“Joe Biden needs to turn the page on a problematic August, but can he?
The U.S. president’s approval rating is at the lowest point since he took office, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, following America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
ICU beds are again in short supply in parts of the U.S., with Covid-19 cases averaging 160,000 a day and about 100,000 patients hospitalized nationwide, a somber postscript to a promised ‘Summer of Freedom’ that never really arrived.
Biden plans tomorrow to travel to New York City and New Jersey, where flash flooding killed at least 40 people when remnants of Hurricane Ida hit the region.
The trip follows his visit Friday to Louisiana, where the storm wreaked havoc after making landfall, spotlighting progressive Democrats’ concerns about climate change and their demands the Biden administration do more to combat it.This all sets the backdrop for a pivotal month for Biden’s economic agenda. Democratic leaders have been hoping to leverage their narrow margins in the House and Senate to pass key elements of the president’s $3.5 trillion tax and spending package.
But Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia whose vote is potentially decisive, dealt a blow to that effort last week when he demanded a ‘strategic pause’ and argued for a smaller package of measures.
Manchin’s move fueled speculation that Biden’s agenda could be headed for defeat in Congress this fall.
It’s too early to say whether that’s true. But it’s clear the president could use a break or two to start changing the political narrative away from perceived missteps.
The success of his agenda and his party’s fate in next year’s midterm elections could hang in the balance.” — Kathleen Hunter Read more at Bloomberg
“Military action | A Guinean military unit seized power and arrested President Alpha Conde, roiling global aluminum markets on concerns about supply disruptions from the world’s biggest exporter of the metal’s raw material, bauxite. The coup is the third time soldiers have taken control of a government in Africa in about a year after similar actions in Mali and Chad.” Read more at Bloomberg
“The Taliban have claimed victory in Afghanistan's Panjshir province, with a spokesman saying the region had been ‘completely conquered’ after two weeks of fierce fighting with a resistance group. If the claim is true, it would mean the Taliban now control every Afghan province. However, the National Resistance Front in Afghanistan, an anti-Taliban group that has been battling the militants' offensive in the Panjshir Valley, denied the claim, with a spokesman telling CNN: ‘The resistance is still all over the valley.’ The claims follow a weekend of intense fighting in the Panjshir Valley, with heavy casualties reported. Meanwhile, Klain said the US will find ways to get any remaining Americans in Afghanistan out of the country if they want to leave, even after the US finished its military evacuation. But when it comes to fighting ISIS-K, with no US troops left on the ground, gathering intelligence will become infinitely more difficult, according to current and former officials.” Read more at CNN
Pete Buttigieg, right, and his husband, Chasten, announced on Saturday that they had become parents of a boy and a girl.Credit...via Twitter
“Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, said on Saturday that he and his husband, Chasten, were now the parents of two children, making him the first openly gay cabinet secretary to become a parent while in office.
‘We are delighted to welcome Penelope Rose and Joseph August Buttigieg to our family,’ Mr. Buttigieg, 39, said in a statement on social media, sharing a photograph of his daughter and son for the first time since announcing last month that the couple were completing the process of becoming parents.
In the image, the couple, seated on a hospital bed, are smiling as they each cradle a newborn. The Buttigieges did not respond to a phone call seeking comment and have offered few other details about their children.
Mr. Buttigieg surfaced in national politics when he entered the presidential race in 2019 as mayor of South Bend, Ind. This year, Mr. Buttigieg and Chasten, 32, relocated to Washington after Mr. Buttigieg became transportation secretary, making him the first openly gay cabinet member to be confirmed by the Senate. He is also the youngest member of President Biden’s cabinet.
