George Floyd’s memorial gives way to a 10th night of protests. UPDATES

Hundreds gather for George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis

After 10 tumultuous days across the United States, hundreds of people gathered at a private memorial service Thursday afternoon in Minneapolis for George Floyd, whose death in police custody has sparked widespread protests against police violence and systemic racism.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the civil rights organization National Action Network, took the stand at the service to call Floyd’s death emblematic of the oppression black Americans have faced since the nation’s founding.

“George Floyd’s story has been the story of black folks,” Sharpton said. “What happened to Floyd happens every day in this country — in education, in health services and in every area of American life. It’s time for us to stand up in George’s name and say, ’Get your knee off our necks.’ ”

 

Mourners of all races — African American, white, Latino, Asian and Native American — gathered to show support for Floyd’s family. The ceremony in Minneapolis kicks off a four-day “celebration of life” touching all of the places Floyd called home. Additional services are planned in North Carolina and Houston over the coming days.

A somber and defiant memorial for George Floyd in Minneapolis gave way to a 10th night of protests on Thursday as thousands of demonstrators again poured into the nation’s streets, crowding outside City Hall in Seattle and marching across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The tone at many protests on Thursday was largely mournful, after more than a week of crowds burning with grief and anger over the death of Mr. Floyd and other black Americans whose deaths have spurred calls for criminal justice reform.

 

Fueling the anguish on Thursday, an investigator in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was fatally shot while being chased by three white neighbors in suburban Georgia, said that one of the suspects had used a racial slur after the shooting.

The developments came as officials from Louisville, Ky., to Seattle have been lifting nightly curfews, after protests there had become largely peaceful in recent days.

• New York: Crowds gathered Thursday outside Gracie Mansion, the Upper East Side mayoral residence, and snarled traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, ahead of a nightly curfew that will remain in effect until June 8. [Follow our live coverage of the protests in New York.]
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• Nashville: The Black Lives Matter movement held a protest at the Bicentennial Mall. Demonstrators marched to the National Museum of African American Music, which is scheduled to open later this year. The procession made its way to the state capitol.
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• Boston: In Jamaica Plain, a silent vigil was held on Thursday afternoon to protest racial injustice. The city’s mayor, Marty Walsh, led a moment of silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, which was how long the Minneapolis police order charged in the killing of George Floyd kept his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck.
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• Washington: Mayor Muriel Bowser said there would be no curfew on Thursday night, despite President Trump encouraging shows of force from the military and law enforcement to crack down on protesters,
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• Santa Monica, Calif.: In Los Angeles County, a nightly curfew that had been widely criticized was lifted on Thursday. The decision came after more than 3,000 people had been arrested in the nation’s second-largest city since the protests began last week. Most of the arrests were for curfew violations, with offenders issued citations and released. There were demonstrations in several places in the county, including Santa Monica.
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• Salt Lake City: A man who pointed a bow and arrow at demonstrators and brandished a knife during a protest last week was charged with two felony weapons counts and one count of aggravated assault, the county’s district attorney said. The man, Brandon McCormick, drove his car into the crowd and said, “Yes, I’m American. All lives matter,” a video of the altercation showed. The crowd beat him up and set his car ablaze.

• In his most extensive comments on the civil unrest gripping the country, Attorney General William P. Barr defended law enforcement’s aggressive, militaristic response to protests while acknowledging the “long-standing” concerns with police that were exposed by the death of Floyd.

• President Trump’s former chief of staff John F. Kelly defended former defense secretary Jim Mattis on Thursday over Mattis’s criticism of the president’s handling of nationwide protests. Kelly also dismissed Trump’s assertion that the president fired the retired general in 2018.
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• In a major break with Trump, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) said Thursday that she is struggling with her support for her fellow Republican president and praised Mattis for a statement in which he sharply criticized Trump.

New US unemployment claims reached 1.9m last week despite rate of increase slowing

• ‘The figures are so high that it’s hard to grasp the reality’
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• New filings down for ninth consecutive week
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• Another 1.9 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week as the total number of claims passed 42 million since the coronavirus pandemic hit the US.The pace of layoffs has slowed dramatically from its peak of 6.6m at the start of April as states start to relax quarantine orders and last week was the ninth consecutive week of declines. But the scale of layoffs remains staggeringly high. In the worst week of the last recession “just” 665,000 people filed for unemployment.Jason Reed, professor of finance at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said the numbers may be coming down, but “this is unprecedented. The figures are so high that it’s hard to grasp the reality.”

Two Buffalo police officers are suspended after shoving a protester.

Two Buffalo police officers were suspended without pay on Thursday night after a video showed them shoving a 75-year-old protester, who was hospitalized with a head injury, the authorities said.

Mayor Byron Brown said the man was in serious but stable condition. A video showed the man motionless on the ground and bleeding from his right ear.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York condemned the actions of the officers in a statement late Thursday night.

As coronavirus took jobs or workers fell ill, teen children have toiled full-time, becoming lifelines

As the pandemic took jobs or workers fell ill, teens have toiled full time, becoming lifelines

With parents in quarantine or unemployed, teens have had to forgo schooling to become family breadwinners, working jobs in grocery and big-box stores and keeping links in the nation’s food supply intact while eschewing almost everything about being a teenager.

Few police and a relaxed atmosphere at a Brooklyn vigil.

People assembling for a 7 p.m. Black Lives Matter vigil at McCarren Park in Brooklyn were almost indistinguishable from regular parkgoers, until an air horn and a round of applause on a plaza between two ball fields signaled the start — and suddenly hundreds of people who had been lounging on the grass, playing catch and listening to reggae from a sound system on a vintage school bus turned to face a small band of speakers and organizers.

“This seems more chill,” Emily Engle, 26, of Bushwick said before the start of the vigil as she sat on a park bench. She wanted a relaxed gathering, she said, after seeing the mayhem firsthand in SoHo on Sunday night. “We felt the rage,” Engle said. She didn’t condemn it, or its connection to what became a night of looting that led to a citywide curfew. “It’s an important time to take physical action because it’s easy to just post something online,” Engle said. But she added that it’s “a tough question” of how far to take it.

