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anonymous

NATO must focus more on challenge of rising China, report to say | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...na-report-to-say-idUSKBN28A1T0

china nato russia us

shared by anonymous on 30 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • NATO must think harder about how to handle China and its military rise, though Russia will remain its main adversary during this decade, according to a report to be published on Tuesday on reforming the Atlantic alliance.
  • “China is no longer the benign trading partner that the West had hoped for. It is the rising power of our century and NATO must adapt
  • Part of NATO’s response should be maintaining a technological advantage over China, protecting computer networks and infrastructure
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • forge closer ties with non-NATO countries such as Australia
  • deterrence in space
  • China is investing massively in new weapons. It is coming closer to us, from the Arctic to Africa. China does not share our values ... and tries to intimidate other countries
  • NATO should consider including China in NATO’s official master strategy document, its “Strategic Concept”
  • Even as U.S. President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ era comes to an end and Europeans welcome the election of an Atlanticist president-elect in Joe Biden, tensions over NATO’s ability to act remain.
  • From anger over Turkey’s decision to buy a Russian weapons system to U.S. doubts over Europe’s commitment to its own defence, NATO - founded in 1949 to contain a military threat from the Soviet Union - has also faced calls from Trump to do more in the Middle East.
  • However, Eastern European allies, fearful of Russia since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, are concerned about shifting too many resources away from NATO’s core task of defending Europe.
martinelligi

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

www.nytimes.com/...covid-19-coronavirus

news new york times pandemic

shared by martinelligi on 30 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The drugmaker Moderna said it would apply on Monday to the Food and Drug Administration to authorize its coronavirus vaccine for emergency use.
  • Moderna’s application is based on data that it also announced on Monday, showing that its vaccine is 94.1 percent effective, and that its study of 30,000 people has met the scientific criteria needed to determine whether the vaccine works.
  • The new data also showed that the vaccine was 100 percent effective at preventing severe disease from the coronavirus.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Mr. Bancel said the company was “on track” to produce 20 million doses by the end of December, and 500 million to a billion in 2021. Each person requires two doses, administered a month apart, so 20 million doses will be enough for 10 million people.
  • Moderna is the second vaccine maker to apply for emergency use authorization; Pfizer submitted its application on Nov. 20. Pfizer has said it can produce up to 50 million doses this year, with about half going to the United States.
  • Speaking on “CBS This Morning” on Monday, Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, reiterated that distribution would begin quickly after the expected approvals of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. “We could be seeing both of these vaccines out and getting into people’s arms before Christmas,” he said.
  • Meanwhile, federal officials have urged Americans returning from Thanksgiving travel to reduce unnecessary activity.
  • Moderna has received a commitment of $955 million from the U.S. government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for research and development of its vaccine, and the United States has committed up to $1.525 billion to buy 100 million doses.
  • Asked about the role of states in the distribution process, Mr. Azar said that doses would be shipped out through normal vaccine distribution systems, and governors would be “like air traffic controllers” determining which hospitals or pharmacies receive shipments.
  • But generally, “Be thinking people in nursing homes, the most vulnerable, be thinking health care workers who are on the front lines,” he said.
  • More than 70 vaccines are being developed around the world, including 11 that, like Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, are in large-scale trials to gauge effectiveness.
  • If authorization is granted, the first shots could be given as early as Dec. 21.
  • The government has arranged to buy vaccines from both Moderna and Pfizer and to provide it to the public free of charge.
  • F.D.A. scientists will examine the information, and the application is likely to undergo a final review on Dec. 17 by a panel of expert advisers to the agency, Mr. Bancel said, adding that he expected the advisers to make a decision within 24 to 72 hours. The F.D.A. usually follows the recommendations of its advisory panels.
  • In response to a question about how officials can guard against people using money or connections to jump the proverbial line, Mr. Azar vowed to “call out any inequities or injustices that we see.”
  • The first shots of the two vaccines are likely to go to certain groups, including health care workers, essential workers like police officers, people in other critical industries and employees and residents in nursing homes. On Tuesday, a panel of advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet to determine how to allocate initial supplies of vaccine.
  • The first injections may be given as early as Dec. 21 if the process goes smoothly and approval is granted, Stéphane Bancel, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview.
  • Moderna’s application is based on data that it also announced on Monday, showing that its vaccine is 94.1 percent effective, and that its study of 30,000 people has met the scientific criteria needed to determine whether the vaccine works. The finding from the complete set of data is in line with an analysis of earlier data released on Nov. 16 that found the vaccine to be 94.5 percent effective.
  • The drugmaker Moderna said it would apply on Monday to the Food and Drug Administration to authorize its coronavirus vaccine for emergency use.
  • According to Transportation Safety Administration data, about 800,000 to one million people passed through T.S.A. checkpoints each day in the days before and after the holiday — far lower than the same period last year, but likely far higher than epidemiologists had hoped to see.
  • There were 91,635 current hospitalizations as of Nov. 28, according to the Covid Tracking Project, almost twice as many as there were on Nov. 1, and triple the number on Oct. 1.
  • California on Sunday became the first state to report over 100,000 cases in a week, according to a New York Times database.
hannahcarter11

