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Residents of southwest Florida faced scenes of widespread destruction and flooding as the storm battered the state overnight and left more than 2.4 million people without power.
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Showing posts with label FLORIDA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FLORIDA. Show all posts
September 30, 2022
Hurricane Ian makes landfall in Florida
December 4, 2021
DeSantis proposes a new civilian military force in Florida that he would control
Yesterday, Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis called for a state military force that would not be “encumbered by the federal government.” National Guard units in Oklahoma have asked for, and been denied, exceptions to the Pentagon requirement that guard members must be vaccinated against COVID in order to participate in orders and to receive pay, and DeSantis has made his opposition to vaccine mandates his political cause. DeSantis has asked the state legislature for $3.5 million to train and equip 200 volunteers who would answer to him alone.
While other states have such forces for specific events, DeSantis simply says such a force in Florida would give him "the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible." At the same time, he has asked the legislature for $100 million for the state’s National Guard.
And yet, as Republicans around the country insist on the Big Lie, they are running up against reality, in the form of the legal system.
After World War II, Americans of all parties rallied around the idea of using the government for the good of the majority. But the idea that Americans who want the government to work for the good of the community were “socialists” regained traction with the rise of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Republicans under Reagan focused on slashing regulations and the social safety net.
But Americans continued to support an active government, and to keep those voters from power, Republicans in the 1990s began to insist that the only way Democrats won elections was through voter fraud. Those false allegations have metastasized until we are at a moment when Republicans refuse to believe that a majority of Americans would vote for a Democratic president.
Although Joe Biden won the 2020 election by a majority of more than 7 million votes and by a decisive margin of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College (the same margin Trump had called a “landslide” in 2016), Republicans are doubling down on the idea that the election must have been stolen and they must declare independence from the “socialist” government.
Today, John Eastman, the author of the Eastman memo outlining a plan to throw out Biden’s electors and thus throw the 2020 election to Trump, has told the January 6 committee that he will plead the Fifth when he testifies before the committee. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution protects U.S. citizens from self-incrimination. The Guardian revealed last week that Trump made phone calls to the so-called “war room” at the Willard Hotel before the January 6 insurrection and that Eastman was potentially associated with those calls.
“Dr. Eastman has a more than reasonable fear that any statements he makes pursuant to this subpoena will be used in an attempt to mount a criminal investigation against him,” his lawyer told the committee.
Yesterday, Jeffrey Clark, formerly a lawyer for the Department of Justice—one of those charged with enforcing the rule of law in this country—has told the committee that he, too, will plead the Fifth. Clark tried to involve the Justice Department itself in overruling the results of the 2020 election. Today he announced that he has a medical condition that will not allow him to testify before the January 6th committee tomorrow as planned.
The committee has postponed the deposition until December 16.
October 28, 2020
Will Florida Decide the Presidential Race or Throw It Into Confusion?
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By the time Election Day is over, all the votes may not be counted. But there may be at least one way to know whether Joe Biden will be President—if he decisively wins the state of Florida.
In Florida, election officials say there’s a good chance that they will have the overwhelming majority of ballots counted by midnight on November 3rd. And while pollsters believe that Biden can plausibly win the Presidency without winning Florida’s twenty-nine electoral votes, they are confident that President Donald Trump cannot. Jim Messina, who ran President Obama’s reëlection campaign, in 2012, told me that he has run simulations of some sixty-six thousand possible electoral outcomes, and in none of them did Trump win without capturing Florida. “It’s just the math,” he said. “If Biden can win Florida early on Election Night, it’s over.”
Many of the big swing states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, may need several hours, or even days, to declare a winner. That’s because state laws do not allow mail-in and absentee ballots to be counted until Election Day—even as mail-in ballots are surging amid the covid-19 pandemic.
But in Florida mail-in ballots are being counted as they arrive—meaning that, unless an unexpectedly large wave of ballots arrives by mail on Election Day, state officials will post the tally of mail-in votes shortly after the polls close, at 7 p.m. At the request of county election supervisors, Governor Ron DeSantis agreed to allow them to begin counting ballots weeks earlier than usual. The volume has already set records: more than three million mail-in ballots have been received, in addition to about two million early votes cast in person. In all likelihood, more than half of Florida’s ballots will be cast before Election Day.
