March 10, 2020



Trading halted after Dow opens down 1800 points

Dow plunges more than 2,000 points

The Dow Jones industrial average cratered 7.8 percent, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 shed 7.6 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index fell 7.3 percent.
The threat of a coronavirus-fueled oil-price war and ongoing panic about the spreading disease grew and triggered a rare forced halt to trading early in the session.

White House advisers to give Trump policy options, including paid sick leave

Many Democrats are insisting paid sick leave be a part of the government's response.
Analysis

Markets are sending a message: Recession risk is real

The real risk to the economy is a slew of defaults — both personal and business.

  • One key factor in the collapse: a price war kicked off over the weekend by Saudi Arabia when it decided to flood the markets with cheap oil, driving prices down and hurting oil producers in America, Canada, and elsewhere. [Washington Post / Thomas Heath, Will Englund, and Taylor Telford]
  • Saudi Arabia’s decision comes after Russia broke with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, better known as OPEC, over the weekend and refused to cut oil production in order to artificially inflate prices. Both countries’ economies rely heavily on oil revenue, but demand has flagged as the coronavirus curbs travel in China and elsewhere. [Bloomberg / Ilya Arkhipov, Will Kennedy, Olga Tanas, and Grant Smith]
  • The result is less than positive for US economic outlooks: The yield curve for Treasury bonds fell sharply in response to the oil glut, compounding the economic impact from a drop in consumer spending caused by the coronavirus. [NYT / Neil Irwin]
  • According to Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, this amounts to an economic “double whammy — demand is collapsing and investors do not believe that world governments will provide enough stimulus to prevent price drops.” Without taking steps to try to mitigate this, he says, it could lead to a serious recession. [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]
Italy's death toll leaps by 97 in one day to 463
  • Italy had previously locked down much of its northern region in response to a worsening coronavirus outbreak, meaning Europe could also be facing a major economic shock. However, the European Central Bank is unlikely to make any dramatic moves in response to the virus. [WSJ / Pietro Lombardi, Tom Fairless, and Patricia Kowsmann]
  • As of Monday, the lockdown was extended to include all of Italy; that means the entire country will be under major travel restrictions and many public venues will be closed. [BBC]




Florida Republican Matt Gaetz goes into quarantine AFTER flying on Air Force One with

2 Congressmen Who Spent Time With Trump Go Into Isolation Amid Fear of Coronavirus

One of them, Representative Matt Gaetz, rode back on Air Force One from Florida to Washington on Monday afternoon. He announced his self-quarantine an hour after getting off the president’s plane.
Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, who toured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta with Mr. Trump on Friday, likewise went into isolation on Monday after being told by the C.D.C. that it had found a photograph of him with the infected person at the conservative conference.

Mr. Collins was on the tarmac when Mr. Trump landed in Atlanta on Friday and shook the president’s hand before joining him on the tour of the C.D.C. “While I am not experiencing any symptoms, I have decided to self-quarantine out of an abundance of caution,” Mr. Collins wrote on his Twitter feed.

That makes four members of Congress who have now quarantined themselves because of their potential exposure at the conservative conference, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, both Republicans.



FABRICE COFFRINI / AFP VIA GETTY
Sometime before June 29, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court will either plunge the United States into the severest constitutional crisis of the Trump years—or save Americans from that crisis.
Three different committees of Congress, as well as New York State prosecutors, have issued subpoenas to President Donald Trump’s accountants and bankers for his tax and business records. Trump has sued to stop the accountants and bankers from complying. He has lost twice at the district-court level and twice at the appeals-court level. Now he is looking to the conservative majority on the Supreme Court to rescue him.
On March 31, the court will hear oral arguments in the cases of Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Deutsche Bank. The decision will be rendered sometime between then and the court’s summer break.
Although Trump is suing his accountants and his bankers as a private citizen, his case has been joined by the Department of Justice. Solicitor General Noel Francisco has signed an amicus brief on behalf of the United States. It is an astonishing document. It invites the Supreme Court to junk two centuries of precedent—and to substitute an entirely new system of judicial review of congressional subpoenas that involve a president.
A legislative subpoena must therefore satisfy heightened requirements when it seeks information from the President. At the threshold, the full chamber should unequivocally authorize a subpoena against the President. Moreover, the legislative purpose should be set forth with specificity. Courts should not presume that the purpose is legitimate, but instead should scrutinize it with care. And as with information protected by executive privilege, information sought from the President should be demonstrably critical to the legislative purpose. A congressional committee cannot evade these heightened requirements merely by directing the subpoena to third-party custodians, for such agents generally assume the rights and privileges of their principal, as this Court has recognized in analogous cases.
All the requirements in that above paragraph were devised for purposes of this litigation. None of them has ever been enforced—none of them has ever been imagined—in the previous 230 years of skirmishing between Congresses and presidents. Every must and should and cannot was invented in this very brief, for the immediate legal purposes of this president in this dilemma. The solicitor general might as well have said that subpoenas must be delivered by a sled pulled by flying reindeer, for all the connection between these demands and the previous constitutional history of the United States.