Mr. Buttigieg and Chasten, a former middle school teacher, wed in 2018. Since Mr. Buttigieg entered the national spotlight, they have often sought to upend perceptions of gay relationships.” Read more at New York Times
“Some US hospitals are getting close to full capacity as Covid-19 continues to spread, and soon officials could be making choices about who gets an ICU bed, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN. ‘We are perilously close,’ the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases said. ‘You're going to be in a situation where you're going to have to make some very tough choices.’ Masking is important, Fauci noted, but ‘vaccination is the No. 1’ method of lowering hospitalizations. In the Southeast, Georgia is now seeing its highest number of hospitalizations since the start of the pandemic, matching January peaks, according to federal data. Concerns about Covid-19 are putting more emphasis on booster shots, with White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain committing to the science but not giving a specific date as to when they would be available to the public. Fauci, however, has confirmed that booster doses of Pfizer and Moderna might not come at the same time.” Read more at CNN
“WASHINGTON (AP) — Mary Taboniar went 15 months without a paycheck, thanks to the COVID pandemic. A housekeeper at the Hilton Hawaiian Village resort in Honolulu, the single mother of two saw her income completely vanish as the virus devastated the hospitality industry.
For more than a year, Taboniar depended entirely on boosted unemployment benefits and a network of local foodbanks to feed her family. Even this summer as the vaccine rollout took hold and tourists began to travel again, her work was slow to return, peaking at 11 days in August — about half her pre-pandemic workload.
Taboniar is one of millions of Americans for whom Labor Day 2021 represents a perilous crossroads. Two primary anchors of the government’s COVID protection package are ending or have recently ended. Starting Monday, an estimated 8.9 million people will lose all unemployment benefits. A federal eviction moratorium already has expired.
While other aspects of pandemic assistance including rental aid and the expanded Child Tax Credit are still widely available, untold millions of Americans will face Labor Day with a suddenly shrunken social safety net.” Read more at AP News
“OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — A summer that began with plunging caseloads and real hope that the worst of COVID-19 had passed is ending with soaring death counts, full hospitals and a bitter realization that the coronavirus is going to remain a fact of American life for the foreseeable future.
Vaccination rates are ticking upward, and reports of new infections are starting to fall in some hard-hit Southern states. But Labor Day weekend bears little resemblance to Memorial Day, when the country was averaging fewer than 25,000 cases daily, or to the Fourth of July, when President Joe Biden spoke about nearing independence from the virus.
Instead, with more than 160,000 new cases a day and about 100,000 COVID patients hospitalized nationwide, this holiday feels more like a flashback to 2020. In Kansas, many state employees were sent home to work remotely again. In Arizona, where school mask mandates are banned, thousands of students and teachers have had to go into quarantine. In Hawaii, the governor has issued a plea to tourists: Don’t visit.
‘The irony is that things got so good in May and most of June that all of us, including me, were talking about the end game,’ said Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Berkeley. ‘We started to enjoy life again. Within a very few weeks, it all came crashing down.’
The resurgence has left the country exhausted, nervous and less certain than ever about when normalcy might return.
More than 1,500 Americans are dying most days, worse than when cases surged last summer but far lower than the winter peak. Although the rate of case growth nationally has slowed in recent days and incremental progress has been made in Southern states, other regions are in the midst of growing outbreaks. And with millions of schoolchildren now returning to classrooms — some for the first time since March 2020 — public health experts say that more coronavirus clusters in schools are inevitable….
Vaccines are effective in preventing severe disease and death, but 47% of Americans are not fully vaccinated, allowing the highly infectious delta variant more than enough opportunity to inflict suffering and disrupt daily life. Health officials say that most of the patients who are being hospitalized and dying are not vaccinated and that it is those unvaccinated people who are driving the current surge and burdening the health care system….
The summer surge has played out in a fatigued, politically divided country with no unified vision for how to navigate the pandemic. During previous upticks, the promise of vaccines led many to think that a return to ordinary life was perhaps just months away and that masking up or staying home was a short-term investment toward that goal. But the virus’s mutations and the refusal of millions of Americans to take the shots have dimmed that hope.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Public health warnings against using the anti-parasitic ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19, especially in the large doses meant for livestock, appear to have made little progress in stemming its popularity in parts of the United States.
Hospitals and poison control centers across the United States are treating a growing number of patients taking the drug.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that almost 90,000 prescriptions for ivermectin were being written per week in mid-August, up from a prepandemic weekly average of 3,600. Veterinary supply store shelves have been emptied of it.