The McCarren vigil seemed unlikely to test limits. There was virtually no visible police presence, a fact one speaker, a woman, referenced in call-and-response opening remarks delivered through a bullhorn to a predominantly white crowd.

“We acknowledge our privilege to assemble without police violence,” she said. Demonstrators then knelt or sat for 30 minutes of silence, which fell over the park.

 

Manhattan judge denies Legal Aid request to free hundreds of George Floyd protesters held more than 24 hours

A Manhattan judge sided with police on Thursday by denying Legal Aid lawyers’ request for the immediate release of hundreds of prisoners held in custody for days after their arrest amid George Floyd protests.

The emergency lawsuit filed Tuesday against the NYPD called for the release of 108 New Yorkers “detained illegally” in violation of New York state’s 24-hour arrest-to-arraignment requirement.

As of the Thursday afternoon hearing, the number of people arrested in Manhattan who have been waiting to see a judge in cramped cells for more than 24 hours had climbed to 202, according to an NYPD lawyer.

After lengthy arguments from Legal Aid and city lawyers — who all appeared via video — Manhattan Supreme Court Judge James Burke denied the request, saying the police processing of the cases is “a crisis within a crisis."

Burke elaborated, saying he saw “a civil unrest crisis within the overarching Covid-19 crisis.”

"To that end, the entire police department has been deployed and the entire Manhattan DA’s office is, quote, all hands on deck and working to relieve the problems which we are currently addressing,” Burke said.

“It is simply a fact that virtual parts [remote hearings] slow down the pace of arraignments, including but not limited to technical issues," Burke said. He also noted that the volume of cases before the courts and police has increased.

This male is arrested on the corner of W. 14th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on Tuesday, June 2. (Sam Costanza/for New York Daily News)

Burke said in this case, an exception the 24-hour rule could be made because of the unusual circumstances.

[More New York] 14-year-old boy pleads guilty to robbery in connection to Tessa Majors’ murder, prosecutors drop murder charge »

 

Legal Aid Society lawyers said they’d monitor the situation and would appeal “if necessary.”

“We are also disheartened, however, because the overwhelming number of people held illegally are those accused of charges that should have resulted in their automatic release,” the society said in a statement.

"Motivations aside, the NYPD is fully responsible for the hundreds of New Yorkers who are currently languishing in cages, deprived of their due process rights and at an increased risk of contracting COVID-19.”

[More New York] MTA pulls newest subway cars after two trains come unhitched in tunnel while carrying passengers »

 

Social distancing is nearly impossible in holding cells, NYPD Assistant Deputy Commissioner Janine Gilbert said in court. “But I might add that these protesters are not social distancing when they’re out in the street,” she said.

There are many disorderly people — looters and rioters — who are fighting with the police, throwing bottles at the police, throwing Molotov cocktails at their vehicles, setting several ablaze, throwing flaming garbage and Molotov cocktails at vehicles with officers inside them.”

The NYPD said cops have provided masks to suspects not wearing them when they were arrested, but said there is no hand sanitizer dispensers in holding cells as prisoners were making weapons out of them.

Senior staff attorney for Legal Aid Marlen Suyapa Bodden lambasted the NYPD’s narrative, claiming the NYPD has ample resources to handle the caseload and is delaying the processing on purpose.

“They have 38,000 police officers, so they have plenty of police officers to do their policing work. The fact is, the police department is not doing its job,” she said.

"The NYPD is one of the wealthiest police departments in the world. They have access to the best technology and that’s why they can run around surveilling people, wiretapping people, doing all sorts of things.

“But now, when it comes to processing protesters, people who are asserting their First Amendment rights, oh, all of a sudden, because they’re protesting police brutality, now we’re back to the days of carrier pigeon.” 

VOX

Rubber bullets can seriously mess you up

The dangers of “nonlethal” police weapons — like rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, and tear gas — explained.

Around the country, police and law enforcement agents are responding to the protests against police brutality with ... brutality.

Standard crowd-control weapons — including rubber bullets, chemical irritants, flash-bang grenades, and contraptions that combine aspects of all three — are being deployed against protesters and the journalists covering them to disperse crowds, sometimes seemingly unprovoked, and against peaceful protesters.

While these riot-control weapons are said to be “nonlethal” or “less lethal” by police and their manufacturers, they can still cause significant harm. In some cases, they can kill or cause lasting disability.

“These weapons are supposed to be used as a last resort, if there’s really an uncontrollable level of violence that threatens public safety,” Rohini Haar, an emergency room physician who has studied the impact of crowd-control weapons, tells Vox. “Without that level, that threshold, the use of weapons against unarmed civilians is pretty unjustified.”

Here are three of the more common crowd-control weapons being used on protesters. Let’s walk through them.

Rubber bullets are bullets. Bullets can kill.

Rubber bullets are not always made out of rubber. Technically, they are called “kinetic impact projectiles.” Some are made out of hardened foam or plastic. Others contain a metal core. Some are more like beanbags shot out of a rifle. Wooden bullets also are grouped into this category, and they are also dangerous and have been used against protesters in recent days.

Regardless of their composition, these projectiles are shot out of guns at speeds comparable to that of a typical bullet, and when they hit their target, they can maim, blind, or even kill. The rubber bullets are meant to be “nonlethal” or “less lethal” and used in crowd control. But research shows how brutal these bullets can be.

“It sounds like a Nerf gun or something, but it’s definitely much more dangerous than that,” Haar says. “From our research, we find that there’s really no safe way to use rubber bullets.” The group found 26 studies on the use of rubber bullets around the world, documenting a total of 1,984 injuries. Fifteen percent of the injuries resulted in permanent disability; 3 percent resulted in death. When the injuries were to the eyes, they overwhelmingly (84.2 percent) resulted in blindness.

These weapons can also cause internal bleeding in the abdominal region, concussions, injuries to the head and neck, and skin and soft-tissue damage. Furthermore, these weapons are unwieldy and hard to aim at specific targets.