In theory, the tabulation of ballots cast in person should proceed quickly. Wesley Wilcox, the supervisor of elections in Marion County, in the northern part of the state, hopes that most will be counted by late Tuesday evening. “The vast majority will be done by 9 p.m., and that will be true of most counties,” Wilcox, who is the incoming president of the state’s association of election supervisors, told me. “Usually, by 11 p.m. we are out of here—that’s my hope and prayer.”
But, in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where the tabulation of mail-in ballots won’t begin until Election Day, things may not be so simple. Ever since the pandemic began, Democratic leaders have feared that a substantial majority of Republican voters would cast ballots in person on Election Day. (In Florida, Democrats lead Republicans by a huge margin in mail-in votes, and Republicans have a sizable lead in early voting.) If Trump endorses the tally of in-person votes and dismisses the mail-in ballots as fraudulent before they are even counted, he could claim victory that night. Such an outcome could set the stage for a bitter and protracted postelection dispute.
If Trump has already lost Florida, though, those complaints are likely to carry much less weight, even with his supporters. It was precisely the desire to deliver such a decisive blow that prompted Michael Bloomberg, the businessman and former mayor of New York, to pledge a hundred million dollars to support Biden’s candidacy in Florida. “He doesn’t want there to be any doubt,” Mitchell Berger, a prominent Democratic lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, told me. So far, the Bloomberg organization is spending a large chunk of its money to pay an army of people to canvass for Biden door to door.
But the knockout scenario assumes two things: Biden wins Florida by a convincing margin, and there are no major disputes about the tally. Although Biden is ahead in most statewide polls, his lead is typically not much larger than the margin of error. And Florida has experienced balloting problems in nearly every statewide election since 2000, when George W. Bush and Al Gore finished with nearly identical totals, initiating a long and vicious fight. Florida remains deeply polarized, and statewide races have continued to be decided by razor-thin margins.
The other factor that has strained Florida elections is voter suppression, which has been a key component in the Republican Party’s quest to become the state’s dominant party. In the past decade, G.O.P. leaders have learned that lower turnouts usually help their candidates, and they have pushed laws to make it harder for people to vote. In 2019, the Republican-dominated legislature eviscerated an amendment to the state constitution that granted voting rights to most nonviolent felons who had completed their sentences. On October 14th, the office of Laurel Lee, the secretary of state, sent a letter to county election supervisors informing them that every early-voting drop box should be protected by a security guard around the clock. (County governments have placed hundreds of boxes around the state; most are emptied and locked at the end of the day’s voting.) Democratic leaders claimed that Lee, a Republican appointee, is trying to reduce the number of early-voting sites, because many counties do not have the manpower to protect them. In any case, many election supervisors appear to have ignored her missive.
Voting by mail has gone smoothly so far. Under state law, voters must place their completed ballot in a signed envelope and drop it in the mail. When the ballot is received, the signature on the envelope is compared with the voter’s signature on her registration record. If the signatures match, the envelope is opened and the ballot counted. If the signatures seem mismatched, the unopened ballot is set aside and the voter is contacted and given a chance to fix the problem. If the voter cannot be reached, the ballot is examined by the local canvassing board—made up of the county election supervisor, a judge, and a county commissioner. An adviser from each of the campaigns is also allowed to express an opinion. The ballot is thrown out only if the canvassing board decides that it is invalid. “Unless there is a good reason to reject a ballot, we don’t reject a ballot,” Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, told me.
According to Earley, more than fifty thousand early ballots have been checked in his county, and only a hundred have issues awaiting resolution. Lawyers for Trump have been more aggressive than Biden’s lawyers in challenging ballots, but they have been ineffective. When I spoke to Earley earlier this month, he told me that the Trump lawyers had contested signatures on ten ballots so far; all ten were examined and counted, he said. In Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale, lawyers for the Trump campaign challenged fifteen random signatures, in what they described as an effort to test the system. All fifteen were accepted.
