhoek, near Rotterdam, in December. Tests carried out on some 750 children, teachers and their relatives found that roughly 10% were infected with the virus. The local municipality on Wednesday began testing all 62,000 residents above the age of 2 to find out more about how the variant spreads.
  • Austria, one of the first European countries to shut schools in November, plans to reopen them gradually from Jan. 25, but in staggered systems and with millions of test kits distributed to reduce the risk of infection.
mariedhorne

Xi's China Crafts Campaign to Boost Youth Patriotism - WSJ - 0 views

  • Today, China is embarked on another campaign to re-educate its young people. The message is more blatantly nationalistic than anything in recent decades, with President Xi Jinping’s image often at the center. And it is far more sophisticated than anything Beijing has attempted in the past.
  • Pan Borui, a 19-year-old freshman at a Beijing college, got hooked last year on the cartoons, which he said will “shape the thinking of the next generation of Chinese.” He said he knew they were made with party support, but said most Chinese still considered them very accurate and more accessible than traditional news reports.
  • Beijing’s ambitions are laid out in a document published by the State Council, China’s cabinet, in November 2019, which said “patriotism is the most natural and simple emotion of the Chinese.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • One kindergarten in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou interspersed its lessons in September with four days of what it called “military training” for its 5- and 6-year-olds. The children, dressed in military fatigues, held Chinese flags and performed salutes, according to the school’s official WeChat social-media account.
  • In 2016, the party issued what it said were reform guidelines calling on its Communist Youth League to help lead on social media. The Youth League began opening accounts on platforms including Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. It also started an official account on Bilibili, a video-hosting platform akin to China’s YouTube whose users are mainly under 25. The Youth League and its regional arms now have almost 11.5 million followers there.
mariedhorne

China's Economy Powers Ahead While the Rest of the World Reels - WSJ - 0 views

  • The upshot is a world more reliant on China for growth than ever before. For 2020, China’s economy is expected to account for 16.8% of global gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, according to forecasts by Moody’s Analytics. That’s up from 14.2% in 2016, before the U.S. and China entered a trade war. The U.S. is expected to make up 22.2%, virtually unchanged from 22.3% in 2016.
  • The gains are a testament to China’s success in containing Covid-19 and getting its businesses humming again. The country’s stimulus programs, which were smaller as a portion of the overall economy than in the U.S., focused on restoring factory production and keeping small businesses from going bust, with relatively little direct support for consumers.
  • A November survey by HSBC Holdings PLC of more than 1,100 global corporations found that 75%, including 70% of U.S. companies, expect to increase their supply-chain footprint in China over the next two years
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In Australia, nearly 42% of the country’s goods exports went to mainland China in October, near the all-time monthly high from earlier in the year, before slipping to 37% in November, according to Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
  • The U.S. is also grappling with extreme political stress. This year, it is expected to grow around 3%-4%, but its economy likely won’t get back to its 2019 size until the second half of the year, according to some economists’ forecasts.
  • Orion’s operating profits in China jumped 28% in the first three quarters of last year compared with the same period a year earlier, thanks to the introduction of new products into the market, including glutinous rice cake-inspired Choco Pies. China sales accounted for 48.2% of Orion’s overall revenue in 2019, compared with 38.7% in 2010.
  • By early April, more than 97% of China’s larger enterprises had reopened, according to Zhang Weihua, an official with China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
  • Consumer spending in China bounced back by the fall. China’s personal luxury-goods market is expected to have grown 7.6% in 2020, even as the global market contracted 20%, according to research firm Euromonitor International.
mariedhorne

Opioid Deaths in Canada Were Falling, Then Came Coronavirus - WSJ - 0 views

  • After a public-health push that focused on overdose prevention sites, methadone clinics and counseling services, the number of deaths from opioid overdoses finally began to fall in Canada last year.
  • As cities across Canada locked down, the number of overdose deaths surged, putting the country on track to lose the gains it made last year. Unlike in the U.S., where opioid-related deaths have continued to rise, deaths in Canada fell 13% in 2019, to 3,799. This year they could surpass the record 4,372 deaths reported in 2018, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
  • The overdose death toll in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, reached 28 in October, the most in a single-month on record, according to city statistics. As of October, 206 died in 2020, compared with 141 for all of last year.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • By June, the province’s chief coroner said fatalities between March and May were 25% higher than the median monthly rates of 2019. The province estimates that, if the number of opioid-related deaths continues to increase at current rates for the rest of the year, 2,271 will die in 2020, a 50% jump from last year.
  • In the U.S., opioid deaths have risen almost continually for three decades and hit a record of more than 72,000 last year, according to federal government projections.
  • In Vancouver, overdose deaths fell almost 40% in 2019 to 247, accounting for much of the overall reduction in Canada. But by October of this year, the city had already surpassed last year’s total, with 291 dead, according to the British Columbia Coroners Service.
mariedhorne