“At short range, they come out of the gun as fast as a bullet,” Haar says. “And so they can break bones. They can fracture skulls. If they hit the face, they can cause permanent damage and disability. At long distances, they ricochet, they have unpredicted trajectories, they bounce, and they’re quite indiscriminate. So they can’t possibly target either an individual or a safe body part of an individual.”

Flash-bangs, a.k.a. stun grenades, can burn and damage hearing

Rubber bullets are hardly the only problematic “nonlethal” weapon used against protesters. Flash-bang grenades, or stun grenades, are another tool being deployed by police that explode with a bright light and incredibly loud sound to get people to scatter from an area. How loud? 160 to 180 decibels, according to Physicians for Human Rights.

These noise levels are “not safe for any period of time” according to the American Speech-Language Hearing Association. They can damage the eardrums and cause temporary deafness. The light can temporarily blind a person. Pieces of the grenade may fly off as shrapnel, injuring a person. These grenades can also burn people at close range. The North Carolina Supreme Court has even declared them a weapon of “mass death and destruction.”

Tear gas is illegal in warfare, yet it can be used by police

Finally, there’s tear gas, or chemical irritants that affect the eyes, nose, mouth, lungs, and skin (there are several types of chemicals that fall under the “tear gas” category). These chemicals are banned internationally in warfare, yet they are still legal for domestic police forces — including in the US — to use to disperse crowds.

They cause immediate irritation to the eyes and lungs, but their long-term effects are less well understood.

“It’s still questionable what kinds of respiratory damage tear gas does,” Anna Feigenbaum, a journalism professor and the author of a book on the history of tear gas, told Vox’s Jen Kirby.

“We don’t really know what its impacts are in terms of different kinds of asthma and lung disease,” she continued. “What we do know is that for people who have any kind of preconditions, it’s incredibly dangerous for them to be in spaces that are tear-gassed. For anyone who’s very young or very old, it has increased dangers.”

Putin’s Favorite Ex-Congressman Dana Rohrabacher Is Now Pitching a Cure for COVID

Former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has booked his first lobbying client, a company promising a COVID-19 cure and led by a California businessman who’s been collaborating with Rudy Giuliani on a documentary on Joe Biden and Ukraine.

The company, Linear Therapies, is seeking to develop drugs that can both prevent people from getting the virus and cure them if they do. And Rohrbacher’s role is pretty simple: use his political connections to pitch Vice President Mike Pence’s office, which is playing a leading role on the White House coronavirus task force.

But while Linear is one of many companies turning to K Street for help to pitch its COVID remedies to federal legislators and regulators, the cast of characters behind it—from Giuliani to Rohrabacher to Tim Yale, the Orange County Republican who leads the company—makes it a notable entrant in an industry where political connections can mean a financial windfall.

Yale said Rohrabacher’s tenure on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, as well as his particular “network of skills,” made him a natural advocate for the company.
Rohrabacher began plotting his move to K Street just weeks after he was defeated in 2018 at the hands of Democrat Harley Rouda. In February 2019, less than a month after leaving office, Rohrabacher’s new firm, R&B Strategies, signed its first client, a Kuwait-based company fighting what it says is that country’s political prosecution of one of its Russian-born executives.

During his thirty years in Congress, Rohrabacher had a quixotic reputation and ideological streak. He was ahead of the curve in his advocacy for medical cannabis, and though Linear was incorporated on 4/20 this year, Yale told PAY DIRT that it’s not doing any work in that space.

Rohrabacher also had a famously friendly relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, so friendly in fact that the FBI warned the congressman in 2012 that the Kremlin considered him a potential intelligence source. In 2017, he attempted to broker a deal whereby the U.S. would pardon Assange in exchange for evidence that Russia was not, in fact, behind the hacking of Democratic email accounts during the 2016 presidential election.

China, Iran hackers are targeting presidential campaigns, Google says

The company said the efforts so far to hack staffers’ Gmail accounts have failed.

By Matt Viser, Josh Dawsey and Ellen Nakashima ●  Read more »

y Robert Klemko ●  Read more »

 

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Testing remains far below need. Number of Unemployed increases. UPDATES

The inability of the United States to provide broad diagnostic testing, widely seen as a pivotal failing in the nation’s effort to contain the virus, has been traced to the botched rollout by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the tardy response by the Food and Drug Administration and supply shortages of swabs and masks.

 

But the fragmented, poorly organized American health care system has also made it difficult for hospitals and other medical providers to quickly overcome obstacles to testing.

The picture for testing is improving, slowly. The United States is completing more than 300,000 tests a day, double the amount of a month ago, according to The Covid Tracking Project.

Still, the level of testing in the United States is orders of magnitude less than what many epidemiologists say it should be. The country should be doing at least 900,000 tests a day — and as many as 20 million — to yield an accurate picture of the outbreak, they say. The need for extensive testing is even more acute as many governors have reopened their states before the epidemic has crested. Without sufficient testing it will be hard to identify and contain new outbreaks.

Most testing is not done by public health authorities — whose labs have been chronically underfunded — but by hospital laboratories and major for-profit testing companies.

 

There have been calls for more than a decade to create a national laboratory system that could oversee a testing response in a public health crisis. An effort to create one 10 years ago withered away over time because of a lack of funding.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"] Sami Adamson, a freelance scenic artist, had to wait more than two months to collect unemployment benefits from New Jersey after applying.Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times[/caption]

Jobless claims reach 38.6 million in nine weeks.

Even as restrictions on businesses began lifting across the United States, another 2.4 million workers filed for jobless benefits last week, the government reported Thursday, bringing the total of new claims to more than 38 million in nine weeks.

A recent household survey from the Census Bureau suggests that the pain is widespread: Forty-seven percent of adults said they or a member of their household had lost employment income since mid-March. Nearly 40 percent expected the loss to continue over the next four weeks.

And there is increasing concern that many jobs are not coming back, even for those who consider themselves laid off temporarily.

Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who is a co-author of an analysis of the pandemic’s effects on the labor market, estimates that 42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job losses. “I hate to say it, but this is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought,” he said of the path to recovery.

