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AMERICA

HURRICANE PREP IS NEAR THE END

Updates from March 2021

Biden takes first military action with Syria strike on Iran-backed militias.

The US has carried out an air strike targeting Iran-backed militias in Syria, in the first military action undertaken by the Biden administration.
The Pentagon said the strike destroyed "multiple facilities" and was ordered in response to attacks against US and coalition personnel in Iraq.
Militia officials said one person had been killed but a war monitor reported at least 22 fatalities.
Syria condemned the attack as a "bad sign" from the new US administration.

The Pentagon said its strike near the Iraqi border in eastern Syria was a "proportionate military response" that was taken "together with diplomatic measures", including consulting coalition partners.
After Trump, what will Biden do about Iran?
How the US and Iran became adversaries
It came after a civilian contractor was killed in a rocket attack on US targets earlier this month. A US service member and five other contractors were also injured when the rockets hit sites in Irbil, including a base used by the US-led coalition.

Rockets have also struck US bases in Baghdad, including the Green Zone, which houses the US embassy and other diplomatic missions.
There are about 2,500 US troops in Iraq to assist Iraqi forces in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group

this information is cited by bbc.com. if you never saw any of this it's for you to find on Wattpad!!!
hope it helps!! the link isn't working so i just copied and pasted from the website!

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   Surveillance Video Shows Brutal San Francisco Assault That Fatally Injured 84-Year-Old Man
February 1, 2021 at 7:44 pm
  Filed Under:Anza Vista, Arrest, Assault, Crime, Homicide, San Francisco, San Francisco News, San Francisco police

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — Video obtained by KPIX 5 Monday shows the brutal assault on an 84-year-old San Francisco man last week that critically injured the victim and helped lead to the suspect's weekend arrest.

Family on Monday confirmed that the victim, 84-year-old San Francisco resident Vicha Ratanapakdee, died from the injuries he sustained at 3 a.m. Saturday morning at San Francisco General Hospital. Originally from Thailand, Ratanapakdee came to San Francisco to help care for his grandchildren. He was injured last Thursday during his morning walk, his family said.

At around 9:30 a.m. Thursday, SFPD officers responded to a report of an assault near the corner of Fortuna and Anza Vista avenues, police said.

The surveillance video from a camera across the street captured the moment of impact. Ratanapakdee is seen walking in the driveway of a home.

The suspect barrels him into the victim violently, knocking him to the ground before the suspect casually walks away in the same direction he came from.

San Francisco police said they were quickly able to identify the male assault suspect as 19-year-old Daly City resident Antoine Watson. They also identified a female associate he was with at the time of the assault as 20-year-old Daly City resident Maylasia Goo.

On Friday, investigators obtained an arrest warrant for Watson for assault with a deadly weapon and elder abuse causing great bodily injury. When police were notified that the victim succumbed to his injuries, the SFPD Homicide Detail took over the investigation.

Saturday evening at approximately 8:45 p.m., officers served a search warrant on the 500 block of Lisbon Street in Daly City and located Watson and Goo, who were arrested without incident.

Watson was transported to San Francisco County Jail and booked on the outstanding arrest warrant and on one count of murder. Goo was transported to the San Francisco County Jail and booked on one count of being an accessory after the fact.

Ratanapakdee's family is demanding justice.

"This guy should not be let on the street," said Eric Lawson, Ratanapakdee's son-in-law. "He should be charged with murder. If you see the video there's nothing non-intentional about it."

Lawson told KPIX 5 he believes racism played a role in the attack.

"When people saw me, because I'm Asian they blame me; [they think] that I bring the COVID to this country," said Lawson.

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On the GoFundMe page he created to raise money for funeral arrangements, he wrote "racism has once again proven deadly."

UPDATE: Warrior Jeremy Lin Will Not ID Source Of On-Court 'Coronavirus' Taunt
February 27, 2021 at 11:16 am
Filed Under:Coronavirus, COVID, COVID-19, Golden State Warriors, Jeremy Lin, NBA, Racism

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — NBA veteran Jeremy Lin, who is attempting to resurrect his career by playing with the Golden State Warriors G League team, has taken to social media complaining that he has been called 'coronavirus' on court.

But in a followup post on Saturday, Lin said he will not be identifying the source of the racist taunt.

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"I know this will come as a disappointment to some of you but I'm not naming or shaming anyone," he tweeted. "What good does it do in this situation for someone to be torn down. It doesn't make my community safer or solve any of our long-term problems with racism."

The NBA said it will be launching an investigation into the claims. The G League is playing in a bubble in Orlando with no fans allowed at the game.

Lin, an Asian-American Bay Area native who starred at Harvard and played for several NBA teams and the Beijing Ducks last season, currently is averaging 19.6 points and 7.2 assists a game for Santa Cruz.

He is best known for a run of outstanding play as a member of the New York Knicks during the 2011–12 season, generating a cultural phenomenon known as "Linsanity". Head coach Steve Kerr was asked about Lin's social media post.

"Really powerful. I applaud Jeremy for his words and echo his sentiments regarding racism against the Asian-American community," Kerr said before Golden State hosted Charlotte at Chase Center. "It's just so ridiculous and obviously spawned by many people, including our former president, as it relates to the coronavirus originating in China. It's just shocking. I can't wrap my head around any of it, but I can't wrap my head around racism in general.

"We're all just flesh and blood. We're all just people. As (Gregg) Pop (Popovich) once said to me, 'We're all accidents of birth. We're born. We come out the way we are. We don't have a say in it. What we do have a say in is how we treat people.′ It's shocking to me that we can treat each other so poorly based on the color of skin or whatever it is. So I applaud Jeremy for speaking up."

Lin's racially motivated taunting claims came in a post on Instagram where he condemned the wave of violence against Asian-Americans.

"Something is changing in this generation of Asian Americans," he posted. "We are tired of being told that we don't experience racism, we are tired of being told to keep our heads down and not make trouble. We are tired of Asian American kids growing up and being asked where they're REALLY from, of having our eyes mocked, of being objectified as exotic or being told we're inherently unattractive."

"We are tired of the stereotypes in Hollywood affecting our psyche and limiting who we think we can be. We are tired of being invisible, of being mistaken for our colleague or told our struggles aren't as real.

"I want better for my elders who worked so hard and sacrificed so much to make a life for themselves here. I want better for my niece and nephew and future kids. I want better for the next generation of Asian American athletes than to have to work so hard to just be "deceptively athletic."

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Being an Asian American doesn't mean we don't experience poverty and racism. Being a 9-year NBA veteran doesn't protect me from being called "coronavirus" on the court. Being a man of faith doesn't mean I don't fight for justice, for myself and for others. So here we are again, sharing how we feel. IS ANYONE LISTENING??"

Oakland Police Arrest Suspect Who Allegedly Made Online Threats To Asian Americans
February 23, 2021 at 8:04 am

OAKLAND (CBS SF) — Amid a surge of violence targeting Asian-Americans, the Oakland Police Department announced late Monday they have arrested a Berkeley resident for allegedly posting online threats against the community.

Investigators posted on Facebook that the department received tips on Feb 11 from their media partners about troubling statements directed towards the Asian community posted on social media. An investigation was immediately launched and detectives were able to identify a person of interest.

While not releasing the suspect's name, Oakland police said the individual was a resident of Berkeley and was known to OPD because of a recent firearms charge arrest.

Investigators were able to obtain a warrant for the person's arrest. The individual was safely taken into custody.

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High Winds Topple Tree In San Francisco; One Person Injured
The arrest came during a heightened effort from Oakland police to bring the recent surge violence in Chinatown to an end.

In a two-week span in February, authorities recorded 18 crimes against Asian Americans around Oakland's Chinatown, according Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley. She has launched a special unit within her department to investigate the attacks.

To counter the surge in violence, recently named Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong has deployed the department's mobile community command unit to Chinatown and increased police street patrols. He also took the streets to personally assure residents and business owners that his department was there to protect them.

"We wanted our business owners and community to know that we care," Armstrong said. "That we are concerned and are going to do everything to keep the community safe."

High Winds Topple Tree In San Francisco; One Person Injured
May 2, 2021 at 10:03 am

l SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF/BCN) — High winds howled through San Francisco late Saturday afternoon, toppling a tree near Sydney G. Walton Square that injured one person, authorities said.

San Francisco fire officials said the tree fell down just before 4 p.m. near Front and Jackson streets. At the time, high winds were howling in the city at 30 mph or more.
Gusty westerly winds have been observed in portions of the #BayArea since mid afternoon. Strongest winds have been through the #AltamontPass and at #SFO. Locally gusty conditions will continue through the rest of the evening. Winds will gradually decrease after midnight. #CAwx pic.twitter.com/c77HBYn7g3

Power companies are fighting an uphill battle they are sure to lose and they're blaming customers who are taking advantage of massive government savings programs. Specifically, they are blaming Utah Solar Incentives that encourage homeowners to use clean energy by reducing solar power projects to $0 installations.

Until now, solar panels were less about saving money and more about environmental protection. In order to get more people to switch to clean solar energy the federal and state governments are highly incentivizing homeowners who live in specific zip codes to go solar with $1000's of dollars in rebates and incentives that can cover 100% of the costs associated with a new solar panel installation.

When homeowners visit Energybillcruncher to see if they qualify, many are shocked to learn that solar panels can be installed on their home with no upfront costs after rebates and solar incentives. You can find out which solar incentives are offered in your area by using your zip code. You can even use this tool to help calculate your savings by entering your utility provider and your average power bill. In many cases, customers are saving up to 50% on the cost of powering their home each year.

How Do Solar Programs Work?
Solar panels are much cheaper today than they were 10 years ago, which means millions of homeowners that could not previously afford to do so are switching to solar. Utah Homeowners that qualify for this new program no longer have to buy solar panels. With rebates being as high as they are, homeowners are able to drastically reduce their power bill without dealing with the upfront costs of installing solar panels.

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Stimulus Check Latest: Will You Get A Fourth Relief Payment?
May 1, 2021 at 11:57 am
Filed Under:American Jobs Plan, Norm Elrod, Stimulus Check, Yeva Nersisyan
(CBS San Francisco) — A possible fourth stimulus check remains a popular topic with the third round of economic relief payments almost concluded. About 161 million payments of up to $1,400 per person have been issued since the third stimulus package passed in mid-March. Paper checks and EIP cards continue to continue to show up in mailboxes. And plus-up payments, for those who didn't receive what they were due, have also been going out for weeks. Together they add up to most of the $422 billion allotted in President Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act.

These relief payments are part of a larger effort to cushion COVID's economic impact on households and support the economy while the pandemic recovery continues. The stimulus package also extends unemployment benefits, enhances the child tax credit, and much more. The recent round of checks follows the $1,200 CARES Act payments at the pandemic's outset and the $600 payments from January.