The C.D.C. reported that one person had an “altered mental status” after purchasing ivermectin on the internet and taking a reported five pills daily for five days. Another person drank an ivermectin formula intended for cattle and was hospitalized for nine days with tremors and hallucinations.
The warnings are not enough. Ivermectin has been promoted by celebrities like the podcasting giant Joe Rogan, who listed it this week among the treatments he was given after contracting the virus. Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who has been banned from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, took out a box of ivermectin pills during one of his trademark rants and popped two tablets live on the show that he still manages to stream.
Ivermectin was introduced as a veterinary drug in the late 1970s, and it was later approved for use in humans infected with parasites. Since 1987, its U.S. maker, Merck & Co., has donated billions of doses that have spared hundreds of millions of people from river blindness in Africa and other parasitic diseases. Two scientists shared a Nobel Prize in 2015 for their work in developing the drug. But in the United States, it has limited human applications, like treating lice and rosacea, and has been primarily used to deworm horses, cows and pets — until now.
On Twitter last month, the Food and Drug Administration warned that the drug was not approved for use against Covid and that taking large doses could cause serious harm. ‘You are not a horse,’ its tweet read. ‘You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.’” Read more at New York Times
“RIO DE JANEIRO — Just a few weeks ago, Covid-19 was spreading with alarming ease across a cluster of nations in South America, overwhelming hospital systems and killing thousands of people daily.
Suddenly, the region that had been the epicenter of the pandemic is breathing a sigh of relief.
New infections have fallen sharply in nearly every nation in South America as vaccination rates have ramped up. The reprieve has been so sharp and fast, even as the Delta variant wreaks havoc elsewhere in the world, that experts can’t quite explain it.
Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Uruguay and Paraguay experienced dramatic surges of cases in the first months of the year, just as vaccines started to arrive in the region. Containment measures were uneven and largely lax because governments were desperate to jump-start languishing economies….
There have been no new sweeping or large-scale containment measures in the region, although some countries have imposed strict border controls. A major factor in the recent drop in cases, experts say, is the speed with which the region ultimately managed to vaccinate people. Governments in South America have generally not faced the kind of apathy, politicization and conspiracy theories around vaccines that left much of the United States vulnerable to the highly contagious Delta variant.” Read more at New York Times
From Louisiana to New York, communities across the eastern US are trying to piece lives back together more than a week after Hurricane Ida slammed into the Gulf Coast. In both areas of the US, roadways turned to rivers, lives were lost and structures were destroyed by strong winds and rising waters. Power restoration could take weeks more in some places, officials said, with more than 530,000 customers in Louisiana still in the dark. Climatologist Kim Cobb warned that New York, like many cities, was clearly not prepared to deal with climate-related and weather disasters such as Ida. The true extent of the storm's impact on human lives is still being realized. In one heartbreaking account, Chasity Fatherree recounts how her father became the first of dozens of confirmed casualties in the devastating storm system.” Read more at CNN
“SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. (AP) — Tens of thousands of people who fled South Lake Tahoe in the teeth of a wildfire were returning home as crews finally managed to stall the advance of flames scant miles from the resort.
But authorities warned that residents of the scenic forest area on the California-Nevada state line weren’t out of the woods yet, with risks ranging from smoky, foul air to belligerent bears.
Evacuation orders for South Lake Tahoe and other lakeside areas were downgraded to warnings on Sunday afternoon and California Highway Patrol officers began removing roadblocks along State Highway 50 from Nevada to the city limits.
The threat from the Caldor Fire hasn’t entirely vanished but downgrading to a warning meant those who wish could return to their homes in what had been a smoke-choked ghost town instead of a thriving Labor Day getaway location.” Read more at AP News
“A former Marine outfitted in body armor fatally shot four people, including a baby, mother and grandmother, near Lakeland, Florida, early yesterday in what the sheriff there called an ‘active shooter rampage.’ The suspect then got into a firefight with officers before surrendering, but he later tried to take a gun from an officer at a hospital, the sheriff said. An 11-year-old girl who was shot is expected to recover. Meantime, at least 46 people, including eight children, have been shot in Chicago over the weekend, police said. A 4-year-old boy was taken to a hospital in critical condition after he was shot twice in the head Friday night inside a home, Chicago police said. Adding to the violence, three people, including a student, were shot on the campus of Towson University in Maryland early Saturday, according to Baltimore County Police. The injuries were not life threatening, the university said.” Read more at CNN
“Texas lawmakers have taken the state’s long history of chest-thumping conservatism to new levels over the last few months.
