“The U.S. reached a key milestone in its fight against COVID-19 on Friday, with half of Americans now fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than 165.9 million Americans, or 50% of the population of all ages, are fully vaccinated, with 193.7 million having received at least one dose as of Friday.
According to White House COVID-19 Data Director Cyrus Shahpar, Friday's data totals include 565,000 newly vaccinated Americans, and the one-week average of new vaccinations is up 11% from the last week, and up 44% over two weeks.
The increase in vaccinations comes as the country sees a spike in cases due to the highly-contagious delta variant, which experts say accounts for about 80% of new cases. White House officials have said they believe the uptick in people headed to get inoculated is because the states hardest hit by the virus are seeing how the delta variant poses a greater risk.” Read more at USA Today
“The American economy roared into midsummer with a strong gain in hiring, overcoming trouble in matching workers with openings, as the recovery appeared to take firmer hold.
Employers added 943,000 jobs in July, the Labor Department reported Friday, with restaurants and bars leading the way. It was the best monthly performance in nearly a year, and it was accompanied by a sharp drop in the unemployment rate to 5.4 percent, the lowest since the pandemic began, from 5.9 percent.
One cloud loomed over the buoyant numbers: The data was collected in the first half of last month, before the Delta variant of the coronavirus exploded in many parts of the country. Experts warn that a sustained outbreak could pose a threat to industries just regaining their footing.” Read more at New York Times
“Disputes over whether schools should be allowed to require face masks escalated in two states Friday, with the ideological battle over public health and personal choiceshowing little sign of abating on the eve of the new school year.
In Arkansas, a judge temporarily blocked a state law that prevents schools and other government agencies from mandating masks. But in Florida, the state school board boosted the governor’s opposition to mandates, extending eligibility for a taxpayer-funded school voucher program to students who face mask requirements.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended universal masking in all schools, saying it is among the best strategies available to mitigate spread of the coronavirus. But Florida and Arkansas are among about a half-dozen states that have banned their school districts from imposing requirements.” Read more at Washington Post
“Understand the State of Vaccine Mandates in the U.S.
College and universities. More than 400 colleges and universities are requiring students to be vaccinated for Covid-19. Almost all are in states that voted for President Biden.
Hospitals and medical centers.Many hospitals and major health systems are requiring employees to get the Covid-19 vaccine, citing rising caseloads fueled by the Delta variant and stubbornly low vaccination rates in their communities, even within their work force. In N.Y.C., workers in city-run hospitals and health clinics will be required to get vaccinated or else get tested on a weekly basis.
Federal employees. President Biden announced that all civilian federal employeesmust be vaccinated against the coronavirus or be forced to submit to regular testing, social distancing, mask requirements and restrictions on most travel. State workers in New York will face similar restrictions.
Can your employer require a vaccine? Companies can require workers entering the workplace to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to recent U.S. government guidance.” Read more at New York Times
“A criminal complaint was filed with the Albany County sheriff’s office against New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), the office said on Friday, a move that could accelerate the local prosecutor’s ongoing investigation into the embattled governor.
At the same time, Cuomo’s legal team signaled that he plans to vigorously defend himself, questioning the account of an executive assistant said to have filed the criminal complaint and attacking an investigation commissioned by state Attorney General Letitia James (D) as biased and incomplete.” Read more at Boston Globe
“A New Jersey gym owner and a Washington state man on Friday became the first people to plead guilty to assaulting police in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, facing what they acknowledged in plea deals could be roughly three to five years in prison under sentencing guidelines.
The agreements by Scott K. Fairlamb, 44, of Sussex, N.J., and Devlyn D. Thompson, 28, of Seattle, set potential benchmarks for what at least 165 defendants charged with assaulting or impeding officers could expect if they cooperate.” Read more at Washington Post
“The Education Department said Friday it will extend the suspension of federal student loan payments through Jan. 31, 2022, marking the fourth time the agency has given borrowers breathing room amid the pandemic. The department says it will be the final extension offered to borrowers.