How Is The Economic Recovery Going?

In the first quarter of 2021, the U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 6.4 percent, faster than the 4.3 percent rate from the fourth quarter of 2020. The annual rate of growth could reach double-digits in the second quarter. The country's gross domestic product (GDP), an estimate of economic activity in the economy, is close to where it was before the pandemic. Experts believe it will return to its pre-pandemic level this summer. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, "the increase in first quarter GDP reflected the continued economic recovery, reopening of establishments, and continued government response related to the COVID-19 pandemic."Large segments of the workforce have felt little economic impact from the pandemic. Many jobs performed at a desk in an office were just as easily performed at a desk in someone's home. And with fewer outlets for spending, plus three stimulus checks, many Americans managed to save more money. The personal saving rate ballooned to 33.7 percent last April and, at 13.7 percent for February 2021, remains almost double where it was before the pandemic. Households have accumulated a whopping $4.1 trillion in savings, more than triple what it was before the pandemic.

The housing market has surged, as people stuck at home realized the limitations of their living space. The National Association of Realtors recently reported that the national median sales price for a home hit $329,100 in March, up 17.2 percent from March of 2020. That number rose in every region of the country. Much of that rise was likely pushed by houses priced above the median. Housing inventory increased slightly, but was still down 28.2 percent from the previous February. And of the homes that sold that month, 83 percent were for sale for less than a month.

The stock market also continues to boom. The Dow Jones is still hovering near record territory, closing Thursday at 34,055. Individual investors, flush with extra cash from three rounds of stimulus, have poured into the market. Bigger investors continue to bet on a strong economic recovery as the year progresses. While some experts foresee some of the strongest economic growth in decades decades, others are worried about higher inflation. Recent predictions show prices rising about 2.7 percent in 2021, as compared to 2.3 percent in 2019 and 1.7 percent in 2020. Some of the predicted rise will likely result from depressed prices returning as the economy moves out from under the pandemic. All of this suggests worries about inflation may be overblown.

According to Yeva Nersisyan, Associate Professor of Economics at Franklin & Marshall College, "we had a whole year where prices didn't really increase. And for some stuff they actually decreased. So, if you're comparing this year to that year, then the reading is going to be higher than if the prices had continued to just go up. If there wasn't a pandemic, the prices would just go up more steadily, and we wouldn't see that kind of a jump that we saw recently."

Many households are still far from where they were in early 2020, before COVID crippled the economy. Financial insecurity is widespread, with 40 percent of respondents in a recent TransUnion survey saying their current income falls short of their pre-pandemic income. Nine percent of American adults (18 million people) reported a shortage of food in their household over the previous week, according to U.S. Census survey data from the second half of March. Approximately 15 percent of renters (10.7 million people) have fallen behind on their rent, including 21 percent of renters with children in their household. (The federal eviction moratorium currently in effect doesn't forgive rent owed, it pushes the debt into the future.) Millions are also struggling to pay their mortgage.

As of the second half of March, nearly a third of American adults reported some difficulty keeping up with expenses in the prior week. A survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that over 58 percent of those receiving a third stimulus check have or will use the money on consumption or paying down debt. That includes debt incurred during the pandemic. A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll from last February listed food and housing costs as the second and third most popular uses of the then-upcoming stimulus.

Employment also remains well below pre-pandemic levels. Millions of jobs lost during the pandemic have not returned. And more than half of the job loss during the COVID crisis has come in low-wage industries. Approximately 553,000 people initially applied for unemployment insurance for the third full week of April, slightly down from the previous week's adjusted level. (A typical pre-pandemic week saw about 250,000 new unemployment applications.) The four-week moving average is at its lowest since the start of the pandemic. Another 122,000 applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which supports freelance and self-employed workers. Many jobless Americans have not received unemployment insurance and other government benefits, because of long waits, perceived ineligibility and other issues. And hiring (or re-hiring) for jobs in hard-hit industries like food service and hospitality is proceeding slowly, even as hiring picks up across the economy overall.

The most recent round of stimulus checks is helping those Americans still awaiting the recovery to pay bills and put food on the table. But they remain a short-term fix for a longer-term problem. The money will likely run out long before many people are once again able to earn a living wage. And some politicians feel that this latest stimulus check, on top of previous stimulus checks, still won't be enough.

Who Supports A Fourth Stimulus Check?

A group of Democratic Senators, including Ron Wyden of Oregon, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, recently sent a letter to President Joe Biden requesting "recurring direct payments and automatic unemployment insurance extensions tied to economic conditions."

As the Senators reasoned in their letter, "this crisis is far from over, and families deserve certainty that they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. Families should not be at the mercy of constantly-shifting legislative timelines and ad hoc solutions."

An earlier letter to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris from 53 Representatives, led by Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, staked out a similar position. "Recurring direct payments until the economy recovers will help ensure that people can meet their basic needs, provide racially equitable solutions, and shorten the length of the recession."

Additional co-signers included New York's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan's Rashida Tlaib, two other notable names among House Progressives. The letter didn't place a number on the requested stimulus payments. But a tweet soon after put it at $2,000 per month for the length of the pandemic.

A majority of Americans also favor recurring relief payments. According to a January poll from the Data For Progress, nearly two-thirds of all voters support $2,000 monthly payments to all Americans for the length of the pandemic. Supporters include a majority of Independents and Republicans. The Urban Institute estimates that another stimulus payment could reduce poverty by at least 6.4 percent in 2021. Many economists are also onboard. A 2020 open letter from experts in the field argued "direct cash payments are an essential tool that will boost economic security, drive consumer spending, hasten the recovery, and promote certainty at all levels of government and the economy – for as long as necessary."

READ MORE:
Child Tax Credit: How Much Money Can Parents Expect In Monthly Payments?
The Biden administration, which authored the third round of stimulus, has not stated its position on a fourth check. The president made no mention of the possibility in a recent speech to Congress. And the recently announced American Families Plan does not include another relief payment.

Why Is A Fourth Stimulus Check Unlikely?

All of this voiced support keeps the possibility of another round of stimulus checks — or recurring stimulus checks — alive. It doesn't make them likely, however. And there are a number of reasons why.

Vaccinations are progressing steadily. Adults and those at least 16 years old are now eligible to be inoculated in all 50 states. Three different options are available to the public again since the pause has been lifted on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Actually putting needles in arms will take more time, even as supply catches up to demand. Americans have received over 237 million doses, with 43.3 percent of the population having received at least one dose and 30 percent completely vaccinated. Vaccination numbers continue to increase at a rate of well over two million doses per day.

With vaccinations rising, the economy is showing additional signs of recovery as well. State and local economies are reopening, as restrictions loosen. Hiring has picked up in some sectors. The average for new unemployment claims over four weeks continues to push downward. Consumer confidence continues to climb, reaching its highest level since the start of the pandemic. Consumers are also generally optimistic about business conditions and the job market.

Consumer spending drives two-thirds of the country's economy. And the third stimulus check, along with excess pandemic savings, has increased people's spending power. An improved financial position generally also raises optimism in the future. The ongoing vaccinations, which will continue to allow the economy to safely reopen, certainly help. All that additional spending, along with the release of pent-up demand, should lead to more jobs as companies hire to address consumer needs. With the economy opening up and continuing to improve, a fourth round of stimulus checks loses much of its urgency.

In Nersisyan's view, "let's see if people still need more assistance. Let's see how the economy's doing as things keep opening up and the vaccination rates go up and things go back to some sense of normal. And let's see where the unemployment numbers are. Are people still running behind on their rents and mortgages and so on? And based on that, let's decide whether we need to inject more spending into the economy. I would say wait and see right now."

The American Rescue Plan Act passed along party lines. Republicans were not interested in spending anywhere close to $1.9 trillion, though some did support the third round of stimulus checks. They termed the package a "blue state bailout," claiming it went well beyond the scope of COVID and would increase the deficit, leading to inflation.

The Democrats used a process called reconciliation to pass the bill in the Senate without Republican support. That allows budget-related matters to proceed with a simple majority rather than the filibuster-proof 60 votes. Generally only one reconciliation bill can pass per fiscal year. But a subsequent ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, who interprets the legislative body's rules, opened up an avenue for additional spending legislation. Without reconciliation, any bill would need at least 10 Republican votes, along with every Democratic vote.

But the Biden administration has other priorities. One of its biggest is passing the recently introduced infrastructure plan, which also faces Republican opposition. The American Jobs Plan, worth over $2 trillion, aims to rebuild roads, repair bridges, do away with lead pipes, extend broadband, modernize the country's electric grid and much more. It does not include another stimulus check. One could, in theory, be added at a higher price tag. Republicans oppose the plan, in part, for its reliance on higher corporate taxes. They would be disinclined to support an even larger corporate tax hike to fund another payment.

The American Families Plan, focusing on childcare, education and paid family leave, would cost another $1.8 trillion. Another stimulus check is not included in the current version of this plan either, though one could theoretically still be included. According to the administration, funding for the American Families Plan would come from higher taxes on wealthy individuals. Republicans will likely oppose these tax increases too.

Plenty of negotiating and possible paring down seems inevitable before either plan comes to a vote. And Biden will face an uphill battle attracting 10 Republican supporters in the Senate in both cases. As a result, Democrats may very well be anticipating the need to use reconciliation again to push through these broad pieces of legislation. But Joe Manchin of West Virginia, among the most centrist Democratic Senators, has warned against overusing the process. He is also apparently unwilling to do away with the filibuster, which would lower the number of votes needed to pass legislation to 51. With bipartisanship a seemingly faint dream, that places the Biden administration in a tough spot. It also reduces the odds of them using reconciliation to pass a fourth stimulus check outside of a larger package.

What Other Aid Is Coming?

While a fourth stimulus check is unlikely, more direct payments to Americans have already been signed into law. The American Rescue Plan Act includes an improved Child Tax Credit and extended unemployment benefits.

Under the revised Child Tax Credit, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will pay out $3,600 per year for each child up to five years old and $3,000 per year for each child ages six through 17. Payments will be issued automatically on a monthly basis from July to December of 2021, with the remainder issued when the recipient files their 2021 taxes. (IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig recently confirmed a July launch "with payments going out on a monthly basis.") The benefit will not depend on the recipient's current tax burden. In other words, qualifying families will receive the full amount, regardless of how much — or little — they owe in taxes. Payments will start to phase out beyond a $75,000 annual income for individuals and beyond $150,000 for married couples. The more generous credit will apply only for 2021, though Biden has stated his interest in extending it through 2025.