Canada Criticized for Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout Following Holiday Pause in Vaccinations ... - 0 views

  • While Canada was quick to order vaccines and approved the use of the shot developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE in early December—two days before the U.S. authorized it—the nation has fallen behind several of its developed-country peers in administering vaccinations.
  • Just over 0.5% of the population of the U.S.’s northern neighbor was vaccinated as of Wednesday. By comparison, the U.S. had vaccinated 1.6% of its population by that date, and Israel had inoculated more than 18%, according to Our World in Data, a nonprofit research project at the University of Oxford. The U.K. had vaccinated about 1.9% of its population by Jan. 3, the latest date for which vaccination numbers were available.
  • The rollout has been incredibly slow and painful to watch,” said Samir Sinha, a medical doctor and the director of geriatrics at Sinai Health System and the University Health Network in Toronto. “Especially when you see different jurisdictions handling it differently and struggling to get it efficiently into peoples’ arms.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • As of Wednesday, Canadian provinces had received 436,830 vaccine doses and administered about 44% of them, according to a tracking tool developed by researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph. The tool shows daily vaccination rates remained below 14,000 every day until Jan. 4, when they surpassed 20,000 for the first time. Nearly 31,000 people in Canada received the vaccine on Jan. 6.
  • The province of Quebec said it would delay the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to stretch its supply, arguing that the shot is 90% effective after the first dose—a matter that researchers are still studying. The province still plans to provide a second dose after vaccine supplies increase.
mariedhorne

Indonesia Is First to Approve Sinovac Vaccine Outside China - WSJ - 0 views

  • Indonesia became the first country outside China to give emergency use approval to a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Chinese drugmaker Sinovac Biotech Ltd., despite findings that place the candidate’s efficacy among the lowest for new coronavirus vaccines
  • Indonesia’s food and drug agency said Monday that a late-stage clinical trial in the large city of Bandung showed Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine to be 65.3% effective. That compares to clinical trial results out of Brazil last week showing the vaccine had an efficacy rate of 78%.
  • A rate of 65% exceeds the 50% threshold that the World Health Organization and many regulatory authorities consider necessary for widespread use. Western vaccines developed by Moderna Inc. and jointly by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE have reported their vaccines to be more than 90% effective; another developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC was at least 62% effective, according to the team.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Indonesia’s clinical trial for CoronaVac covered only 1,600 participants, compared with more than 12,000 health care volunteers in the Brazil trial. It isn’t known in either case how many people were infected; researchers usually only unveil data, including which participants received the vaccine versus placebo injections, when positive Covid cases reach a certain number.
  • 270 million, which has seen a surge in Coronavirus cases over the past few weeks, with around 9,000 new cases a day recently despite low levels of testing. Indonesia had already distributed hundreds of thousands of CoronaVac doses to provinces around the country last week in anticipation of the emergency approval, with the goal of quickly vaccinating doctors and nurses, many of whom have been sickened during the pandemic.
  • As of last week, the country had only 3 million Sinovac doses on hand. In a statement last week, Mr. Widodo said another 15 million doses were expected from Sinovac this week in bulk form, and they would be prepared for use by state-owned pharmaceutical company PT Bio Farma before being distributed around the country.
mariedhorne

Kim Jong Un Offers a Rare Sneak Peek at North Korea's Weapons Program - WSJ - 0 views

  • The North is developing military drones, a nuclear-powered submarine and surveillance satellites, Mr. Kim said. Missiles will get smaller and lighter. Others will fly farther.
  • At a Thursday night military parade celebrating the Workers’ Party meeting, the North put a host of military hardware on display, including a submarine-launched ballistic missile that state media touted as the “world’s most powerful weapon.”
  • Pyongyang has been on relatively good behavior, having held off on nuclear tests and ICBM launches for more than three years. The Kim regime was waiting to see if Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Kim met three times, would win re-election and deliver on his promise to quickly broker a denuclearization deal during his second term.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The North test-fired a ballistic missile just three weeks after Mr. Trump’s inauguration four years ago
  • “Pyongyang is signaling that denuclearization is not on the cards and that it will continue to develop its nuclear program as long as there is no agreement with Washington to halt it,” said Ramon Pacheco Pardo, KF-VUB Korea chair at the Institute for European Studies in Brussels.
  • The details on weapons might be partially an attempt to grab focus away from the country’s economic woes. During the pandemic, North Korea sealed itself off from the outside world, letting border trade with China and foreign travel plummet and leading to what was likely the worst economic slide in a generation last year.
mariedhorne