The moratorium was set to expire on Sept. 30, but Congressional Democrats had urged the Biden administration to push back the date as the public health crisis has left many Americans struggling to regain their financial footing. The Education Department had also pressed the White House for a final extension to help borrowers smoothly transition back into repayment, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.” Read more at Washington Post
“WASHINGTON—Democratic lawmakers were working to finalize whittled-down elections legislation as they reached Friday’s anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, with negotiators saying they were close on a measure intended to override state voting restrictions by setting minimum standards for accessing the ballot.
An earlier proposal stalled, sending Democrats back to the drawing board, both to resolve intraparty disagreements and fashion proposals that could draw Republican support. Democrats are pushing for new federal voting laws as many Republican-run states are moving to tighten voting rules, citing election security.
Democrats say there is additional urgency because this month the Census Bureau is slated to release the first major results of the most recent census, which will drive the redrawing of congressional maps.
Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) met on Thursday with other Democrats including Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) to iron out some remaining sticking points.
The Democrats have agreed to narrow the bill, with an emphasis on voting procedures, and scale back their sweeping elections and ethics measure known as the ‘For the People Act,’ which touches on everything from how districts are drawn to how campaigns are financed and how ballots may be cast.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is pushing back against a last-minute effort by a bipartisan group of senators to limit a proposal in the infrastructure bill to increase federal regulation of cryptocurrencies. The fierce lobbying push helped stall plans to finish voting on the bill Thursday night, and now it appears debate will stretch into the weekend.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen spoke with lawmakers Thursday to raise objections to the effort led by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, Democrat from Oregon, and two Republican senators to weaken the legislation’s proposed cryptocurrency overhauls, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of private conversations. Yellen lobbied Wyden about the matter, the people said.” Read more at Boston Globe
“The US Postal Service will pay $120 million over the next five years to a major logistics contractor that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy previously helped lead and with which his family maintains financial ties, according to DeJoy’s financial disclosure statements.
The new contract will deepen the Postal Service’s relationship with XPO Logistics, where DeJoy served as supply chain chief executive from 2014 to 2015 after the company purchased New Breed Logistics, the trucking firm he owned for more than 30 years. Since he became postmaster general, DeJoy, DeJoy-controlled companies, and his family foundation have divested between $65.4 million and $155.3 million worth of XPO shares, according to financial disclosures, foundation tax documents and securities filings.
But DeJoy’s family businesses continue to lease four North Carolina office buildings to XPO, according to his financial disclosures and state property records.
The leases could generate up to $23.7 million in rent payments for the DeJoy businesses over the next decade, according to a person who shared details of the agreements with The Washington Post but spoke anonymously to discuss confidential financial arrangements. In 2018, when DeJoy sat on the company’s board, XPO reported similar figures with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The leases run until 2025 and can be extended until 2030, according to those filings.” Read more at Boston Globe
“At an emergency shelter in the Texas desert, migrant teenagers are housed in long, wide trailers, with little space for recreation and not much to do during the hot summer days, according to lawyers and other advocates for the children who have visited them there.
Some of the children say they can wait more than a month before meeting with someone who can help connect them with a family member or other sponsor inside the United States. Some report episodes of food poisoning and say they have to wash their clothes in a bathroom sink.
In one case, two siblings at the shelter, a former camp for oil workers in Pecos, Texas, were given different case managers by the government. One sibling was reunited with their mother. The other was left behind in the shelter and remains there, according to a lawyer who has visited the shelter.
The living conditions for migrant children who arrive unaccompanied in the United States and are taken into custody appear to have improved since the early spring, when images of them crammed into Customs and Border Protection facilities drew criticism from around the world.
But accounts from people who are able to visit the emergency shelters — where the children are sent while awaiting the chance to be released to family members, friends or better-equipped state-run facilities — suggest that the Biden administration and the private contractors hired to run the facilities are still struggling to provide consistently good care for the children.” Read more at New York Times
“Although most large events shut down last summer because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally forged ahead, panicking health experts as nearly a half-million motorcycle enthusiasts descended on the Black Hills of South Dakota.
This year’s rally, which began on Friday, is expected to draw an even larger crowd, just as the infectious Delta variant is producing more new virus cases nationwide than this time last year.
What path the virus will take through Sturgis remains to be seen.
