Families walk toward planes for evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, as seen in this photo from the US Marine Corps.
“The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs tweeted out a warning last night for U.S. citizens at Kabul airport gates, advising people to ‘leave immediately ‘ due to unspecified security threats. The warning came the same day that Secretary of State Antony Blinken said as many as 1,500 Americans may still be in Afghanistan. To meet its Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline, U.S. military forces will need to stop evacuating people out of the airport days before their final troop withdrawal, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said. That means the window for evacuating refugees and others is even closer than the official end of American presence on the ground.” Read more at USA Today
“WASHINGTON — Representatives Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan, stunned Washington when they secretly flew to Kabul on Tuesday on an unauthorized mission to witness the evacuation of Americans and Afghans.
The lawmakers — Iraq war veterans who have emerged as two of the toughest critics of the Biden administration’s withdrawal — took a commercial flight to the United Arab Emirates, where they boarded a military plane to Afghanistan’s capital. They spoke with State Department officials and U.S. commanders and troops on the ground, and saw throngs of Afghans at the gates outside Hamid Karzai International Airport.
The unauthorized trip infuriated administration officials who were already annoyed by the lawmakers’ outspoken criticism and drew bipartisan rebukes from Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said the trip ‘certainly took time away from what we had been planning to do that day.’
In an interview, Mr. Moulton and Mr. Meijer defended their decision to travel into a dangerous and unpredictable situation and said they had walked away with important insights.” Read more at New York Times
“Moderna has completed its submission to the FDA for full approval of its Covid-19 vaccine for people 18 and older. Meanwhile, Pfizer and BioNTech have begun submitting data for full approval of a third "booster" dose of their vaccine. As expected, full FDA approval of the two-dose Pfizer vaccine is leading to more mandates. The Pentagon is requiring all US military service members to get fully vaccinated against Covid-19 immediately. Disney World also reached a deal with two employees unions to require vaccinations among applicable staff. In a worrying turn, some people have been ingesting ivermectin, a drug used to de-worm livestock, as a treatment for Covid-19. Some hospitals and poison control centers have seen an uptick in such cases as some Republican elected officials and conservative media figures irresponsibly tout the drug.” Read more at CNN
“Global COVID-19 cases. The number of global coronavirus cases appears to be leveling off following weeks of increases, as the World Health Organization (WHO) reported 4.5 million new cases last week, roughly the same amount as the week before. WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the numbers are ‘stable at a very high level ‘and that the virus remains a threat. The relative flattening out of new cases comes as the United States saw the most new cases and deaths of any country last week, as cases in the country increased 15 percent on the previous week.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“More people in Florida are dying of Covid than at any other point in the pandemic.” Read more at New York Times
“Delta Air Lines will require unvaccinated employees to pay an extra $200 per month for their health care plans.” Read more New York Times
“Despite spending billions of dollars on Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration fell far short of its promise to deliver a few hundred million doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2020. Government officials say Pfizer kept the U.S. government in the dark about production setbacks. Pfizer denies it. Read about where things went wrong, or listen to the story.” Read more at NPR
“Scientists say it's common for survivors of sexual assault and other traumas to be unable to fully remember their attacks right away. It can complicate investigations and add to the trauma when police cast doubts on victims' stories and memories. By understanding how trauma affects the brain, police can better help victims of rape cases. Listen to this story or read it.” Read more at NPR
Sidney Powell, right, and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, as members of President Donald Trump’s legal team, address a news conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington on Nov. 19, 2020. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
“A federal judge in Michigan has ordered that Sidney Powell, L. Lin Wood and seven other attorneys who filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election be disciplined, calling the suit ‘a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.’
In a scathing 110-page opinion, Federal District Judge Linda V. Parker wrote that the lawyers had made assertions in court that were not backed by evidence and had failed to do the due diligence required by legal rules before alleging mass fraud in the Michigan vote.
‘This case was never about fraud, ‘she wrote. ‘It was about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.’