The American Rescue Plan Act also extended the weekly federal unemployment insurance bonus of $300 through Labor Day. Recipients with household incomes below $150,000 will not have to pay taxes on the first $10,200 in unemployment benefits. Those eligible for Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which covers people who have used up their state benefits, and PUA will also see their benefits extended through early September. PEUC runs out after 53 weeks. PUA expires after 79 weeks. The Act also added $21.6 billion to the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which is being distributed to states and local governments, who then assist households.

The far-reaching American Jobs Plan includes some elements not traditionally associated with infrastructure. Those range from $213 billion earmarked for affordable housing to $100 billion set aside for workforce development among underserved groups. The plan also looks to increase pay for caregivers who tend to the elderly and disabled. Each of these efforts would mean more money for those affected. On a broader scale, the plan also has the potential to create many jobs across a wide swath of the economy.

The American Families Plan includes 12 weeks of paid family leave that could reach as high as $4,000 per month, depending on a worker's income. It also boosts the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit and places a ceiling on the cost of childcare for many families. The plan sets aside $200 billion for universal preschool. In addition to helping working parents pay for childcare, the plan hopes to allow more parents to return to the workforce.

Much of this additional money in people's pockets is still hypothetical, of course. Both plans must first find their way through Congress. Analyst
Originally published on April 5 @ 4:45 p.m. ET. Stimulus Check Update: Can You Expect A Plus-Up Payment?
April 28, 2021 at 6:25 pm
Filed Under:Norm Elrod, Stimulus Checks, "plus-up" payments

LETTER TO JOE BIDEN;

Child Tax Credit: How Much Money Will Parents Receive Each Month?

(CBS San Francisco) — Raising a child costs a lot of money. Government estimates put the number at over $230,000 per child, not including college, and that figure can be even higher based on the local cost of living. The Child Tax Credit was originally implemented over two decades ago to lessen the financial burden. And millions of parents and guardians are about to receive some more help from Uncle Sam. The American Rescue Plan, signed into law in March, raises the credit amount and changes how it's implemented.

The $1.9 trillion COVID relief package increases the Child Tax Credit from $2,000 to up to $3,600, depending on the child's age and the family's income. Qualifying parents will not have to wait for their tax refunds to see that money either. Payments will be issued on a monthly basis starting this summer. How Will The Expanded Child Tax Credit Work?

According to the stimulus package, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will pay out $3,600 per year for each child up to five years old and $3,000 per year for each child ages six through 17. Payments will be issued automatically on a monthly basis from July to December of 2021, with the remainder issued when the recipient files their 2021 taxes. (IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig recently confirmed a July launch "with payments going out on a monthly basis.") The IRS will pay $500 for dependents age 18 or fulltime college students up through age 24, but only once. Payments will be based on the adjusted gross income (AGI) reflected on a parent or parents' 2020 tax filing. (AGI is the sum of one's wages, interest, dividends, alimony, retirement distributions and other sources of income minus certain deductions, such as student loan interest, alimony payments and retirement contributions.) The amount phases out at a rate of $50 for every $1,000 of annual income beyond $75,000 for individuals and beyond $150,000 for married couples. The benefit will be fully refundable, meaning it will not depend on the recipient's current tax burden. Qualifying families will receive the full amount, regardless of how much — or little — they owe in taxes. There is no limit to the number of dependents that can be claimed.

As an example, suppose a married couple has a four-year-old child and an eight-year-old child and showed an annual joint income of $120,000 on their 2020 taxes. The IRS would send them a monthly check for $550 starting in July. That's $300 per month ($3,600 / 12) for the younger child and $250 per month ($3,000 / 12) for the older child. Those checks would last through December. The couple would then receive the $3,300 balance — $1,800 ($300 X 6) for the younger child and $1,500 ($250 X 6) for the younger child — as part of their 2021 tax refund.

Parents of a child who ages out of an age bracket will be paid the lesser amount. That means if a five-year-old turns six in 2021, the parents will receive a total credit of $3,000 for they year, not $3,600. Likewise, if a 17-year-old turns 18 in 2021, the parents will receive $500, not $3,000.

An income increase in 2021 to an amount above the $75,000 ($150,000) threshold could lower your Child Tax Credit. The IRS will reportedly set up a portal to allow claimants to adjust their income information, thus lowering their payments. Failure to do so could increase your tax bill or reduce your tax refund once 2021 taxes are filed. Recipients will also be able to opt out of periodic payments in favor of a one-time payment at the end of the year.

Eligibility requires that the dependent be a part of the household for at least half of the year and be at least half supported by the taxpayer. A taxpayer who makes above $95,000 ($170,000) will not be eligible for the expanded credit. But they can still claim the existing $2,000 credit per child.

"Big changes to the way that the tax credit is structured," says Stephen Nuñez, the Lead Researcher on Guaranteed Income at the Jain Family Institute, an applied research organization in the social sciences. (Nuñez studies cash welfare policy, that includes field work to answer policy-relevant questions about the social safety net.) "Much more generous, fully refundable, no longer any work requirement and the possibility that it would be paid out on either a quarterly or even monthly basis.

How Long Will The Revised Child Tax Credit Last?

The newly revised Child Tax Credit will last only one year. The rules of reconciliation, which Democrats used to pass the stimulus package containing the expanded credit with a simple majority, don't allow for deficit spending. Legislation must be deficit-neutral or deficit-reducing for the year, as well as for the next five years and 10 years. The thinking was that political pressure from supporters of a widely popular program will force Congress to extend it in the years to come.

Biden has since come out in support extending the enhanced credit until 2025 as part of his American Families Plan. The plan, worth approximately $1.8 trillion, seeks to address childcare, education and paid leave. Its recent announcement follows the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan announced at the end of March to address the country's infrastructure issues.

Many Democrats, however, want to make the Child Tax Credit permanent. On Tuesday, Massachusetts Representative Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, made public a plan to do just that. The suggested change came as part of a broader draft proposal to guarantee paid family leave universal and access to childcare. How much influence this has on the American Families Plan remains to be seen.

What Could This Mean For Families, Society And The Economy?

The enhanced Child Tax Credit would be fully available to families accounting for 27 million children, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That covers approximately half of all Black and Latino children, whose families have been hit particularly hard by the economic fallout from the COVID pandemic. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy believes that households accounting for 83 million children would benefit to some degree. Anywhere from eight to 12 million children live in households facing food insecurity due to lack of money, according to recent Census data from late 2020. Estimates suggest that expanding the Child Tax Credit would push 9.9 million children beyond or closer to the poverty line.

"It's a lot more generous," Nuñez confirms. "It's fully refundable, and it no longer has a work requirement. So that means that it is going to be particularly important for the poorest households, those who earn nothing, or who earn less than $2,500 a year in taxable income. There have been some simulations, some analyses of this particular plan that suggest that these changes are enough on their own to cut the child poverty rate in the United States by somewhere around 40 percent."

"So it's actually a huge impact on child poverty in the United States, Nuñez continues. "And this is consistent with what we've seen happen in other countries that have also introduced something like a child allowance. So, this kind of policy, although it's implemented and administered in different ways in different countries, is fairly common. It exists in Canada, it exists in the UK, in Germany, and other places in the world. And, in those places, it has had very similar results, cutting child poverty by a third or by 50 percent, relative to the baseline."

"It's good that we're reducing poverty," says Yeva Nersisyan, Associate Professor of Economics at Franklin & Marshall College. "And the fact that we could reduce it with a tax credit increase that's not dramatic — we might be almost doubling it, but in dollar terms is not that much — so the fact that we could have done that and we hadn't done it sooner, I think it's kind of outrageous. But it also tells you that the way we think about poverty — the poverty line, where were we put it (which is at an annual income of $26,500 for a family of four) — it's not really realistic."

READ MORE:
Stimulus Check Update: Can You Expect A Plus-Up Payment?
"So that's why a little bit more money can push you over the poverty line," Nersisyan continues. "But that doesn't necessarily mean you're not poor in a more realistic sense."

Some research suggests that reducing poverty would also have knock-on effects in the broader economy. The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine released a report in 2019 called A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty that looked at how to cut poverty in half. It concluded that "the weight of the causal evidence does indeed indicate that income poverty itself causes negative child outcomes, especially when poverty occurs in early childhood or persists throughout a large portion of childhood."

As Nuñez explains, "the reason why they're interested in reducing child poverty, in addition to child poverty being bad, is that there's some research that suggests that child poverty costs the U.S. economy, somewhere in the range of 800 billion to $1.1 trillion each year, because of higher crime, because of poor health outcomes for poorer children, and lower income levels, when they grow up. If you believe that estimate is largely correct, then cutting child poverty in half could have an enormous benefit to the economy as well. So not only is it helping children, reducing suffering. But in the U.S., these sorts of programs could pay for themselves."

The investment could very well pay off in the long run, on both the individual and national scale. People would be healthier and better educated, and then grow up to be more productive members of society. As the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University points out in a recent brief, "cash and near-cash benefits increase children's health, education, and future earnings and decrease health, child protection, and criminal justice costs."

According their recent calculations, "converting the current Child Tax Credit to a child allowance ... would cost about $100 billion and would generate about $800 billion in benefits to society."

In a more theoretical sense, the Child Tax Credit will make the tax structure a little more progressive. Those earning less in income will ultimately pay less in taxes because of the credit. And by comparison, those earning more will pay more. As Nersisyan points out, "any policy that makes your tax system more progressive is good for demand, because people at the lower end of the income distribution tend to have a high propensity to consume. So if you give $1 to somebody who's close to the poverty line, they're likely to spend all of that money. If you give an extra dollar to somebody who's making $200,000 or $300,000 a year, they're not likely to spend a lot of that dollar. They're likely to save most of it."

"It keeps demand higher in the economy," Nersisyan continues. "Higher demand is good because then that encourages more investment, increases productivity and so on so forth."

What Issues May Arise In Implementation?

A program to distribute periodic checks to millions of families brings with it plenty of administrative challenges. That's a big reason why payments aren't scheduled to start until July. "They're going to be standing up a program that is very operationally complex," according to Nuñez. "The IRS is not set up currently to provide regular monthly payments or regular quarterly payments. It's just not something that they've done historically. There's also been at least a decade of underfunding. So they're also fairly poorly funded at this point."

The IRS will use the same technological infrastructure they've used to send out stimulus checks. And those systems are outdated. Sending out checks has depended on old hardware and a software programming language not much used in decades. Distribution of the first stimulus check had plenty of issues. Many eligible recipients experienced delays. The second round went relatively smoothly, as well as the third. But sending out money on a regular basis presents its own challenges.