As the House of Representatives noted in the brief it filed, previous Congresses have obtained the bank records of Presidents Andrew Johnson and Jimmy Carter, and the tax records of President Richard Nixon. They have read the diaries of President Ronald Reagan and the law-firm billing records of first lady Hillary Clinton.
It’s never before been the law that a subpoena of the president must be authorized by “the full chamber,” much less that this authorization be “unequivocal”—whatever that means.
It’s never before been the law that the president’s privileges—whatever they are—also extend to his private business agents.
It’s never before been the law that the courts set themselves over Congress as scrutinizers of its subpoenas, approving or disapproving. Until now, instead, courts have always extended the utmost deference to congressional investigations, from the first Washington administration onward.
The Trump administration cannot cite case law for any of its new demands. It quotes few cases, very briefly and tangentially, and strikingly often with ellipses in the middle of the quote. Instead, it bases its argument on its own vision of the awesome and unassailable power of the presidency. “The President faces a unique risk of harassment in response to his official policies or actions,” his lawyers argue. To heighten that risk, they quote the 1952 case involving President Harry Truman’s seizure of steel plants during the Korean War: “In drama, magnitude and finality [the president’s] decisions so far overshadow any others that almost alone he fills the public eye and ear.” They continue, this time quoting the Supreme Court’s language in the Paula Jones lawsuit against President Clinton: “Likewise, the President ‘occupies a unique office with powers and responsibilities so vast and important that the public interest demands he devote his attention to his public duties.’”
The history-minded reader will recall that Truman lost the steel-seizure case, and that Clinton likewise lost his fight to be immune from civil liability for sexual harassment. Oftentimes, such effusive compliments to the office of the presidency in the language of a Supreme Court decision serve as consolation prizes for some rebuffed claim of presidential power. But Trump’s Department of Justice deploys the compliments as if they constituted the law itself, not the wrapping paper around the law.
The House brief hits back with actual precedents from pertinent law—and this bottom line: “In more than twenty cases concerning the scope of Congress’ power to investigate, this Court has only once held that a Congressional inquiry exceeded its constitutional limits.” That case—Kilbourn v. Thompson—dated from 1880 and dealt with the aftermath of the bankruptcy of a big bond house, J. Cooke and Sons. And even that case was effectively overruled in 1962. “At most,” the Supreme Court said, “Kilbourn is authority for the proposition that Congress cannot constitutionally inquire ‘into the private affairs of individuals who hold no office under the government’ when the investigation ‘could result in no valid legislation on the subject to which the inquiry referred.’” But otherwise, as the Supreme Court held in 1951, for a court “to find that a committee’s investigation has exceeded the bounds of legislative power it must be obvious that there was a usurpation of functions exclusively vested” elsewhere.


All told, the record supports the dry opening of the House brief: “Many momentous separation-of-powers disputes have come before this Court,” it reads. “This dispute, regarding four document subpoenas to third parties for records not covered by any privilege, is not one of them.” The only thing remarkable about the Mazars and Deutsche Bank cases, the House adds, “is the extraordinary breadth of the arguments that President Trump and the Solicitor General make about the supposed power of a President to thwart investigations in furtherance of Congress’s Article I legislative and oversight functions."
By all rights, these cases should end in the kind of defeat for Trump nicely described by a favorite joke of Chief Justice John Roberts. When asked how a certain case could have been decided against a petitioner 9–0, Roberts is said to have replied: “You must remember, there are only nine justices on the Supreme Court.”
But this is the Trump era. The courts are partisan and getting more so. Although Trump lost every previous round of this litigation, one appellate judge did agree with him on the merits: his own appointee to the D.C. Circuit, Neomi Rao.  
In her dissent from the majority opinion against Trump, Rao advanced an arresting new claim: “When Congress seeks information about the President’s wrongdoing, it does not matter whether the investigation also has a legislative purpose … Allegations that an impeachable official acted unlawfully must be pursued through impeachment … [and] cannot be investigated by Congress except through impeachment.”
This is wild talk that would shut down almost all congressional investigations. It asks that Congress decide whether an act was unlawful before it begins its investigation of that act. It’s an argument that cannot be applied in real life—and is probably not meant to be applied in real life beyond this one and only application: shutting down an unwanted investigation of President Trump.
Plainly, there is something in those documents that Trump dreads letting the world see. We now seem on track to one of three possible outcomes of this dispute.
The first is that precedent and law prevail. Trump loses his lawsuit against his accountants and bankers, and the subpoenaed documents are surrendered to Congress.
The second is that the political imperative to save Trump that swayed Rao will sway the conservative justices on the Supreme Court—and that Trump’s secrets will be protected by a 5–4 decision.
The third is that Trump loses—but continues to devise new delays to thwart the subpoenas and defy not only Congress but also the courts.
Every one of these possible outcomes leads to explosive controversy in the summer before the 2020 election.
In the first case, we are surely plunged into a screaming hurricane of Trump scandals.
In the second, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court will be called into doubt in a way not seen in decades, if ever.
And in the third, we confront a full-blown crisis of the rule of law.
Under all three scenarios, the issues raised by impeachment in early 2020 come roaring back for the election finale. Trump’s evident corruption, the questions over his thralldom to the Putin regime in Russia, the refusal of the Republican Party to uphold law when inconvenient to Trump—you thought we’d talked them to death during impeachment? There is so much more to come.

