| Hillary Clinton: Biden 'is building the kind of coalition that I had' Posted: 08 Mar 2020 10:11 AM PDT  Clinton told Zakaria she would support Sanders if he became the nominee, but she wasn't sure he would make that request.
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| Should daylight saving time be eliminated? Posted: 08 Mar 2020 08:22 AM PDT  A push to end the practice of changing clocks twice a year is gaining steam in parts of the U.S. Should daylight saving time be abolished nationwide?
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| A pandemic simulation from 2018 shows how washing your hands more often could slow down an outbreak like the coronavirus Posted: 07 Mar 2020 02:03 AM PST  Washing your hands more is one of the most effective things you can do to combat the coronavirus.
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| Saudi cordons off Shiite-majority region over coronavirus Posted: 08 Mar 2020 08:47 AM PDT  Saudi authorities Sunday cordoned off the eastern region of Qatif, a centre of the kingdom's Shiite minority, in a bid to contain the fast-spreading coronavirus as the total number of cases rose to 11. The lockdown on Qatif, home to around 500,000 people, is the first action of its kind across the Gulf region that has confirmed more than 230 coronavirus cases -- most of them people returning from religious pilgrimages to Shiite-majority Iran. "Given that all 11 recorded positive cases of the new coronavirus are from Qatif... it has been decided... to temporarily suspend entry and exit from Qatif," the interior ministry said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.
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| Amy Klobuchar sparks Biden vice president rumours after slip of the tongue at rally Posted: 08 Mar 2020 07:49 AM PDT  Amy Klobuchar had a slip of tongue when speaking to a crowd of supporters, suggesting she might be Joe Biden's pick for vice president.The Minnesota senator was speaking at a campaign rally for Mr Biden on Saturday in Michigan when she sparked the rumours.
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| Argentina announces first coronavirus death in Latin America Posted: 07 Mar 2020 04:07 PM PST  A 64-year-old man died in Argentina as a result of the new coronavirus, the first such death in Latin America, health authorities announced Saturday. The Ministry of Health said the patient lived in Buenos Aires and had been confirmed with COVID-19 after coming down with a cough, fever and sore throat following a recent trip to Europe.
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| No more refills: U.S. airlines step up measures to guard against coronavirus Posted: 07 Mar 2020 11:15 AM PST |
| Before-and-after satellite images show how the coronavirus has emptied global landmarks, from Mecca's Grand Mosque to Tiananmen Square Posted: 06 Mar 2020 10:21 AM PST  The coronavirus epidemic has prompted many people to avoid busy places and halt their travel plans, especially in places like China, Iran, and Italy.
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| UK police review probe into abduction of Dubai ruler's daughter Posted: 07 Mar 2020 06:08 AM PST  British police said Saturday they were reviewing an investigation into the disappearance of the ruler of Dubai's daughter after a court found that she had been abducted by her father. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, who is vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, orchestrated the forcible return home of Sheikha Shamsa from Britain in 2000, the High Court ruled earlier this week. The finding was part of a damning judgement that also revealed the sheikh had seized Shamsa's sister Latifa, now 35, twice and returned her to Dubai.
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| Governor: Maryland coronavirus cases linked to Egyptian cruise and Texas cases Posted: 06 Mar 2020 08:01 PM PST  Three Maryland residents with coronavirus were infected on an Egyptian cruise. The cases led to precautionary school closings near Philadelphia.
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| Italy Locks Down Rich North as Conte Tries to Contain Panic Posted: 08 Mar 2020 12:55 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte tried to contain the alarm spreading through Europe's fourth-biggest economy, unveiling drastic measures in the middle of the night to restrict the spread of the deadly coronavirus.In a hastily convened news conference Sunday morning, the head of a government already hanging by a thread said that Italy will dramatically restrict movement and activity for a quarter of its population in the economic powerhouse that is the region around Milan.As news of the measures leaked, some Italians gave their reactions. Images and posts on social media showed people rushing to get on the last train out and escape a virtual lockdown amid some of the most sweeping anti-virus measures outside China. Schools have already been shut as tourism has ground to a halt and businesses take a hit in a country already on the brink of recession.Conte's latest effort at damage control comes as cases surged to 5,883 on Saturday with 233 deaths, and as Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of one of the two major government parties, announced he had contracted the illness.Yet the premier's late appearance, and his criticism of "unacceptable" leaks, did little to dispel concern that this was a government with a tenuous grasp of a rapidly evolving national emergency. Conte said he would take "political responsibility" for managing the crisis.Market Reaction?A key test of whether he succeeded will come Monday, when investors will assess the impact of his actions on Italy's already weakened economy.Spreads between Italian and German bonds have crept up since the coronavirus crisis erupted but have so far remained below the average of the past year. A spike in yields would put a further strain on Italy's debt just as the government prepares to widen the deficit to prop up the economy.Conte's announcement came after an early draft of the new rules did the rounds and sparked confusion. Images abounded of Italians crowding trains from Milan and the north to make their way south before restrictions came into force. Train travel between northern and southern Italy appeared normal Sunday morning.The regulations are set to come into force "within hours," Conte said. They are to last until April 3, according to the draft seen by Bloomberg. A final text is still to be published.The bans will stop anyone from entering or exiting the most-affected areas, while movement inside will be allowed only for demonstrable business or health reasons, the draft said. Skiing, public events, religious ceremonies and work meetings will be suspended, while schools, museums, swimming pools and theaters will close.Bars and restaurants will have to make sure patrons keep at least one meter apart or they'll be shut. The decree specifies that failing to respect the measures is a criminal offense, and might lead to imprisonment. Police and the army will be responsible for ensuring that containment measures are respected.Some of the affected regions began signaling their resistance on Sunday morning. The Veneto region opposes the inclusion of the Padua, Treviso and Venice provinces in the decree, according to a statement published by Ansa. Maurizio Rasero, the mayor of Asti, which is in the affected zone, called the ban "madness, a disaster we didn't expect."About 16 million people will be affected by restrictions across Lombardy and in 14 provinces around cities including Venice, Modena, Parma, Rimini and Treviso. A large part of the Piedmont region is also affected but not Turin, the regional capital and the headquarters of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV.A second decree with new containment rules for the rest of the country recommends citizens avoid travel outside their hometowns unless absolutely necessary, and restricts public events from demonstrations to theater shows.With Italy's economy already about to contract before the outbreak, the crisis has all but paralyzed business activity in Lombardy -- which accounts for a fifth of the country's gross domestic product -- and the rest of the north, Italy's economic engine.The government decided on Thursday to double emergency spending to 7.5 billion euros ($8.5 billion) to help cushion the economic impact of the virus.It's also calling up 20,000 doctors, nurses and medical personnel to help deal with the outbreak. Fallout from the virus's spread is slamming Italy's key tourism industry at a time when the country is already teetering on the brink of recession.The European Commission's top economic officials approved Italy's spending plans, saying in a letter to the government in Rome that its stimulus plans won't be factored in when assessing the country's compliance with the European Union's fiscal rules.