And then there's the task of finding all the people who should receive the money, communicating to them that this money is out there and they qualify for it, and then getting them into the system. Nuñez estimates that somewhere around 35 or 40 percent of children who live in poverty also live in households that don't file taxes. "In order to receive aid, you're going to have to file your taxes," Nuñez says. "So those families that make $2,000 a year adjusted income or don't work at all, generally don't file their taxes. And those are the families that are going to receive the most out of this kind of benefit. So there's going to be a big push. There's going to have to be a very big push, where government works with nonprofit partners and others in the field to identify and reach out to these sort of most vulnerable families, the ones that are going to benefit the most from this, and make sure that they understand that this benefit exists and how to get it."

Implementation challenges in the initial stages shouldn't detract from the passage of a program that could change the lives of millions. According to Nuñez, "the big takeaway is even if this is a rough start, even if it has some implementation challenges and on the margins, some people are not getting it that we'd like to get, it's still going to have a huge impact."

What Was Wrong With The Previous Child Tax Credit?

The previous Child Tax Credit delivered some relief to parents and guardians. It reduced one's taxes by up to $2,000 per child per year. But the only way to claim it was by filing taxes. Any additional refund above a filer's tax burden was lost, unless they qualified for the Additional Child Tax Credit. And even that was capped at $1,400. As Nuñez notes, "families that don't make at least $2,500 a year in taxable income cannot qualify for it."

As a result, approximately 33 percent of all children come from families that didn't make enough money to receive the full benefit, and 10 percent of children received no benefit at all, according to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy.

There were other issues that limited the credit's effectiveness for those supporting families. The child had to be a U.S. citizen living under the same roof, 16 years old or younger, and claimed as a dependent, among other criteria. The residency requirements were complicated and out of step with the structure of many modern American families. Children often live with other family members, for example, or shuttle between the homes of separated parents. Dependent children age 17 or older didn't qualify (though they may qualify for the dependent care credit). Payments were issued as tax refunds. So those who didn't file taxes or earn enough to qualify for the full credit — often among the poorest workers — missed out on all or some of the benefit. And even those who did file had to wait for a refund the following year.

The credit disproportionately helped the middle class rather than the poor. Families making more than $100,000 per year received approximately 40 percent of the credit, while families making less than $30,000 received approximately 15 percent.
MORE NEWS:
'The Sky's The Limit For The U.S. Economy,' Says Economic Analyst
Originally published on April 23 at 5:30 p.m. ET.

US denies Iran state media report saying prisoner swap agreed
Meanwhile, UK downplays Iranian state TV report on Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's possible release from prison

2 May 2021
The United States has immediately denied a report by Iran's state-run broadcaster that deals had been reached between Tehran and Washington that would see prisoners swapped and Tehran receive billions of dollars.

An unnamed official quoted by Iranian state TV said earlier on Sunday that a deal made between the US and Tehran involved a prisoner swap in exchange for the release of $7bn in frozen Iranian funds. The state TV report, quoting the unnamed Iranian official, also said British-Iranian national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe would be released once Britain had paid off a debt on military equipment owed to Tehran.

A British Foreign Office official played down that report.

Iran state TV had quoted the official as saying: "The Americans accepted to pay $7bn and swap four Iranians who were active in bypassing sanctions for four American spies who have served part of their sentences." It did not name the Iranians that Tehran sought to be freed.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price immediately denied the Iranian state TV report.

"Reports that a prisoner swap deal has been reached are not true," Price said.

"As we have said, we always raise the cases of Americans detained or missing in Iran. We will not stop until we are able to reunite them with their families."

Biden's chief of staff Ron Klain also denied the report on the US, telling CBS's Face the Nation that "unfortunately that report is untrue. There is no agreement to release these four Americans."

"We're working very hard to get them released," Klain said. "We raise this with Iran and our interlocutors all the time but so far there's no agreement."

Tehran holds four known Americans now in prison. They include Baquer and Siamak Namazi, environmentalist Morad Tahbaz, and Iranian American businessman Emad Shargi.

The reports by Iranian state television come amid a wider power struggle between hardliners and the relatively moderate government of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. That conflict has only grown sharper as Iran approaches its June 18 presidential election. The broadcaster long controlled by hardliners has aired similarly anonymously sourced reports contradicting diplomats in Vienna trying to negotiate a return to its nuclear deal with world powers.

It was not immediately clear if Sunday's report represented another means to disrupt negotiations by Rouhani officials or sabotage any potential negotiations with the West over frozen funds and prisoner exchanges. No agreement for release of UK national
Iranian state television also quoted the official as saying a deal had been reached for the United Kingdom to pay 400 million pounds ($553m) to see the release of Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

British officials downplayed the report. The Foreign Office said the country continues "to explore options to resolve this 40-year old case and we will not comment further as legal discussions are ongoing".

Last week, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was sentenced to an additional year in prison, her lawyer said, on charges of spreading "propaganda against the system" for participating in a protest in front of the Iranian embassy in London in 2009.
That came after she completed a five-year prison sentence in Iran after being convicted of plotting the overthrow of Iran's government, a charge that she, her supporters and rights groups deny. While employed at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news agency, she was taken into custody at the Tehran airport in April 2016 as she was returning home to Britain after visiting family. Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of Zaghari-Ratcliffe, told The Associated Press news agency he was not aware of any swap in the works.

"We haven't heard anything," he said. "Of course we probably wouldn't, but my instinct is to be sceptical at present."
Earlier on Sunday, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the BBC that he believed Zaghari-Ratcliffe was being held "unlawfully" by Iran in a way that amounts to "torture".
"I think she's been treated in the most abusive, tortuous way," Raab said. "I think it amounts to torture the way she's been treated and there is a very clear, unequivocal obligation on the Iranians to release her and all of those who are being held as leverage immediately and without condition."

Negotiations ongoing
Last week, cabinet spokesman Ali Rabiei hinted that a prisoner swap between Iran and the US may be in the works, saying the idea "has always been on the agenda" and noting the judiciary has confirmed its "readiness".

His remarks followed that of the foreign ministry spokesman who suggested Tehran hopes to swing a substantial prisoner swap as part of ongoing negotiations in Vienna. A similar swap accompanied the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

Tehran is now negotiating with world powers over both it and the US returning to its 2015 nuclear deal, which saw it limit its uranium enrichment in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.

As the negotiations continue, Iranian negotiators there have offered encouraging comments, while state TV quoted anonymous sources striking maximalist positions.

That even saw Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian deputy foreign minister leading the talks, offer a rebuke on Twitter last week to Iranian state television's English-language arm, Press TV.

Harris responds to Tim Scott: US is not racist, but racism cannot be ignored 01:44
Clay Cane is a Sirius XM radio host and the author of "Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race." Follow him on Twitter @claycane. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN)Wednesday night, President Joe Biden delivered his first address before a joint session of Congress -- a speech full of optimism, policy priorities and an expansive vision for the future. I wasn't surprised that the Republican Party chose to put South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott forward for their "rebuttal" -- in this case, 15 minutes of dissembling in the service of an obvious plea to voters who do not look like him. One of the main requirements for today's Black Republicans appears to be the tricky logic of downplaying racism while simultaneously playing the race card. Scott was clearly ready to perform that number last night. He quickly went viral for his rebuttal to Biden, saying: "I get called 'Uncle Tom' and the N-word -- by 'progressives'"! Minutes later he added, "Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country."
There are two big problems with that take. First, it's hard to imagine a country where people are calling you the N-word as not being racist. Second, as much as Scott's pronouncement of an un-racist America may have appealed to some Republican White voters, it wasn't an actual rebuttal to Biden's remarks. Biden never said America was a racist country. Scott created a strawman talking point for his party's base so he could tell them what they wanted to hear. He was joyfully playing the role of the Black man who makes White Americans more comfortable.
Here are some recent facts about Biden -- or other elected leaders -- calling America racist.

In January of 2020 the New York Times asked presidential candidates at the time if the United States was a racist country, and not one of them said yes.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg answered, "I don't think it's fair to categorize it as a racist country."

Even Sen. Elizabeth Warren only said, "I think that racism is a serious problem in this country."
Mayor Pete Buttigieg avoided saying the country was racist: "I am convinced that white supremacy is the force most likely to destroy the American dream."
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has never explicitly said America was a racist country and was consistently criticized for appearing to focus more on class.
In July of 2020, Biden came under fire for saying Trump was America's first racist President, which was pretty shocking to historians considering how both Democratic and Republican Presidents upheld the extermination of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, advocated for Jim Crow laws and supported voter disenfranchisement via the Southern Strategy. Also, we must never forget the war on drugs, which directly targets Black and brown people, and the tragedies of mass incarceration. In Wednesday's speech, Biden only mentioned racism twice, when he called "to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system" and also said, "we have a real chance to root out systemic racism that plagues American life in many other ways."The truth is that Scott wasn't there to rebut Biden's speech. He had one job: to soothe racial guilt at any cost.

2 storm systems threaten millions with severe weather for Sunday and Monday
By Allison Chinchar, CNN Meteorologist

Updated 2:08 PM ET, Sun May 2, 2021

Two separate storm systems -- one from the Gulf Coast region and the other coming from the Mountain West -- will threaten millions of people with severe weather Sunday and Monday.

The Gulf Coast system will arrive Sunday. More than 15 million people from Lake Charles, Louisiana to Pensacola, Florida, and northward to Memphis could experience damaging winds, hail and a few tornadoes.
"There will be a Slight Risk (level 2 of 5) of severe weather across south Mississippi and southeast Louisiana during the daytime hours on Sunday," the National Weather Service Office in New Orleans explains. "Damaging winds and large hail are the most significant threats, but a tornado or two cannot be ruled out."
Flash flooding will also be a concern, especially for areas of Texas and Louisiana that have been dealing with heavy rain for the past few days.
Check the weather in your area here >>
"The ground is already saturated in a lot of these areas, so it won't take much to initiate flash flooding," said Haley Brink, CNN Meteorologist. "In fact, some areas of Texas have picked up over 4 inches of rain in just the last 48 hours."

Severe storms and snow?
A second system will be sliding through the Mountain West and Central Plains on Sunday. "Strong to severe thunderstorm development is also possible over the central High Plains, where large hail and severe gusts are the threats," the Storm Prediction Center said.
In western Kansas, the SPC has posted an Enhanced risk (level 3 out of 5).
By Sunday night, as colder air pushes in behind the front, snow is forecast for the higher elevations of Colorado and Wyoming. Several cities along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains will go from having temperatures 15-20 degrees above normal to 20-25 degrees below normal in just 48 hours.
Denver will be one of those cities feeling seasonal whiplash. On Saturday, the mile-high city reached 86 degrees, their average high for late June and one degree shy of the record for May 1. By Monday, the city will be expecting a high temperature of only 47 degrees -- their normal high for late February.
Winter Storm Watch Mountains Sunday Night and Monday. #cowx pic.twitter.com/xgPsmaqCQX

— NWS Boulder (@NWSBoulder) May 1, 2021
The exceptionally warm air ahead of the front will be fueling yet another day of severe storms -- this time along the Mississippi River Valley region.
On Monday, over 40 million people from Dallas, Texas, to Columbus, Ohio, will be under the threat for severe storms. The main dangers will be damaging winds hail, and tornadoes. The greatest threat for tornadoes exists from Tulsa, Oklahoma over to Paducah, Kentucky. The biggest concern for the lower Ohio River Valley through the Ozark Plateau will be the timing of the storms, which will largely be in the evening and overnight. A recent study found that nighttime tornadoes are more than twice as likely to be deadly.