The New Covid-19 Strain in South Africa: What We Know - WSJ - 0 views

  • A new variant of the coronavirus is driving a powerful second wave of infections in South Africa. The variant has already spread to other countries and raised concerns over how it will respond to Covid-19 vaccines.
  • he discovery and spread of the South African variant has coincided with a powerful surge in infections in the country. New daily cases and deaths have already surpassed those seen in the first wave, which peaked in July, and infections are still going up. South African researchers say they also believe that the new variant is more transmissible, since it has quickly crowded out other versions of the virus circulating in the country.
  • So far, laboratories in at least 14 countries—including Canada, France, Germany and China--have found the variant in coronavirus tests, although mostly in people who had recently traveled to South Africa. Researchers in the U.K., Botswana and Zambia say they have found cases of local transmission of the variant in their countries.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Researchers who have studied the E484K mutation say it may make the existing Covid-19 vaccines less effective against the new variant, but is unlikely to be totally resistant to the shots.
  • Laboratory experiments have shown that the E484K mutation can make the virus resistant to some important antibodies the body uses to fight off Covid-19.
  • “The challenge like here in [South Africa] is in knowing whether reinfection is more likely with these variants,” said Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, “or whether they are just seeing reinfection with these variants because they are the viruses circulating at the moment and immune responses from first episodes have waned.”
  • South Africa expects to get its first one million doses of a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC this month, with the second shipment of 500,000 doses due in February.
mariedhorne

Uganda Votes for President Amid Internet Shutdown - WSJ - 0 views

  • Ugandans voted on Thursday amid heightened security and an internet shutdown after a hotly contested and violent race in which a youthful rapper-turned-lawmaker is attempting to unseat one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders.
  • Some 18 million voters cast ballots at around 35,000 polling stations across the coffee- and oil-producing country to decide a presidential election that has sparked the worst political clashes in decades. Dozens of military trucks mounted with machine guns patrolled the uncharacteristically quiet streets of the capital, Kampala. State television warned voters not to wear clothing in colors that denoted partisanship, to “avoid trouble.”
  • Incumbent President Yoweri Museveni has easily won previous contests since assuming power in 1986, but his winning streak appears to be in jeopardy in the face of a challenge from Bobi Wine, a 38-year-old musician.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The winner requires more than 50% of the vote.
  • Election observers from the U.S. and European Union aren’t monitoring the election for the first time in decades, after the government declined to accredit monitors
  • Some recent polls suggest that Mr. Museveni will win with a slim margin of just 53%, a far cry from his 61% victory in 2016. Yet many analysts expect the 76-year old to claim a much larger margin, due to the control he wields over state institutions.
  • Crucially, Uganda hosts East Africa’s largest unexploited oil reserves and is on the cusp of an oil boom, as oil companies prepare to invest as much as $20 billion to develop vast crude fields along the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, where production is expected to commence in 2024.
mariedhorne

Amid Crises, Biden and the Establishment Step Back In - WSJ - 0 views

  • One started in Washington when Richard Nixon was president, the others when Ronald Reagan was. They have seen it all: wars, recessions, control by one party and then another, terrorist attacks, and, now, a pandemic.
  • They are, respectively, President-elect Joe Biden ; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ; Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer ; and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. They have known one another for decades, so there will be no surprises. They will be overseeing a Washington where the Senate is perfectly divided between the two parties and the House nearly so—a power alignment that, at least in theory, ought to draw them all a bit closer together near the political center.
  • ; Mr. Biden will attempt to be the establishment unifier, and hope that is what the nation wants. His best hope may be to build a personal popularity that overcomes other structural obstacles, yet many Americans wonder whether he is too old or insufficiently in command of the party around him to do so.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The pending impeachment trial of President Trump in the Senate has the potential to be both an enormous distraction and deeply divisive at the outset of the Biden term.
  • And if he seeks to do deals, he will have to contend with whatever continuing resistance Mr. Trump is able to exert from the outside, and with a handful of Republican senators interested in running for president in 2024, in part by playing to the Trump base.
mariedhorne