Republicans, who have complete control of state government in Texas, have pushed through some of the most extreme rightwing measures in the country. They enacted the most restrictive abortion law in the United States, essentially outlawing the practice after six weeks and incentivizing private citizens to sue anyone who assists another person in obtaining one. They passed a measure allowing anyone to carry a handgun without a permit or training. They severely restricted how teachers can talk about systemic racism in their classrooms, passing a law that says teachers cannot be required to discuss current events and cannot give ‘deference to any one perspective’ if they do so. And they passed sweeping new election restrictions, banning voting practices, including 24-hour and drive-thru voting, that the state’s largest, and Democratic-leaning, county used in 2020.
It’s a hard-right turn driven by a need to appeal to the core part of the Republican base, observers say, particularly at a time when there are clear signs the Republican electorate in Texas shrinking and the state becoming increasingly politically competitive. Nearly all of the state’s population growth over the last decade has come from people of color, recent census numbers show. Democratic-leaning cities and their suburbs are growing quickly, while Republican-leaning rural areas are not.
‘They’re doing it because their base, primary Republican voters, is declining,’ said Robert Stein, a professor at Rice University in Houston. ‘You don’t have to have a PhD to figure it out.’
The laws will have significant impact on the lives of Texans. Approximately 85% of all abortions previously performed in the state are now illegal, providers say, forcing women to travel outside of the state to obtain one. People who work long hours and can’t take time off work will face obstacles to casting a ballot with 24-hour voting now banned. And people with disabilities may face more difficulties in casting their vote because of new restrictions on people who assist them.
The extremism in Texas is being led by Greg Abbott, the state’s Republican governor, who faces a Republican challenge from the right in his primary election next year. Though Abbott, considered a potential presidential contender in 2024, is still overwhelmingly favored in the race, observers say he has used the legislative session to burnish his conservative bona fides. Abbott has called lawmakers back to Austin for special legislative sessions this year to take on red-meat issues for the Republican base, including voting and critical race theory, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society.
As Republicans push extreme bills in the legislature, they’re also bolstered by an extremely powerful political advantage. A decade ago, Republicans had complete control over the process of drawing the boundaries for state legislative and congressional districts. It allowed them to distort the lines to help Republicans win elections and guarantee their election in the state legislature over the past 10 years. This year the lines will be redrawn again and Republicans once again will have complete control of the process. It’s a power that allows Republicans to make laws without having to worry about alienating Democratic voters.” Read more at The Guardian
“WASHINGTON — Top US national security officials will see how the failed war in Afghanistan may be reshaping America’s relationships in the Middle East as they meet with key allies in the Persian Gulf and Europe this week.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were traveling to the Gulf separately, leaving Sunday. They will talk with leaders who are central to US efforts to prevent a resurgence of extremist threats in Afghanistan, some of whom were partners in the 20-year fight against the Taliban.
Together, the Austin and Blinken trips are meant to reassure Gulf allies that President Biden’s decision to end the US war in Afghanistan in order to focus more on other security challenges like China and Russia does not foretell an abandonment of US partners in the Middle East. The US military has had a presence in the Gulf for decades, including the Navy’s 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Biden has not suggested ending that presence, but he — like the Trump administration before him — has called China the No. 1 security priority, along with strategic challenges from Russia.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Bodies floating downstream into Sudan reveal what appears to be a new phase of ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, a CNN investigation found. Witnesses on the ground say the bodies tell a dark story of mass detentions and mass executions across the border in Humera, in Ethiopia's Tigray region. Humera is one of many towns involved in the conflict that has ravaged the African country since the Ethiopian government launched an offensive in the northern Tigray region in November. Despite Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's quick declaration of victory, the region is still wracked by fighting, and CNN has previously reported on many atrocities including torture, extrajudicial killings and the use of rape as a weapon of war. CNN's investigations indicate that the ethnic profiling, detention and killing of Tigrayans bears the hallmarks of genocide as defined by international law. The Ethiopian government said it was investigating the allegations.” Read more at CNN
“Patricia Maginnis, one of the nation’s earliest and fiercest proponents of a woman’s right to safe, legal abortions, who crusaded for that right on her own before the formation of an organized reproductive-rights movement, died on Aug. 30 in Oakland, Calif. She was 93.