Expect a 'flurry' of pardons before Trump leaves office, source says - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

trump pardons transition biden politics

shared by hannahcarter11 on 03 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The public should expect a "flurry" of pardons before President Donald Trump leaves office, a source close to the White House says, as has happened at the end of previous administrations.
  • some of the President's advisers believe that it would be perfectly fine for Trump to pardon his family members and other associates preemptively, even though they haven't been charged with any crimes.
  • Trump's allies in Congress and conservative media have said the President should pardon himself
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • CNN reported on Tuesday that associates in Trump's orbit, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, have approached the President to seek preemptive pardons.
  • The President has also been talking with advisers about preemptively pardoning several people close to him, including his children and son-in-law, the White House adviser Jared Kushner.
  • Donald Trump Jr., the President's son, was under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller for contacts he had with Russians, but was never charged. And Kushner provided false information about his foreign contacts when applying for his security clearance, but Trump issued him one anyway.
  • Nine individuals in Trump's orbit, including his former national security adviser Michael Flynn and longtime friend Roger Stone, have been indicted or found guilty of crimes related to a constellation of alleged criminal conspiracies.
  • The pardoning discussions come on the heels of the President's decision to grant Flynn a full pardon, absolving him of charges related to lying to federal agents over his contact with the Russian ambassador to the United States.
lmunch

Pfizer's Vaccine Offers Strong Protection After First Dose - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-vaccine-pfizer.html

politics US pfizer vaccine crisis pandemic

shared by lmunch on 08 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published on Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration before a meeting of its vaccine advisory group.
  • Last month, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their two-dose vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95 percent after two doses administered three weeks apart. The new analyses show that the protection starts kicking in far earlier.
  • What’s more, the vaccine worked well regardless of a volunteer’s race, weight or age. While the trial did not find any serious adverse events caused by the vaccine, many participants did experience aches, fevers and other side effects.
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  • Pfizer and BioNTech began a large-scale clinical trial in July, recruiting 44,000 people in the United States, Brazil and Argentina. Half of the volunteers got the vaccine, and half got the placebo.
  • Many experts have expressed concern that the coronavirus vaccines might protect some people better than others. But the results in the briefing materials indicate no such problem.
  • Even if the vaccine is authorized by the F.D.A., the trial will continue. In the briefing documents, the companies said that they would encourage people to stay in the trial as long as possible, not knowing whether they got the vaccine or the placebo, so that the researchers could continue to collect information about whether the vaccine was safe and effective.
  • The F.D.A. concluded that there were no “meaningful imbalances” in serious health complications, known as adverse events, between the two groups. The agency noted that four people in the vaccinated group experienced a form of facial paralysis called Bell’s palsy, with no cases in the placebo group. The difference between the two groups wasn’t meaningful, and the rate in the vaccinated group was not significantly higher than in the general population.
  • The new Pfizer analysis revealed that many volunteers who received the vaccine felt ill in the hours after the second dose, suggesting that many people might have to request a day off work or be prepared to rest until the symptoms subside. Among those between ages 16 and 55, more than half developed fatigue, and more than half also reported headaches. Just over one-third felt chills, and 37 percent felt muscle pain. About half of those over age 55 felt fatigued, one-third developed a headache and about one-quarter felt chills, while 29 percent experienced muscle pain.
hannahcarter11

Dolly Parton learned she funded the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine when the rest of us did - CNN - 0 views