(Updates with Veneto region reaction in 12th paragraph.)\--With assistance from Daniele Lepido, Tommaso Ebhardt, Alessandro Speciale, Sonia Sirletti and Ross Larsen.To contact the reporters on this story: Alberto Brambilla in Milan at abrambilla5@bloomberg.net;John Follain in Rome at jfollain2@bloomberg.net;Alessandro Speciale in Rome at aspeciale@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Flavia Krause-Jackson, James AmottFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| The Boeing 737 MAX Nightmare Keeps Getting Worse Posted: 06 Mar 2020 05:06 PM PST  Nearly a year after a second crash of a Boeing 737 MAX that led to its grounding, the full extent of the company's complicity and negligence, abetted by regulators, is revealed by a damning report from the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.And the issue of how soon this deeply flawed company culture and regulatory system will be fixed becomes even more urgent.One thing is for sure: in the history of air crash investigations, since the beginning of the Jet Age 60 years ago, there has never been such a serious and sustained breakdown in the safeguards intended to keep flying safe.I have covered the MAX catastrophe for The Daily Beast since the first crash, of Lion Air Flight 610 in Indonesia that killed 189 passengers and crew on October 29, 2018. Like many other reporters, I was stonewalled and misled by Boeing's carefully orchestrated and sustained campaign to resist grounding the airplane. For example, it was obvious to me and other experienced reporters that the Lion Air pilots had been swiftly overcome by a problem that that they had not been trained to prepare for because it was related to a new control system, Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), that they—along with all other MAX flight crews—did not know even existed.How Boeing's Bean-Counters Courted the 737 MAX DisasterBoeing Fires its CEO at Last. And Before Anybody Flies on a 737 MAX, 10 Questions Need AnsweringAnd yet Boeing insisted to us that the pilots could have overcome this fatal malfunction by treating it as a condition known as "runaway stabilizer"—one that was actually included in the flight manual as a legacy item—even though the actions triggered by the MCAS were far more extreme.Now the House report confirms, shockingly, that Boeing knew all the time that the pilots had only 10 seconds to identify the problem and deal with it before being overpowered by the MCAS's rogue actions.Furthermore, when I suggested to Boeing that it seemed that the Lion Air crash was very likely caused by what is called a single-point failure—in other words, one flawed system had fatal consequences because there was no backup system to check and correct it, an accepted bedrock principle of safety regimes—the company robustly denied this.When the MCAS was fatally triggered it was responding to false data fed to it from a sensor on the jet's nose that suggested that the airplane was approaching a stall, when it was not. The House report confirms that at least 80 percent of the world's fleet of MAX jets were not fitted with a warning light that would have alerted pilots to a false reading—because this was an optional extra that airlines chose not to adopt.And the report reveals for the first time that in 2013 a Boeing engineer suggested that the MAX should be equipped with a synthetic air speed indicator, a computer-based system first used on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, that would have provided a far more reliable backup system in the case of false readings. Boeing management rejected this proposal because it would have entailed providing pilots with simulator training—something that the company was determined to avoid on the grounds of costs. In fact, the report reveals, in 2017 Boeing's chief test pilot responded to suggestions that simulator training was needed because of the MCAS system, by saying, "Boeing will not allow that to happen. We'll go face to face with any regulator who tries to make that a requirement."Perhaps the most dismaying revelation about the complete collapse of the safety ethic among Boeing's management is that throughout the development of the jet there were frequent warnings from engineers that decisions were being taken that jeopardized its safety. In fact, the committee's investigators say that their report was informed by "numerous whistleblowers."By the time that the FAA certified that the MAX was safe to fly, early in 2017, it was clear that the agency's culture was as steadfastly in denial as Boeing—even though there were already people in the FAA who knew how dangerous the situation was. For example, as the report points out, after the Lion Air crash, the FAA carried out a risk assessment that calculated if no fixes were made to the airplane's known flaws there would be at least 15 more catastrophic crashes during the jet's expected time in service. And yet Boeing and the FAA together refused to take action as more and more of the jets entered airline service every week—until, on March 10, 2019, another jet operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed, killing all 157 passengers and crew. And, even then, the FAA was the last of the world's regulators to ground the jets.It's clear that Boeing has already decided who should be thrown under the bus for their own failings: Dennis Muilenburg, its boss who was fired in December. His successor, David Calhoun, told The New York Times that Muilenburg had put profits before quality:"I'll never be able to judge what motivated Dennis, whether it was a stock price that was going to continue to go up and up, or whether it was just beating the other guy…if anybody ran over the rainbow for the pot of gold on stock, it would have been him."That was a surprising abdication of Calhoun's own responsibility, since he had been a member of Boeing's board for the whole period of the MAX's development. Challenged on this by the Times, Calhoun said, "Boards are invested in their C.E.O.s until they are not."Given that attitude, there's a lot about Boeing's standards of governance that is as worrying as its standards of engineering.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson endorses Bernie Sanders Posted: 07 Mar 2020 05:18 PM PST  Jackson will appear alongside Sanders in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Sunday.
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| Coronavirus: US deaths rise to 19 as New York declares state of emergency Posted: 07 Mar 2020 02:26 PM PST  * Florida officials announce two deaths, the first on the east coast * US has at least 400 confirmed cases of coronavirusThe death toll from coronavirus in the United States rose on Saturday afternoon to 19 people, as authorities announced two deaths in Florida, the first US deaths outside the west coast, two more in Washington state – and the governor of New York declared a state of emergency.Across the country, there were at least 400 confirmed cases of coronavirus, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state and local governments.More than 3,000 people remained quarantined on the Grand Princess, a cruise ship moored off the coast of San Francisco, California, as authorities tested crew members and passengers among those from 50 countries onboard.At least 21 of those had tested positive for the virus, and Donald Trump said Friday that he preferred the passengers stay onboard the ship, so they would not increase the number of coronavirus cases on American soil."I like the numbers being where they are," Trump said, in widely criticized remarks. "I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault."The head of the US Food and Drug Administration said in a rare Saturday briefing that materials for 2.1m coronavirus tests will have been shipped to non-public US labs by Monday, as the Trump administration aimed to counter criticism that its response to the disease has been sluggish and confusing.Stephen Hahn, the FDA commissioner, told reporters at the White House that manufacturers have told the agency they believe that