She ordered the lawyers to pay the attorney’s fees for their opponents in the case — the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan. She also wrote that she will require them to attend legal education classes. And she referred the group to the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission, as well as attorney disciplinary committees in the states where each attorney is licensed, which could initiate proceedings that could result in the lawyer’s being disbarred.” Read more at Washington Post
“The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot has demanded a large collection of documents from several US government agencies. The wide-ranging requests cover communications related to former President Trump’s family members and any communications between Trump or his allies and ‘any DOJ official’ in the days before and after January 6. The committee has also requested information from the National Archives, which houses all of Trump's records from his time as president. Trump yesterday said he would invoke executive privilege to try to block the investigation but didn’t specify how he would go about that. Ultimately, Trump could try to go to court to stop the committee from obtaining some of these documents.” Read more at CNN
“The leaders of Time’s Up, the advocacy group founded by political insiders in Washington and Hollywood to fight workplace sexual misconduct, decided against issuing a statement in support of New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s first harassment accuser in December after consulting with the governor’s top aide, according to people familiar with the matter and text messages obtained by The Washington Post.
The text messages show that Time’s Up chief executive Tina Tchen told her colleagues to ‘stand down’ from a plan to release a public statement supporting Cuomo’s first accuser, Lindsey Boylan, after two people connected to the group spoke with Melissa DeRosa, the governor’s longtime adviser.
A day earlier, DeRosa had briefed Roberta Kaplan, then the chairwoman of Time’s Up, about Cuomo’s plans for an initial response to Boylan, and Kaplan shared the statement with Tchen, according to people familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose them.” Read more at Washington Post
“Search and rescue efforts have been suspended in Tennessee following a weekend of destructive floods that claimed 20 lives. Now, it’s up to the National Guard and the state Transportation Department to begin massive cleanup efforts. In the West, the region around Lake Tahoe in California and Reno, Nevada, is experiencing the worst air quality in the country by far as several large wildfires burn nearby. The Air Quality Index, an indicator of how unhealthy the air is, spiked to 694 in Tahoe City on Monday; an AQI between 300 and 500 is considered ‘a health warning of emergency conditions.’ As if that weren’t enough, more hurricane activity could happen around the Gulf of Mexico soon. The National Hurricane Center gives the Gulf area an 80% chance of a tropical system developing in the next few days.” Read more at CNN
“Remaking the economy
President Biden’s domestic agenda seems to be back on track in Congress.
House Democrats resolved a procedural spat this week, and they and Senate Democrats are now turning to the substantive work of putting together a sprawling bill meant to slow climate change, reduce poverty and expand pre-K, college financial aid and Medicare benefits.
The package represents Biden’s most ambitious attempt to reshape the American economy — more so than either the large infrastructure bill also making its way through Congress or the pandemic-relief law that Biden signed in March. The newest bill is likely to be larger and longer lasting, and would affect many aspects of daily life, like education, health care and perhaps even the weather.
But the bill will need to survive a narrow path to pass. No Republicans are likely to support it. Democrats will thus need to maintain the support of all 50 of their senators, including moderates like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and lose no more than three House members.
Today, we offer a guide to the package, which will occupy Congress for much of the next month and maybe beyond. Daily news coverage tends to focus on the procedural back-and-forth, for the simple reason that members of Congress and their aides are also focused on that back-and-forth. We’ll step back to walk you through the plan’s substance, including the contentious parts and the areas where Democrats seem to have a consensus.
Climate
If Biden is going to sign meaningful climate legislation in his first two years — and maybe ever — it will be as part of this bill.
The most significant provision would push the electricity sector to reduce pollution sharply over the next 15 years, which scientists say would have a major impact on carbon emissions. It would do so by subsidizing the use of solar, wind, nuclear and other forms of clean energy while financially penalizing the use of dirty energy like coal, our colleague Lisa Friedman says.
This electricity plan seems likely to be included in a final bill, although Manchin has been vague about his position on it. One unknown: How will it treat natural gas, which is less polluting than coal but more polluting than other energy forms?
The bill is also likely to help families pay for electric cars and energy-efficient homes. Another uncertainty is whether the bill will include something known as a carbon border adjustment tax — a tax on imports whose production was carbon-intensive, like many from China.
Pharmacists fill prescriptions in Rio Grande City, Texas.Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York Times
Health care
‘The health care parts of the bill are huge,’ our colleague Margot Sanger-Katz says. ‘There is a lot of health care policy that will have real effects in the lives of people.’ And many of the provisions seem likely to survive in the final bill.