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

vaccine cnn coronavirus Dolly Parton

shared by hannahcarter11 on 01 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The diminutive diva's $1 million donation to Covid-19 research was partly used to fund Moderna's promising Covid-19 vaccine -- something she didn't even know until her name appeared among other sponsors in a preliminary report on the vaccine.
  • Parton, who said she'd found out her donation contributed to the vaccine trial on Tuesday morning,
  • Parton first donated to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Covid-19 research efforts in early April, when there were around 200,000 cases of Covid-19 in the US.
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  • The Moderna vaccine is thought to be 94.5% effective against coronavirus, according to early data released by the company.
  • Vaccinations could begin as soon as late December, top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said, though they'll be made available first to high-risk groups like health care workers, the elderly and people with underlying medical conditions.
  • In April, Parton encouraged her fans who could afford it to donate to the Vanderbilt Health Covid-19 research fund. Since then, it's raised more than $100,000 of its $250,000 goal.
rerobinson03

Barr Acknowledges Justice Dept. Has Found No Widespread Voter Fraud - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...william-barr-voter-fraud.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 02 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Attorney General William P. Barr acknowledged on Tuesday that the Justice Department has uncovered no voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” a striking repudiation of President Trump’s groundless claims that he was defrauded.
  • Mr. Barr has advanced Mr. Trump’s political agenda perhaps more than any other cabinet member, bringing the Justice Department as close to the White House as it has been since Watergate.
  • And Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, who has refused to recognize Mr. Trump’s election loss, moved closer to overtly accepting the reality that Mr. Biden would be in the White House next year as he discussed the prospects for more pandemic stimulus in 2021.
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  • Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer for Mr. Trump who has been at the forefront of promoting his election conspiracy theories, said that his team had gathered evidence of illegal voting in six states, backed up by sworn witness statements, and that the Justice Department had failed to investigate what the team had uncovered. 
  • There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the D.H.S. and D.O.J. have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that,” Mr. Barr said, referring to the Department of Homeland Security and his own department.
  • Mr. Barr had been mostly silent since the election, but some Republicans privately pushed him to publicly rebut Mr. Trump, according to a person told of those conversations. His comments may have been prompted by Mr. Trump’s increasingly specious election claims; the president suggested on Sunday that the Justice Department and the F.B.I. may have played a role in an election fraud.
  • Mr. Barr had given prosecutors the authority to examine allegations by Mr. Trump’s allies of voter ineligibility in Nevada and improperly dated mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. The results of those investigations have not been publicly disclosed, but Mr. Barr’s remarks suggested that any impropriety was too insignificant to change the election results.
  • “Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. They are not systemic allegations, and those have been run down; they are being run down,” he said. “Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes. They have been followed up on.”
  • But none, at least so far, have won Mr. Trump anything more significant than the ability to move his poll observers from 10 feet to six feet away from workers counting votes in Pennsylvania.
  • The campaign and its allies have now lost nearly 40 cases across the country as judge after judge — including some appointed by Mr. Trump — discredited the efforts as lacking both legal merit and convincing proof.
  • In the months before the November election, Mr. Barr had been one of the loudest voices sounding alarms about widespread fraud, claiming repeatedly in speeches and interviews that the potential for it was high and that it posed a grave danger to the election. Mr. Barr’s claims were often false or exaggerated and were widely refuted.
yehbru

Supreme Court Seems Ready to Limit Human Rights Suits Against Corporations - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...corporations-human-rights.html

US Supreme Court Mali Nestle Lawsuit Ivory Coast Human Rights

shared by yehbru on 02 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court, which has placed strict limits on lawsuits brought in federal court based on human rights abuses abroad, seemed poised on Tuesday to reject a suit accusing two American corporations of complicity in child slavery on Ivory Coast cocoa farms.
  • The case was brought by six citizens of Mali who said they were trafficked into child slavery as children
  • The plaintiffs sued under the Alien Tort Statute, a cryptic 1789 law that allows federal district courts to hear “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”
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  • The claim plaintiffs bring alleges something horrific: that locaters in Mali sold them as children to an Ivorian farm where overseers forced them to work,” Mr. Katyal said
  • A 2004 Supreme Court decision, Sosa v. Álvarez-Machain, left the door open to some claims under the law, as long as they involved violations of international norms with “definite content and acceptance among civilized nations.”
  • Those questions suggested that the court could rule for the companies without making a broad statement about corporate immunity
  • “Even where the claims touch and concern the territory of the United States,” he wrote, “they must do so with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritorial application.”
  • The court said foreign corporations may not be sued under the 1789 law, but it left open the question of the status of domestic corporations.
  • In Tuesday’s case, Nestlé USA v. Doe, No. 19-416, the companies sought to expand both sorts of limitations. They said the 1789 law did not allow suits even when some of the defendants’ conduct was said to have taken place in the United States, and they urged the court to bar suits under the law against all corporations, whether foreign or domestic.
  • They sued Nestlé USA and Cargill, saying the firms had aided and profited from the practice of forced child labor.
  • Mr. Katyal said there were ways to hold such a corporation accountable. But he said the 1789 law was not one of them
rerobinson03