Forecasters expect another overactive hurricane season with 17 named storms
By Allison Chinchar and Haley Brink, CNN Meteorologists

Updated 10:53 AM ET, Thu April 8, 2021 After last year's record-breaking hurricane season, forecasters are expecting another overactive season.

Colorado State University (CSU) released its 2021 Atlantic hurricane season forecast on Thursday morning and is predicting another above-average season this year.
CSU is calling for 17 named storms, 8 hurricanes and 4 major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher). Each of these numbers is above the typical season average of 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes.
However, seasonal averages are in the process of being updated, according to Ken Graham, director of the National Hurricane Center (NHC).
"We will have those new averages going into the season. In fact, over the next couple of weeks we are going to release that information," Graham says.

CSU is one of many academic institutions, government agencies and private forecasting companies putting out seasonal projections.
Even though the official forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) won't come until the end of May, there is already a strong consensus that the Atlantic is headed for yet another active season. Factors that increase hurricane activity
There is considerable warmth across much of the eastern Atlantic where the ocean's surface temperature is 1-3 degrees Celsius above normal for early April.
"The primary reasons why we're going above average is the low likelihood of a significant El Niño event and the relative warmth in the tropical (Atlantic) but especially the subtropical eastern Atlantic," said Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist at CSU.
Sea surface temperatures are one of the ingredients needed to fuel hurricanes, so it makes sense that there would be a correlation between those temperatures and an active season.

Another big factor is El Niño, or the lack thereof. When El Niño is present, it reduces Atlantic hurricane activity due to increased vertical wind shear -- changes in wind speed and direction that prevent hurricanes from forming. Most dynamical and statistical models are currently indicating low chances of El Niño developing between August and October.
"The current odds of El Niño from NOAA are quite low for August-October (10%)," according to Klotzbach.
Average conditions or even La Niña conditions create a more favorable environment for tropical storm development. While we are coming off an active La Niña pattern, according to NOAA it is not entirely over yet.
So, for the moment, El Niño's calming effect on Atlantic hurricane season does not seem likely for 2021. La Niña present early this year
The Oceanic Niño Index measures warm and cool patterns in the eastern Pacific that indicate El Niño and La Niña conditions. A positive index indicates the presence of El Niño while a negative index indicates La Niña. The index during the winter of 2020 is the lowest it has been since the winter of 2010.
Monthly temperature anomaly, in degrees CelsiusWarm, El Niño conditions
Cool, La Niña conditions
Normal conditions

Changes to hurricane season are coming
The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season finished with a total of 30 named storms -- the most in any year on record. People along the coastline from Texas to Maine were affected by at least one named storm that season. But the post-season brought about some significant changes, including the retirement of three individual storm names, as well as the entire list of back up names. The World Meteorological Organization's Hurricane Committee held its annual meeting last month to discuss past hurricane seasons and update its operational plans. Before 2021, if the hurricane season used up all the names on the predetermined alphabetical list, the next plan of action was to use the Greek alphabet. "The Greek alphabet will not be used in the future because it creates a distraction from the communication of hazard and storm warnings and is potentially confusing," the WMO announced in March.
It was decided that a separate list of names would be used as a backup.
The Greek alphabet will be replaced by a supplemental list of names using the same rules as the main Atlantic hurricane season naming list -- a list of names A-Z, but excluding the letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z -- for if and when the initial list of names has been exhausted. This will allow for the supplemental list of names to be more easily retired and replaced when the need arises.

Hurricane preparedness begins now
Climatologically, about 30% of all Atlantic hurricanes make US landfall. However, you don't need to have all of the 17 forecast storms make landfall in the US for it to be an impactful season. "It doesn't matter if there's 30 storms or one ... if it impacts you, it's a busy season," Graham says.
Hurricanes are becoming more dangerous. Here's why >>>
This is why it's important to start preparing now by reviewing your evacuation plans and ensuring your evacuation kit is in order and up to date.
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) is already beginning its preparations for this year's season. This year, the center will be releasing their Atlantic outlook products beginning May 15 as opposed to June 1, in order to better serve the communities impacted by early-season tropical systems. Build A Kit

After an emergency, you may need to survive on your own for several days. Being prepared means having your own food, water and other supplies to last for several days. A disaster supplies kit is a collection of basic items your household may need in the event of an emergency.

feature_mini img
Make sure your emergency kit is stocked with the items on the checklist below. Download a printable version to take with you to the store. Once you take a look at the basic items consider what unique needs your family might have, such as supplies for pets or seniors. Basic Disaster Supplies Kit

To assemble your kit store items in airtight plastic bags and put your entire disaster supplies kit in one or two easy-to-carry containers such as plastic bins or a duffel bag.

A basic emergency supply kit could include the following recommended items:

Water (one gallon per person per day for several days, for drinking and sanitation)
Food (at least a three-day supply of non-perishable food)
Battery-powered or hand crank radio and a NOAA Weather Radio with tone alert
Flashlight
First aid kit
Extra batteries
Whistle (to signal for help)
Dust mask (to help filter contaminated air)
Plastic sheeting and duct tape (to shelter in place)
Moist towelettes, garbage bags and plastic ties (for personal sanitation)
Wrench or pliers (to turn off utilities)
Manual can opener (for food)
Local maps
Cell phone with chargers and a backup battery Additional Emergency Supplies

alert - warning
Since Spring of 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended people include additional items in their kits to help prevent the spread of coronavirus or other viruses and the flu.
Consider adding the following items to your emergency supply kit based on your individual needs:

Masks (for everyone ages 2 and above), soap, hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes to disinfect surfaces
Prescription medications
Non-prescription medications such as pain relievers, anti-diarrhea medication, antacids or laxatives
Prescription eyeglasses and contact lens solution
Infant formula, bottles, diapers, wipes and diaper rash cream
Pet food and extra water for your pet
Cash or traveler's checks
Important family documents such as copies of insurance policies, identification and bank account records saved electronically or in a waterproof, portable container
Sleeping bag or warm blanket for each person
Complete change of clothing appropriate for your climate and sturdy shoes
Fire extinguisher
Matches in a waterproof container
Feminine supplies and personal hygiene items
Mess kits, paper cups, plates, paper towels and plastic utensils
Paper and pencil
Books, games, puzzles or other activities for children

( ready.gov )

Maintaining Your Kit

After assembling your kit remember to maintain it so it's ready when needed:

Keep canned food in a cool, dry place.
Store boxed food in tightly closed plastic or metal containers.
Replace expired items as needed.
Re-think your needs every year and update your kit as your family's needs change.

Kit Storage Locations

Since you do not know where you will be when an emergency occurs, prepare supplies for home, work and cars.

Home: Keep this kit in a designated place and have it ready in case you have to leave your home quickly. Make sure all family members know where the kit is kept.
Work: Be prepared to shelter at work for at least 24 hours. Your work kit should include food, water and other necessities like medicines, as well as comfortable walking shoes, stored in a "grab and go" case.
Car: In case you are stranded, keep a kit of emergency supplies in your car.
Last Updated: 03/08/2021 Hurricanes are becoming more dangerous. Here's why

A record-setting hurricane season just ended. Explore what we know, think we know, and are just learning about how climate change is influencing the world's most dangerous storms.
By Brandon Miller, Drew Kann, Judson Jones, Renée Rigdon and Curt Merrill, CNN
Illustrations by Leanza Abucayan, CNN
Published December 3, 2020
Katrina. Maria. Andrew. Haiyan.

Hurricanes are the most violent storms on the planet. The names of the most damaging ones live on because of the devastation they left in their wake.

Known outside of North America as tropical cyclones or typhoons, hurricanes are essentially massive engines of wind and rain that are fueled by warm ocean water and air.

This heat energy is converted into lashing winds and driving rainfall that can bring devastating impacts when they hit cities, homes and infrastructure.

Over the last two-plus centuries, human activity — mainly the burning of fossil fuels – has added lots of heat to the oceans and air where these storms are spawned.

The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was the most active on record, and many of the storms that slammed into the Gulf Coast, Central America and the Caribbean this year exhibited hallmark signs that they were supercharged by global warming.

In 1961, Hurricane Esther became the first storm to be recorded by a weather satellite. NASA
Though global temperature data goes back over 150 years, hurricane records are actually very sparse prior to the 1970s, when satellites first began capturing images of all of the world's oceans.

While scientists are still learning exactly how this added heat is changing hurricanes, research shows that the storms are becoming more destructive in some key ways.

Here's what scientists are most confident is happening to hurricanes as a result of climate change, what they think might be occurring and the biggest questions about how these massive storms are changing that remain unanswered.

What scientists know for sure
Sea level rise is making storm surge more dangerous

Hurricanes are categorized by their wind speeds, but the most deadly and destructive threat posed by most hurricanes is the storm surge they can produce.

Storm surge is the rapid rise in ocean levels brought about by the powerful winds and low pressure in a hurricane.

When a storm's winds blow onshore, they can send feet of water rushing inland at depths far greater than even the most extreme high tides.

And when storm surge strikes a developed coastline, the cost in both lives and property can be enormous.

More than 1,800 lives were lost when Hurricane Katrina hit southern Louisiana in 2005, and many of those who died fell victim to storm surge, according to NOAA.

While no tide gauge measurements were available in the hardest-hit parts of the Bahamas when Hurricane Dorian struck in 2019, witnesses reported that the storm put parts of the islands under as much as 20 feet of water. Sea level rise of only a couple of inches can make a dramatic difference in how far inland storm surge can travel.

Already, storm surge has gotten worse because sea levels are rising - and fast.

Since 1880, global sea levels have risen by an average of 8 to 9 inches. Two-thirds of that increase has occurred in just the last two and a half decades, driven mainly by the rapid melting of the world's ice sheets and glaciers.