Against Trump’s wishes, the push to vote by mail is growing in several states.

Mr. Trump is continuing to rail against voting by mail, which is increasingly viewed as a necessary option for voting amid a pandemic.

 

His antipathy, however, has done little so far, to slow its growth as an option in both Democratic and Republican states. Eleven of the 16 states that limit who can vote absentee have eased their election rules this spring to let anyone cast an absentee ballot in upcoming primary elections — and in some cases, in November as well. Another state, Texas, is fighting a court order to do so.

 

Four of those 11 states are mailing ballot applications to registered voters. And that doesn’t count 34 other states and the District of Columbia that already allow anyone to cast an absentee ballot, including five states in which vote-by-mail is the preferred method by law.

Part of the growth is because of the specter of people voting and getting sick amid the pandemic, as happened in Wisconsin last month. But part reflects the growth of voting by mail as an increasingly desired option even before the coronavirus. In 2016, nearly one in four voters cast absentee or mail ballots, twice the share just 16 years ago, in 2004.

Nearly one in four New Yorkers lacks adequate food, the city says.

Two months into the coronavirus pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of people out of work, nearly one in four New Yorkers needs food, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Thursday.

To address the problem, the city plans to increase to 1.5 million the number of meals it distributes each day by next week, officials said, with a million to be delivered and 500,000 available for pickup at schools.

Before the virus hit, Mr. de Blasio said, officials believed that “somewhere over a million” city residents “were food-insecure, needed food more, at some point in the year.”

As a result of the pandemic, he said, “we think that number is two million or more. So almost a doubling. That’s why we have made food such a central part of what we do in response to this crisis.”

 

The city has been expanding its food-distribution efforts for weeks and has given out 32 million meals during the crisis, the mayor said.

The mayor’s announcement came after a series of complaints about the quality and nutritional value of food delivered to some residents.

Subway ridership is up 50 percent from last month, but still far below normal.

New Yorkers are slowly beginning to return to the subway system, in another sign that Americans at the center of the global coronavirus pandemic are eager for a return to normalcy.

Subway rides are now averaging 600,000 a day, after a low of 400,000 in April, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said Wednesday.

Bus ridership is up too, from a low of 400,000 to some 700,000 trips a day.

The nation’s biggest mass transit system saw its ridership plummet over 90 percent, in part by government order: Only essential workers are supposed to use it, along with people who absolutely need to.

Sarah Feinberg, the interim president of the New York City Transit Authority, who oversees bus and subway service, said at the monthly MTA board meeting that these relatively modest increases in ridership make proper social distancing on public transit all but impossible.
“The goal will have to be, being absolutely vigilant about your mask use and putting as much distance from yourself and the next person as possible,” she said.
Since the statewide stay-at-home order was announced in late March for all non-essential workers, those essential workers who have had to keep taking mass transit have reported crowded subway cars and buses during rush hours.

The head of buses, Craig Cipriano, urged non-essential workers to avoid riding the buses over the Memorial Day weekend. “We can’t risk overwhelming the system. Part of keeping everyone safe for now is staying off the buses,” he said. “So please don't try to take them to the beach this weekend. We need all New Yorkers to do their part, that means staying away for now.”

The MTA has instituted measures to protect its workers, like protective plastic barriers in work places and on buses, rear door boarding for buses, and it is increasing its “temperature brigades.” Next week, it will roll out its experimental UV light treatment at a few limited locations.

Michael Cohen was released from prison amid coronavirus concerns.

Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, was released from a federal prison on Thursday on furlough and returned to his home in Manhattan, one of his lawyers said. He had asked to be released over health concerns tied to the coronavirus.

Mr. Cohen, 53, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and other crimes, had been serving his sentence at a minimum-security camp about 75 miles northwest of New York City.

His projected release date was November 2021. A law enforcement official said it was expected that Mr. Cohen would serve the balance of his sentence under home confinement.

MTA Will End Overnight Subway Service For Duration Of Pandemic. UPDATES

The MTA will soon cease overnight subway service, an unprecedented disruption that will allow crews to disinfect trains more frequently to help slow the spread of coronavirus.

In a joint press conference on Thursday, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio said that subways will not run between the hours of 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. for the duration of the pandemic. The indefinite shutdown will begin the morning of May 6th.

Subway ridership has plummeted by 92 percent since the COVID-19 crisis began, and only 10,000 people were using the system during the overnight window, officials said. The MTA will provide buses, for-hire vehicles and "dollar vans" for essential workers traveling at night.

The bombshell announcement follows Cuomo's demand on Wednesday that the MTA begin disinfecting trains on a nightly basis. The governor singled out the number of homeless New Yorkers seeking shelter in the transit system, describing their presence "disgusting and disrespectful."

De Blasio said the curtailed hours would allow for the city to better address that "unacceptable reality." Both state police and NYPD officers will provide a "robust and sustainable" presence during the overnight shutdown, the governor said.

Metro North and the Long Island Railroad trains will also be disinfected regularly, but without service interruptions.

Transit advocates cautioned that the subway shutdown should be a short-term intervention, and must be paired with increased bus service for frontline workers.


Another 3.8 million Americans lose jobs as US unemployment continues to grow

Pace of job losses appears to be slowing but figures increase and many people yet to receive benefits as backlog hits US system

Another 3.8 million people lost their jobs in the US last week as the coronavirus pandemic continued to batter the economy. The pace of layoffs appears to be slowing, but in just six weeks an unprecedented 30 million Americans have now sought unemployment benefits and the numbers are still growing.

The latest figures from the labor department released on Thursday showed a fourth consecutive week of declining claims. While the trend is encouraging, the rate of losses means US unemployment is still on course to reach levels unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The figures are also still undercounting the number of people out of work. Some states are still dealing with backlogs of claims after their systems were overwhelmed by the massive volume of applications.


Florida has become a notable black spot. As of Tuesday the state had received more than 1.9 million claims and processed just over 664,000, one of the slowest rates in the nation.