The UK Just Approved the Pfizer Covid Vaccine. What Happens Next? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uk-covid-vaccine-pfizer.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The first rigorously tested coronavirus vaccine was given a green light for use on Wednesday in Britain. Doses of the vaccine, made by the American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and a small German company, BioNTech, will be injected starting next week, the government said.
  • Rather than accepting the findings of vaccine makers, American regulators painstakingly reanalyze raw data from the trials to validate the results, poring over what regulators have described as thousands of pages of documents.
  • Regulators in Britain and elsewhere in Europe lean more heavily on companies’ own analyses. Instead of sifting through raw trial data and crunching the numbers themselves, regulatory agencies often will study a drugmaker’s reports and, unless there are anomalies, ground their decisions in company-provided documents.
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  • “In the U.K., they’ve just been able to say, ‘We have the data, we’re having the meeting,’” said Stephen Evans, a professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
  • To speed the process, Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency had its experts review vaccine data as it became available, and separate teams worked in parallel on different parts of the process, rather than one waiting for another to finish.
  • The countries that remain in the European Union are waiting for its regulator, the European Medicines Agency, to authorize a vaccine. Like the F.D.A., the European regulator has scheduled a Dec. 29 meeting to consult outside experts and offer an opinion on the Pfizer vaccine.
  • Pfizer plans to ship 800,000 doses to Britain in the coming days. Starting Tuesday night, those doses were being prepared for shipping at a factory in Puurs, Belgium, BioNTech said.
  • A government advisory body released its list of vaccine priority groups on Wednesday. At the top of the list are nursing home residents and workers, followed by people older than 80 and health and social care workers.
  • The British decision will not in itself bring vaccinations closer anywhere else. But Pfizer executives said on Wednesday that they had already heard from other countries that, in light of Britain’s go-ahead, were looking to accelerate their own approval processes.American regulators, despite months of pressure from Mr. Trump, have maintained that they will follow their plan and review Pfizer’s vaccine to the F.D.A.’s standards.
  • The United States has pre-ordered 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
rerobinson03

Georgia Republicans Seek Cover From Trump's Fury Over Loss - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...epublicans-election-trump.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The lawmakers will not fulfill Mr. Trump’s ultimate wish, expressed in a tweet earlier this week: that enough proof of fraud will be uncovered for him to prevail. But Georgia, perhaps more than any other state in the nation, continues to be haunted by a sort of zombie campaign to produce a Trump victory, one month after Election Day.
  • The effort, which also encompasses numerous lawsuits and an influential far-right disinformation campaign, will not change the election result, barring some Hail Mary upending of a race that has already been certified. But it may have other powerful consequences for the political future of Georgia — and by extension, the nation, given Georgia’s unquestionable new status as a battleground state.
  • On Wednesday, a group of 19 prominent Georgia Republicans — among them former Gov. Nathan Deal and two former U.S. senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson — issued an open letter warning that the focus on fraud allegations could “detract” from the runoffs, which will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
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  • Their concerns came to life Wednesday afternoon at a park in the upscale Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, where hundreds of Trump supporters gathered, waving American flags and Trump flags, to cheer two lawyers who have challenged the Georgia election results in federal court, Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood.
  • But in other ways, the momentum seemed to turn against Mr. Trump this week. On Tuesday, a top state election official, Gabriel Sterling, laced into the president, pleading with him to scale back the conspiratorial rhetoric that Mr. Sterling said was inspiring people to make violent threats against election workers.
  • Noting that the U.S. attorney general, William P. Barr, had just said that the Justice Department found no widespread fraud in the national race, Mr. Raffensperger said, “Our investigators have seen no widespread fraud either.”
  • The president may spout conspiracy theories and acrimony — he has publicly attacked Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp for not acceding to his wishes — but he is also the most popular figure in the Republican Party. Nationally, Mr. Trump’s sustained assault on voting integrity, while false, has persuaded many Republicans that there was something crooked about the election. And no one is sure whether, or for how long, he will continue to command the fealty of his party.
  • But the fact remains that Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp have refused to give Mr. Trump what he wants most: an opening that would allow the results to be overturned (Mr. Kemp has not only certified the state’s 16 electors; he has also refused to call a special session of the legislature, which people like Mr. Wood have demanded, and where the election results could ostensibly be overturned).
  • Aside from trying to assuage Mr. Trump, Republicans in Georgia also appear to be laying the groundwork for new limits on voting, and particularly on absentee voting. Mr. Trump has baselessly claimed that there was something fraudulent about the signature-matching system election officials used to verify the identities of absentee voters.
  • This week, Nse Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project, said that Mr. Raffensperger was “resorting to desperate attempts to smear law-abiding organizations and scare eligible Georgians from registering to vote in critical upcoming elections.” Mr. Raffensperger’s office said on Wednesday that Ms. Ufot’s group had sent an absentee ballot registration form to his dead son.
  • “I would be highly surprised and very disappointed,” Mr. Chambliss, the former senator, said in an interview, “if Donald Trump came to Georgia this weekend and had any comments that weren’t positive about any Republican politician.”
katherineharron