Harris Will Balance Roles as Counselor to Biden, Tiebreaker in Senate - WSJ - 0 views

  • Upon being sworn in as vice president Wednesday, Kamala Harris will have to balance multiple roles: as a counselor to President-elect Joe Biden, the Senate tiebreaker and the potential standard-bearer for the Democratic Party whose current leaders are in their 70s or 80s.
  • While Mr. Biden, 78, is in good health, he will be the oldest president to be sworn into office, putting the role of Ms. Harris, 56, as next in the line of succession and as a party leader into greater focus. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader from New York, is 70, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of California, is 80.
  • Ms. Harris, who officially resigned from her Senate seat Monday, is expected to model her vice presidency after Mr. Biden’s, according to her aides. The president-elect also started his tenure, after serving in the Senate, in the midst of an economic crisis in 2009. Mr. Biden came to be seen as a loyal ally to President Barack Obama and led congressional negotiations on key legislation though sometimes exasperated Mr. Obama and his aides by straying from the administration’s message.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Ms. Harris faces the prospect of being called on to break ties on confirming Mr. Biden’s cabinet nominees, some of whom have drawn GOP criticism and would likely have to be confirmed on party-line votes. She is also expected to be a negotiator—and potentially a tiebreaking vote—for the administration’s legislative priority: passing a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.
  • Mr. Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years, has a long and respectful relationship with GOP leader Mitch McConnell.
  • North Dakota GOP Sen. Kevin Cramer said Senate Republicans have a cordial relationship with Ms. Harris and will have to be open to working with her. “I think the fact that she was a senator is helpful—both to her and to us,” he said. “Because she understands the culture of the Senate and personality of the Senate.”
  • “I became confident then that she was running for president,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) of Ms. Harris’s questioning of Mr. Kavanaugh in 2018.
mariedhorne

For Joe Biden, Daunting-and Unprecedented-Challenges - WSJ - 0 views

  • Every new president and Congress face their own particular set of challenges, which tend at the outset to feel both unique and daunting—though sometimes they actually aren’t as new and momentous as they seem.
  • On top of that, Mr. Biden also will be taking office on the steps of a Capitol still bearing the scars left by a mob of Trump supporters set on stopping him from taking office.
  • Mr. Biden will take office with the health and economic threats posed by the global pandemic still raging, and destined to pose a cloud over at least his first year in power. “There’s nothing that can be done anywhere in the government-policy area that comes close to the impact on the economy and the country of getting the pandemic under control,” says Josh Bolten, president of the Business Roundtable.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “The first thing overlaying all of it is, just how do we get some things done?” says Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who ran against Mr. Biden in the 2020 primaries but has been an ally since
  • Biden advisers are blunt in describing the challenge they will face in dealing with China: Beijing’s behavior has produced a bipartisan alarm that now needs to be turned into an entirely new strategic approach. President Trump and his advisers began this work, but it still is at its very early stages.
  • The politics surrounding climate change has shifted dramatically in the past few years, and there is more bipartisan agreement than ever before on the desire for a coherent national action plan. The problem is finding agreement on what that might be.
mariedhorne

Yellen Calls for More Aid to Avoid Longer, More Painful Recession - WSJ - 0 views

  • Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for Treasury secretary, plans to tell lawmakers that the U.S. risks a longer, more painful recession unless Congress approves more aid and urge them to “act big” to shore up the recovery.
  • “Economists don’t always agree, but I think there is a consensus now: Without further action, we risk a longer, more painful recession now—and long-term scarring of the economy later,” Ms. Yellen will say. “Over the next few months, we are going to need more aid to distribute the vaccine; to reopen schools; to help states keep firefighters and teachers on the job.”
  • Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, unveiled last week, provides for another round of direct stimulus payments, extended and enhanced jobless benefits, funding for schools and first responders and the creation of a nationwide vaccination program. It also includes longstanding Democratic priorities, such as raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and expanding paid leave for workers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The hearing comes at a time of growing uncertainty over the progress of the pandemic, which has killed close to 400,000 people in the U.S., as well as the state of the economy. Retail sales fell for the third straight month in December and employers cut jobs, ending seven months of employment gains.
  • Mr. Mnuchin said he couldn’t extend them beyond their Dec. 31 expiration, drawing criticism from Democrats who accused him of trying to hamstring the incoming administration.
  • Democrats and Republicans might press her on whether the Treasury would incorporate climate change into the broader financial regulatory framework, and whether she sees a more active role for the FSOC in the Biden administration.
mariedhorne