by the end of next week they could scale up to a capacity of 4m additional tests.New efforts have been announced to prevent the spread of disease and protect vulnerable people. Officials in Seattle, Washington, which has one of the largest populations of homeless people in the country, are setting up locations for homeless people who might need treatment or self-quarantine for coronavirus.On Friday, the gig economy organizing group Gig Workers Rising had published a petition asking chief executives at Uber, Lyft, GrubHub, Instacart, DoorDash, Postmates and Handy to give workers paid sick time off during the coronavirus outbreak.On Friday night, an Uber executive made a partial response to concerns about gig economy workers' vulnerability to contagion, saying the company would pay drivers and couriers diagnosed with the Covid-19 novel coronavirus, or quarantined by public health officials for up to 14 days, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.Meanwhile, the number of cases of coronavirus continued to rise across the country, fueling continued concerns about whether the nation's healthcare system was prepared for the additional strain.Andrew Cuomo, New York state's governor, announced there were at least 76 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the state as of early Saturday afternoon, a jump of 21 overnight, and that he was declaring a state of emergency, which allows a state to take special control of funds and resources.He criticized the Trump administration, where the vice-president, who has been put in charge of containing the crisis, and the president, have been speaking at cross-purposes.On Thursday Mike Pence, the vice-president, said there were not enough coronavirus testing kits available in the US to meet medical demand, but on Friday afternoon Donald Trump said there was testing available for all who needed it."That has caused consternation, anxiety," Cuomo said on Saturday. "You know what's worse than the virus? The anxiety, and the fear and the confusion."There is a growing sense that the US government is not fully in control of preparing for and managing either various aspects of the medical situation or public information.The White House "should have been telling every hospital to be prepared to see these cases, knowing how to manage bed space in hospitals if this gets bad and preparing the public for the fact that we're going to be facing a pandemic rather than saying it's containable," Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security and an infectious-disease physician, told the Washington Post. "The idea of containment requires a lot of public health resources that can be better spent."The US capital, Washington DC, reported its first presumptive case on Saturday evening.In the Pacific north-west state of Washington, the main center of the outbreak and death toll so far in the United States, healthcare providers said medical supplies, including masks, are growing scarce, the Seattle Times reported.And in Washington DC, financial regulators made contingency plans for how to oversee financial markets as the coronavirus closes in on the capital. Officials said Friday that the first three cases of the pneumonia-like disease had been diagnosed in Montgomery county, Maryland, home to thousands of federal workers who commute to nearby Washington daily.Concerns about coronavirus led to the cancellation of major events, including South by Southwest, a tech, music and film conference that typically draws more than 400,000 people to Austin, Texas, in late March.Similarly, the forthcoming women's world hockey championships in Canada were canceled Saturday. In California, the San Francisco Symphony has cancelled performances at its symphony hall through 20 March.At least two universities on the west coast announced that they would temporarily hold classes online, rather than in person. The University of Washington, being at the center of the US spread so far, and Stanford University, in California, where the university announced that two undergraduate students were in self-isolation after possible exposure to coronavirus.At the University of California, Los Angeles, three students who were tested for Covid-19 have all tested negative, and the university is continuing to hold live classes on campus for the moment, the university's chancellor, Gene Block, said.Internationally there is disagreement among leading experts about whether the virus has reached pandemic status.California state authorities were working on Saturday evening with federal officials to bring the Grand Princess cruise ship to a non-commercial port and test the 3,500 people aboard.There was no immediate word on where the vessel will dock. Pence said at a meeting in Florida with cruise line executives that officials were still working on the plan."All passengers and crew will be tested for the coronavirus and quarantined as necessary," he said.In Seattle, Washington, which has one of the largest populations of homeless people in the United States, local officials said they have designed a plan to help treat any members of the city's homeless population who might contract coronavirus.
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| Sen. Klobuchar calls for independent review of black man's case Posted: 06 Mar 2020 02:32 PM PST  Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked a top Minnesota prosecutor to initiate an independent investigation into the case of Myon Burrell, a black man who as a teenager was sentenced to life in prison after the stray-bullet killing of an 11-year-old black girl.
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| Coronavirus may force Americans to avoid crowds, brace for quarantines, health official warns Posted: 08 Mar 2020 06:37 AM PDT  WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Americans, especially those who are vulnerable, may need to stop attending big gatherings as the coronavirus spreads through U.S. communities, a top health official said on Sunday, adding that the possibility of large-scale quarantines cannot be ruled out. Anthony Fauci, the head of the infectious diseases unit at the National Institutes of Health, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that after initial missteps distributing tests, there should be 400,000 more tests available by Monday and 4 million by the end of the week. In the United States, 19 people have died out of about 450 reported cases of coronavirus, which originated in China last year and causes the sometimes deadly respiratory illness COVID-19.
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| Photos show how people around the world are disinfecting schools, mosques, and streets to stop the coronavirus from spreading Posted: 07 Mar 2020 05:02 AM PST  Misting tunnels, spray guns, and robots are sanitizing public places. But experts are still debating the effectiveness.
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| Nevada high court defends Tahoe bear activists' free speech Posted: 08 Mar 2020 08:12 AM PDT  Social media comments about protecting bears that were posted by Lake Tahoe activists referring to a longtime wildlife biologist as a murderer constitute "good faith communications" protected as free speech, the Nevada Supreme Court says. The recent opinion doesn't end a lawsuit filed in Washoe County District Court in Reno.
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| Quarter of Italians on lockdown as virus sweeps globe Posted: 08 Mar 2020 06:31 AM PDT  A quarter of the Italian population was in lockdown on Sunday as the government took drastic steps to stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus sweeping the globe, while Iran recorded another 49 deaths and the national airline suspended flights to Europe. Italy's COVID-19 death count is now 233, more than any other country outside China. Italy's measures, in place until April 3, bar people from entering or leaving vast areas of northern Italy without good reason, according to a decree published online.
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| Betsy Devos introduces rule making it harder for child abuse victims come forward at school Posted: 06 Mar 2020 11:33 AM PST  Education secretary Betsy DeVos has introduced a new rule that could make it harder for child abuse victims to come forward at school.The Trump admin introduced changes to Title IX to be rolled out this month about how sexual assault and harassment chargers are handled at K-12 schools and on college campuses.