Biden's popular vote margin over Trump tops 7 million - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

trump

shared by katherineharron on 04 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • President-elect Joe Biden's margin over President Donald Trump in the nationwide popular vote is now more than 7 million votes and may continue to grow as several states continue counting votes.
  • Biden's lead over Trump is the second largest since 2000
  • Biden had won about 81.2 million votes, the most votes a candidate has won in US history, and Trump had won about 74.2 million.
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  • Trump's vote count makes him the second-highest vote earner in American history.
  • the President has refused to concede the race and continues to make baseless claims about widespread voter fraud.
  • Biden won 306 electoral votes, while Trump has 232. Two hundred and seventy electoral votes are needed to become president.
  • A number of states have certified their election results, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan.
  • The campaign has mounted legal challenges that have failed to gain any traction, with many of the cases being dismissed by judges for lack of evidence.
  • Despite Trump's refusal to concede, Biden has continued to build out his administration and has named several key nominees and appointees to top roles in his administration.
  • On Tuesday, Biden introduced a diverse economic team, including Janet Yellen, who would be the first woman as Treasury secretary if confirmed by the Senate.
ethanshilling

Arctic's Shift to a Warmer Climate Is 'Well Underway, Scientists Warn - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...arctic-climate-change.html

climate arctic world

shared by ethanshilling on 08 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • “There is no reason to think that in 30 years much of anything will be as it is today,” one of the editors of a new report on the Arctic climate said.
  • The Arctic continued its unwavering shift toward a new climate in 2020, as the effects of near-record warming surged across the region, shrinking ice and snow cover and fueling extreme wildfires, scientists said Tuesday in an annual assessment of the region.
  • This year the minimum extent of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, reached at the end of the melt season in September, was the second-lowest in the satellite record, the scientists reported
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  • While the whole planet is warming because of emissions of heat-trapping gases through burning of fossil fuels and other human activity, the Arctic is heating up more than twice as quickly as other regions.
  • And perhaps most stunning, snow cover across the Eurasian Arctic reached a record low in June.
  • The amount of snow that fell across the Eurasian Arctic was actually above normal this year, said Lawrence Mudryk, a researcher with Environment and Climate Change Canada and lead author of the section on snow cover in the assessment. “Despite that, it was still warm enough that it melted faster and earlier than usual,” he said.
  • The warmth was pervasive across the Arctic. The average land temperature north of 60 degrees latitude, as measured from October 2019 through September, was 1.9 degrees Celsius, or 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit, above the baseline average for 1981-2010 and the second-highest in more than a century of record-keeping.
  • In recent years Arctic researchers have increasingly come to recognize that the region is moving from a climate that is characterized less by ice and snow and more by open water and rain.
  • The increasing dominance of younger, and thus generally thinner, ice has contributed to the reduction in sea-ice extent, Dr. Perovich said, since thinner ice is less likely to last through a single season.
leilamulveny

