“PARIS — President Biden’s announcement of a deal to help Australia deploy nuclear-powered submarines has strained the Western alliance, infuriating France and foreshadowing how the conflicting US and European responses to confrontation with China may redraw the global strategic map.
In announcing the deal Wednesday, Biden said it was meant to reinforce alliances and update them as strategic priorities shift. But in drawing a Pacific ally closer to meet the China challenge, he appears to have alienated an important European one and aggravated already tense relations with Beijing.
France on Thursday reacted with outrage to the announcements that the United States and Britain would help Australia develop submarines, and that Australia was withdrawing from a $66 billion deal to buy French-built submarines. At its heart, the diplomatic storm is also a business matter — a loss of revenue for France’s military industry and a gain for US companies.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s foreign minister, told France info radio that the submarine deal was a ‘unilateral, brutal, unpredictable decision’ by the United States, and he compared the US move to the rash and sudden policy shifts common during the Trump administration.
Underscoring its fury, France canceled a gala scheduled for Friday at its embassy in Washington to mark the 240th anniversary of a Revolutionary War battle….
The deal also seemed to be a pivot point in relations with China, which reacted angrily. The Biden administration appears to be upping the ante with Beijing by providing a Pacific ally with submarines that are much harder to detect than conventional ones, much as medium-range Pershing II missiles were deployed in Europe in the 1980s to deter the Soviet Union.” Read more at Boston Globe
“The White House has primed governors on how many Afghan refugees they can expect to be resettled in their states in the coming weeks. The initial tally of arrivals under the new Afghan Placement and Assistance Program is roughly 37,000. Most of these people, who left Afghanistan in the final phases of the US troop withdrawal there, worked directly with the US government or are related to someone who did. Some worked as journalists, activists or humanitarian workers, US officials say. Under the plan, California and Texas will get the most refugees -- 5,255 and 4,481, respectively. Eleven other states will be expected to resettle more than 1,000 refugees each.” Read more at CNN
“Is Covid-19 immunity waning among vaccinated people? If so, can booster shots help? Those are the big questions on the table when FDA advisers meet today to discuss the possibility of booster shots for Covid-19 vaccines. Booster shots are not unusual, and neither is a pharmaceutical company’s request to start giving people additional shots to improve immunity. But the question has been mired in politics. The FDA and CDC have been reluctant to appear overeager at the prospect of booster shots. But the White House and experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci have been more bullish on the subject. It will all come down to the data, and right now, multiple studies show that a third dose of Pfizer's or Moderna's vaccines, or a second dose of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine, turbo-charge the production of antibodies.” Read more at CNN
“America's economy is emerging from the pandemic with more well-paying jobs for those who want them, less hunger, less poverty, higher wages, less inequality, and more wealth for everyday Americans.
Why it matters: None of these outcomes were expected when the pandemic began. All of them are the result of massive government programs, Axios Capital author Felix Salmon writes.
Stimulus checks lifted nearly 12 million Americans out of poverty, according to new census data this week. Government programs also saved millions of people from losing their health insurance, even as millions lost their jobs.
Headline unemployment stands at 5.2% — low, but still higher than the pre-pandemic rate of 3.5%. The true unemployment rate, however, as measured by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, tells a different story.
Overall, true unemployment — people who are looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage, but who can't find one — stands at 22.8%, which is lower than the 24% rate in February 2020.
The rate has come down across all demographics — including white, Black, and Hispanic Americans, men and women.
The average wage now stands at $30.73 per hour, up 8% from $28.51 in February 2020.
Household wealth for the bottom 50% of the population stood at a record $2.62 trillion at the end of the first quarter — up 30% from the end of 2019.
The top 10% also saw their wealth grow, but not as fast — they're up 17% over the same period….
The bottom line: Pandemics are devastating, but the economic response has surpassed expectations. So the U.S. economy has grown from its pre-pandemic level, in contrast to Europe and most of the world.” Read more at Axios
“The House Oversight and Reform Committee is launching an investigation into fossil fuel industry disinformation on the climate crisis. Recent reports have suggested the fossil fuel industry has participated in campaigns aimed at creating confusion about the cause of the climate crisis or actively sown distrust in science. Lawmakers plan to invite the heads of six oil companies and major lobbying groups to testify next month. The hearing will align with Congress's planned timetable to pass massive climate and clean energy investments as part of Biden's budget bill, as well as the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow.” Read more at CNN
“John Durham, appointed under Trump to scrutinize the Trump-Russia investigation, secured an indictment of a lawyer with Democratic ties, accusing him of lying to the F.B.I.” Read more at New York Times
“A new conservative coalition led by former Trump administration advisers plans to launch an up to $10 million campaign to attack President Biden’s economic package as it advances through Congress.