Prepare Your Pets for Disasters

Your pets are important member of your family, so they need to be included in your family's emergency plan. To prepare for the unexpected follow these tips with your pets in mind:

Make a plan.
Build an emergency kit.
Stay informed.
Make a Plan

If you have a plan in place for you and your pets, you will likely encounter less difficulty, stress and worry when you need to make a decision during an emergency. If local officials ask you to evacuate, that means your pet should evacuate too. If you leave your pets behind, they may end up lost, injured or worse.

Things to include in your plan:

Have an evacuation plan for your pet. Many public shelters and hotels do not allow pets inside. Know a safe place where you can take your pets before disasters and emergencies happen.
Develop a buddy system. Plan with neighbors, friends or relatives to make sure that someone is available to care for or evacuate your pets if you are unable to do so.
Have your pet microchipped. Make sure to keep your address and phone number up-to-date and include contact information for an emergency contact outside of your immediate area.
Contact your local emergency management office, animal shelter or animal control office to get additional advice and information if you're unsure how to care for your pet in case of an emergency.
Build a Kit for Your Pet

Just as you do with your family's emergency supply kit, think first about the basics for survival, such as food and water. Have two kits, one larger kit if you are sheltering in place and one lightweight version for if you need to evacuate.  Review your kits regularly to ensure that their contents, especially foods and medicines, are fresh.

Here are some items you may want to include in an emergency kit for your pet: Food. Keep several days' supply of food in an airtight, waterproof container.
Water. Store a water bowl and several days' supply of water.
Medicine. Keep an extra supply of the medicine your pet takes on a regular basis in a waterproof container.
First aid kit. Talk to your veterinarian about what is most appropriate for your pet's emergency medical needs.
Collar with ID tag and a harness or leash. Include a backup leash, collar and ID tag. Have copies of your pet's registration information and other relevant documents in a waterproof container and available electronically.
Traveling bag, crate or sturdy carrier, ideally one for each pet.
Grooming items. Pet shampoo, conditioner and other items, in case your pet needs some cleaning up.
Sanitation needs. Include pet litter and litter box (if appropriate), newspapers, paper towels, plastic trash bags and household chlorine bleach to provide for your pet's sanitation needs.
A picture of you and your pet together. If you become separated from your pet during an emergency, a picture of you and your pet together will help you document ownership and allow others to assist you in identifying your pet.
Familiar items. Put favorite toys, treats or bedding in your kit. Familiar items can help reduce stress for your pet.
Tips for Large Animals

alert - info
If you have pets such as horses, goats or pigs on your property, be sure to prepare before a disaster.
In addition to the tips above:

Ensure all animals have some form of identification.
Evacuate animals earlier, whenever possible. Map out primary and secondary routes in advance.
Make available vehicles and trailers needed for transporting and supporting each type of animal. Also make available experienced handlers and drivers.
Ensure destinations have food, water, veterinary care and handling equipment.
If evacuation is not possible, animal owners must decide whether to move large animals to a barn or turn them loose outside.
Stay Informed

Being prepared and staying informed of current conditions. Here are some ways you can stay informed:

Pay attention to wireless emergency alerts for local alerts and warnings sent by state and local public safety officials.
Listen to local officials when told to evacuate or shelter in place.
Download the FEMA app and get weather alerts from the National Weather Service, for up to five different locations anywhere in the United States.
Always bring pets indoors at the first sign or warning of a storm or disaster.

THUS IS VERY LONG!! ))

In 2020 America experienced a terrible surge in murder. Why?
A modern murder mystery, In many respects, the murder of Alante Hands last year on a Chicago street was sadly unremarkable. He was young, just 27, and black, like four in every five homicide victims in the city. Like nine in ten murders in Chicago, his life was taken by a gun—bullets pierced his arm, chest and leg. He had a lengthy criminal record, beginning a decade ago when he was arrested while still a minor for shooting at a police officer. He died in the violent West Side of the city on West Rice Street, where six others have been murdered in the past two decades. But for the fact that his murder occurred on December 31st 2020, the 787th and final one of an especially bloody year for the city, it might have been forgotten.

The plague year proved brutal for Chicago, already a violent city even by American standards. Murders increased by 56% from 2019—nearly three times as many victims as in all of Italy. As crime data from 2020 are compiled, one thing has become clear: American cities saw the biggest rise in homicides in decades, currently estimated at 30% in a single year. That would be the highest annual increase in more than 50 years. In New York City, murders were up by 45%. In the Bay Area around San Francisco, they rose by 36%. In Washington, dc, they climbed by 19%. Our analysis of preliminary data from the fbi suggests that it is not just a big-city phenomenon.

A Black electrician found a noose hanging in his workspace in New York's Long Island, attorney says

Police in the New York suburb of Long Island are investigating a report of a noose found hanging in a storeroom at a local business, a Suffolk County police spokesperson confirmed to CNN on Monday.

Kyrin Taylor, a 23-year-old electrician who had been working as an apprentice since December at Cooper Power & Lighting Corp., came to work on April 20 to find a noose hanging in his workspace in Farmingdale, his lawyer told CNN on Monday.
"Seeing this took my breath away and I really did not know what to do or what to think," said Taylor, who is Black, in a statement.
His lawyer, Frederick Brewington, said his client called the police because he feared for his safety. He also contacted his union, IBEW Local 25, to inform it of the situation.
Taylor and Brewington both claim that Taylor's boss scolded Taylor for calling the police. The boss has not returned CNN's email and phone requests for comment.

Taylor also said in his statement that this was not the first time he had been the target of harassment by his co-workers.

"I am the only African-American working for [Cooper Power and Lighting] and this was not the first time I was treated with disrespect," he said. "I have been targeted by this act of pure hate and I just don't know what to think. When will people stop thinking it is alright to terrorize Black people?"
Brewington said that the union helped Taylor find a new place to work and Taylor's first day at his new employer was Monday.
The attorney said his client remains heavily impacted by what happened and has sought out counseling to deal with the trauma of the incident. "He's highly upset," Brewington said of Taylor. "He said to me that besides being disgusted, I am afraid. And I said, 'You can't live in fear, but being afraid is not unhealthy.'"

Biden stopped building Trump's wall. Here's what it looks like now
Story by Ed Lavandera, Ashley Killough and Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN
Video by Dave Ruff, Gregg Canes, Joel De La Rosa and Madeleine Stix, CNN
Updated 5:32 PM ET, Fri April 30, 2021

Patagonia Mountains, Arizona (CNN)Once there was a bustling construction zone here.
Now it's like a ghost town, frozen in time.

Heavy machinery is parked and motionless. Stacks of steel bollards stretch as far as the eye can see.
The Trump administration built more than 450 miles of fencing along the US-Mexico border -- including hundreds of miles of replacement fencing and 52 miles of construction where there were no barriers before. The wall became a focal point of his presidency, a staging ground for political rallies and a symbol of the administration's controversial immigration crackdowns. On the campaign trail, President Biden vowed not to build another foot. And he swiftly halted construction once he took office.
A big question still hasn't been answered, months into his presidency: What will happen at sites where construction was underway?
Fencing currently covers 706 miles of the 1,954-mile US-Mexico border. We recently visited four locations along that stretch where wall construction had started, but has been paused since Biden became president.

But people who live and work in the area have a lot to say about what they want to see.
Here's what we saw, and what they told us:
Stop 1: The view from the end of the road
This is about as far as the border wall construction got about 15 miles east of Nogales, Arizona, in the Patagonia Mountains. What you see now is a path carved through a pristine desert landscape. It's a scene that's all too familiar to environmental activist Laiken Jordahl. A former park ranger, he's spent the last four years campaigning against the border wall in these remote areas of Arizona.

" Here's how he describes the landscape:
"It's kind of a bizarre scene because we've got this huge amount of devastation, this massive swath of land that's been blasted open, and nobody knows what's gonna happen next. "
-Laiken Jordahl, environmental activist

Customs and Border Protection has said border wall projects went through "Environmental Stewardship Plans" to analyze and minimize the environmental impact, including studies of how wildlife may be affected by the projects.

Jordahl says he's seen enough.
"We want to see these contracts canceled, and we want to see the remaining billions of dollars left in those contracts used to restore and revegetate this beautiful landscape."

Laiken Jordahl, environmental activist

Stop 2: Tire tracks in the dirt, but no activity to be found
At Coronado National Memorial in Arizona, the tire tracks in the dirt are a reminder of the heavy construction equipment that was here just a few months ago. Back in December, crews were feverishly working to finish erecting a stretch of wall here.

But this much is clear: The landscape in the area has already changed dramatically. Stop 3: A scarred mountainside and a half-built wall
At Guadalupe Canyon, construction crews were busy at work the last time we visited. All you could hear were the sounds of heavy machinery, construction crews and explosive detonations blasting into the mountains. Now, it's eerily quiet. Construction has stopped. And you can see a scarred mountainside, a half-built wall and massive amounts of steel -- seemingly abandoned. Now remnants of old steel border barriers are blocking access to the new wall. For Jordahl and other anti-border wall activists, the question is, how do you repair a mountain that now looks like this? "It is enraging. We have watched thousands of pounds of dynamite be detonated in wilderness areas, in corridors for endangered species, in places where there is not frequent migration from people or smugglers. ... They have cut through an entire mountain range to build a small section of wall that to someone in DC was just another mile on the tally."

Laiken Jordahl, environmental activist

Stop 4: A scene one sheriff calls 'foolish'
In Del Rio, Texas, Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez took us to what's supposed to be a two-mile stretch of border wall. So far, only a few hundred yards have been built. Construction equipment is still on site. Deep trenches are dug out.

n one of his first actions as President, Biden ordered a pause on wall construction and called for a review of projects and a plan to redirect funds within 60 days. Customs and Border Protection, in coordination with the US Army Corps of Engineers, says that to comply with the President's proclamation it's suspended wall construction projects "except for activities that are safety related."
The 60-day review period ended more than a month ago. But pressed for answers on its border wall plans in recent days, the Biden administration hasn't said much.
"Federal agencies are continuing to review wall contracts and develop a plan to submit to the president soon -- it is -- it is paused," White House press secretary Jen Psaki recently told reporters.
On Friday, the administration announced it's taking steps to send billions of dollars back to the Pentagon, canceling all contracts on the border that used funds originally intended for military missions and functions.
The administration's latest funding request to Congress includes $1.2 billion for border infrastructure, but no additional funds for wall construction.

Joe Biden unveils America's most ambitious infrastructure plan in generations
Getting it through Congress will be difficult AT TIMES, JOE BIDEN'S worldview seems that of a time-traveller propelled forward, then stranded: keenly aware of future threats, yet unshakably nostalgic. On March 31st he announced the first half of his massive infrastructure package—laden both with old-fashioned blue-collar building projects as well as newfangled initiatives to help propel America into a greener future. The proposal, laid out at a carpenters' training facility near Pittsburgh, evokes a Rooseveltian past: a time when the manufacturing brawn of unionised Americans powered the economy, an assertive government steered industry and directly created jobs, and building big, expensive infrastructure made entirely in America revitalised a sagging economy. "It is a once-in-a-generation investment in America unlike anything we've seen or done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades ago," the president said, giving a flavour of his monumental ambitions. Equally monumental is the challenge of passing it.