Intelligence report concludes Covid-19 was not 'manmade or genetically modified'
The office of the director of national intelligence said the intelligence community does not believe coronavirus was manmade. The new statement comes amid reports that Trump has asked intelligence officials to investigate whether the virus originated from a Chinese government laboratory. Trump implied that he’d seen evidence proving the unproven theory that the coronavirus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He also repeated claims that China favored Joe Biden over him in the election,
Most epidemiologists believe that a natural transmission of the novel coronavirus from animal to human remains the most likely explanation for the pandemic’s origin.


Trump, under fire about coronavirus response, looks to shift blame to China 

The Trump administration is reportedly pressuring the US intelligence community to seek out evidence supporting an unsubstantiated theory that the coronavirus pandemic has its origins in a Chinese government lab in Wuhan. [NY Times]

Simultaneously, the administration is said to be looking for ways to punish China for its response to the initial coronavirus outbreak. Administration officials have floated several strategies, including clearing the way for Covid-19 victims to sue the country and unilaterally canceling part of the US debt to China. [Washington Post]

Both actions are part of a broader strategy by the GOP: A memo obtained last week by Politico instructed Republican Senate candidates to shift their focus to attacking China rather than defending President Trump’s response to the pandemic. [Politico]

Although Trump has taken an increasingly hostile stance toward China in recent days, a month ago, the president complimented the country’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
Donald J. Trump(@realDonaldTrump)

Just finished a very good conversation with President Xi of China. Discussed in great detail the CoronaVirus that is ravaging large parts of our Planet. China has been through much & has developed a strong understanding of the Virus. We are working closely together. Much respect!

March 27, 2020



Armed protestors demonstrated against the extension of shelter in place orders in Michigan. 

The demonstrators, some of whom were carrying assault rifles, compared the state’s Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer to Hitler.

Gov. Whitmer of Michigan, a prime political target in partisan clashes over stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus outbreak, signed three executive orders on Thursday to reinstate a state of emergency during the coronavirus pandemic.

The moves, which put into place a new state of emergency through May 28, were in response to the Republican-led State Legislature’s refusal to extend the original emergency declaration on the day it was set to expire.

Republican lawmakers have tried to strip the governor’s power to declare a state of emergency, which underpins the stay-at-home order. Michigan has had more Covid-19 deaths than every state except New York and New Jersey. “By refusing to extend the emergency and disaster declaration, Republican lawmakers are putting their heads in the sand and putting more lives and livelihoods at risk,” Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat, said in a statement. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

A tightly packed crowd of protesters, some carrying rifles, attempted to enter the floor of the legislative chamber, and were held back by a line of state police and capitol staff, according to video footage posted by local journalists. “Let us in! Let us in!” the protesters chanted, as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder inside the statehouse. Few of them were wearing face masks.

FBI notes on Michael Flynn unlikely to convince judge he was entrapped, legal experts say
The notes, taken by a former senior FBI official, fuel expectations of a pardon for President Trump's former national security adviser.

New Jersey is reporting more new daily deaths than any other state.
New Jersey reported 460 new virus-related deaths on Thursday, more than any other state in the nation. The state is now reporting more new deaths than neighboring New York, which saw 306 new deaths on Thursday, less than half of what it was reporting each day when the outbreak peaked there this month.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Thursday shut down the beaches in Orange County, rolling back earlier attempts at giving people there a chance to stroll along the shore while staying a safe distance from one another. But Alabama moved to reopen its beaches, and Texas will do the same in parts of the state on Friday, even as health experts warn that doing so could produce a surge in new virus cases.

“This disease isn’t going away,” Mr. Newsom warned, noting that the pandemic had claimed at least 95 lives in California in the previous 24 hours.

Congress Passes a $484 billion coronavirus aid package. Another 4.4 million file for unemployment, making for a total over 26 million. UPDATES.

A $484 billion coronavirus aid package is headed to Trump’s desk.

The House on Thursday gave resounding approval to a $484 billion coronavirus relief package to restart a depleted loan program for distressed small businesses and provide funds for hospitals and coronavirus testing, and moved to increase oversight of the sprawling federal response to the pandemic.

President Trump said he was “grateful” for the action to refill the loan program and indicated he would sign the measure. It was the latest installment in a government aid program that is approaching $3 trillion, which passed with broad bipartisan support even as some Democrats condemned it for being too stingy. But the fight over what should be included foreshadowed a pitched partisan battle to come over the next round of federal relief, which is likely to center on aid to states and cities facing dire financial straits.

Even as they dispensed with another nearly half-trillion taxpayer dollars, Democrats were moving to scrutinize the administration’s handling of the funds. Just before the aid package passed, they pushed through a measure creating a special committee to investigate the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic and the array of federal spending measures enacted to address it, defying objections from Mr. Trump and Republicans.

The committee, which will have the power to subpoena documents and witnesses, is charged with examining how the coronavirus relief packages were rolled out, and scrutinizing “preparedness for and response to the coronavirus crisis.”

The vote took place in a House chamber transformed by the pandemic. It was an impassioned debate as lawmakers, most of whom covered their faces with blue surgical masks or homemade swaths of fabric in an array of colors, patterns and glitter, reflected on the effect of the pandemic on their individual districts. Speaker Nancy Pelosi donned purple latex gloves to cast a vote.


A line of cars waiting to receive items from a food distribution drive in Hialeah, Fla., on Wednesday. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed people in the state have been waiting for weeks for a check.Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images

As another 4.4 million file for unemployment, help is slow to arrive.

Nearly a month after Washington rushed through an emergency package to aid jobless Americans, millions of laid-off workers have still not been able to apply for those benefits — let alone receive them — because of overwhelmed state unemployment systems.

Across the country, states have frantically scrambled to handle a flood of applications and apply a new set of federal rules even as more and more people line up for help. On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that another 4.4 million people filed initial unemployment claims last week, bringing the five-week total to more than 26 million.

Nearly one in six American workers has lost a job in recent weeks.

According to the Labor Department, only 10 states have started making payments under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which extends coverage to freelancers, self-employed workers and part-timers. Most states have not even completed the system needed to start the process.