The effort, set to launch Friday, is being spearheaded by the America First Policy Institute founded earlier this year by former Trump officials, as well as conservative organizations such as the Conservative Partnership Institute, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and FreedomWorks.
Leaders of the campaign, called the ‘Save America Coalition,’ met Wednesday night at the Washington headquarters of the America First group located near the White House. They discussed plans to rally more than 100 conservative organizations and draw donors for advertisements and social media campaigns criticizing the Biden proposal in swing states and districts controlled by centrist Democrats.
Conservative alarm about Biden’s proposed tax hikes — which some nonpartisan estimates have found overwhelmingly target the rich and large corporations — has intensified as they move toward passage. Democrats face a difficult legislative path in holding together virtually all of their members in both the House and Senate to approve a plan to spend approximately $3.5 trillion over 10 years on safety net expansions, education programs, and funding to mitigate climate change.” Read more at Washington Post
“Children and teens gained weight at an ‘alarming’ rate during the pandemic, Axios' Marisa Fernandez writes from a CDC report.
About 22% of children and teens were obese in August 2020, up from 19% a year prior.
The report says that among 430,000 youths (ages 2–19), the average body mass index (BMI) increase doubled between 2018 and 2020.
What's happening: Closure of schools and early child care reduced the ability for many kids to have regular physical activity and access to healthy meals.” Read more at Axios
“Satellites are tracking oil spills after Hurricane Ida. As of Tuesday, the Coast Guard had responded to more than 2,200 reports of pollution in the region since the Category 4 hurricane struck in late August. That number was up from about 1,500 last week.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“The U.S. is fighting a settlement shielding Purdue Pharma’s owners from opioid lawsuits. A bankruptcy watchdog at the Justice Department says the agreement between the maker of OxyContin and the drug company's family owners, the Sacklers, violates citizens’ rights to sue.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“WASHINGTON — Ever since a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, Republicans have been trying to shift the national conversation away from that violent day and onto what they say are the problems of the Biden administration: a troubled pullout from Afghanistan, an overtaxed southern border, and rising inflation.
Then, a former campaign operative of former president Donald Trump announced that he was organizing hundreds of protesters to return to the Capitol Saturday for a rally in support of the defendants charged in connection with the deadly assault, which left dozens of officers bloodied.
Bad memories of the violence rushed back. The Capitol Police announced that they were reinstalling a security fence around the complex and were aware of ‘concerning online chatter’ from extremist groups. And many Republican lawmakers said they wanted nothing to do with the event. Not a single member of Congress has confirmed plans to attend, even those who have been most outspoken in portraying the rioters as patriots who have been persecuted for their political beliefs.
‘There are a lot of clearly angry people who want to march on the Capitol,’ said Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican. ‘I haven’t talked to a single Republican up here in the Senate that has encouraged or enabled anything like that.’
Nevertheless, the ‘Justice for J6’ rally, to be held at noon Saturday at the foot of Capitol Hill, has created a predicament for Republicans, who are caught between a hard-right base, including many voters who consider the rioters righteous, and a desire to distance themselves from the attack and its political fallout.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Democrats have been sharpening their attacks on Republicans over the pandemic, former president Donald Trump and other polarizing topics, and now, emboldened by victory in California’s recall election, party leaders are seeking to further escalate hostilities ahead of the midterm elections.
Beyond prompting a collective sigh of relief in a party reeling from a difficult summer, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Tuesday win served as the first test of a revamped campaign strategy that Democrats quietly began assembling weeks ago, amid a realization that positive talk about President Biden getting the country back on track had run into the harsh realities of a delta variant coronavirus surge.
Chastened by the resurgence, the difficult Afghanistan withdrawal and declining public confidence in Biden’s handling of the pandemic and other issues, Democrats have gone on offense against the GOP, following private summer polling that showed broad and growing anger at the Republican resistance to vaccination, according to Democrats familiar with the discussions who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy.
Now, Democrats are openly touting vaccine mandates they once shied away from — and chastising Republicans who oppose them. They are delivering sharper criticisms of the motives of the unvaccinated, a group that is largely Republican, and spending much more time talking about Trump. A year after Biden won the presidency on a promise of uniting the country, Democrats have embraced a far more divisive set of talking points that casts their opponents as threats to the country.
‘The contrast is going to be clear as we move into 2022,’ Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison told reporters Wednesday. ‘The contrast between folks who are card-carrying members of Trumpism and folks who are Americans through and through and are fighting for this country.’
The Democratic approach sets the stage for a bitter midterm campaign in which Republicans have already launched searing broadsides of their own on several fronts. They have cast Democrats as socialists because of their ambitious government spending proposals. They have seized on the increase in violent crime and a surge of migrants at the southern border to question Biden’s control of the country. And they have focused relentless attention on the administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Read more at Washington Post
“WASHINGTON — There’s one sure way to know there’s a Democrat in the White House: Republicans are complaining about the national debt again.