But there are troubling signs ahead. In Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, the Republican-dominated canvassing board has been barring people from filming while it considers problematic ballots. Democratic leaders could go to the courts on such contested issues—but in Florida more than two decades of solid Republican control has made that route deeply uncertain. Berger, the Democratic lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, said that the Biden campaign will deploy hundreds of lawyers around the state to handle challenges on Election Day. “We are trying to prevent things from becoming totally insane,” he said.
The likeliest cause of insanity will be a very tight election. Trump has to win in Florida, and, if he’s within reach, the threat of chaos seems highly probable. One possibility is that all votes will not be counted. Nearly four million people in Florida have already voted by mail, but some two million more have requested ballots and not yet returned them. There is a real possibility that their ballots won’t be delivered by November 3rd, not least because of Trump’s attempt to cripple the U.S. Postal Service. In 2018, when Rick Scott ran for a U.S. Senate seat against the incumbent, Bill Nelson, some fifteen thousand ballots were not counted because they arrived after Election Day—a number larger than Scott’s margin of victory. If the vote count is close this year, fights will likely arise from every kind of ballot anomaly, including mismatched signatures and missing postmarks. In 2018, some eleven thousand ballots were rejected for such problems.
There is also the possibility of foreign intervention. Russian hackers penetrated election systems in at least two Florida counties in 2016, and, according to American intelligence, they are working to compromise the process again. Voter-registration systems in the state—as in every state—are especially vulnerable to attack. Disinformation poses a danger, too. Last week, many Democratic voters received intimidating e-mails, which threatened, “You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you.” The messages were made to appear as if they were from the Proud Boys, a group that government agencies have deemed “white supremacist.” In fact, according to American intelligence officials, they were sent by Iranian agents.
But the Proud Boys may still add to the uncertainty of Election Day. Earlier this month, as a caravan of mostly Caribbean-American Biden supporters wound through Coral Gables, it ran into a Trump parade, which one of the caravan’s leaders told me included members of the Proud Boys. In the caravan, a truck with a large screen was playing pro-Biden videos. According to Johnny Celestin, the president of Haitians for Biden, some twenty Proud Boys confronted the caravan, flashing the group’s hand signal; then one of them smashed the windshield of the truck. “Someone should have been arrested for that,’’ he said. Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys’ chairman, denied that there was an altercation and said that the group of Proud Boys was much smaller.
As it happens, Tarrio lives in Miami. He told me that he wasn’t planning on being in Florida on Election Day—he’ll be in D.C., he said, hopefully someplace close to the White House. “Trump is going to win, man,” Tarrio said. “I’m going to check into a hotel with a good view and enjoy the festivities.”
August 11, 2020
A poster child for mishandling the coronavirus crisis
![Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a news conference held Monday at Tampa General Hospital. [DIRK SHADD | Times]](https://arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tbt.s3.amazonaws.com/public/EOY2KTJTQBDNVKOI6XX26ZLFNE.JPG)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has repeatedly sought to downplay the virus.
The Sun Belt states have been especially hard hit as the virus has surged across most of the country this summer, forcing renewed shutdowns and public health warnings. But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican and favorite ally of President Donald Trump, has become a poster child for mishandling the crisis—holding out against issuing a stay-at-home order and then rushing the reopenings, even as experts warned that testing in the state was still insufficient.
Similar to Trump, DeSantis had repeatedly sought to downplay the virus, initially blaming an increase in the number of cases on increased testing, an assertion that experts said was not enough to explain the rise in infections and hospitalizations.
“A new case is just a positive test. It doesn’t mean somebody’s sick,” the governor said in June. “The number of cases is not necessarily something that’s going to tell you what the burden of the disease is.”
At one point, he suggested the media was to blame for failing to adequately cover the pandemic.
He has also been accused of sidelining the state's public health officials. In May, he fired the state's top data scientist who was charged with tracking infections. Rebekah Jones, who worked at the Florida Department of Health, said the governor had pressured her to manipulate the data to support the reopening. She said when she refused, she was let go.
At first, DeSantis tried to dismiss the complaint, saying he was under the impression from her supervisor that she was "tired and needed a break." Later, his office issued a statement saying that Jones "exhibited a repeated course of insubordination" and had herself tampered with the data.