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| Bernie Sanders Feels Joe Biden Is ‘Up to the Task’ of the ‘Rigors’ of Being President Posted: 08 Mar 2020 07:20 AM PDT  In the wake of many of his supporters and progressives openly questioning the cognitive capabilities of former Vice President Joe Biden, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on Sunday that he doesn't make "personal attacks" on Biden while waving off concerns that the ex-veep isn't "up to the task" of being president.Appearing on CNN's State of the Union, the democratic-socialist Vermont senator was asked by anchor Jake Tapper about tweets his campaign staff sent over the weekend comparing Sanders' robust campaigning to Biden's lighter schedule."Bernie has three public events just today in two different states, each speaking engagement extending for close to an hour," Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir tweeted in response to a report that Biden spoke for just seven minutes at a Saturday rally in St. Louis.Why the Democratic Race Isn't Close to Over"Do you think that Vice President Biden is not up to the task in terms of the rigors of being either the Democratic nominee or being the president?" Tapper wondered aloud."No," Sanders responded. "No, I think what we're talking about is my schedule, which I just mentioned to you. By the way, we're in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and later this afternoon we'll hold a rally here."After noting that Rev. Jesse Jackson would be joining him on the trail and supporting his campaign, Sanders pointed out that he wouldn't be taking personal shots at his Democratic primary rival."But look, Joe Biden is a friend of mine and Joe and I have disagreements on the issues," Sanders added. "I do not make personal attacks on Joe."Earlier in the interview, Sanders also said that while he was the best candidate to win over Midwestern voters, such as in Michigan, he also felt that Biden could defeat Trump if the ex-veep became the nominee."I've been asked a million times and I believe Joe can beat Trump," Sanders said. "I believe if Joe is the candidate, I'll do everything I can to ensure that he does."In the wake of Biden leapfrogging Sanders as the Democratic frontrunner, many of the former vice president's critics on the left have openly begun suggesting that the 77-year-old candidate is suffering from cognitive decline."After disappearing for the week, this isn't a convincing response to growing concerns—first implied in the debates by Julian Castro, then raised by Cory Booker, today reported in @Politico—about Biden's cognitive decline," The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald tweeted on Saturday. "Soon he'll just appear by hologram, spouting phrases."Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Florida Woman Changed Voters' Party Affiliations, Officials Say Posted: 08 Mar 2020 09:27 AM PDT  A Florida woman was charged on Thursday after officials said she filled out 10 voter registration forms with false information, at least six of which enrolled Democratic and independent voters in the Republican Party without their consent.The woman, Cheryl A. Hall, 63, of Clermont, Florida, worked for Florida First, a voter registration group heavily funded by America First Policies, which supports President Donald Trump.America First Policies announced plans last year to spend more than $20 million on voter registration efforts in at least four battleground states: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.Alan Hays, the supervisor of elections in Lake County, Florida, near Orlando, said that although Hall was charged with submitting 10 false voter registration forms, he believes she might have submitted another 109 forms with false information.Some forms submitted by Florida First contained faulty information in handwriting that did not match Hall's, he said, leading him to believe that others at the organization might have also falsified voter information.Hays said he could not speculate on Hall's motive, and was continuing to investigate to ensure the integrity of the county's voter registration system. Florida holds its presidential primary on March 17, and Lake County began early voting on Thursday."It has absolutely nothing to do with party politics," said Hays, a Republican. "If you're misbehaving, I'm going to call you on it."Hays said the false information came to his attention after three voters contacted his office late last month, complaining that they had received cards stating that their party registration had been changed, even though they had never made such a change.The registration forms that switched their party affiliation were stamped with a number belonging to Florida First, and when he contacted the group, it traced the forms back to Hall, he said.Although the forms contained the correct names of voters, their dates of birth, Social Security numbers and other details were incorrect and automatically flagged by the county election database as unverifiable, he said."It's just really bizarre," Hays said. "I don't know what part of her imagination was convinced she could get away with this."Hall was charged with 10 counts of submitting false voter registration information and released on $20,000 bond on Thursday, according to the Lake County Sheriff's Office.At least six of the forms were of Democrats or independents who had their party affiliation changed to Republican, Hays said. The others had their signatures or other details falsified, he said."We don't know what she was hoping to accomplish," said Lt. John Herrell of the Lake County Sheriff's Office, adding that it "certainly does not appear" that Florida First did anything wrong. Hall, he said, may have simply gone "off the rails."No one answered at a phone number listed for Hall, and it was not immediately clear if she had a lawyer.She is due back in court on March 30 and has not entered a plea, the sheriff's office said. Submitting false voter information is a third-degree felony, punishable by a $5,000 fine or up to five years in prison, Hays said.Kelly Sadler, a spokeswoman for America First Policies, referred questions about the charges to Florida First, but confirmed the organization is a "big donor" to the Florida group.Elicia Babac, Florida First's state director, said in a statement the group was "actively working with the Lake County Supervisor of Elections to ensure every voter is properly registered to vote.""Florida First will continue to work tirelessly to serve communities that may be underrepresented, and provide them access to voter registration services," Babac said, adding that the group was working with county officials to "ensure there are no additional irregularities."Hall was working as a part-time employee, Babac said. Florida First has advertised that it pays $15 to $18 an hour to voter registration canvassers "who believe in the conservative principles of limited government, keeping taxes low and that an overly intrusive federal government has a negative impact on our citizens."Hays said he had seen Hall, a registered Republican, canvassing with voter registration forms at several community events.At a news conference Wednesday, Hays said he wanted voters to know that even if unauthorized changes were made to their registration files, they could still cast a provisional ballot and election officials would ensure that every eligible vote was counted."The real takeaway nugget was, 'Folks, we want you to know we're on top of this situation,'" Hays said. "If you find your record has been altered, the integrity of our voting database is still intact."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| McDonald’s worker arrested after allegedly smashing coffee pot on customer’s head Posted: 06 Mar 2020 11:39 AM PST  The incident reportedly took place after verbal dispute at the drive-thru window.
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| Israel's Netanyahu discusses coronavirus concerns with Pence Posted: 08 Mar 2020 08:33 AM PDT  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed coronavirus concerns with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday amid reports Israel is about to restrict the entry of travelers from parts of the United States. Both men agreed to follow up their telephone call with discussions later on Sunday between U.S. and Israeli health officials on technological and scientific cooperation and ways to "confront the challenges" posed by the virus, Netanyahu's office said in a statement. Pence is leading the U.S. federal response to the coronavirus after the Republican administration was criticized for sending mixed messages and unpreparedness.
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| How the coronavirus outbreak could help fuel China's dystopian surveillance system Posted: 07 Mar 2020 02:30 AM PST  Authorities have used invasive surveillance techniques to monitor citizens to try to stem the epidemic. Experts fear this could be the new normal.
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| Officials confirm first coronavirus case in nation's capital Posted: 07 Mar 2020 06:57 PM PST  A man in his 50s tested positive for coronavirus — the first presumptively confirmed case in the nation's capital — and another person who traveled through the city has also tested positive in Maryland, officials said. District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser said Saturday the man in the initial case started exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 in late February. "With his test yielding presumptive positive, D.C. Health has started its investigation in keeping with CDC guidelines," Bowser said.
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| Before coronavirus, Seattle was under siege by the deadliest flu in history. Here's what life was like. Posted: 07 Mar 2020 01:42 PM PST  As the coronavirus epidemic threatens Seattle and Washington, there's an odd echo of 1918 when the Spanish flu had the city on lock down.