Debate Showed Trump Hasn't Settled on Main Message Against Biden - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...sage-against-biden-11601550000

debate biden politics culture trump

shared by leilamulveny on 06 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Trump’s debate performance on Tuesday against Democratic nominee Joe Biden, GOP campaign strategists said, encapsulated his struggle to frame the race in the same consistent and persuasive way he did in 2016, as he spent the night ticking through multiple attacks he and his campaign have rotated through for most of the past year.
  • Mr. Biden has maintained a consistent lead in public surveys
  • Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Biden’s time in government and called him an avatar for much of the liberal wing of the party. He questioned the former vice president’s health, attacked his son and tried to paint Mr. Biden as ill-equipped to stem the violence that has erupted at times alongside civil rights protests during Mr. Trump’s fourth year in office.
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  • Mr. Trump sent mixed messages in his own day-after analysis. During the debate, Mr. Trump said Mr. Biden was beholden to the most liberal members of his party, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and a group of four female House members, known as The Squad, which includes Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D., N.Y.). But Wednesday, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that Mr. Biden was in fact not listening to the Left, and that he had spent the debate “throwing Bernie, AOC PLUS 3, and the rest, to the wolves!”
  • But Mr. Trump’s inability to convey a central argument for his candidacy also contrasts with the past two successful presidential campaigns.
  • But Mr. Trump sometimes overlooked his own record.
  • During the portion of the evening focused on the economy, Mr. Biden promised to increase the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%. Mr. Trump interjected, “Why didn’t you do it before, when you were vice president with Obama?” “Because you, in fact, passed that,” Mr. Biden responded, referring to the 2017 tax law cutting the rate to 21%. “That was your tax proposal.”
xaviermcelderry

Trump Live Updates: Back at the White House, President Continues to Downplay Virus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-covid-live-updates

Trump Covid pandemic

shared by xaviermcelderry on 06 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Instead, the president has continued his year-long pattern of downplaying the deadly threat, Tweeting on Monday from the military hospital where he had been receiving state-of-the-art treatment for Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
  • President Trump is incurring significant risks, physically and politically, by leaving the protective care of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a White House that is less a safe space than a hot zone.
  • The White House resembled a ghost town again on Tuesday, as officials stayed home to wait out the infectious period from an outbreak of the coronavirus within the building and among people who had been there.
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  • President Trump returned to the White House on Monday night, staging a defiant, made-for-television moment in which he ripped off his face mask and then urged the nation to put aside the risks of the deadly coronavirus that has swept through his own staff and sent him to the hospital for three days.
  • Trump climbed into a hermetically sealed, armored Chevy Suburban with at least two Secret Service agents so the president could wave to supporters outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where he was hospitalized from Friday to Monday.
  • Medical experts said the move put agents at risk.
cartergramiak

Trump's Return Leaves White House in Disarray as Infections Jolt West Wing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-covid-white-house.html

trump politics pandemic

shared by cartergramiak on 07 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The West Wing was mostly empty, cleared of aides who were sick or told to work from home, and staff in the White House residence were in full personal protective equipment.
  • Aides said the president’s voice was stronger after his return from the hospital Monday night, but at times he still sounded as if he was trying to catch air.
  • Four more White House officials tested positive, including Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, bringing to 14 the number of people carrying the virus at the White House or in the president’s close circle.
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  • West Wing aides, shaken by polls showing the president badly trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr., worried that they were living through the final days of the Trump administration
  • Late in the day, the stock market collapsed when Mr. Trump abruptly called off talks for a congressional coronavirus relief bill after the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, said such a stimulus was badly needed.
  • Some White House staff members wondered whether Mr. Trump’s behavior was spurred by a cocktail of drugs he has been taking to treat the coronavirus, including dexamethasone, a steroid that can cause mood swings and can give a false level of energy and a sense of euphoria.
  • Prominent supporters of the administration said Mr. Trump should have stayed at the hospital until he was no longer infectious or should remain confined to his residence.
  • There were no answers, either, on when Mr. Trump last tested negative for the virus — a crucial piece of information that the White House and Dr. Conley have refused to answer and would establish the known state of Mr. Trump’s health before the presidential debate last Tuesday or before he attended a fund-raiser in New Jersey on Thursday. The White House first made public that Mr. Trump had tested positive early last Friday.
aleija

Opinion | No stimulus makes no sense - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-859b-f9c27abe638d_story.html

economics jobs recession opinion

shared by aleija on 08 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Having gotten themselves into a precarious-but-fixable financial position, they just give up on fixing it, and instead figure they might as well enjoy some new clothes or nice dinners out before the inevitable denouement.
  • I worry that I myself might fall into this trap when I consider negotiations over the next covid-19 relief package — which President Trump announced he was walking away from Tuesday because the two sides were $800 billion apart.
  • It is roughly equal to the state budgets of California, New York, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania and Illinois combined.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Economically, relief is needed because unemployment remains at nearly 8 percent, and earlier rounds of government emergency spending have run out. Temporary layoffs are becoming permanent as airplanes are mothballed, Disney announces massive layoffs and theater chain Regal closes its theaters for the duration. Permanent job losses have a much deeper impact on economic growth.
  • But Republicans should be focused on delivering substantial pandemic relief.
  • There’s less reason to worry that we’ll encourage more bad behavior if we bail out businesses, since they didn’t do anything wrong, other than happen to be selling a good or a service that isn’t much use while people are distancing.
  • . But America’s borrowing costs are low, and we have decades to pay back the cost of a once-in-a-century emergency.
  • So the economics argue in favor of more relief.
katherineharron