Jones later created her own dashboard.
The state only began releasing hospitalization data on coronavirus patients on July 10th.
In keeping with Trump's agenda, DeSantis has also vowed to fully reopen schools, saying last month, "If you can do Home Depot, if you can do Walmart, if you can do these things, we absolutely can do the schools."
To date, DeSantis has resisted calls to issue a statewide mandate for wearing face masks in public, although almost one third of counties require them in certain settings.
DeSantis is also making a high-stakes gamble on school openings, with superintendents pressured into decisions that some fear will result in coronavirus outbreaks. DeSantis this week forced one of the country's largest school districts to reopen campuses by the end of August, threatening to withhold up to $200 million in state aid.
The Republican’s administration told Hillsborough County — the eighth-largest system in the country — that it would lose state aid if it did not drop plans to reopen schools remotely for the first month of the 2020-2021 school year. So the county revised its plan and will start with just one week of remote learning. Then parents will choose whether to send their children into school buildings.
“It was very clear. If we do not follow their emergency order, we will be financially hindered,” Hillsborough Superintendent Addison Davis said Thursday. “We would forfeit close to $200 million. We just can’t do that. That would bankrupt us. It would put us in a terrible situation financially.”
DeSantis, cited Martin County Superintendent Laurie Gaylord’s view of reopening schools as a mission “akin to a Navy SEAL operation
August 6, 2020
While There are Over 1000 Deaths in U.S. Each Day for Past 10 Days, in NYC coronavirus infection rate drops below 1% as deaths plummet:
While There are Over 1000 Deaths in U.S. Each Day for Past 10 Days, in NYC coronavirus infection rate drops below 1% as deaths plummet:
New York’s coronavirus infection rate fell below 1% Wednesday as the state continues to stave off a second wave of the deadly respiratory illness. Gov. Cuomo said only 636, or 0.87%, of the more than 70,000 test results that came back Tuesday were positive as hospitalizations fell by four patients to 564 people statewide.
“Our progress is thanks to the hard work of New Yorkers - even after two and a half months of reopening, the numbers have continued to go down,” the governor said in a statement.
The falling infection rate in the Empire State comes as the city passed a significant milestone: three days without a reported COVID-19 death. The state recorded just four deaths from the virus on Tuesday, Cuomo said. Another four New Yorkers of COVID-19 on Tuesday, the governor said.
Meanwhile...
At least 1,252 new coronavirus deaths and 53,633 new cases were reported in the United States on Aug. 5. Over the past week, there have been an average of 56,966 cases per day, a decrease of 14 percent from the average two weeks earlier.
As of Thursday morning, more than 4,832,300 people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 158,500 have died, according to a New York Times database.
Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times N.Y.C. Health Commissioner Resigns After Clashes With Mayor Over Virus
New York City’s health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, resigned on Tuesday and voiced her “deep disappointment” with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s handling of the pandemic, renewing scrutiny of his leadership during the crisis just as the city faces pressing decisions about how quickly to reopen schools and businesses.
Dr. Barbot’s departure came after escalating tensions between City Hall and top city health department officials, which had begun at the start of the coronavirus outbreak in March, burst into public view and raised concerns that the feuding was undermining crucial public health policies.
.The mayor’s new health commissioner is Dr. Dave A. Chokshi, a former senior leader at Health + Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system.
Dr. Chokshi, who has also worked for health department in Louisiana and as a health adviser to the United States secretary of Veterans Affairs, received praise from the former surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, who called him an “extraordinary public health leader who both sees the forest and the trees.”
Current and former health officials said the departure of Dr. Barbot reflected Mr. de Blasio’s history of distrust in his health department. From early in the coronavirus outbreak, he has clashed with the department on testing, public messaging and how quickly to shutter schools. Mr. de Blasio has been faulted for resisting calls to close down schools and businesses, which some epidemiologists believe worsened the outbreak.
Some public health officials had bristled at the mayor’s decision to place the city’s contact-tracing program inside Health + Hospitals. The health department has performed such tracing for decades; the public hospitals have not. Dr. Barbot disagreed with the move, but kept her disapproval private.