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| The Desert Town That’s Home to U.S. Drones and People Smugglers Posted: 07 Mar 2020 08:00 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Moctar raised his right hand above his head and from an almost impossible height poured hot tea into a glass as he recounted his latest trip to Libya transporting migrants seeking to make the hazardous Mediterranean crossing to Europe.The 72-hour journey across the border from Niger to Libya was perilous, with the list of potential dangers including attacks by bandits and Islamist militants to the more mundane of crashing into sand dunes or simply running out of gas. Luckily he reached his destination.He then stuffed his Toyota Hilux with pasta, canned tomatoes, sugar, flour and cooking oil for sale back home. It was one of dozens of such excursions Moctar, 30, has made over the years from Agadez, a sprawling cluster of low, sand-colored compounds huddling in the desert of northern Niger. Now it's also the front line of both Europe's anti-migration efforts and the fight by U.S., French and African forces against the spread of Islamist militancy. Increasingly, Moctar, who is not being identified in full because of the nature of his work, and other smugglers are finding times tough because of the crackdown on trafficking by the Nigerien authorities in cooperation with European nations. Sometimes he turns to smuggling the opioid tramadol, which is popular in neighboring Nigeria."The trafficking of migrants continues, the only difference is now sometimes I fill up the car with drugs, mostly tramadol, when I can't find enough migrants," he said. "If you're taking the risk of breaking the law, there's no point holding back. You might as well go big, at least that'll make it worth the risk." Agadez's role as a hub for trans-Saharan trade dates back centuries — from salt caravans in the 15th century to illicit convoys of migrants."People here live off migrants, it's how we feed our families," said 38-year-old Andre, who's been driving migrants from Agadez, a city of about 100,000 people, to southern Libya since 2007, but these days struggles to find work. "The authorities treat us like criminals when we are just trying to do our job. I know at least two dozen people who have become bandits for lack of work."Today Agadez is playing a new role in the region as home to Air Base 201, where American forces target insurgents affiliated to al-Qaeda and Islamic State in cooperation with the French military throughout the Sahel, an arid area on the southern fringe of the Sahara. The expanded U.S. profile in the region was highlighted in 2017 when four American soldiers died in an ambush in Niger."With Mali and Burkina Faso having lost control of large swaths of territory and the presence of the jihadists' bases, the risk is that they link battlefields across the Sahel," said Frank Van der Mueren, head of the European Union's civilian capacity-building mission in Niger, known as EUCAP Sahel Niger. Niger is now seen by the Europeans as a strategic partner and a "lock on the door'' for security in the Sahel, he said. The Nigerien authorities passed a law in 2015 that made trafficking in migrants a criminal offense and reinforced border patrols. A quarter of the 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) in aid the EU has provided Niger over the 2017-20 period has gone to policies to curb migration. The Nigerien measure followed an agreement between African and European leaders to a common approach to address the root causes of migration amid a surge of arrivals by sea and on land at the EU's external borders, with more than 1 million asylum seekers and migrants trying to reach EU member states that year. In 2018, the EU border control authority Frontex opened its first Risk Analysis Cell on the continent in Niger's capital, Niamey, about 950 kilometers (590 miles) southwest of Agadez.The efforts appear to be working. In 2018, illegal crossings on the Niger route plunged by 80% to 23,000, the lowest number since 2012, according to Frontex.At the same time, migration has now picked up along a western route through Morocco, and prompted smugglers to forge new, more dangerous routes through its eastern neighbor Chad, the European Council on Foreign Relations said in an October 2019 policy brief.And some of Niger's tougher measures on migration have fueled concerns that they're worsening security."The largely military approach has pushed the traffic underground and reinforced criminal networks, including the militias in Libya and some terrorist groups," said Mohamed Anacko, the president of Agadez's regional council.Competition over drug trafficking routes between ethnic militias in the tri-border area between Niger, Chad and Libya further risks destabilizing northern Niger."The situation in Libya boosts the development of transnational border crime and the circulation of arms that reinforces the armed actors and feeds into the conflicts across the Sahel," said Niger's interior minister, Mohamed Bazoum. "The conflict in Libya is fuel on the fire."The exploration of new gold deposits and oil with the construction of a $5 billion oil pipeline by the China National Petroleum Corp., from the Agadem fields in northeastern Niger, brings its own risks. Small-scale gold mining is an increasingly important source of revenue for jihadists operating in the Sahel, including Niger.In northern Niger, most people live off farming, construction work, seasonal migration to Libya and the migrants who still pass though. At one point, young men left to fight with the rebels in Libya, until the spread of Islamic State made the situation there too dangerous.Until 2015, migration-related activities contributed as much as $100 million per year to the regional economy around Agadez, according to the International Crisis Group, citing local authorities in a recent report. At one point, the industry was estimated to support more than half of the households in the town.Authorities managed local conflicts by turning a blind eye to former ethnic Tuareg rebels-turned-smugglers running unofficial travel agencies and moving people, gold, drugs and pasta across the desert. Travel agents made as much as $5,000 a week, employing drivers, cooks, guards and coaxers who picked up migrants from bus stops and brought them to so-called ghettos, or migrant housing, in town.Today, they've seen their revenue dwindles.Dealing with illegal migration by banning the movement of contraband goods and people could be counter-productive, said William Assanvo, an analyst with the Institute for Security Studies in Dakar, Senegal."In some areas, contraband and illicit activities is simply the way in which people are making an income and how the economy is structured," Assanvo said.The U.S. drone base hasn't been much help, either. For a few months in 2017, Agadez residents were bused to the base to help elongate the airstrip for the armed drones that started taking off last year. When that was done, the offers of work quickly dried up."First, the tourists stopped coming," said Surajh Rabiou, a craftsman selling jewelry and wooden carvings near the town's mosque. "Then Europe decided to shut down migration, so we lost that income too. Now the American troops are here, but they don't buy my jewelry like the tourists used to do."\--With assistance from Pauline Bax and Jeremy Diamond.To contact the author of this story: Katarina Hoije in Accra at khoije@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Karl Maier at kmaier2@bloomberg.net, Paul RichardsonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Elizabeth Warren endured sexism at every step of her campaign Posted: 07 Mar 2020 06:02 AM PST  She faced the impossible: be competent but not condescending, cheery but not pandering, maternal but not frumpy, smart but not haughtyA woman cannot be elected president. If that statement was not true when Elizabeth Warren announced her intent to run, on New Years Eve 2018, it has become true now. With her exit from the race, the last serious female presidential candidate has now dropped out, and what was once a historically diverse field has narrowed to two very old white men, the former vice-president Joe Biden, 77, and the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, 78. The next president, it is now assured, will be a man. Again.The bruising contest has left the party divided and rancorous, with the result being that no matter who the Democratic nominee is, he will face not only the formidable resources of a moneyed Republican opposition, but also intense internal enmity within his own party. The internal factionalism and wild hatred within the Democratic party makes either candidate, be it Biden or Sanders, much more likely to lose in November. And the advanced ages of both of the two remaining major candidates means that even if one of them wins the presidency in November, it remains a real question whether they can feasibly run for a second term. And so, win or lose, the long, contentious and often hateful Democratic primary cycle will be repeated in four years for the 2024 cycle, further fracturing and handicapping the party, no matter what.All of this could have been avoided if the media and the electorate were less blinded by cynicism, sexism and fear and more willing to see Warren for who she was – the most capable, competent and kindest candidate in the race.As a woman, the Massachusetts senator always faced an uphill battle of double standards and misogynist resentment. She had to be competent but not condescending, cheery but not pandering, maternal but not frumpy, smart but not haughty. As she rose in the polls last summer and fall, she came under the kind of scrutiny that male frontrunners are not subjected to, and faced skepticism about her claims and character that male candidates do not face.