“BERLIN — Days before roiling waters tore through western Germany, a European weather agency issued an ‘extreme’ flood warning after detailed models showed storms that threatened to send rivers surging to levels that a German meteorologist said on Friday had not been seen in 500 or even 1,000 years.
By Friday, those predictions proved devastatingly accurate, with more than 100 people dead and 1,300 unaccounted for, as helicopter rescue crews plucked marooned residents from villages inundated sometimes within minutes, raising questions about lapses in Germany’s elaborate flood warning system.
Numerous areas, victims and officials said, were caught unprepared when normally placid brooks and streams turned into torrents that swept away cars, houses and bridges and everything else in their paths.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky warned of rising cases on Friday, stating that COVID-19 is ‘becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated’ and that vaccinated people are protected against severe disease.
The highly transmissible delta variant is fueling expanding outbreaks, but they are centered in parts of the country with lower vaccination rates.
‘This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,’ Walensky said during a White House press briefing. ‘We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage, because unvaccinated people are at risk.’
The country is averaging about 26,000 cases per day, nearly a 70 percent increase from the previous seven-day average, Walensky said. Hospitalizations are also up to about 2,790 per day, a 36 percent increase from the prior week, and deaths are up 26 percent, to 211 per day.
But almost all of the hospitalizations and deaths are among unvaccinated people. Walensky said 97 percent of people entering the hospital with COVID-19 are unvaccinated.” Read more at The Hill
“A federal judge in Houston on Friday ruled that an Obama administration program protecting undocumented immigrants who were brought into the United States as children is illegal and halted accepting any new applications for the program.
The decision comes out of a challenge to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that was filed in 2018 by Texas and other states that argued that the program violated the Constitution because it undermines Congress’ authority on immigration laws.
The decision Friday is separate from a previous ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that President Donald Trump's attempt to end DACA in 2017 was unlawful. A federal judge in New York earlier this year then ordered the Trump administration to restore the program as enacted by President Barack Obama.” Read more at USA Today
“TOKYO — The Tokyo 2020 organizing committee reported the first positive case of COVID-19 in the Olympic Village on Saturday.
The unidentified person, who is listed by organizers only as ‘Games-concerned personnel,’ tested positive for the disease Friday and is now quarantining at a hotel.
Toshiro Muto, the CEO of the organizing committee, said in a news conference that he did not have any information about whether the person had been vaccinated. And Seiko Hashimoto, the committee's president, said organizers are doing everything in their power to ensure that the Olympic Village – like all venues and facilities – is as safe as possible.
‘We are sparing no efforts,’ she said.
The unnamed Olympic Village resident is one of 44 people affiliated with the Games who have tested positive for COVID-19 since July 1, according to organizers. Fourteen of those cases were reported Saturday. Twenty-eight of the 44 positives have involved Tokyo 2020 contractors.” Read more at USA Today
“Dallas County health authorities are reporting a case of rare monkeypox virus in an individual who traveled from Nigeria to Dallas. The person, a Dallas city resident, is hospitalized and in stable condition, according to a statement Friday from the Dallas County Department of Health and Human Services.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working with Delta Air Lines and state and local health officials to contact airline passengers and others who may have been in contact with the patient during two flights: from Lagos, Nigeria, to Atlanta on July 8, with arrival July 9; and Atlanta to Dallas Love Field Airport on July 9. Public health authorities said they have identified and are in contact with individuals who were in direct contact with the patient.” Read more at Boston Globe
“A local prosecutor charged a boat captain and two other employees Friday over 17 deaths in July 2018 when a tourist duck boat sank on a Missouri lake during a severe thunderstorm, reviving the threat of long prison sentences seven months after federal charges against them were dismissed.
The total of 63 felony charges were filed in Stone County against the captain, the general manager, and the manager on duty the day of the accident for the Ride the Ducks attraction on Table Rock Lake near the tourist mecca of Branson, in southwestern Missouri.
Captain Kenneth Scott McKee, of Verona, general manager Curtis Lanham, of Galena, and manager on duty Charles Baltzell, of Kirbyville, were charged after a federal judge dismissed earlier charges filed by federal prosecutors, concluding they did not have jurisdiction.” Read more at Boston Globe
“WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen has cast doubt on the merits of the trade agreement between the United States and China, arguing that it has failed to address the most pressing disputes between the world’s two largest economies and warning that the tariffs that remain in place have harmed American consumers.