Perhaps the most consequential debate inside City Hall over the coronavirus came during the second week in March. The city had a small number of positive cases, but its public health system was flashing a warning about the unchecked spread of a flulike virus.
Dr. Barbot and one of her top deputies began urging more restrictions on gatherings. Mr. de Blasio for a time sided instead with Dr. Katz, who had been advising City Hall against ordering shutdowns.
Some officials inside the health department talked about quitting that week, or staging a walkout to force action. Eventually, top officials and the mayor agreed on the need to lock down the city to stop the spread of the virus. Mr. de Blasio ordered schools closed on March 15.
Outside of the administration, some blamed Dr. Barbot for the delays and confusion, citing her shifting public statements on the virus from late January to early March. A few elected officials called for her to be fired in early April.
On March 4, with COVID-19 cases emerging in Westchester County, Barbot dismissed the threat of infection by casual contact, saying, “There’s no indication that being in a car, being in the subways with someone who’s potentially sick is a risk factor,” the letter notes.
At a City Hall press conference on March 5, with “only four confirmed cases” in NYC, Barbot said the city was urging people who arrived from certain countries with rising cases to self-isolate, but everybody else without symptoms should not have to quarantine.
The turmoil at the top of the city’s health agency worsened in May over the mayor’s decision to locate the city’s contact-tracing efforts within its public hospital system and not in the health department.
Under Health + Hospitals, the city’s contact-tracing program got off to a rocky start. Lacking the capability to hire and manage 3,000 new workers, it outsourced much of the day-to-day management of the call center at the core of its operations to Optum, a billion-dollar subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.
So far, fewer than half of New Yorkers who have tested positive for the coronavirus — some 20,000 people since the program began on June 1 — have shared their contacts.
“Right now, cases are popping up all over the place and we are not linking them to known contacts except in a small proportion of cases,” Dr. Neil Vora, the director of the trace effort, said at an internal town-hall-style meeting for tracers last month, a recording of which was provided to The Times.
Even with the new tracing program, the health department has been called on to handle more intricate aspects of so-called disease detective work, particularly in group settings like homeless shelters and nursing homes. That expanded to include restaurants and other social gatherings last month.
The mayor said on Friday that outbreaks in schools would also be handled by the health department, in coordination with the city’s new corps of contact tracers.
Mr. de Blasio has pointed to court delays and bail reform to explain the surge in gun violence. But the N.Y.P.D.’s own numbers tell a different story.Credit...Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock[/caption]The Mayor Blames the Virus for Shootings. Here’s What Crime Data Shows.
The mayor and commissioner have cited a range of causes that they have portrayed as outside their control: the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, as well as measures approved by the State Legislature, including one that eliminated cash bail for many defendants.
But a confidential analysis of police data, conducted by city officials but not released to the public, offers little if any evidence to back up their claims. In fact, the analysis, obtained by The New York Times, suggests the state’s new bail law and the mass release of inmates from city jails in recent months because of the coronavirus outbreak played almost no role in the spike in shootings.
Of the 1,500 inmates let out of Rikers from March 16 to April 30, only seven had been rearrested on a weapons charge by mid-July, according to the confidential analysis.
Nearly 2,000 people who in July had open gun cases were allowed to go home to await trial, but only about 40 of those defendants were arrested on another weapons charge while they were out, the analysis said.
Instead, the analysis points to a different possible reason for the wave of shootings: The number of arrests for gun crimes has plummeted.
While murders and shootings have surged, reports of other major crimes have actually fallen in recent months. Still, the spike in gun violence has stirred deep fears that the city might be sliding back to an era of random violence on the streets. Recent shooting victims have included a two teenagers going to play basketball and a baby boy.
New York City is not alone. Shootings have skyrocketed in major cities across the country, and that surge has led to intense political fights over whether efforts to rein in the police, including the Defund the Police movement touched off by the killing of George Floyd, are playing a role.
On Sunday, another 19 people were shot in New York City, one fatally. Through the first seven months of this year, shootings were up 72 percent over the same period last year and murders rose 30 percent, even as reports of other violent crimes like rape, assault and robbery fell.