> As she rose in the polls last summer and fall, she came under the kind of scrutiny that male frontrunners are not subjected toThis is the fate of a lot of women who come close to attaining power, and empirical data backs up the phenomenon: writing in the Washington Post, the Cornell philosopher Kate Manne cited a 2010 Harvard study that found that women are viewed more negatively simply by seeking office. "Voters view male and female politicians as equally power-seeking, but respond to them quite differently," Manne writes. "Men who seek power were viewed as stronger and tougher, while power-seeking women provoked feelings of disgust and contempt."As a result, all of Warren's virtues were recast as vices in the public eye. Her impressive credentials and superlative intellect became out-of-touch elitism. Her joyousness and enthusiasm were cast as somehow both insincerely pandering and cringingly over-earnest. This kind of transformation of neutral or positive character traits into negative ones is not something that happens to men in similar positions. Sanders can aestheticize his practiced cantankerousness for laughs and sympathy without anyone asking if its a put-on. Biden can use slang from the 1930s without anyone ever questioning whether the ostentatious folksiness of his "no malarkey" messaging might be just a tad affected. But for Warren, every smile was interpreted as a sign of concealed hatred, of secret, nefarious motives.Her policy efforts, too, were cast as a repudiation of her principles rather than as steps toward realizing them. Her attempt to transform Medicare for All from a symbolic rallying cry into a substantive, workable and affordable policy change that can be made in our time brought, paradoxically, accusations that she was less serious about the policy for trying to make it a reality. Her plans to break up tech monopolies, repair the damage to black wealth done by historic redlining policies and reshape massive federal spending projects to make them environmentally sustainable were all cast as signs of duplicity and lack of commitment to her stated values. Meanwhile, male candidates who did not have substantive plans to implement such policies were believed, largely uncritically, when they told the public that they would put them in place.In this race, men's statements – about who they are, what they value, what they would do as president – have largely been taken at face value, even when male candidates have made false or exaggerated claims or contradicted themselves. But Elizabeth Warren was never given the benefit of the doubt. Her flaws and missteps were magnified, and interpreted in ways disproportionate to their significance, while comparatively greater mistakes by male rivals were all but ignored. When she referred to her father as having worked as a janitor, a days–long news cycle asked why, if he was really a janitor, her brother had once referred to him as a "maintenance man". That these are effectively the same did not matter: the irrelevant non-story was interpreted as a sign of her constitutional untrustworthiness.Warren was said to be not really running for president, but running as a spoiler; not really happy to meet voters, but shamelessly pretending with her long selfie lines; not really committed to economic inequality, but merely devoting her life to it as some sort of long con. None of these accusations made much logical sense, but that didn't matter, because they were backed up by the force of feeling – a very strong feeling, held by many men and women alike, that a woman seeking power and status just can't be trusted.The epistemic philosopher Miranda Fricker calls this tendency to disbelieve women, and to believe powerful men, "testimonial injustice": the harm done to speakers when prejudiced listeners discount their credibility. Women face testimonial injustice in particular when they challenge or contradict men, as cultural tropes that depict women as conniving, scheming, and selfish can be mustered to make her seem less credible, him more believable. Fricker doesn't apply her concept of testimonial injustice to gender conflict exclusively, but it is an obstacle that many women recount in their own experiences of gendered injustice: the sense that they cannot be believed, that they cannot achieve equal credibility and moral footing with men in the minds of their peers, that they will always be assumed to be either stupid or dishonest. Branded as dishonest even as she told the truth, duplicitous even as she kept her promises, Warren faced testimonial injustice on a huge scale, and it ultimately doomed her campaign.Which brings us to the real moment, I think, that effectively killed Warren's chances at the presidency: not the botched communications rollout of her Medicare for All plan, as many pundits have said, but her conflict with Sanders. In January, CNN reported that Warren and Sanders had met privately in late 2018 before announcing their candidacies, and that Warren had told close associates afterwards that Sanders had said something rude, inconsiderate and sexist to her: that he did not think a woman could defeat Donald Trump. Sanders says that's not what he meant, but the two candidates' accounts of the conversation are not incompatible. When Warren confirmed the report, the story both pointed to the troublesome misogyny of Sanders supporters and incited it: they began a gruesome, hateful and organized attack against Warren and her supporters. They called her a liar. They called her a snake, and made excessive use of the snake emoji. The online conversation veered from the typical competitive snarkiness into something darker and more hateful. Many of the things Sanders supporters said in response to this incident were deeply sexist and deeply cruel. A few of the things they said were threatening.In the aftermath, it became difficult, if not impossible, to say that you believed Warren about the conversation: any public statement of support for her or belief in her account was met with fierce harassment. Perhaps this is why few of them were made. The public consensus quickly became that she was lying about the conversation with Sanders, and that he was not lying. It is plausible, to me, to think that a white man in his late 70s, comfortable in his privilege and out of touch with his time, said something condescending and sexist to a woman in private. I find Warren's account more plausible than the alternative offered by Sanders' supporters, that a woman invented the story and leaked it to hurt an innocent man. But to those that make it, the feasibility of the accusation is not important. What is important, again, is that the accusation is backed up by feeling, the feeling that Warren owes something to this man, that she betrayed him, that she can't be trusted.> What happened to Elizabeth Warren is proof that women's lives are still constrained and narrowed by sexism, that women's talents and ambitions still matter less than men'sMany people believed Warren was lying when she said that Sanders told her a woman couldn't be president, and in politics, what gets believed is effectively indistinguishable from the truth, whether or not it has any bearing on fact. Maybe this is why powerful men, given so much credibility and so much benefit of the doubt, seem to have a strange power of pronouncement. They declare that a woman is deceitful and people stop trusting her; they declare that a woman is unelectable and people stop imagining the country she would shape; they say, even allegedly, even third-hand, that a woman can't beat Trump, and people nod along, believing. And then they vote for a man.Warren events became famous for the selfie lines, the sometimes hours-long rally-after-the-rally in which waiting voters and supporters could chat with campaign reps about the candidate, talk to one another about the issues they cared about and ultimately get a picture with Warren herself. By the time she dropped out, Warren had taken more than 100,000 of these pictures. The events developed a particular ritual, and one aspect was what Warren did when she met a small girl: she would kneel down to the child's eye level and offer her a pinkie promise. "I'm running for president, because that's what girls do," she would tell them, and then ask them to remember.The message to the children was that women can do anything, that when they grow up their talents won't be ignored, their intelligence won't be mocked, their horizons won't be narrowed because of their sex. But if anything, Elizabeth Warren's candidacy proved that this is not true. There is no way for a woman to be enough to overcome misogyny – there is no amount of smart she can be, there is no amount of good she can be, there is no point at which she will be so overpoweringly hardworking and so obviously qualified that people who do not want women to have positions of prominence and authority will have to give her one anyway. What happened to Elizabeth Warren is proof that women's lives are still constrained and narrowed by sexism, that women's talents and ambitions still matter less than men's.I don't think that Elizabeth Warren lied very much during this campaign. I don't think she lied about her principles, or her policy agenda, or about Bernie Sanders. If she ever lied, it was to those little girls. * Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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| Romney Backs Burisma Probe, Paving Way for Johnson to Subpoena Witness Posted: 06 Mar 2020 09:45 AM PST  Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah) said Friday that he would support Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) in his plan to subpoena a witness as part of a probe into Burisma and the Bidens."Senator Romney has expressed his concerns to Chairman Johnson, who has confirmed that any interview of the witness would occur in a closed setting without a hearing or public spectacle," Liz Johnson, Romney's communications director, said in an emailed statement to National Review. "He will therefore vote to let the Chairman proceed to obtain the documents that have been offered."Romney previously raised concerns over the situation, which Johnson has said is simply to let "the American people see what this possible corruption is," telling reporters Thursday that the probe "appears political.""There's no question that the appearance of looking into Burisima and Hunter Biden appears political. I think people are tired of these kind of political investigations," Romney told reporters, and said he had to meet with Johnson before deciding on his vote.With Romney's approval, Johnson's plan to subpoena a former Ukrainian embassy official who consulted for the Washington-based Blue Star Strategies — a firm Burisma hired to combat accusations of corruption within the energy company — will likely proceed."As part of the committee's ongoing investigation, it has received U.S. government records indicating that Blue Star sought to leverage Hunter Biden's role as a board member of Burisma to gain access to, and potentially influence matters at, the State Department," Johnson wrote to announce his intentions on Sunday.Johnson, who said Thursday that he had begun inquiring about the situation in 2017, said Wednesday that he had come across a Blue Star document which describes a "misinformation campaign" against Ukrainian prosecutor Victor Shokin, who Joe Biden bragged about getting fired.