Her niece Semberlyn Crossley said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Ms. Maginnis, whom many consider the first abortion-rights activist in the United States, helped shift the debate in the era before Roe v. Wade away from the rules governing abortion providers to the right of women to control their bodies.
As Texas and other states pass or are considering laws drastically curtailing most abortions, her life is a reminder of the single-minded commitment it took to help secure the right to abortion, and of what women faced before the procedure was legalized….
She founded the Citizens Committee for Humane Abortion Laws, which called for women’s right to safe and legal elective abortions, in San Francisco in 1962. The committee, which later changed its name to the Society for Humane Abortion, sponsored symposiums to educate medical and legal professionals and operated a free post-abortion clinic.
A few years later Ms. Maginnis, along with two colleagues, Lana Phelan Kahn and Rowena Gurner, formed the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws (ARAL), the precursor to NARAL Pro-Choice America, now one of the nation’s major abortion-rights advocacy organizations, which was founded in 1969.
The women became known as the ‘Army of Three’ as they conducted a systematic civil disobedience campaign at a time when even mailing literature about birth control was illegal. They led classes in how to conduct do-it-yourself abortions and coordinated what they called an “underground railroad” of information, which provided, among other things, a continually updated list of qualified abortion providers in Mexico, Japan and Sweden.
In violation of local and state laws that prohibited telling women where they could “procure a miscarriage,” they also distributed leaflets on the streets of San Francisco doing just that and urging women to attend their do-it-yourself abortion classes.
‘I am attempting to show women an alternative to knitting needles, coat hangers and household cleaning agents,’ Ms. Maginnis told reporters in 1966.
The Army of Three flagrantly violated the law not only to help educate women but also so they could be arrested and test anti-abortion ordinances. Ms. Maginnis and Ms. Gurner were arrested in San Francisco in 1967 and convicted of unlawfully advertising abortion, but in 1973 a California appeals court overturned their convictions as unconstitutional, rendering the ordinances invalid.
Ms. Maginnis, who grew up in a strict Roman Catholic family in Oklahoma, told Slate that she couldn’t specify the moment she became an activist. Rather, she said, she seemed to reach the boiling point after a long, slow buildup of rage — after she tended to women with botched abortions at an Army hospital; after she saw how powerless women were in the face of bureaucratic medical protocols; after she saw the wide disparities in how poor women and women of color were treated compared with women of means; and after she had three abortions herself, one performed in Mexico and two that were self-induced.” Read more at New York Times
“NEW YORK (AP) — On what’s traditionally one of the sleepiest weekends at the movies, the Marvel film ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ smashed the record for Labor Day openings with an estimated $71.4 million in ticket sales, giving a box office reeling from the recent coronavirus surge a huge lift heading into the fall season.
The Friday-to-Sunday gross for ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,’ Marvel’s first film led by an Asian superhero, ranks as one of the best debuts of the pandemic, trailing only the previous Marvel film, ‘Black Widow’ ($80.3 million in July). Overseas, it pulled in $56.2 million for a global three-day haul of $127.6 million. Disney anticipates ‘Shang Chi,’ made for about $150 million, will add $12.1 million domestically on Monday.
The Walt Disney Co. opted to release ‘Shang-Chi’ only in theaters where it will have an exclusive 45-day run. Some of the studio’s releases this year, including ‘Black Widow,’ have premiered day-and-date in theaters and on Disney+ for $30.” Read more at AP News