Ms. Yellen’s comments, in an interview with The New York Times this week, come as the Biden administration is seven months into an extensive review of America’s economic relationship with China. The review must answer the central question of what to do about the deal that former President Donald J. Trump signed in early 2020 that included Chinese commitments to buy American products and change its trade practices.
Tariffs that remain on $360 billion of Chinese imports are hanging in the balance, and the Biden administration has said little about the deal’s fate. Trump administration officials tried to create tariffs that would shelter key American industries like car making and aircraft manufacturing from what they described as subsidized Chinese exports.
But Ms. Yellen questioned whether the tariffs had been well designed. ‘My own personal view is that tariffs were not put in place on China in a way that was very thoughtful with respect to where there are problems and what is the U.S. interest,’ she said at the conclusion of a weeklong trip to Europe.” Read more at New York Times
“White House press secretary Jen Psaki called a question from a Fox News reporter ‘loaded and inaccurate’ on Friday when asked about the topic of vaccine misinformation on social media.
Fox's Peter Doocy pressed Psaki on her comments the previous day that Facebook is not doing enough to stop misinformation on the platform. Psaki had noted the White House was taking an active role in ‘flagging problematic posts for Facebook’ in an attempt to combat misinformation.
Doocy asked Psaki on Friday how long the Biden administration has ‘been spying on peoples’ Facebook profiles looking for vaccine misinformation.’
Well, that was quite a loaded and inaccurate question, which I would refute," Psaki responded.
She also told the reporter to ‘let me finish’ when interrupted.
‘We’re in regular touch with a range of media outlets ... as we are in regular touch with social media platforms. This is publicly open information, people sharing information online. Just as you are all reporting information on your news stations,’ she added.
Psaki had said that 12 people were responsible for roughly 65 percent of all the anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. Doocy asked on Friday if those 12 people know that someone in the U.S. surgeon general’s office is going through their profile.
‘I’m happy to get you the citation of where that comes from. There’s no secret list, I will tell you that these are people who were sharing information on public platforms on Facebook. Information that is traveling is inaccurate. Our biggest concern here — and I frankly think it should be your biggest concern — is the number of people who are dying around the country because they’re getting misinformation that is leading them to not take a vaccine,’ Psaki said.” Read more at The Hill
“William H. Regnery II, a reclusive heir to a Midwestern textile fortune who bankrolled some of the leading organizations and figures behind the rise of the alt-right and championed efforts to win adherents to a modernized notion of white supremacy, died on July 2 at his home in Boca Grande, Fla. He was 80.
A cousin, Alfred Regnery, said the cause was cancer.
Mr. Regnery rarely granted interviews or spoke in public, and he sought to work behind the scenes, through funding and organizing. He came to his far-right views late in life, at least publicly, saying he had grown disenchanted with the “ebullient optimism” of the Republican Party in the early 1990s.
Instead, he wrote in a 2015 memoir, ‘Left Behind,’ he saw ‘nascent political correctness stifling debate, unrestricted immigration changing the demographics of the country, affirmative action penalizing whites, and open housing curtailing freedom of association.’
In response, he began to lay the intellectual groundwork for a new movement built around strengthening what he believed was America’s founding white identity, embracing eugenics, sharp immigration restrictions and even the splintering of North America into racially pure ‘ethnostates.’
In 2001 he founded the Charles Martel Society, named for the Frankish king who defeated a Muslim army at the Battle of Tours in 732, an event that many white supremacists credit with saving Western civilization. The society’s main output is The Occidental Quarterly, which publishes academic-sounding essays with titles like ‘Reflections on Some Aspects of Jewish Self-Deception.’
Membership in the society is confidential; Mr. Regnery intended it to be something of a safe space for like-minded extremists. To give his views a more public face, in 2005 he spent $380,000 to create the National Policy Institute, a think tank designed to inject white-supremacist ideas into mainstream political conversations.
But the institute languished for its first decade, even after Mr. Regnery hired the alt-right figure Richard Spencer, a charismatic former Ph.D. student, in 2011.