Fed chair warns of economic tragedy if America can't control the coronavirus - CNN - 0 views

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

economy

shared by katherineharron on 06 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The recovery is far from complete, and the US economy remains of danger of shifting into reverse once again. One major risk factor: A rise in Covid-19 infections, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday at the National Association for Business Economics annual meeting.
  • A second wave of coronavirus could "more significantly limit economic activity, not to mention the tragic effects on lives and well-being,"
  • But just hours after Powell's appeal, President Donald Trump halted negotiations for a new stimulus package. "I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill that focuses on hardworking Americans and Small Business, he said on Twitter.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "The US federal budget is on an unsustainable path, has been for some time," Powell said. But "this is not the time to give priority to those concerns."
  • last week's September jobs reported showed only 661,000 jobs were added back to the economy, fewer than expected
  • A prolonged slowing of the recovery is bad news, Powell said, "as weakness feeds on weakness."
  • "Once you're permanently laid off it's just difficult to get back into the workforce," Powell said.
anonymous

Humanitarian crisis feared as Nagorno-Karabakh ceasefire buckles | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...easefire-buckles-idUSKBN26Y11R

armenia azerbaijan world turkey iran

shared by anonymous on 13 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Armenia and Azerbaijan accused each other on Tuesday of violating a humanitarian ceasefire agreed three days ago to quell fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh,
  • internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but governed and populated by ethnic Armenians
  • The Russian-brokered ceasefire, aimed at allowing the sides to swap prisoners and bodies of those killed, is buckling, dimming peace prospects after deadly clashes broke out on Sept. 27..
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “Azeri armed forces are not violating the humanitarian ceasefire,” defence ministry spokesman Vagif Dargiahly said.
  • The flare-up of fighting is the worst since a 1991-94 war over Nagorno-Karabakh that killed about 30,000.
  • it is close to Azeri gas and oil pipelines to Europe, and Turkey and Russia risk being dragged in. Russia has a defence pact with Armenia, while Turkey is allied with Azerbaijan.
  • Turkey is not involved in the mediation, which has been led by France, Russia and the United States.
  • The conflict is also worsening the spread of COVID-19 across both countries,
  • Armenia’s new cases had doubled over the past 14 days as of Monday, while new infections were up approximately 80% over the past week in Azerbaijan,
martinelligi

Live Stream and Updates: Amy Coney Barrett Confirmation Hearing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...amy-coney-barrett-live

barrett SCOTUS politics

shared by martinelligi on 13 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Justices do not set an agenda, Judge Barrett said, they respond to the cases that come before them. The description of the process was accurate, but also largely irrelevant in today’s legal world, where interest groups seek out and advance cases to come to the Supreme Court for the express purpose of getting justices to rule on policies to match their political beliefs.
  • “Judges cannot just wake up one day and say, ‘I have an agenda — I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion,’ and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world,” Judge Barrett said.
    • martinelligi
      martinelligi on 13 Oct 20
       
      True, however our biases impact every decision we make and on such an important scale many things are at stake.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Justice Scalia had famously written that the Roe v. Wade decision establishing abortion rights was wrongly decided and should be overturned, Judge Barrett refused to clarify her own views on the issue.
  • Judge Amy Coney Barrett declared at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Tuesday that she was “not here on a mission to destroy the Affordable Care Act” and would not “allow myself to be used as a pawn to decide this election for the American people.”
  • But at the same time, she declined to say whether she would recuse herself, if confirmed, from considering an upcoming case in which Republican states are trying again to get the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act — or from any case that may arise if there is a legal dispute over the outcome of next month’s presidential election.
  • Supreme Court justices do not like to recuse themselves, in part because, unlike at the district and appeals court levels, there is no one to replace them if they step aside. If a justice decides to stay on a case despite accusations of a conflict of interest, there is no appeal.
  • Judge Barrett eventually defended herself to Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, insisting that she had integrity “to apply the law as the law” and was not trying to achieve any political end
  • Asked about other issues — notably abortion rights — Judge Barrett spoke about the doctrine of “stare decisis,” which says the Supreme Court should be reluctant to revisit issues it has previously decided.
  • “In English, that means I interpret the Constitution as a law,” said Judge Barrett. “The text is text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. It does not change over time, and it is not up to me to update it or infuse my own views into it.”
    • martinelligi
      martinelligi on 13 Oct 20
       