As Florida’s unemployment website became unusable under the weight of the traffic, the state agreed this month to accept paper applications, a tacit acknowledgment that the system was all but broken. Florida’s breakdown became a national symbol of distress, when footage of a snaking line for those applications outside the public library in Hialeah, a blue-collar city outside Miami, drew wide attention online.

The debacle has become an embarrassment for Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican. He called the system “cumbersome” last week and acknowledged that only 4 percent of 850,000 pending claims had been paid. He appointed an unemployment czar and signed executive orders waiving some requirements to ease the traffic on the website. The number of paid claims has slowly inched up.



One in five who were tested for antibodies in New York City had them.

About 21 percent of about 1,300 people in New York City who were screened for virus antibodies tested positive, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday.

The results come from a state program that randomly tested 3,000 supermarket customers across New York State this week. Nearly 14 percent of those tests came back positive, he said.

If those numbers translate to the true incidence of the virus, they would mean that more than 1.7 million people in New York City, and more than 2.4 million people statewide, have already been infected. These numbers are far greater than the 250,000 confirmed cases of the virus that the state has recorded.

If those numbers translate to the true incidence of the virus, they would mean that more than 1.7 million people in New York City, and more than 2.4 million people statewide, have already been infected. These numbers are far greater than the 250,000 confirmed cases of the virus that the state has recorded. It would also mean that the fatality rate from the virus was relatively low, about 0.5 percent, Mr. Cuomo said.

Mr. Cuomo also released the state’s daily figures of deaths and hospitalizations:

Deaths are falling: 438 deaths were reported on Thursday, down from 474 on Wednesday. The number of deaths in the first four days of this week is down 33 percent compared with the first four days of last week. The state’s death toll is now 15,740.

New hospital admissions remain flat: The number of virus patients entering hospitals has stayed around 1,360 a day for the last three days. That is down from around 3,000 a day at the start of the month.



Most N.Y.C. patients hospitalized with the virus had a chronic condition, a study found.

A new study of thousands of people who were hospitalized in New York City after contracting the coronavirus found that more than nine in 10 had at least one chronic health condition and that most had at least two.

The findings were included in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that describes the characteristics of thousands of Covid-19 patients admitted from March 1 to April 4 at a dozen hospitals in New York City and Westchester County and on Long Island that are operated by Northwell Health.

The researchers found that dozens of children and teenagers were hospitalized with the virus, but survived it, and that women had a clear edge in beating the virus. Fewer of them were hospitalized to begin with, and they were more likely to survive. One in five hospital stays ended in death. The mortality rate for those who were placed on ventilators and were no longer in the hospital was 88 percent.

Given that the length of hospital stays in the Northwell cases was relatively short, four days on average, it is possible that those who died were mainly patients who were so ill that any treatment was unlikely to help them.

Like several other reports on smaller patient groups at area hospitals, the Northwell research indicated that obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes were common risk factors for severe Covid-19 disease requiring hospitalization. One of the most striking findings: only 6 percent of hospitalized patients had no underlying health conditions at all.

Cuomo said New York nursing homes would be investigated.

Mr. Cuomo said on Thursday that nursing homes in New York would be investigated to ensure that they were following strict rules that had been put in place during the outbreak.

More than 3,500 people have died in nursing homes since the outbreak began, according to state data. That is roughly 20 percent of all virus-related deaths in New York.

Nursing homes have been required to:

Have their staffs undergo regular temperature checks and wear protective personal equipment.

Quarantine patients infected with the virus.

Assign specific staff members to residents who are infected, and to transfer any infected patients to other homes if providing appropriate care where they are is not possible.

Notify residents and family members within 24 hours if a resident tests positive or dies because of the virus.

Readmit those infected only if homes can provide the adequate level of care as dictated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state Health Department.

New U.S. Jobless Claims Push 4-Week Total to 22 Million. UPDATES

Jobs Figures Show the Breadth of the Economic Ruin

The data underscore the impact on every corner of the economy: hotels and restaurants, retailers, manufacturers and white-collar strongholds.

Even as political leaders wrangle over how and when to restart the American economy, the coronavirus pandemic’s devastation became more evident Thursday with more than 5.2 million workers added to the tally of the unemployed.

In the last four weeks, the number of unemployment claims has reached 22 million — roughly the net number of jobs created in a nine-and-a-half-year stretch that began after the last recession and ended with the pandemic’s arrival.

The latest figure from the Labor Department, reflecting last week’s initial claims, underscores how the downdraft has spread to every corner of the economy. The mounting unemployment numbers seem certain to add to pressure to lift some restrictions on business activity. President Trump on Thursday announced new guidelines for states eager to reopen, but many governors and health experts are more cautious.

If quarterly unemployment hits 30 percent — as the president of one Federal Reserve Bank predicted — 15.4 percent of Americans will fall into poverty for the year, researchers found, even in the unlikely event that the economy immediately recovers. That level of poverty would exceed the peak of the Great Recession and add nearly 10 million people to the ranks of the poor.

Trump says governors can reopen sooner than May 1.

Trump told the nation’s governors on Thursday that they could begin reopening businesses, restaurants and other elements of daily life by May 1 or earlier if they wanted, abandoning his threat to use what he had claimed was his absolute authority to impose his will on them.

On a day when the nation’s death toll from the coronavirus increased by more than 2,000 for a total over 30,000, the president released a set of nonbinding guidelines that envisioned a slow return to work and school over weeks or months. Based on each state’s conditions, the guidelines in effect guarantee that any restoration of American society will take place on a patchwork basis rather than on a one-size-fits-all prescription from Washington that some of the governors had feared in recent days.