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| Washington State mulling mandatory measures to contain coronavirus Posted: 08 Mar 2020 07:39 AM PDT |
| Barr Increasingly Appears Focused on Undermining Mueller Inquiry Posted: 07 Mar 2020 07:13 AM PST  WASHINGTON -- Attorney General William Barr testified before Congress last spring that "it's time for everybody to move on" from the special counsel investigation into whether Donald Trump associates conspired with Russia's 2016 election interference.Nearly a year later, however, it is clear that Barr has not moved on from the investigation at all. Rather, he increasingly appears to be chiseling away at it.The attorney general's handling of the results of the Russia inquiry came under fire when a federal judge questioned this week whether Barr had sought to create a "one-sided narrative" clearing Trump of misconduct. The judge said Barr displayed a "lack of candor" in remarks that helped shape the public view of the special counsel's report before it was released in April.In fact, Barr's comments then were but the first in a series of actions in which he cast doubt not just on the findings of the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and some of the resulting prosecutions, but on its very premise. In the process, Barr demoralized some of the department's rank and file and lent credence to Republican politicians who seek to elevate the Mueller investigation into an election-year political issue -- including Trump."I'm deeply troubled by what I've been seeing with Barr's stewardship of the Justice Department," said Nancy Baker, a scholar of attorneys general who studied Barr's first stint in the post under President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s. At the very least, she said, he has created the appearance that he does not "respect the long-standing norms of departmental independence."Some of Barr's defenders insist that he is suffering from a situation beyond his control: namely, a president whose running commentary on criminal cases he has an interest in has sowed suspicion about the attorney general's motives. In a ruling Thursday in a Freedom of Information Act case over the Mueller report, Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District for the District of Columbia questioned whether Barr had redacted portions of the Mueller report in order to protect the president.The department's spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, said Friday that "the court's assertions were contrary to the facts" and that Mueller's team helped the attorney general decide what information should be kept out of public view.Nonetheless, the judge's criticism reinforced the impression that Barr has been on a mission to undercut the Mueller inquiry. In ever stronger terms, Barr has implied that Mueller was appointed in 2017 only because FBI officials rushed without reason to escalate their suspicions about the Trump campaign into a full-blown investigation.The Justice Department's own inspector general rejected that premise late last year, finding that the bureau's decision was justified by the facts. But Barr has assigned a federal prosecutor to investigate the matter further and has suggested that the inquiry might conclude that the FBI acted in bad faith. Investigators are also said to be examining the intelligence agencies' assessment that President Vladimir Putin of Russia interfered in the American presidential race on behalf of Trump.Last month, Barr appointed another outside prosecutor to review a case that Mueller brought against the president's former national security adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI. And in a second case that the Mueller team brought against Roger Stone, Trump's longtime friend, the attorney general overruled career prosecutors to seek a more lenient prison sentence, triggering a chain of events that the federal judge overseeing the case called "unprecedented."In those and other instances, Barr has never mentioned Mueller by name. But he has increasingly sided with the view of Trump and his allies that the special counsel's inquiry was baseless. As Barr put it succinctly in a December interview with NBC News, "Our nation was turned on its head for three years, I think, based on a completely bogus narrative."He has implicitly criticized both John Brennan, the CIA director under President Barack Obama, and James Comey, who Trump fired as FBI director in 2017, for actions related to the Russia inquiry. Noting that Brennan twice warned the Russian government not to interfere in the 2016 election, Barr said it was "inexplicable" no one warned the Trump campaign that the Russians had targeted it.He also said Comey refused to take the necessary security clearance steps that would have enabled him to cooperate fully with Michael Horowitz, the department's inspector general, in his review of aspects of the Russia investigation. But he noted that John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut who is separately investigating the origins of the Russia inquiry, has the power to compel testimony. "A decision has to be made about motivations," he said.The president's allies are eager to draw Barr more publicly to their side. At an expected upcoming oversight hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who chairs the panel, is likely to question Barr about whether he believes the Mueller inquiry was necessary or justified.Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., another staunch defender of the president, has promised to ask the Justice Department to open a criminal inquiry into whether the special counsel's office mishandled the prosecution of George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.Both Barr's critics and defenders are carefully watching the Flynn case for signs that Barr is backing away from what had been an aggressive prosecution initiated by Mueller and inherited by the U.S. attorney's office in Washington. More than two years after he pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the government, Flynn reversed himself and asked to withdraw his plea. He claimed prosecutors had deceived him -- accusations that the judge overseeing the case has firmly rejected.Once Flynn recanted, prosecutors stiffened their sentencing recommendation, saying Flynn deserved up to six months in prison. But in January, they seemed to soften that stance, saying that probation was also "reasonable."Outside prosecutors have now been assigned to review the Flynn prosecution, along with other politically sensitive national security cases -- a level of second-guessing that has disturbed federal prosecutors in the Washington office and elsewhere.Even some of Barr's defenders acknowledge that the sentencing of Stone, a former campaign adviser to Trump, turned into a debacle for the department. Barr overruled the sentencing recommendation of four career prosecutors after Trump wrote on Twitter that Stone was being treated too harshly.The prosecutors withdrew from the case in protest. Faced with a backlash in his department, Barr asked the president on national television to quit commenting on the department's criminal cases, and associates suggested he was on the verge of resigning. But when Trump ignored him, Barr stayed put.While Barr insisted he made his decision about Stone's proper punishment based on the merits of the case, sentencing data show the move was extraordinary.A jury convicted Stone, 67, of obstructing a congressional inquiry, tampering with a witness and lying to congressional investigators. The government requested that Stone be granted leniency despite the fact that he had refused to plead guilty.That was the case in less than 2% of the nearly 75,000 criminal defendants who were sentenced in federal courts in the fiscal year that ended in September, according to data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission. The Stone case also stands out because the government ended up seeking a lighter punishment than the federal probation office had recommended, although that recommendation was likely guided by information provided by the prosecutors who Barr overruled.Prosecutor rarely ask for leniency after a trial because it undercuts their ability to negotiate guilty pleas with other defendants, according to Douglas Berman, a professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law who specializes in sentencing issues. "They want to be able to say, and to have a defense attorney repeat to a client, that they are willing to cut a deal, but they are never going to offer this again," he said.In fact, a review by The New York Times of more than 60 federal cases in which a defendant faced at least one similar charge to Stone's turned up no instances in which the government recommended leniency after a trial. The Times reviewed cases in which defendants were sentenced after January 2017 and that were handled by two of the biggest U.S. attorneys offices: in Washington and in the central district of California.In at least nine cases, the government asked for leniency, technically called a variance from sentencing guidelines. Prosecutors typically cited other mitigating factors, including advanced age or illness, on top of a speedy guilty plea.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Two test positive for coronavirus at US conference attended by Pence Posted: 07 Mar 2020 05:02 AM PST  Two people have tested positive for the new coronavirus after taking part in a pro-Israel lobby group's conference in Washington which Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and dozens of lawmakers also attended. The influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee said in an email to attendees, speakers and congressional offices that the infected pair had traveled from New York to go to the March 1-3 event. "We have confirmed that at least two Policy Conference attendees from New York have tested positive for the Coronavirus," AIPAC said in the message, posted to its Twitter account.