The institute organized a ‘European identitarian congress’ in Budapest in 2014, and both Mr. Regnery and Mr. Spencer traveled to Hungary to attend. But the conference was a bust: The Hungarian government banned the meeting, and Mr. Regnery was detained upon arrival at the airport and deported the next morning. Mr. Spencer, who arrived in the country by land, was also deported.
Their fortunes turned a year later, as Donald J. Trump, early in his presidential campaign, began to energize the far right with his calls for immigration restrictions and other policies long advocated by the institute.
Mr. Regnery saw Mr. Trump’s victory as his own. At an institute conference in Washington just after the 2016 election, he said, ‘I never thought in my life I would experience an event such as this, and I am now persuaded that with your courage the alt-right side of history will prevail.’
Mr. Regnery preferred to keep out of the spotlight and let Mr. Spencer speak for the institute. But in a 2017 interview with Buzzfeed News, he took credit for the seemingly sudden rise of the alt-right.
‘My support,’ he said, ‘has produced a much greater bang for the buck than by the brothers Koch or Soros Inc.’
Buzzfeed called him ‘the most influential racist you’ve never heard of.’
Mr. Regnery, seen outside his home in Boca Grande, Fla., in 2017, once said the only way to save America’s white identity was for it to break up into several smaller nations, one each for the country’s various ethnic groups.Credit...Will Vragovic
William Henry Regnery II was born on Feb. 25, 1941, in the Chicago area and grew up in Hinsdale, Ill., a suburb. His father, William F. Regnery, worked for the family textile business, Joanna-Western Mills. His mother, Elisabeth (Brittain) Regnery, was a homemaker.
He is survived by his wife, Judith (Page-Timson) Regnery; his brothers, Peter and Patrick; two sons from a previous marriage, William F. and David Regnery; two of his wife’s children, Robert and William T. Regnery, whom he adopted;two children with Mrs. Regnery, Jonathan Regnery and Johanna Durkin; and 12 grandchildren.
Mr. Regnery was not the only member of his family active in conservative politics. His grandfather, William H. Regnery, was a founding member of the America First Committee, which sought to keep the United States out of World War II. His uncle Henry founded Regnery Publishing, which produces books by a range of conservative voices, including William F. Buckley Jr., Ann Coulter and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Regnery attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied political science and joined the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative student organization co-founded by Mr. Buckley. He left before graduating to work on Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.
In the 2017 interview with Buzzfeed, one of the few times he spoke to the news media, he claimed that his efforts on behalf of Mr. Goldwater included what he called “Operation Dewdrop,” in which he attempted to deter Democratic voters in Philadelphia by hiring a plane to seed the skies with dry ice, in the hopes of making it rain. He failed — though, he recalled, he burned his fingers on the ultracold dry ice containers.
Mr. Regnery later returned to Chicago, where he worked for Joanna-Western Mills. He became the company’s president in 1980 but was ousted a year later, after several quarters of poor financial performance. According to his own account, he spent the rest of his career in a variety of businesses, while also dabbling in Illinois politics.
In his memoir, he recounted how he first began to turn against the Republican Party after listening to a speech in 1993 in which the economist Milton Friedman declared that the end of the Cold War meant that the free-market economic doctrines of the Reagan era had won. In an early sign of that break, according to a 2017 profile in Mother Jones, Mr. Regnery ran unsuccessfully for Illinois secretary of state in 1994 on the Term Limits and Tax Limits Party ticket.
Five years later, he convened a Who’s Who of white supremacists for a conference in Florida, where he delivered a speech, ‘For Our Children’s Children,’ in which he said the only way to save America’s white identity was for it to break up into several smaller countries, one each for the country’s various ethnic groups.
His racism grew more explicit. He announced plans in 2004 to start a whites-only dating site. It never happened, but he continued to worry that white people were in danger of extinction: In 2006 he delivered a speech in Chicago in which he said, ‘The white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity.’
By then he had severed most of his ties with mainstream Republicans, and they with him. That same year the leadership of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which he had joined in college, removed him from its board.
Mr. Regnery may have seen the election of Mr. Trump as his ticket back into the party, with the National Policy Institute and Mr. Spencer as his vehicle. It didn’t happen.