Transmission is more difficult outdoors, vaccines greatly reduce the risk of serious illness, and South Dakota has the fewest new virus cases per capita in the United States. At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers Delta as contagious as chickenpox, and people are traveling from across the country — severalSouthernstates are in their worst outbreaks of the pandemic — to a region with a relatively low vaccination rate.
Hundreds of new cases were linked to last year’s rally, but because infected bikers returned to their home states, it made contact tracing difficult and obscured the true tally.” Read more at New York Times
“ORBETELLO, Italy — On Friday, the first day that Italians needed to present a nationwide health passport for access to indoor dining, museums, gyms, theaters and a wide range of social activities, Margherita Catenuto, 18, from Sicily, proudly showed a bar code at the Capitoline Museum in Rome certifying that she was vaccinated.
‘It’s like showing you have a conscience,’ said Ms. Catenuto as she walked in. ‘You do it for yourself, and you do it for others. It’s very sensible.’
Similar measures to stem the coronavirus pandemic have prompted large protests in France and bitterly split Americans between cities that will require vaccine passes, like New York, and entire parts of the country that consider even masks an affront to their rights. But Italians have mostly greeted their new Green Pass with widespread acceptance and, after some compromises, near political consensus.
After a long populist period that prized anti-establishment fervor and viral propaganda over pragmatism and expertise, Italians are suddenly enjoying a high season of rationality.” Read more at New York Times
“KABUL — Taliban fighters seized control of the capital of Nimruz province in southwestern Afghanistan on Friday, the first provincial capital to be overrun by the militants since the withdrawal of US and NATO forces from the country.” Read more at Boston Globe
“MOSCOW—A Russian court handed American private-equity investor Michael Calvey a suspended sentence of 5½ years for embezzlement, a day after a judge ruled that he was guilty in a case that galvanized the international business community for more than two years.
Six of Mr. Calvey’s associates, who were also convicted, received various lesser sentences.
On reading the sentence, Judge Anna Sokova told Moscow’s Meshchansky district court Friday that the court found the testimony of Mr. Calvey and his co-defendants ‘far-fetched and truthful only to the extent that they do not contradict other investigated evidence.’
The 5½ year suspended sentence includes five years of probation, meaning if Mr. Calvey doesn’t break the law for the next five years, his sentence would be considered served, the court said.Russian prosecutors had sought a six-year suspended sentence for Mr. Calvey, founder and senior partner at Baring Vostok Capital Partners and a prominent advocate for Western investment in Russia, who was arrested in February 2019 along with his associates on charges of defrauding lender Vostochny Bank of 2.5 billion rubles, the equivalent of around $32 million at the time.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“MIAMI — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida snapped this week at a reporter who asked if masks might help keep children safe in a state that now has more Covid-19 hospitalizations, including for pediatric patients, than anywhere else in the nation.
He blamed President Biden’s purported failure to control the spread of the virus across the border after the president suggestedthat governors like Mr. DeSantis should either ‘help’ fight the coronavirus or ‘get out of the way.’
And he touted a new state rule, adopted on Friday, that will counter local school mask mandates by allowing parents to request private school vouchers if they feel that the requirements amount to “harassment.”
Mr. DeSantis has been unyielding in his approach to the pandemic, refusing to change course or impose restrictions despite uncontrolled spread and spiking hospitalizations — an approach that forced him to undertake the biggest risk of his rising political career.” Read more at New York Times
Representative Conor Lamb rose to prominence in 2018 when he won a special House election in a district that President Donald J. Trump had carried by double digits.Credit...Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
PITTSBURGH — Representative Conor Lamb thinks he knows what it takes for Democrats to win statewide in Pennsylvania.
He looks to President Biden, whose narrow victory in the state — called four days after Election Day — put him over the top and in the White House….
A Marine veteran and former prosecutor, Mr. Lamb, 37, is likely the last major candidate to enter what are expected to be competitive, knockdown primary battles in both parties for the seat now held by Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican who is retiring.