The plurality of the new package's spending, some $621bn, will be spent on transport infrastructure. Most of this will be put towards old-fashioned, New Deal-style projects, such as roads, bridges, public transport, railroads and airports. But $174bn of it will go on electric vehicles—tax credits to help consumers afford them, to encourage states to build 500,000 public charging stations and to boost domestic supply chains (the White House laments the size of America's electric-vehicle market, Motley Fool Issues Rare "Ultimate Buy" Alert
Investing May 2, 2021

By: Eric Bleeker

As a long-time tech stock analyst at The Motley Fool, every day I wake up and get the chance to witness two of the most legendary investors of our time aim to help everyday people like you identify and profit from some of the world's most promising investment opportunities.

And it's times of uncertainty and confusion that really open the doors to some of the best opportunities available to investors like you and me.

It's hard to believe, but 2020 marked the 27-year anniversary of the founding of The Motley Fool by those two legendary investors, David and Tom Gardner.

It's truly amazing that Tom and David were able to go from publishing an investment newsletter for 300 or so subscribers out of the shed behind David's house...

To serving millions of hardworking investors like you around the globe from offices in far-flung countries like Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and Japan...

All while navigating the dot.com bubble, the Housing Crisis, and the current environment.

David and Tom have put together a heck of a run. And since I have the luxury of working with them, I know what they're most proud of is their ability to consistently lead investors to some of the most life-changing investment returns the market has ever seen. I'm talking, of course, about companies like:

Amazon (up 22,548%)
Netflix (up 27,591%)
Nvidia (up 3,783%)
Baidu (up 2,423%)
Salesforce.com (up 3,242%)
Those are actual investment recommendations David and Tom have shared with The Motley Fool community over the years – and the list goes on!

But I'm not here to throw David and Tom a victory parade or make you feel depressed if you missed out on any of those huge gains...

Instead, I'm writing you today to talk about something I believe will change the way you invest forever.

More specifically, a rare and historically very profitable stock buy signal is flashing right now.

You see, David and Tom Gardner independently research and pick their own stocks – what David picks has nothing to do with what Tom pick and vice versa.

However, every so often the two of them will land on the exact same stock.

Many of us around the office have come to call this formal agreement between these two legendary investors the "Ultimate Buy" sign.

It's rare that David and Tom formally agree on the exact same stock – it's only happened 28 times over the entire history of Motley Fool Stock Advisor.

But when it has happened, the results have been spectacular: Netflix is up 18,136% since Tom agreed with David on it in June 2007
Tesla, which received the "Ultimate Buy" sign in November 2012, is up 11,041% since.
In fact, across the 28 stocks David and Tom have agreed on ... the average return is an astounding 1,486% ... crushing the S&P 500 by more than 13x!

Of course, neither David or Tom would ever describe this stock as a "sure thing," but the details behind this tiny little internet company are impressive:

It's smaller than 1/50th the size of Google.
Each one of David's and Tom's recommendations of its stock is crushing the market.
Its young CEO has already banked $2.3 billion on this stock since its IPO.
This company stands to profit as more and more people ditch cable for streaming TV. And in fact, David and Tom believe this company's crucial technology could represent the final nail in the coffin for traditional cable.

Now this isn't some competitor to Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video as you might expect. Instead, this company sits in the middle of the advertising market, which is more than 10X bigger than the online streaming industry.

In an interview with Tom Gardner and his team, this company's CEO called the current moment "the most exciting in the history of advertising."

Of course, any CEO could say that simply to build up hype and push the company's stock price higher ... but this CEO is putting his money where his mouth is.

He's betting his fortune – over $2.3 billion – on what he's calling cable TV's "ticking time bomb."

And here's the real kicker...

Despite this company's jaw-dropping success over the past few years, most investors have still never even heard of this company's name!

That's right, while everyone on CNBC and in The Wall Street Journal is busy talking about blue-chip stocks like Apple and Facebook, this significantly smaller (yet faster-growing!) company is flying almost completely under the radar.

And, while most investors have been busy pouring more money into only these well-known tech stocks, David and Tom have been doing what the world's greatest investors do — looking for the next stock that could deliver returns of +1,000%, +2,000%, or even +5,000%.

That's why they've been pounding the table on this "Ultimate Buy" stock I've begun to tell you about today – urging members of The Motley Fool investment community to buy shares before they potentially take off.

Look, I understand this all may sound too good to be true, but the returns for "Ultimate Buy" stocks simply have been too good to ignore – and there's no guarantee that the investing world ever sees this buy signal flash again.

Which is exactly why I want to show you the hard numbers behind this incredible stock and invite you to hear more about this strategy directly from David and Tom and their team of analysts – that way, you can decide for yourself if you want to buy shares of this fast-growing company for your portfolio.

There's just one catch:

I'm sharing the details of the stock only with members of The Motley Fool's flagship investing service, Motley Fool Stock Advisor.

Now, if you're not familiar with Motley Fool Stock Advisor service, it's the award-winning online investing service David and Tom created to provide easy-to-follow, monthly stock recommendations to individual investors.

That's right! Each and every month, over 750,000 investors tune in to discover which stocks David and Tom Gardner believe investors should be buying shares of today.

So, due to the urgency of this recent development, we put together a painstakingly researched report that shows you why this one stock could be an "Ultimate Buy."It reveals the reasons why we think every forward-thinking investor should be paying close attention to this revolutionary new industry and what might be a potentially life-changing investment opportunity.

This report is free to you when you sign up for Stock Advisor today.

Lastly, keep in mind that at The Motley Fool, we believe in a long-term investment approach. It's a philosophy that has worked well for our 750,000 members -- and we know it'll work for you too. "Ultimate Buy" Returns are as of April 8, 2021. The 28 stock occurrences refer to all recommendations inside of both Motley Fool Rule Breakers and Motley Fool Stock Advisor. All other returns are updated during market hours. CEO figures are as of August 15, 2020.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Eric Bleeker owns shares of Amazon, Baidu, NVIDIA, and Tesla. The Motley Fool owns shares of Amazon, Baidu, Netflix, NVIDIA, Salesforce.com, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The Motley Fool respects your privacy and strive to be transparent about our data collection practices. We use your information to customize the site for you, to contact you about your membership, provide you with promotional information, and in aggregate to help us better understand how the service is used.

Past performance is not a predictor of future results. Individual investment results may vary. All investing involves risk of loss.

Privacy/Legal Information. "Ultimate Buy" Returns are as of April 8, 2021. The 28 stock occurrences refer to all recommendations inside of both Motley Fool Rule Breakers and Motley Fool Stock Advisor. All other returns are updated during market hours. CEO figures are as of August 15, 2020.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Eric Bleeker owns shares of Amazon, Baidu, NVIDIA, and Tesla. The Motley Fool owns shares of Amazon, Baidu, Netflix, NVIDIA, Salesforce.com, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The Motley Fool respects your privacy and strive to be transparent about our data collection practices. We use your information to customize the site for you, to contact you about your membership, provide you with promotional information, and in aggregate to help us better understand how the service is used.

Past performance is not a predictor of future results. Individual investment results may vary. All investing involves risk of loss.

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Migrants' choice: Risk starvation or leave home
04:14
One suspected driver of the migrant 'caravan': climate change
By John D. Sutter, CNN Investigates
Video by Bryce Urbany, McKenna Ewen, David Muñoz and John D. Sutter, CNN
Data analysis by Aaron Kessler, CNN
Updated 1:40 PM ET, Tue December 11, 2018
Copán, Honduras (CNN)Each night after her husband left, Delmi Amparo Hernández walked to a neighbor's house to look for him on the TV news. He had fled their mountaintop community here in rural Honduras without a phone because no one in the family could afford one. Their floor was made of dirt, they grew their own food. Watching coverage of the migrant caravan heading for the United States was Hernández's only way to know if he was alive.

What she saw in the broadcasts were visions from hell. Families jumping from bridges, getting kidnapped along dusty roads, dodging tear gas cannons fired by police from richer nations. How could this be? She continued scanning, hoping to find him, hoping not to.