In mid-May, gun arrests citywide began to drop precipitously, the city analysis of police data shows. During the week of May 24, there were 113 gun arrests. During the week of June 7, there were 71 such arrests. By the week of June 28, there were only 22.
Over the same period, the data shows, shootings started rising. During the week of May 24, there were 23 shootings; in the week of June 7, there were 40. In the week of June 28, the number of shootings spiked to 63.
At a new conference on Tuesday, Mr. de Blasio said the city had deployed more officers to troubled precincts, and gun arrests were beginning to rise again. During the week ending on July 27, arrests for firearms climbed up back up to 54, the police said.
The city’s own analysis suggests the bail law, which allows many defendants accused of nonviolent crimes to be released before trial without posting bail, had little to do with the rise in violence. It notes that shooting incidents stayed relatively stable for more than four months after the legislation was passed.
The analysis also indicates that the courts are processing gun crimes at close to the same rate as before the pandemic. According to the Police Department’s data, there were 2,181 unresolved gun cases in July — slightly fewer than the 2,285 gun cases that were open in December 2019.
Similarly, the courts handled 642 gun and murder arraignments from October 2019 to December 2019. Between April and June of this year, they handled 819 gun and murder arraignments — and all of them were conducted remotely by video.
“The way we are processing arrests has not changed at all,” said Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., the Manhattan district attorney. “In May, the volume and severity of the arrests we were handling was the same as it was in January. We’re open.”
Still, Michael LiPetri, the Police Department’s chief of crime control strategies, said that the virus’s effects on the criminal justice system were being felt on the streets.
Early in the pandemic, Chief LiPetri said, many suspects arrested on gun charges who in the past would have been asked to post bail were instead released without bail to stem the spread of disease in jail.
So far this year, he said, 40 percent of all gun suspects were released on their own recognizance, compared to only 25 percent last year, and about 35 percent had bail set, compared to 55 percent last year.
The large number of people being sent home to await trial, even with a serious gun charge, he said, had created a permissive atmosphere, especially among gang members who the police believe are driving the wave of shootings.
“When people get arrested and then get out, their crew members start feeling comfortable carrying firearms,” he said.
Chief LiPetri acknowledged the number of gun arrests had dropped off, saying that the force was stretched thin because of the pandemic and the need to redeploy people to cover protests.
In the past month, he said, the department has started moving robbery detectives to work on violent crime and has shifted more than 300 officers in administrative positions to precincts with high numbers of shootings.
A dispute over Postal Service funding complicates the U.S. stimulus impasse as talks continue.
Top lawmakers remained nowhere close to an agreement on Wednesday for a new economic rescue package amid the recession, and appeared to be growing increasingly pessimistic that they could meet a self-imposed Friday deadline.
A dispute over funding for the United States Postal Service has joined expanded unemployment benefits and aid to state and local governments on the list of issues dividing Democratic leaders and the Trump administration.
“I feel optimistic that there is a light at the end of the tunnel,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said after hosting another round of talks in her Capitol Hill office with Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary; Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, the minority leader. “But how long that tunnel is remains to be seen,” Ms. Pelosi added.
On the Senate floor, Mr. Schumer called for the Postal Service to fix mail delays that have resulted from cutbacks that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy put in place during the pandemic. Democrats and voting rights groups have charged that the cuts are part of a deliberate effort by President Trump to undermine the service in order to interfere with mail-in voting that will be critical to a safe election in November. Democrats have called for $3.6 billion in the aid package to ensure a secure election, including broader mail balloting, but Republicans are opposing the funds.
Other outstanding disputes include whether to appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars to help states and local governments avoid laying off public workers as tax revenues fall, and whether to reinstate a $600 per week unemployment supplement from the federal government to laid-off workers.
Democrats are pressing to extend the payments, which lapsed last week, through January. Republicans on Tuesday countered with a plan to resume them at $400 per week through Dec. 15, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions who insisted on anonymity to describe them. Democrats declined the offer, they said.
Mr. Trump on Wednesday again suggested that he would act on his own to impose a federal eviction moratorium and temporarily suspend payroll tax cuts if an agreement could not be reached. He also reiterated his opposition to a critical Democratic proposal to send more than $900 billion to state and local governments whose budgets have been devastated by the recession.