March 9, 2020

US Deaths rise to 19 as New York declares state of emergency.








  • Third death in Australia as Italy prepares to seal off Lombardy

  • CaliforniaThousands held on cruise ship as scientists say: ‘This is now a pandemic’

  • CPACConservative conference guest tests positive for coronavirus

NY TIMES


Coronavirus in N.Y.: Cuomo Declares State of Emergency

The announcement came as the number of patients in New York rose to 89, including a Queens driver who worked for Uber.

Credit...Cindy Schultz for The New York Times



ALBANY, N.Y. — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared a state of emergency on Saturday as the number of coronavirus cases in New York rose to 89, which include a Queens driver who worked for Uber and two unexplained positive tests of patients 200 miles to the north.
Moving on multiple fronts to curb the spread of the virus, Mr. Cuomo said the state of emergency would allow New York’s government to respond faster by lifting regulations.
The governor’s announcement came as concerns about the outbreak grew in New York City, which has 12 confirmed cases, up from six that were disclosed as of Friday. The epicenter in New York State continues to be just north of the city, in Westchester County, where there are 70 cases in total. These cases were mostly, if not all, related to a cluster in Westchester that first came to the authorities’ attention after a New Rochelle resident, a 50-year-old lawyer, was confirmed as New York’s second coronavirus patient.

State officials said they were testing dozens of mouth and nasal swabs from people who might have been exposed to the lawyer, who has been hospitalized but whose condition is said to be improving. Technicians are working around the clock at private and public laboratories, including a major site near the State Capitol.
In the United States, more than 380 cases of the virus have been confirmed, and at least 19 people have died, according to a New York Times database.
Despite the spread in the state and the mounting toll of the virus, which has killed more than 3,500 people worldwide, Mr. Cuomo sought to calm the public during a news conference in Albany.
“You know what’s worse than the virus — the anxiety,” Mr. Cuomo said, noting that most patients would suffer mild or no symptoms.[Why Closing the New York City Public Schools Is a ‘Last Resort’]
The declaration of emergency will allow the state to speed up the purchasing of supplies and the hiring of workers to assist local health departments that have been handling the monitoring of thousands of self-quarantined patients, Mr. Cuomo said.

“Somebody has to go knock on their door, once a day,” he said. “This is labor intensive.”
The declaration would also allow officials to skirt purchasing regulations, if necessary, he said.
Andrew Cuomo
✔@NYGovCuomo
UPDATE: We have learned of new confirmed cases of in NYS bringing the total number of cases to 76.

- 57 cases in Westchester County
- 11 cases in NYC
- 4 cases in Nassau County
- 2 cases in Rockland County
- 2 cases in Saratoga County

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Still, there were signs that the outbreak was spreading, including a pair of patients in Saratoga County, north of Albany — the first such confirmed cases outside of the New York City region.
On Friday night, the Uber driver from Queens tested positive, and the case prompted more than 40 doctors, nurses and other workers at a hospital there to go into voluntary self-isolation over fears that they might have been exposed to the coronavirus, officials said on Saturday.
The man, 33, walked into St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in the Far Rockaway section of Queens on Tuesday and reported flulike symptoms. He went home and returned later when his symptoms worsened, an official said.
Dozens of workers at the hospital are now being tested, officials said.
“Obviously, 40 people are out,” said Councilman Donovan Richards Jr., a Democrat who represents Far Rockaway. “The hospital will need to replace those people temporarily. They will need money to do that. They need supplies. We need to keep the health care up and running.”