After remaining largely silent while the debt swelled by $8 trillion under former president Donald Trump, Republicans have rediscovered their sense of fiscal responsibility just in time to oppose much of President Biden’s domestic agenda and risk the country’s credit rating.
They cite the debt, now at $28.5 trillion, asone reasonfor opposing the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion legislation to expand the social safety net and address climate change — even though, unlike with the 2017 Republican tax cuts, Democrats are aiming to offset most, if not all, of the cost with tax increases on the wealthy and other revenue raisers.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Hospitals throughout Idaho are now allowed to ration medical care as the state expands its ‘crisis standards of care’ criteria in the face of overwhelming coronavirus cases and hospitalizations.” Read more at Washington Post
“Federal prosecutors plan to criminally charge a former Boeing Co. pilot they suspect of misleading aviation regulators about safety issues blamed for two fatal crashes of the 737 MAX, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mark Forkner, who was Boeing’s 737 MAX chief technical pilot during the aircraft’s development, is likely to face prosecution in the coming weeks, these people said. In his former role, Mr. Forkner served as the plane maker’s lead contact with the Federal Aviation Administration for how airline pilots should be trained to fly the new jet.
It couldn’t be learned what formal charge or charges Mr. Forkner might face. Boeing admitted in a criminal settlement reached with prosecutors earlier this year that two of its employees—unnamed in that agreement—conspired to defraud the FAA about 737 MAX training issues in order to benefit themselves and the company.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. Boeing declined to comment.
David Gerger, an attorney for Mr. Forkner, didn’t respond Thursday to requests for comment. Mr. Gerger has said Mr. Forkner, a pilot and Air Force veteran, wouldn’t endanger pilots or passengers. Mr. Forkner left Boeing in 2018 and went to work for Southwest Airlines Co. , where he worked until last year.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that prosecutors were focused on two employees: Mr. Forkner and another former Boeing pilot, Patrik Gustavsson, who also dealt with the FAA. Mr. Forkner persuaded regulators to approve excluding details of a new flight-control system known as MCAS from the 737 MAX’s pilot manuals, according to a U.S. House investigation. An attorney for Mr. Gustavsson declined to comment.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“SAN DIEGO—Close to half of all new U.S. gun buyers since the beginning of 2019 have been women, a shift for a market long dominated by men, according to a new study.
The preliminary results from the 2021 National Firearms Survey, designed by Deborah Azrael of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Matthew Miller of Northeastern University, show an estimated 3.5 million women became new gun owners from January 2019 through April of this year. About 4 million men became new gun owners over that period, they found.
For decades, other surveys have found that around 10% to 20% of American gun owners were women.
The number of federal background checks for gun purchases hit an all-time high in 2020 of 21 million, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“A federal judge in Washington has ordered the Biden administration to stop using a public-health law to turn back families who enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico seeking asylum.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan put his own order on hold for 14 days, to allow the government time to appeal.
If the ruling goes into effect, the Biden administration would be forced to allow thousands of migrant families caught crossing the border illegally to stay in the U.S. while they wait for asylum or other humanitarian protection claims to be adjudicated, a process that often takes several years to complete.
The border policy was implemented by former President Trump in March 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. At the time, Trump administration officials said a public-health law known as Title 42 gave the government the authority to turn back to Mexico any migrant caught crossing the border illegally, regardless of their country of origin, to stop the spread of Covid-19.
Since then, about 1.1 million people have been turned back to Mexico, including roughly 118,000 people traveling as families.
Judge Sullivan’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in January. The suit had been on hold for months in the spring and into the summer, as the ACLU and other immigrant-rights organizations negotiated with the government to ease the border restrictions. During that time, nongovernmental organizations including the ACLU identified thousands of families who were considered to be particularly vulnerable to be allowed to cross into the U.S. at still-closed border crossings. That exemption process formally ended last month.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio), one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former president Donald Trump, on Thursday announced he will not seek reelection in 2022, citing a desire to ‘build a fuller family life’ as well as ‘the toxic dynamics inside our own party.’
Gonzalez, a former professional football player, was once seen as a rising star within the GOP, before his vote to impeach Trump incurred the wrath of the former president and his supporters. Gonzalez was facing a tumultuous primary against Max Miller, an aide to the former president, whom Trump endorsed in February.
Gonzalez, who turns 37 on Saturday and has two children, said in a statement Thursday that his decision was based on concerns about the toll the job was taking on his young family, as well as the state of the Republican Party.” Read more at Washington Post
“MINNEAPOLIS — The former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd pleaded not guilty Thursday to a charge that he violated the civil rights of a 14-year-old boy when he used a chokehold to restrain the teenager and hit him with a flashlight during a 2017 arrest.