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| The DNC just made it mathematically impossible for Tulsi Gabbard to make the next debate, leaving Biden and Sanders one-on-one Posted: 06 Mar 2020 02:43 PM PST  Even if Gabbard were to somehow secure all 352 of the delegates in the next round of voting, she would still fail to break the 20% threshold.
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| Michigan state senator denies sexual harassment allegations Posted: 06 Mar 2020 11:17 AM PST  A Michigan lawmaker issued a statement Friday denying that he sexually harassed three women, a day after the Senate leader removed him from a committee he led and ordered him to undergo training. Sen. Peter Lucido, a Republican from Macomb County's Shelby Township, noted that the Senate Business Office and its outside lawyers determined the allegations could not be "unequivocally substantiated". "Given that I have not sexually harassed anyone nor were there any citations of a violation of Senate rules determined by the investigation, I look forward to continuing to work on behalf of the people I represent," Lucido said.
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| We shouldn't have to pay for Jack Dorsey's $40m estate when it crumbles into the sea Posted: 08 Mar 2020 03:00 AM PDT  By using public money to protect California homes from climate change, the state is transferring wealth from working-class people of color to white property owners Even by the standards of overpriced San Francisco, the Sea Cliff neighborhood is astronomically expensive. Nestled between two gorgeous parks and with what a realtor might describe as commanding views of the Golden Gate, it could hardly be different. Homes in the area routinely go for more than $10m. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and the payment service Square, recently bought a place here for $21.5m – next door to his $18m present home. The 0.62 acre compound is recessed from the street and perched on a cliff overlooking the beach.And that's where things get interesting, because cliffside living has become an increasingly risky proposition in California. Warming ocean temperatures are whipping up stronger surfs and more brutal winter storms, causing cliffs to crumble ever faster into the sea. The consequences for thousands of cliff-top houses such as Dorsey's could be catastrophic. Still, @Jack's bet isn't a bad one: depending on when the house goes over the edge, it might well be the rest of us that gets stuck with the bill.That's because most of the cost of protecting California properties from coastal erosion, wildfires and other effects of the climate crisis will be met by the state, with public money. This means those costs won't fall on the disproportionately white and wealthy people who own property. Rather, they'll be increasingly borne by the working- and middle-class Hispanic, black and brown Californians that make up the majority of the state, many of whom don't own real estate. Without really grappling with this reality, the state is slipping step by step towards a massive wealth transfer from the general public to the owners of private property. It's one more way in which the climate crisis is also a crisis of racism and inequality.What Sea Cliff could look like in a few years' time can be glimpsed in the town of Pacifica, 14 miles to the south. Parts of the town, which is much more middle-class than Sea Cliff, sit directly on beautiful bluffs that overlook – and are tumbling into – the Pacific Ocean. When the town's mayor proposed a "managed retreat" from the coast, home owners and local realtors revolted: the proposal would have effectively taken their homes off the market, cutting them off from potential profits. (Owners does not mean residents: about a third of Pacifica's housing stock, including many of the most threatened buildings, consists of rental units.) So instead of a managed retreat, the city is taking money from the public coffers and using it to protect property investments by building sea walls and replenishing eroding beaches with trucked-in sand, among other measures.This is a dynamic we've seen throughout the late capitalist economy. The sociologist Ulrich Beck described it as a change from "a logic of wealth distribution" to one of "risk distribution". Profits are privatized, but risk is made public. The banks made a bunch of bad bets on crappy mortgage debts? Bail them out with public money and give the executives multimillion-dollar bonuses. Someone half bakes a fundamentally unprofitable tech business? Let them IPO it so they can liquidate hundreds of millions of dollars of stock options while transferring the ultimately worthless company into the hands of public pension funds and workers' 401ks.That's the same thing that is now happening in California, where the land is uniquely threatened and at the same time uniquely valuable. There is a concerted political effort not to manage the risk, but rather to keep it from impacting value by making the public bear the costs of the climate crisis through things such as the sorts of publicly funded disaster relief programs and state-subsidized insurance payouts that Jack Dorsey could theoretically benefit from. This is, in fact, what many of the owners of capital and real estate think the government is for: protecting the value of private property at all costs. It's one of the reasons we have a climate crisis – instead of a robust, rapid transition away from fossil fuels – in the first place.The sheer immensity of the climate crisis, and of California, ensures that more and more of the costs will be borne by the public. The LA Times estimates that $150bn in California property might be impacted by coastal flooding and erosion by 2100. That's $150bn in private wealth which the government has made it a public priority to preserve. But those costs are dwarfed by the risks created by the region's intensifying wildfires, which threaten millions of properties around the state. The financial response to wildfires so far shows how these risks will inevitably be collectivized.It will go something like this: as houses become astronomically expensive, insurance payouts become astronomically large. In response, in threatened areas, private insurers will cancel coverage, or multiply rates to the point of unaffordability. The state will be forced to step in to stabilize the rates, and keep the land valuable, which will likely involve something like the National Flood Insurance Program, which subsidizes flood insurance provided by private insurers and underwrites the full extent of their losses.The racist dimension to this wealth transfer must not be overlooked. Fewer than 55% of California households own their dwelling and only 42% of Latino households and 33% of black ones do. Non-urban space, open space, and at-risk space in California is today particularly white, or at least white-owned.Especially in the sorts of rural areas threatened by wildfire, that disparity is highly dependent on California's history of racial violence and exclusion. The genocide of California's first peoples; restrictions on the citizenship status of Asian immigrants; the seizure of Japanese American land during the second world war; the arrogation of land for infrastructure projects in the postwar period; discriminatory lending practices, racial covenants and other racist real estate policies, perpetuated by de facto segregation – all worked to ensure that non-white property ownership in rural California has remained low and concentrated in dense cities.All of this creates an unjust mismatch: the collective that is underwriting the risk of climate catastrophe is not the same as the group that is incurring it. As a result, the siphoning off of public wealth to protect private property favors white Californians.Of course, that's one of the reasons it's been politically acceptable. It would be difficult to imagine the government sanctioning a massive wealth transfer in the other direction, for example by relieving the mortgage debts of the black and brown Americans who were the primary victims of the subprime crisis. But when fire and other types of home insurance markets fail, as they are already beginning to do and inevitably will, the state will have to step in to shore up the largely white property market with black, brown, working and middle-class public money.As the incalculably large price tag of climate change comes due, those excluded from the property market will increasingly foot the bill for California's cult of the homeowner. It remains to be seen whether that cult will endure, or whether the state can rethink its relationship to real estate.
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| Europe’s Longest-Serving Leader Now Wants His Own Church Posted: 07 Mar 2020 09:00 PM PST |
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