Tom Melillo, a hospital spokesman, said that the patient remained in quarantine at the hospital on Saturday, and that hospital officials were monitoring everyone who might have been exposed to the patient.
A spokesman for Uber, Andrew Hasbun, confirmed that the man worked as a driver for the app. The company is assisting health officials to determine whether the man exposed passengers to the illness, Mr. Hasbun said.
The man was not licensed to pick up passengers in the city or at its two airports, but he was free to drop off passengers in the five boroughs, the company said. Those limitations might affect the number of people he exposed to the virus.

Credit...Uli Seit for The New York Times
Other cases in New York City include three family members who live in the Upper West Side, two Brooklyn women in their 60s and 70s who showed symptoms after returning from a cruise in Egypt and a Brooklyn man in his 30s who remains hospitalized after visiting Italy, one of countries with the biggest outbreaks outside China.
Several of the new cases announced on Saturday in upstate New York added a layer of mystery to exactly how residents were contracting the coronavirus.
In Saratoga County, the two new cases involved a 57-year-old pharmacist and a 52 year-old woman who may have contracted the virus through contact with a Pennsylvania resident at a conference in Miami.The source of contraction seemed more direct in Westchester County: 


































All 23 new cases announced on Saturday involved people who had been in contact with the New Rochelle man, Mr. Cuomo said


The man, a partner at a small Midtown Manhattan law firm, had attended synagogue services before becoming symptomatic.
Public health officials closed the synagogue, Young Israel of New Rochelle, and asked that anyone who had attended services, a bat mitzvah or a funeral there recently isolate themselves as a precaution.
Also on Saturday, the governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, said a New York doctor who commutes to work at Bridgeport Hospital tested positive for the coronavirus. Mr. Lamont said the physician did not show visible symptoms while treating patients and isolated himself.
New Jersey officials said four people in the state had tested positive for the virus: a 32-year-old man, a man in his 50s and a woman in her 30s, all from Bergen County near New York; and a man in his 60s from Camden County, in the southern part of the state.
Mr. Cuomo on Saturday did not say how many New Yorkers were now isolating themselves at home over fears they might have been exposed to the virus. But as of Friday, New York officials said they had asked about 4,000 people in the state to self-quarantine.
About 2,300 of that quarantined group were in New York City, and most of them had recently returned from five countries where the outbreak has been most severe: China, Iran, Italy, Japan and South KoreIn his remarks on Saturday, Mr. Cuomo said the state was aggressively testing as many people as possible.“We want to find positives,” the governor said, adding that while some people might be disconcerted by the rising number of patients, it showed that the solid medical detective work was underway. “We say, ‘That’s good news, that we know who the people are.’”New York City officials have asked the federal government to send more diagnostic kits for the coronavirus, saying in a letter on Friday that the city’s limited capacity to test had “impeded our ability to beat back this epidemic."

March 8, 2020

Global Coronavirus Cases Top 100,000,





Coronavirus live Italy death toll nears 200 with almost 4,000 cases



















ChinaSchools reopen as cases rise rapidly in Europe

Scientist exodusTrump's devaluing science is danger to US response, experts warn

Germ-sharing gig economyVirus takes toll on gig workers Italy death toll nears 200 with almost 4,000 cases







SXSW Festival cancelled over coronavirus fears



BroadwayTheatres ask sick customers not to turn up

Festival cancelled over coronavirus fears




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USDeath toll rises to 14 as University of Washington cancels classes






Trump, is debating whether or not people onboard the Grand Princess cruise ship, which is off the Californian coast and where there’s a host of suspected cases, should be allowed off, he has said.


*We initially said the ship was docked on the Californian coast. It is, in fact, off the coast and this post has been amended to reflect that.


Some more detail on the situation onboard the Grand Princess: The US vice president, Mike Pence, says 21 of them have tested positive, with one other test thus far proving inconclusive.


According to Reuters, he has said the ship will be taken to a non-commercial port and everyone onboard – passengers and crew – will be tested.


Pence has said those on the ship who need to be quarantined will be quarantined and those who need treatment will receive it. There are more than 3,500 people on the ship, counting passengers and crew, and Pence said he anticipated about 1,100 needing to be kept onboard.


The US vice president said 19 of those who tested positive were crew members and two were passengers.




































CORONAVIRUS


Trump hands his sidekick the job of a savior


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