“We have some states and cities — you know them all — they’ve been very poorly run over the years,” he said. “We’re not going to go along with that.”
More than 53,720 cases and 1,250 deaths were reported on Wednesday in the United States. The U.S. Virgin Islands set a daily case record, and Florida became the second state after California to pass 500,000 confirmed infections.
Credit...Hans Pennink/Associated Press[/caption]Health experts ask the F.D.A. to make vaccine deliberations public.
A letter signed by nearly 400 health experts on Wednesday night urged the Food and Drug Administration to conduct full safety and efficacy reviews of potential coronavirus vaccines before making the products widely available to the public.
The group called on Dr. Stephen Hahn, the F.D.A. commissioner, to be forthcoming about the agency’s deliberations over whether to approve any new vaccine, in order to gain the public’s trust.
“We must be able to explain to the public what we know and what we don’t know about these vaccines,” noted the letter, which was organized by the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest. “For that to happen, we must be able to witness a transparent and rigorous F.D.A. approval process that is devoid of political considerations.”
More than 30 experimental coronavirus vaccines are in clinical trials, with several companies racing to have the first product in the United States ready by the end of the year. The federal government has promised more than $9 billion to companies for these efforts to date. But many people are highly skeptical of these new vaccines, and might refuse to get them.
Kenya’s unusual approach to the school problem: Cancel the year and start over.
For Kenyan students, 2020 is turning out to be the year that disappeared.
Education officials announced in July that they were canceling the academic year and making students repeat it. They are not expected to begin classes again until January, the usual start of Kenya’s school year.
Experts believe Kenya is the only nation to have gone so far as to declare the entire school year a washout.
“It’s a sad and great loss,” said Esther Adhiambo, 18, who had expected to finish high school and enroll in university this year. “This pandemic has destroyed everything.”
The decision to scrap the academic year, taken after a monthslong debate, was made not just to protect teachers and students from the coronavirus, but also to address glaring issues of inequality that arose when school was suspended in March, said George Magoha, the education secretary. After schools closed, some students had the technology to access remote learning, but others didn’t.
But while the goal was to level the playing field, researchers say it might just widen already-existing gaps. Once schools reopen, the two sets of students will not be on the same level or able to compete equally in national exams, education experts said.
The decision affects more than 90,000 schools and over 18 million students in pre-primary through high school, including 150,000 more in refugee camps, according to the education ministry. Universities and colleges are also closed for physical classes until January, but can continue holding virtual instruction and graduations.
Credit...KTLA5[/Los Angeles will shut off water and electricity at houses that host large parties
Eric M. Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, said on Wednesday that the city could cut off power to homes or business that host large gatherings in defiance of public health guidelines.
Large gatherings in private homes are banned under Los Angeles County’s public health orders because of the pandemic, but there have been a number of reports of parties in recent weeks. One party that drew a large group to a mansion on Mulholland Drive on Monday night devolved into chaos and gunfire after midnight, leaving five people wounded, one of whom later died, the authorities said.
“Some research has shown that 10 percent of people cause 80 percent of the spread,” Mr. Garcetti said. “These super-spreader events and super-spreader people have a disproportionate impact on the lives that we are losing, and we cannot let that happen like we saw on Mullholland Drive on Monday night.”
Teachers returned to a Georgia school district last week. 260 employees have already gone home to quarantine.
Hundreds of students and teachers in Indiana, Mississippi, Georgia and North Carolina have already been forced into quarantine as covid-19 continues to complicate plans to reopen schools.
Trump and his spinners are suddenly freaking out about Florida. Here’s why.
July 26, 2020
WELCOME TO THE SUNSHINE STATE
As virus hit Florida, its governor sidelined scientists to follow Trump
The state’s crisis, experts and officials say, has revealed the shortcomings of a response built on shifting metrics, influenced by a few advisers and tethered to the Trump administration.
Essential work leads to a coronavirus outbreak for one group of immigrants in Florida
Guatemalan laborers, asked to work through the pandemic, are now among the hardest-hit communities in the hard-hit state.
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