Medicare would expand to include dental, hearing and vision coverage for Americans over 65 — an important change, given how many of them struggle to see, hear or chew, Margot says. Medicaid (the federal program focused on low-income people) would expand specifically in the 12 states that have not signed up for the program’s Obamacare expansion. Subsidies for private Obamacare plans would also grow, as would money for home health care, to help more people avoid nursing homes.
Margot says that her reporting on Capitol Hill indicates the biggest uncertainty is how aggressive Congress will be about trying to reduce prescription drug prices. That provision could be very popular — and also reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, freeing up more money for other parts of the bill. ‘The House is on board for a big drug price approach,’ Margot says. ‘But there is less consensus in the Senate, and, of course, the pharma industry will not go down without a fight.’
Education and families
The plan includes two major expansions of education. It would make prekindergarten available to every 3- and 4-year-old, likely by subsidizing the state programs that more than half of them already attend. The federal government would also try to make community college universal, by expanding financial aid to cover both tuition and living expenses.
Those provisions have the potential to lift upward mobility by reducing educational inequality, experts say. And several other provisions would immediately reduce poverty. They include:
The extension of a child tax credit in the pandemic relief plan that sends families up to $300 per child each month but is set to expire in December.
A national program of paid leave — worth up to $4,000 a month — for workers who take time off because they’re ill or caring for a relative.
Subsidies for child care.
Taxes
Democrats plan to pay for the bill’s costs by raising taxes on the affluent. The plan includes increases in the corporate tax rate and the top income tax rate, as well as perhaps a new tax on companies’ overseas profits.
The fight over these taxes is likely to be ‘the most fraught part’ of the debate, says our colleague Emily Cochrane, who covers Congress. Manchin, for example, has said both that he favors a smaller corporate tax increase than what Biden and top Democrats have proposed — but also that he wants tax increases to cover the bill’s full costs. That’s one reason the bill could shrink from its current estimated cost of $3.5 trillion.
One other thorny tax issue: Some House members, especially from higher-tax states like New York and New Jersey, want to restore some deductions that largely benefit higher-income households and that Republicans scrapped during the Trump presidency. Why are Democrats pushing for a tax cut that mostly benefits the upper middle class and above? ‘It is truly an ‘all politics is local’ issue,’ The Times’s Jim Tankersley says.
Timeline
House and Senate Democrats will negotiate in the coming weeks. Both chambers could then pass identical bills early this fall and send the legislation to the White House for Biden’s signature — if Democrats can remain united.” Read more at New York Times
“Hong Kong's national security police are investigating the group behind the city's annual June 4 vigil, which commemorates pro-democracy protesters who died in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. As part of the investigation, the group must submit meeting records and personal details of all its directors and members, including addresses and other contact information. Police claimed such information will help them investigate possible crimes against national security. The group, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, has reportedly considered disbanding under the city’s controversial new security law as more protesters, journalists and pro-democracy figures have been arrested.” Read more at CNN
“Israel’s new prime minister heads to the White House on Thursday for an introductory meeting with President Joe Biden and the promise of a ‘new era of cooperation’ in U.S.-Israeli relations. The face-to-face meeting between Biden and Naftali Bennett will be their first since Bennett became prime minister in June. In an interview with the New York Times, Bennett said he would stress that he intends to proceed with efforts to expand West Bank settlements that Biden opposes. Bennett also ruled out the possibility of reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians on his watch and declined to support Biden’s plans to reopen a consulate for Palestinians in Jerusalem.” Read more at USA Today
“Adult film star Ron Jeremy has been indicted on more than 30 charges, including rape and sexual battery.” Read more at USA Today
“OnlyFans reversed its ban on explicit content after a backlash from creators.” Read more at New York Times
“Lives Lived: David Roberts, an accomplished writer on mountaineering, turned adventure into literature and spawned generations of imitators. He died at 78.” Read more at New York Times
“ESPN is removing longtime basketball reporter Rachel Nichols from all NBA coverage, and canceling her daily show "The Jump," reports Sports Business Journal.
The drama comes a month after The New York Times posted leaked audio of Nichols, who is white, suggesting that her Black colleague Maria Taylor was chosen to lead ESPN's NBA finals coverage instead of her because the network was ‘feeling pressure’ on diversity.” Read more at Axios