Protesters in MAGA hats and flying Confederate flags swarm Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Utah, Wyoming and Virginia to demonstrate 'tyrannical' and 'unconstitutional' lockdown orders that are 'worse than the virus'



Protesters have continued to gather across the United States, ignoring social distancing rules to demonstrate against lockdown orders they call 'tyrannical' and 'worse than the virus'. Thousands of protesters drove to Michigan's State Capitol to protest Democratic Gov Whitmer Wednesday. In Utah protesters held signs that read 'Resist like it's 1776' and 'America will never be a socialist country'. And in Kentucky protesters shouted out as Democratic Governor Andy Beshear spoke to the state. A Reopen North Carolina Facebook page has 42,000 members; a protester was arrested there Wednesday. And a startling image from Ohio shows a baying crowd at the window of the Statehouse Atrium on Monday. In Virginia a protest against Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam's lockdown is scheduled for Thursday. In Wyoming protesters led calls to 'defend liberty' and urged Gov. Mark Gordon to not 'flatten the economy'.



Early research suggests that obesity is a big risk factor, but not asthma.


Early research on underlying health conditions associated with the virus has highlighted that obesity appears to be one of the most important predictors of severe cases of the coronavirus illness, but asthma does not.

New studies point to obesity as the most significant risk factor, after only older age, for patients being hospitalized with Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. Some 42 percent of American adults — nearly 80 million people — live with obesity. Young adults with obesity appear to be at particular risk, studies show.

The research is preliminary, and not peer reviewed, but it buttresses anecdotal reports from doctors who say they have been struck by how many seriously ill younger patients of theirs with obesity are otherwise healthy.

For people with asthma, the outbreak of a disease that can lead to respiratory failure was particularly worrisome. Many health organizations have cautioned that asthmatics are most likely at higher risk for severe illness if they get the virus.

But data released this month by New York State shows that only about 5 percent of Covid-19 deaths in New York were of people who were known to also have asthma, a relatively modest amount. Nearly 8 percent of the U.S. population — close to 25 million people — has asthma, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.



Death tolls are growing at nursing homes in New York, New Jersey and Virginia.

The virus has been sweeping through nursing homes across the country and claiming the lives of thousands of residents who are particularly vulnerable — older people, many with underlying health issues, who are living in close quarters, as well as the people who care for them.

In New York and New Jersey, funeral directors have been unable to keep up with the death toll at one nursing home after another. In New York City, the administrator for a home in Queens said that 29 residents have died, but other workers said the toll was considerably higher. In a small New Jersey township, the police on Monday found 17 dead bodies inside a nursing home morgue designed to hold four people. This brought the death toll at the long-term care facility to 68, including 26 people who tested positive.
The $349 billion lending program for small businesses has run out of funds.
A federal loan program intended to help small businesses keep workers on their payrolls has proved woefully insufficient, with a staggering 22 million Americans filing for unemployment in the last four weeks.

The program, called the Paycheck Protection Program, was in limbo as the Small Business Administration said on Thursday that it had run out of money. Millions of businesses were unable to apply for the loans while Congress struggled to reach a deal to replenish the funds.

Congress initially allocated $349 billion for the program, which was intended to provide loans to businesses with 500 or fewer employees. The money went quickly, with more than 1.4 million loans approved as of Wednesday evening.





China’s economy shrinks, ending nearly half a century of continuous growth.

Chinese officials on Friday said the world’s second-largest economy had shrunk in the first three months of the year, ending a streak of untrammeled growth that survived the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the SARS epidemic and even the global financial crisis.

The data reflects China’s dramatic efforts to stamp out the coronavirus, which included shutting down most factories and offices in January and February as the outbreak sickened tens of thousands of people.

The stark numbers make clear how monumental the challenge of getting the global economy back on its feet will be, and may help to explain why world leaders — including President Trump — are so eager to restart their own economies. Since it emerged from abject poverty and isolation more than 40 years ago, China has become perhaps the world’s most important growth engine.

Now China is trying to restart its $14 trillion economy, an effort that could give the rest of the world a much-needed shot in the arm. The coronavirus’s spread to the United States and Europe, which froze the economies there, has led to forecasts that the world’s output could shrink far more this year than it did even during the financial crisis.

16 Million Unemployed as 6 Million More Americans File for Unemployment. UPDATES

Virus Throws Millions More Out of Work, and Washington Struggles to Keep Pace
Federal efforts to keep businesses operating and workers employed have so far failed to stop the bleeding as the coronavirus tears through the economy in devastating ways.

When the federal government began rushing trillions of dollars of assistance to Americans crushed by the coronavirus pandemic, the hope was that some of the aid would allow businesses to keep workers on the payroll and cushion employees against job losses.

But so far, a staggering number of Americans — more than 16 million — have lost their jobs amid the outbreak. Businesses continue to fail as retailers, restaurants, nail salons and other companies across the country run out of cash and close up shop as their customers are forced to stay at home.

The Labor Department report pushed to more than 16 million the number of workers who have lost their jobs over the past three weeks, which is more job losses than the most recent recession produced over two years.


There is a growing agreement among many economists that the government’s efforts were too small and came too late in the fast-moving pandemic to prevent businesses from abandoning their workers. Federal agencies, working in a prescribed partnership with Wall Street, have proved ill equipped to move money quickly to the places it is needed most. The response came too late to save many of the businesses that now face bankruptcy.

An analysis by University of Chicago economists of data from Homebase, which supplies scheduling software for tens of thousands of small businesses that employ hourly workers in dining, retail and other sectors, suggests more than 40 percent of those firms have closed since the crisis began.

As the coronavirus shuts businesses across the United States, fresh evidence of the economic devastation came from a government report on Thursday that showed that 6.6 million more workers had lost their jobs.

Small-business aid from an initial $349 billion pot has been slow to arrive for many companies already staring down the possibility of bankruptcy, with bureaucratic and technological hurdles bedeviling the program. The Paycheck Protection Program — which offers companies forgivable loans to continue covering their payroll — began taking applications only on April 3, weeks after many merchants had been ordered to close their doors. Very little of the more than $100 billion committed through it so far has actually made it into borrowers’ hands.

Flooded by requests for help like never before, a federal disaster loan program that was supposed to deliver emergency relief to small businesses in just three days has run low on funding and nearly frozen up entirely. Now, business owners who applied are desperate for cash and answers about what aid, if any, they are going to receive.

The initiative, known as the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, is an expansion of an emergency system run by the Small Business Administration that has for years helped companies after natural disasters like hurricanes, floods and tornadoes. To speed billions of dollars in aid along, the government directly funds the loans, sparing applicants the step of finding a lender willing to work with them.