Trump Weighs Many Pardons as Presidency Winds Down - WSJ - 0 views

  • President Trump was expected to issue as many as 100 pardons and commutations on his final full day in office, but on Monday was leaning against some of the more controversial proposed grants of clemency at the urging of his advisers, said people familiar with the discussions.
  • The coming round of pardons, expected Tuesday, has been the talk of Washington in recent days, as allies on Capitol Hill and close to the White House have traded tips on how soon the list might come and who might be on it. Mr. Trump is also working to firm up his defense team for his second impeachment trial as he heads into his last full day of the presidency.
  • In recent months, the president had discussed the prospect of pardoning himself, other members of his family—including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka Trump —as well as his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. But Mr. Trump has been leaning away from those pardons in recent days as advisers have counseled him that they would be unnecessary, the person familiar with the conversations said, while noting that Mr. Trump has been known to suddenly reverse course.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Mr. Broidy was charged in federal court in Washington, D.C., in October and accused of failing to report work for which he was paid at least $6 million by the man accused of masterminding the alleged fraud, Jho Low, to try to influence the Justice Department investigation into the scandal.
  • In 2001, President Bill Clinton pardoned fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a major donor to the Democratic Party and Mr. Clinton’s presidential library, on his last day in office. President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, convicted on charges related to passing classified documents to WikiLeaks, just days before leaving the White House.
  • The two men met on Sunday, and the former New York mayor isn’t currently expected to be part of the president’s team, another person familiar with the plan said, though the person cautioned: “Never say never.”
mariedhorne

Biden's Climate Plan to Get a Boost From Democrat-Led Senate - WSJ - 0 views

  • When President-elect Joe Biden’s advisers wrote his climate plan, they often had one small audience in mind: the U.S. Senate.
  • The Democratic control is still narrow—both parties have 50 Senate seats and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris breaks ties—and that is likely to limit how far Mr. Biden and fellow Democrats can reach.
  • Mr. Biden, as a candidate, had called for $2 trillion in spending on projects to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that most scientists implicate in climate change.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Biden team has also promised 500,000 new charging stations for electric vehicles, a further appeal to states hungry for federal highway money. It is also another boon to electric utilities eager to boost demand from electric vehicles.
  • Democratic control also puts the Congressional Review Act in play. It allows Congress, with a simple majority, to overturn regulations finalized by the executive branch in the previous 60 legislative days, putting into jeopardy several Trump administration rules that eased environmental standards.
mariedhorne

U.S. Carries Out Last Execution of Trump's Term - WSJ - 0 views

  • ASHINGTON—The Justice Department early Saturday executed Dustin Higgs, the 13th and final federal inmate to die before President Trump leaves office and President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the death penalty, is sworn in.
  • In separate opinions, Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the condemned were put to death leaving unresolved claims regarding their mental capacity, exculpatory evidence, the risk of excruciating pain from lethal injection and other legal issues.
  • Justice Breyer previously has expressed doubts that the death penalty, as practiced today, can be squared with the Eighth Amendment protection from cruel and unusual punishments. He wrote Friday that the Trump-era executions compounded those concerns, calling “into question the constitutionality of the death penalty itself.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Following the execution, the prison released a statement addressed to Mr. Higgs from Ms. Jackson’s younger sister, whom it did not identify by name. “When the day is over, your death will not bring my sister and the other victims back. This is not closure, this is the consequence of your actions,” it said.
  • Mr. Higgs delivered a final statement before he was put to death. “The tone of his voice when he said his final words was calm but in substance Higgs was defiant,” according to an Associated Press pool report. “‘I’d like to say I am an innocent man,’ he said, mentioning the three women by name. ‘I did not order the murders.’”
  • The federal death chamber, at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., likely will be mothballed after Mr. Higgs’s execution. No further executions currently are scheduled, and Mr. Biden, who has called for the legal abolition of capital punishment, is unlikely to approve any others. With Mr. Higgs’s execution, 50 inmates will remain on the federal death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which is critical of capital punishment.
  • The government, arguing that litigating the issue would needlessly delay Mr. Higgs’s execution, asked the Supreme Court to overrule the lower courts. Friday’s order did just that, directing “the prompt designation of Indiana” as the state whose death penalty procedures should be followed. The majority provided no legal explanation for the decision, but in prior cases some conservative justices have complained that condemned inmates game the system by filing last-minute appeals to prolong their lives.
1 - 20 of 81 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page