      This is the end of the two separate articles I read on the matter- this page is a compilation.
katherineharron

Ballot dropboxes: Republicans inject new chaos into 2020 election - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

trump election

shared by katherineharron on 14 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The latest election controversy cropped up this week in California, where Republicans installed dozens of unauthorized ballot dropboxes that state officials say are illegal.
  • The coronavirus pandemic has led to historic interest in mail-in voting, but President Donald Trump and the GOP have spent months attacking the integrity of mail ballots and fighting in court against dropboxes. The California dispute is the latest flashpoint in this ongoing battle."Whether or not it is technically legal, it's extremely problematic for voters," said CNN election law analyst Rick Hasen, who is also a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. He said the unauthorized dropboxes were "not secure" and that the GOP was "asking for trouble."
  • The California Republican Party installed dozens of unauthorized ballot dropboxes in at least four Southern California counties, where there are competitive House races this year. The party claims it did this as part of an above-board effort to legally collect and return people's ballots.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "Republicans are in a tough spot," Hasen said. "On one hand, you have the President, who is criticizing vote-by-mail and says it is prone to fraud. On the other hand, Republicans in California has long relied on a strong vote-by-mail operation to get out the Republican vote."
  • Padilla's office says state law only permits election officials -- not political parties -- to establish dropboxes for voters to return their ballots. Therefore, the GOP-installed boxes are illegal.
  • The memo also said Republicans violated laws on ballot collection, which is pejoratively called "ballot harvesting." California lets voters designate any "person" to return their ballot on their behalf, often a family member of a volunteer from a political campaign. But the GOP dropboxes eliminated this person-to-person part of the process, which is a key safeguard against fraud.
  • "You mean only Democrats are allowed to do this? But haven't the Dems been doing this for years? See you in court. Fight hard Republicans!" Trump tweeted Tuesday night, inaccurately describing state laws, which allow any party to collect ballots, as long as it is done in-person.
  • It's possible Republicans were just trying to test the waters of what they are legally permitted to do, like their recent efforts to send unauthorized poll watchers to voting sites in Philadelphia. Another more sinister possibility, experts said, is that they knew the dropboxes would cause issues, but are trying to sow chaos and weaken public confidence in the vote-by-mail process.
clairemann

Nxivm sex-cult guru Keith Raniere to be sentenced today - 0 views

nypost.com/...-raniere-to-be-sentenced-today

courts cults abuse psychology

shared by clairemann on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Nxivm sex-cult founder Keith Raniere faces up to life behind bars Tuesday when he is set to be sentenced in the horrific abuse of scores of young women.
  • running a twisted secret group out of Albany that sexually, physically and mentally abused followers.
  • “a massive manipulator, a con man and the crime boss of a cult-like organization involving sex trafficking, child pornography, extortion-compelled abortions, branding, degradation and humiliation,” t
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • a modern-day Svengali.”
  • compared himself to Einstein and Gandhi while touting Nxivm as a “community guided by humanitarian principles that seek to empower people.”
  • he created a secret master-slave group for women within Nxivm called DOS, where stick-thin devotees were branded with his initials above their genitals, made to wear dog collars and submit to unwanted sex with Raniere and other members, the feds said.
  • who went by the title “The Vanguard” — preyed on the young as he committed what the FBI called “serious crimes against humanity.”
  • part of his bizarre plan to use her as some kind of “vessel” to supposedly achieve immortality — and took porno shots of her, according to testimony at his trial.
  • Many were then branded with a cauterizing pen in ceremonies videotaped by other members to prove their loyalty to the group, some women said.
  • “The world closed in on me,” she recalled. “Every degree of freedom I had was lost.”
  • In June 2019, the jury took under five hours to convict Raniere of all of the seven counts against him, including for sex-trafficking, racketeering, child pornography and forced labor. He faces 15 years to life on the charges.
  • The sentencing comes amid heightened interest in the case, with two recent docu-series — HBO’s “The Vow” and Starz’ “Seduced” — featuring survivors telling their stories.
  • Raniere, who did not testify at his trial, has also vowed to protest his innocence.
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