But in the face of the pandemic, the loan program is drowning in requests. Many applicants have waited weeks for approval, with little to no information about where they stand, and others are being told they’ll get a fraction of what they expected.

The program is supposed to offer loans of up to $2 million, but many recent applicants said the S.B.A. help line had told them that loans would be capped at $15,000 per borrower. That was backed up by a message from the agency that one applicant shared with The New York Times.

The CARES Act, the $2 trillion relief bill signed by President Trump last month, also authorized the S.B.A. to hand out the first $10,000 as a grant that didn’t have to be paid back. Those funds were supposed to be available to applicants within three days of their application, even if they weren’t approved for a loan. That hasn’t happened, according to more than 400 applicants who contacted The Times.

Banks, which are expected to front the money for the program, are still battling bottlenecks at the overwhelmed Small Business Administration and are waiting for technical information they need to close and fund the loans.

Efforts to pass $250 billion in small-business loans stalled in the Senate after Republicans and Democrats clashed over what to include. Senators and advocacy groups have begun to push additional measures to bolster companies through the pandemic. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, wrote on Thursday that “the federal government should cover 80 percent of wages for workers at any U.S. business, up to the national median wage, until this emergency is over.”

Senators and advocacy groups have begun to push additional measures to bolster companies through the pandemic. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, wrote on Thursday that “the federal government should cover 80 percent of wages for workers at any U.S. business, up to the national median wage, until this emergency is over.”

Congress seems unlikely to adopt a similar program, or even something akin to what Mr. Hawley proposed on Thursday. And while Mr. Trump has promised a “boom” in the economy in the weeks to come — foreshadowing a push to lift the restrictions officials have placed on activity — many economists disagree.

Forecasters at Moody’s Analytics warned on Thursday that some 45 million Americans were at risk of losing their jobs amid the pandemic, including three-quarters of the workers in the hospitality and construction industries. They warned it was a “conservative estimate.”

Here’s what else is happening in the U.S.:

New York State reported that the number of patients hospitalized with the virus rose by only 200, the smallest one-day increase since a statewide lockdown. But the daily death toll remained grim: 799, bringing the total to 7,067.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide has surged past 1.5 million, according to data collected by The New York Times and Johns Hopkins University. As of Friday morning, at least 95,000 people had died, and the virus had been detected in at least 177 countries.

Trump forges ahead with broader agenda even as coronavirus upends the country
as the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the country, President Trump’s administration has ousted two key inspectors general, moved to weaken federal gas mileage standards, nominated a young conservative for a powerful appeals court and sent scores of immigrants back across the southern border without a customary hearing.

It’s a whirlwind of activity taking place away from the spotlight that highlights how the twin crises of a viral outbreak and an economic slowdown have not slowed Trump’s aggressive push to advance his broader agenda in the months before he faces voters.

In some cases, Trump is continuing to do what he had been doing, pushing policies that have won him plaudits among his conservative supporters. In others, he is using the broad powers granted to the executive branch amid a national crisis to pursue policy goals he has long sought and in some cases struggled to achieve.

Trump Keeps Talking. Some Republicans Don’t Like What They’re Hearing.
Aides and allies increasingly believe the president’s daily briefings are hurting him more than helping, and are urging him to let his medical experts take center stage.

In his daily briefings on the coronavirus, President Trump has brandished all the familiar tools in his rhetorical arsenal: belittling Democratic governors, demonizing the media, trading in innuendo and bulldozing over the guidance of experts.

It’s the kind of performance the president relishes, but one that has his advisers and Republican allies worried.

As unemployment soars and the death toll skyrockets, and new polls show support for the president’s handling of the crisis sagging, White House allies and Republican lawmakers increasingly believe the briefings are hurting the president more than helping him. Many view the sessions as a kind of original sin from which all of his missteps flow, once he gets through his prepared script and turns to his preferred style of extemporaneous bluster and invective.

Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board chastised the president for his behavior at the briefings. “Covid-19 isn’t shifty Schiff,” it wrote in an editorial on Thursday, using Mr. Trump’s nickname for Representative Adam Schiff. “It’s a once-a-century threat to American life and livelihood.”

With only intermittent attempts to adapt to a moment of crisis, Mr. Trump is effectively wagering that he can win re-election in the midst of a national emergency on a platform of polarization.Three new polls this week show Mr. Biden leading the president, and the Trump campaign’s internal surveys show he has mostly lost the initial bump he received early in the crisis, according to three people briefed on the numbers. Public polls show he badly trails the nation’s governors and his own medical experts in terms of whom Americans trust most for guidance.

The White House coronavirus task force released a breakdown of testing data on Thursday, revealing that older Americans who are tested for the virus are more likely to test positive than other age groups.

Among people who were tested:

11 percent of those under 25 were positive.

17 percent of those between 25 and 45 were positive.

21 percent of those between 45 and 65 were positive.

22 percent of those between 65 and 85 were positive.

24 percent of those over 85 were positive.

One American man did not seem all that excited about wide-scale testing:  Trump.

The president expressed reluctance to wait for comprehensive national testing before reopening the country for business and social life again. While he boasted that testing has increased drastically in recent days, he said it would be implausible to expect that the whole country could be screened for the virus as a condition of restoring normal life.

“Do you need it? No,” he said at his daily briefing. “Is it nice? Yes. We’re talking 325 million people. That’s not going to happen, as you can imagine.”

Even though more than 1,000 people are now dying every day in the United States, new infections have slowed in places where stringent measures have been in place for more than two weeks, offering some hope.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain was moved out of intensive care on Thursday, as the country’s coronavirus death toll approached 8,000. The next question is when, and how, to reopen the British economy.

France’s death toll rose past 12,000 on Thursday, but the total number of patients in intensive care fell slightly for the first time since the start of the epidemic.

The Federal Reserve has also created a flurry of new programs to keep the financial system from seizing up, including one effort announced Thursday that seeks to help nearly 19,000 businesses that have not otherwise obtained federal assistance.