In the years since Mr. Trump’s victory, the institute has faced mounting financial and personnel problems, especially after Mr. Spencer helped organize the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, in which a white supremacist, Alex Fields Jr., drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring several and killing one.
By 2020 the institute’s website was moribund, with no new content in months, and the Internal Revenue Service had revoked its tax-exempt status. In May a judge in Illinois ordered the institute to pay $2.4 million to Bill Burke, who was injured by Mr. Fields, but it is unclear where the money will come from.” Read more at New York Times
“Frank Askin, who enrolled in law school when he was 31 and devoted the next 50 years to defending the civil liberties of Americans suspected of being disruptive radicals, died on July 1 at a hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 89.
The cause was cardiac arrest, his son Jonathan said.
Collaborating with law student volunteers and often with the New Jersey Civil Liberties Union, Mr. Askin won rulings that barred the state police from arbitrarily stopping and searching ‘longhaired travelers’ on public roads during the 1960s; granted protesters the right to distribute leaflets at shopping malls; and required the F.B.I. to purge its investigative files on a 15-year-old high school student who had written to the Socialist Workers Party to gather information for a political science course.
He also won the rights of residents to challenge the rules of their homeowners’ associations and of the homeless to have access to public libraries.
After dropping out of college in Baltimore to become a community organizer and journalist, Mr. Askin was admitted to Rutgers Law School in New Jersey. He joined the faculty immediately after graduating in 1966 and taught there for 53 years. He was the founder of the Rutgers Law Constitutional Litigation Clinic (now the Constitutional Rights Clinic).” Read more at New York Times
“Italy announced on Tuesday that it was banning large cruise ships from entering Venice’s waters and was also declaring the city’s lagoon a national monument, in a move to protect a fragile ecosystem from the downsides of mass tourism.
The ban, demanded for decades by both Venice residents and environmentalists, will take effect on Aug. 1.
‘The intervention could no longer be delayed,’ Italy’s culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said in a statement.
In recent weeks, as cruise ships returned to Venice after the pause imposed by the pandemic, protesters in the city rallied on small boats and on the waterfront with ‘No big boats’ flags. Last Sunday, they demonstrated during the Group of 20 summit for economic ministers that took place in the city, attracting international media attention.” Read more at New York Times
“DES MOINES — If ever there was a political bloc that could be counted on to hold a candle for Donald Trump, it would seem to be white evangelical Christians, who maintained a near-uniform front for the Republican throughout his presidency and beyond.
Yet, as some 1,200 evangelicals gathered here for the Family Leadership Summit, widely seen as the first political event on the long road to the 2024 Republican primary, there was a feeling among some that it was time to move on.
‘I agree with pretty much everything Trump did on policy as president, but I don’t think it would be good for him or good for the country if he ran again,’ said Ken Hayes, a retired nonprofit worker from rural Fort Dodge, who said he prayed for Trump every day the man was in office.
Held in the Des Moines convention center, the daylong event is considered a key preview of how would-be candidates resonate among social conservatives, who dominate the Republican caucuses here. It featured appearances from former vice president Mike Pence, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Defying Trump Ensures a Bruising 2022 Fight for Anthony Gonzalez
In a world without Donald Trump, Anthony Gonzalez would be a rising star in the Republican Party: son of Cuban immigrants, first-round draft pick of the Indianapolis Colts, Stanford business school graduate. The 36-year-old was — until he voted with nine other Republicans to impeach Trump for inciting the Capitol riot. Joshua Green reports.” Read more at Bloomberg“U.K. Fraud Unit Finds Bribe Network Behind World’s Cobalt Hub
U.K. prosecutors say they have proof of an alleged money-laundering ring spanning from Africa to Europe that paid almost $380 million in cash bribes to authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Michael J. Kavanagh explains the money siphoned off over a five-year period is more than Congo’s total 2020 spending on health care.” Read more at Bloomberg“Australia’s ‘Covid-Zero’ Strategy Reaches Limit With No Plan B
Just a few months ago, Australia’s virtually Covid-free status made it the envy of the world. Then the delta variant flipped the script. Even as the U.S. and U.K. reopen, Australia seems to be stuck in place. And it’s all for a daily caseload a third the size of New York’s and less than 3% of what London is currently encountering, Jason Scott writes.” Read more at Bloomberg
No posts