It is the only open seat now in Republican hands in a state that Mr. Biden carried, and Democrats see it as their best opportunity to expand their hairbreadth control of the Senate, where the 50-50 partisan split leaves Vice President Kamala Harris to cast deciding votes. A single additional seat would mean a simple Democratic majority in the Senate, and at least a sliver of insulation for the White House from the whims of individual senators who now hold enormous sway, like the moderates Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Mr. Lamb rose to prominence in 2018 when he won a special House election in a district that Mr. Trump had carried by double digits. He won twice more in a redrawn but still politically mixed district, staking out independent positions that included voting against Representative Nancy Pelosi for House Speaker. But while he bills himself as the strongest potential Democratic nominee precisely because of what he calls his Bidenesque, centrist approach, aspects of his record, including on guns and marijuana, are out of step with many primary voters.” Read more at New York Times
“In 1990, when Congress passed a law that set criteria under which federally recognized Native American tribes could reclaim ancient burial remains and sacred objects, legislators hoped to encourage the return of items by museums and other institutions. But more than three decades later, some officials acknowledge that the law, known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, has not been as effective as they had hoped.
The remains of more than 116,000 Native American ancestors are still held by institutions around the country, and the National Park Service says that, for nearly all of them, the institutions have not linked the remains to a particular tribe, a designation known as ‘culturally affiliated’ that allows Indigenous groups to reclaim the bones of their forebears.
‘This is first and foremost an issue of Indigenous rights,’ said Veronica Pasfield, a NAGPRA officer for the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan. ‘The right to protect the graves of your ancestors and relatives is one of the most fundamental human rights on the planet.’
But now the Biden administration is seeking to make regulatory adjustments that would help expedite repatriation proceedings and require museums to complete the process of identifying the remains.” Read more at New York Times
“MATCHING-DONATION GIMMICKS from political campaigns have come under increased scrutiny from federal prosecutors looking to tamp down on misleading fundraising appeals—but former President Donald Trump continues to rely on the technique to woo small donors. Trump’s official Save America fundraising committee is still sending appeals with subject lines like “400% impact” that promise to turn a $500 donation into a $2,500 one. Campaign-finance experts warn that the tactic is legally questionable.
Appeals that promise to triple, quadruple or otherwise multiply a donor’s money are “material misrepresentations” if there’s no evidence such matches actually occur, according to a Justice Department court filing in May against a pro-Trump group that wasn’t affiliated with the GOP former president. Such tactics have been popular on both sides of the aisle until recently, though in some cases they likely did involve real pledges to match funds from other donors. But Justice Department’s new attention to the practice has made campaigns more cautious.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Col. Dave Severance, the commander of the Marine company that raised a huge American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in World War II, inspiring the photograph that thrilled the American home front and became an enduring image of men at war, died on Monday at his home in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 102.” Read more at New York Times
The Houston Astros pitcher J.R. Richard in an undated photo. He was one of the most intimidating pitchers in baseball in the late 1970s, but a stroke ended his career.Credit...Joel Draut/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press
“J.R. Richard, a flame-throwing right-handed pitcher whose scintillating career with the Houston Astros was cut short by a stroke in 1980, died on Wednesday. He was 71.
The Astros announced his death but did not give a cause or say where he died.
Richard was one of the most intimidating pitchers in baseball in the late 1970s. He stood 6-foot-8, his fastball approached 100 miles per hour, and his long stride toward home plate made him appear uncomfortably close to batters. He also had a devastating slider.
‘When he pushes off that mound,’ the Pittsburgh Pirate slugger Dave Parker told Sports Illustrated in 1978, ‘he looks like he’s 10 feet away from you instead of 60. It causes you to lean a little bit and makes you think you have to swing the bat quicker.’
After a few years in the minor leagues, Richard became a full-time member of the Astros’ starting rotation in 1975. Over the next four seasons he won 74 games and led baseball twice in strikeouts (with 303 in 1978 and 313 in 1979) and once in earned run average (with 2.71 in 1979). He could be wild; in 1976, he walked 151 batters.” Read more at New York Times
“Exxon Mobil Corp. was suspended from the Climate Leadership Council, a centrist research and advocacy group that unites conservation groups and some of the world’s biggest corporations in forming policies to tackle climate change.
The move comes just weeks after an Exxon lobbyist was secretly recorded by Greenpeace saying some of the company’s key climate commitments were disingenuous. The group’s founding members include BP, ConocoPhillips, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Conservation International.” Read more at Boston Globe
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