A federal grand jury indicted Derek Chauvin in May on a charge he violated the Black teenager’s constitutional rights when he employed force similar what he used on Floyd, who died in May 2020 after he was restrained facedown and handcuffed on a Minneapolis street as he begged for breath and was no longer resisting.
Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck and back for nearly nine and a half minutes until the man no longer had a pulse, was convicted in April of murder and sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison for the man’s death. He and the other officers at the scene — J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas K. Lane, and Tou Thao — are also facing federal charges alleging they violated Floyd’s civil rights during that fatal arrest.
All four pleaded not guilty during an arraignment hearing in that case on Tuesday.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Justice Clarence Thomas, 73, in rare public remarks yesterday at Notre Dame, said of increased politicization of the Supreme Court:
‘The court was thought to be the least dangerous branch, and we may have become the most dangerous,’ Thomas, who received a standing ovation, said in a CNN clip from his appearance in South Bend, Ind.
On calls from the left to add justices to the court, Thomas said: ‘I've been on the court for 30 years. It's flawed. But ... it works. It may work sort of like a car with three wheels. [Laughter] ... Somehow you sort of hobble along, and you recognize its imperfection.’
‘I think we should be careful destroying our institutions because they don't give us what we want, when we want it.’” Read more at Axios
“Service industry workers say customers are angrier than ever.
Restaurant servers, airline workers and customer-service trackers are confronting a wave of blowups rooted in pandemic-related stress and resistance to public-health protocols like mask-wearing and social distancing. So far this year, the FAA has opened more than 750 investigations over unruly airline passengers, compared with just 146 in all of 2019. With the pandemic dragging into an 18th month in the U.S. as roughly a quarter of adults remain unvaccinated, psychologists say it is getting harder for some people to muster empathy and tamp down anger. Customer satisfaction is at the lowest level since 2005, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, and for many, the persistence of remote work, a labor shortage and supply issues aren’t exactly helping.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place. It got angrier instead.
After a 2018 algorithm change that CEO Mark Zuckerberg said aimed to strengthen bonds between users, publishers and Facebook staffers warned it was doing the opposite—causing the most divisive content to go viral and creating an incentive to produce more of it, documents reviewed by the Journal show. ‘Misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares,’ Facebook researchers noted internally.
In an interview, Lars Backstrom, a Facebook vice president of engineering, said that any algorithm risks promoting content that is objectionable or harmful to some users. ‘Like any optimization, there’s going to be some ways that it gets exploited or taken advantage of,’ he said. ‘That’s why we have an integrity team that is trying to track those down and figure out how to mitigate them as efficiently as possible.’
Some within Facebook sought to curb the overhauled algorithm's rewarding of outrage and lies. Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents show, because he was worried they might hurt the company’s other objective—making users engage more with Facebook.” Read more at Wall Street Journal“In January, a former cop turned Facebook Inc. investigator posted an all-staff memo on the company’s internal message board. It began ‘Happy 2021 to everyone!!’ and then proceeded to detail a new set of what he called ‘learnings.’ The biggest one: A Mexican drug cartel was using Facebook to recruit, train and pay hit men.
The behavior was shocking and in clear violation of Facebook’s rules. But the company didn’t stop the cartel from posting on Facebook or Instagram, the company’s photo-sharing site.
Scores of internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show employees raising alarms about how its platforms are used in some developing countries, where its user base is already huge and expanding. They also show the company’s response, which in many instances is inadequate or nothing at all.
Employees flagged that human traffickers in the Middle East used the site to lure women into abusive employment situations in which they were treated like slaves or forced to perform sex work. They warned that armed groups in Ethiopia used the site to incite violence against ethnic minorities. They sent alerts to their bosses on organ selling, pornography and government action against political dissent, according to the documents.
Facebook removes some pages, though many more operate openly, according to the documents.
In some countries where Facebook operates, it has few or no people who speak the dialects needed to identify dangerous or criminal uses of the platform, the documents show.
When problems have surfaced publicly, Facebook has said it addressed them by taking down offending posts. But it hasn’t fixed the systems that allowed offenders to repeat the bad behavior. Instead, priority is given to retaining users, helping business partners and at times placating authoritarian governments, whose support Facebook sometimes needs to operate within their borders, the documents show.
Facebook treats harm in developing countries as ‘simply the cost of doing business’ in those places, said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president who oversaw partnerships with internet providers in Africa and Asia before resigning at the end of last year. Facebook has focused its safety efforts on wealthier markets with powerful governments and media institutions, he said, even as it has turned to poorer countries for user growth.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Lives Lived: Ida Nudel personified the Cold War struggle of Jews to immigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel. She died at 90.” Read more at New York Times
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