She had begged Germán Ramírez not to go, but her 30-year-old husband had his reasons. The town's corn and bean crops had failed during a years-long drought. There was no work aside from farming. No money for irrigation. Their four children, ages 3 to 13, had little to eat.
Ramírez told his wife that he had no choice but to leave with the "caravan" of thousands that had formed in Honduras and would make its way north. This was their chance, she recalled him saying that day. He could go with the group, find work, send back money.
It was this or risk starvation.
Delmi Amparo Hernández with her four children.
Delmi Amparo Hernández with her four children.
The couple's tragic story, as well as others I heard on a recent four-day trip to western Honduras, complicates two narratives being told about the migrant caravan.
To hear President Trump tell it, Central American "Gang Members and some very bad people" are attempting to storm the United States at its southern border. "This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you," the President wrote on Twitter. American news reports, meanwhile, largely have focused on high rates of violent crime in Honduras and El Salvador that have driven families to seek asylum as refugees in the United States.
Overlooked is this factor: climate change.
The "dry corridor" of Central America, which includes parts of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, has been hit with an unusual drought for the last five years. Crops are failing. Starvation is lurking. More than two million people in the region are at risk for hunger, according to an August report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
"Under normal circumstances, without any change in rain patterns, people are already struggling," said Edwin Castellanos, dean of research at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and a global authority on climate change in Central America. "In some of these dry areas, we have seen events of children actually dying out of hunger. So, it is that extreme."
This drought has been longer and more intense than those seen before in the dry corridor, Castellanos said. The failure of critical springtime rains is also new, he said, and is causing such problems for farmers whose crops depend on that water.
Subsistence crops like corn and beans are all but dying. Our crew saw beans the size of Tic Tacs. And shriveled, partially blackened ears of corn could fit inside your palm.
Corn crops have been smaller than usual, leading to a hunger crisis.
Corn crops have been smaller than usual, leading to a hunger crisis.
Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection, said in a speech on Friday that drought and crop failures in Honduras and Guatemala "directly translate into who's arriving at our border."
Studies have not definitively tied this particular drought to climate change, but computer models show droughts like the one happening now are becoming more common as the world warms.
Thousands have risked their lives to flee these circumstances. And previously unpublished data shows people started leaving certain areas of Honduras amid crop failures -- even as homicide rates were declining.
Take Copán, the region of Honduras that Germán Ramírez fled in October.
In fiscal year 2012, around the start of the drought, only about 20 family members from Copán were apprehended by the US Border Patrol while trying to cross the US-Mexico border, according to a data analysis of records shared with CNN by Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at The University of Texas at Austin. Then drought hit, its cumulative effects growing as the years wore on. In 2017, about 1,450 family members from Copán were apprehended by US authorities at the border, the data show. In fiscal year 2018, with the data ending in September, the number of migrants picked up was more than 2,500. Those figures are "absolutely" an underestimation, said Leutert. "You're missing people who left Copán and went to big cities, you're missing people who left Copán and went to another place in the region, you're missing people who tried to go to the United States and didn't make it -- and you're missing people who went to the United States and crossed undetected."
The figure is a "baseline" that shows something big is happening, she said.
Any person's decision to abandon their homeland is complex. For some, violence is part of it. As is extreme poverty. In Central America, it's often a combination of things.
But there's another truth: This region is becoming less hospitable to farmers as more-industrialized countries burn loads of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. A December report shows the world is on track to create 37.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution in 2018 -- yet another record. This pollution traps heat and warms the planet, making cyclical weather events like droughts, floods and certain storms worse.
The United States, which is the destination for so many migrants fleeing Honduras, bears outsize responsibility for global warming. Cumulatively, the nation has done more to cause climate change since the Industrial Revolution than any other. Today, President Trump supports increased coal production and has pledged to abandon the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global warming to at most 2 degrees Celsius. A "rulebook" for that agreement is being debated this week at the COP24 conference in Katowice, Poland, with the United States on the sidelines.
Notably, Trump also has also made immigration his signature issues, rallying supporters around the idea of stopping people from Latin America, like Germán Ramírez, from crossing illegally into the United States. There's broad support for a crackdown on illegal immigration in the United States among Republican voters. A quarter of US midterm voters said that immigration was their No. 1 issue, and 75% of those voters were Republicans, according to a November exit poll. "Build that wall" has become a popular chant at Trump political rallies.
Federal authorities have met would-be migrants at the border near San Diego with tear gas. Officials say the tear-gassing occurred after migrants threw rocks at authorities.
Yet there's an unspoken irony here.
The nation that's become a destination for so many migrants -- a beacon of opportunity and hope --is contributing to the conditions forcing some people to abandon home.
'I was waiting for you like the rains in May'
Think of Central America like an island.
That's advice from Castellanos, the climate scientist in Guatemala.
He's not talking about just any old island. He's referencing the specks of land in the Pacific -- Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands -- whose very existence is threatened by rising sea levels that are linked to global warming. I visited the Marshall Islands in 2015 after readers of CNN's "Two Degrees" series voted for me to do a story on "climate refugees." Higher tides and increased flooding were already pushing people out -- and to Arkansas, of all places.
Crops have been failing in the "dry corridor" of Central America.
Crops have been failing in the "dry corridor" of Central America.
These little islands gained a huge voice at the United Nations climate talks in Paris in December of that year -- the predecessor to the talks happening now in Poland. Calling themselves the "High Ambition Coalition," island diplomats rallied with richer nations to make a moral case for climate action -- saying their sovereign territory would vanish if global temperatures were allowed to warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. That goal became embedded in the Paris Agreement. In order to achieve it, global carbon emissions would need to be cut in half in about a decade.

The climate problem in Central America isn't so much sea-level rise. But Castellanos told me an argument can be made that the region is nearly as susceptible to global warming. It is a slim stretch of land connecting North and South America -- a string of land between continents. That makes it vulnerable to storms coming from the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean. Climate change is supercharging those. Plus, climate models show both floods and droughts getting more intense. The United Nations Development Programme considers Honduras to be "highly vulnerable" to climate change, both now and in the future as the atmosphere continues to warm.
The dry corridor gets that name because it's long been dry, situated behind a mountain range that catches weather from the Caribbean. But the recent drought there has challenged notions about how bad a drought in Central America could be, Castellanos told me. Some areas have seen 10 consecutive months without rain. Spring rains have become unreliable in recent years, damaging crops
Data from the El Cuje weather station in southeastern Guatemala shows a drop off in rainfall for the surrounding regions over the spring and summers of 2014 and 2015 compared with historical information. The starkest difference appears in the months of May and June.
Jan.
April
July
Oct.
100
200
300
400 millimeters of rainfall
1950-2000
1950-2000
2014
2014
2015
2015 Central Americans have an expression -- "I was waiting for you like the rains in May." It references the fact that massive rains fall in May and June, like clockwork each year. Farmers plant their crops accordingly, counting on the spring rains to soak the plants and ensure a productive harvest. Many people here are subsistence farmers and can't afford irrigation systems. They're completely at the mercy of rains, and those rains aren't coming.
When they do come, they come all at once -- causing floods and damage.
"Here, unlike in the United States, we don't have a problem of convincing people" that climate change is real, Castellanos told me. "People are convinced by what they see."
Germán Ramírez, the farmer on the hilltop in Copán, lived through this. Then he heard the caravan was passing near his village. People believed that traveling together would provide safety. From Honduras to Guatemala to Mexico, the number would grow into the thousands. In mid-October, Ramírez fled Copán on foot, hoping to catch the caravan. He carried a small backpack with a few items of clothing, his wife said. In his pocket was a paper with a neighbor's telephone number on it.
That phone would ring in the village some time later.
It would not be Ramírez's voice on the phone.
And the news would not be good.
'We are losing most of the crops'
I came to meet the people left behind.
The location: several communities in the Copán Department of Honduras, near the Guatemala border. I'd chosen the place because of the data CNN analyzed with Stephanie Leutert, from the University of Texas.
The data, which tracks families apprehended at the US-Mexico border, does not prove on its own that people are fleeing Copán because of climate change. But the figures do support the idea that people newly started fleeing during that timeframe.
The first point is that the exodus from Copán has grown faster than in the rest of Honduras. In 2012, only 3.7% of Honduran migrants came from that area. By 2018, up to September, it was more than 9%. Meanwhile, the number of murders per year in Copán has been declining.
Again, this provides only a rough sketch of what's happening, Leutert said, but it is clear that climate change is one factor driving people from the region. "Climate change is reducing (crop) yields," she said. "It's like a tax. It's making things harder for people and industries that rely on weather stability. Sometimes climate change can push people over the edge and make it impossible (to survive). We see that with the coffee industry. That last added cost is making the business model unsustainable -- and pushing people to migrate."
Copán is a mountainous place of dense forest and sweeping valleys. In the morning, mist rises from the hills like steam, making it look like molten ripples of land have just cooled. By afternoon, clouds hang on the hilltops, threatening to rain but rarely cracking. Dried-up corn stalks, which look almost unrecognizable if you're used to the engineered, Midwestern variety, dart around at odd angles between rocks and patches of dirt, clinging to steep hillsides. The more fertile land is the valleys, where most crops grow. Even during the worst of the drought, some vegetation here is green and appears almost lush. But Castellanos and others told me it's the timing and amount of rain that's critical. And many months here are now totally dry.
What was it like to live in this place?
And how and when did people feel it was impossible to stay? The resident of this house in Copan, Honduras, emigrated. The area has seen its homicide rate go down while emigration to the US rises.
Our team drove south past a town that was abandoned by the Mayan people thousands of years ago and now is known for the remaining artifacts. Our tires kicked up dust from the path, coating every roadside fern in a film of beige.
At a construction site, Evelio Ochoa, 35, was pouring cement into the land -- helping build the foundation of a home for his niece. He's doing any odd job he can find these days. Years ago, he told me, he paid a coyote -- a smuggler -- to help him leave Honduras. His small plot of corn and bean crops had failed, he said. The coyote's price: 60,000 Lempiras, or about $2,500. He got the money from a relative, he said.
That price bought him three attempts to reach the United States.
He made the first attempt in 2014, he told me, amid record drought.
The second was earlier this year.
Both times he was deported, he said.
If he failed a third time, there would be no money to try again.
"You don't fear for yourself, you fear for your family," Ochoa said of setting out on the journey. "The moment you step out of the house and start walking it's difficult -- not because of the danger but because you miss your family" and are thinking about their safety.
In September, Ochoa said, authorities caught him a third time.
He finds himself back in Honduras, struggling to feed his family. Ochoa's wife, Nora Vazques, said she and their five children would have starved if a relative hadn't been sending money from the United States. The 33-year-old mother, whose children are ages 1 to 12, showed me a basket of unusable black corn kernels, picked from a rotten crop.
"Before, the rain was much better," she said standing in the shadow of her doorway, the midday light half-illuminating her face. Her hand shook as she wiped away tears.
"He grew a lot of corn" back then, she said. "Now we are losing most of the crops."
'This is an injustice'
Lisandro Mauricio Arias is mayor of the town the Mayans abandoned.
We met at the town square, which is surrounded by tile roofs and palm trees. Copán Ruinas is a tourist destination that boasts several quaint hotels, but the town has seen better times. For that reason, I figured Arias might downplay the outmigration that data shows is occurring here -- that he might have an incentive to say the drought hasn't been so bad.
He didn't do that.
The town is emptying out, he told me.
How many people have left?
His guess: 30%.
He regrets that, but says it may be the only way.
"When analyzing precipitation levels, we can see they have changed a lot -- which is really alarming," he said. "Problems associated with drought will get worse."
"We respect the decisions the United States is making," he added. "It's their country, and they have the right to defend it. However, I believe they need to take into consideration the human factor -- what is humanity? These people are not trying to meddle. [They are] looking for an opportunity to survive."
Among those people are the sons of Mariano and Gregoria Perez.
The two young men, ages 19 and 26, are stuck in Tijuana, Mexico, according to their family in Honduras. Their parents have only been able to speak with them two or three times, they said, because phone credit is so expensive. (I was unable to reach them.)
Two of Gregoria Perez's sons left Honduras in the migrant "caravan."
Two of Gregoria Perez's sons left Honduras in the migrant "caravan."
What the men's parents know are only the barest of details. One son was mugged and lost all of his belongings, including his passport, according to Mariano Perez, 55. Gregoria said she told the boys they could come back home. Secretly, though, the family worries. The young men have crossed international borders illegally already. Could they come back?
"I would say that this is an injustice because they did not do anything wrong," said Gregoria Perez, who, like her husband, said the boys left because farming wasn't viable amid the drought, and there were no other options. "They want to find work to sustain themselves."
I sat down outside to talk with her husband as the sun was setting. He sat on a small wooden stool and I was on the ground. The angle and time of night rendered his face in silhouette.
Mariano Perez told me his sons heard about the caravan on TV and left the same day. The father was down the hill helping a neighbor build a fence. He didn't know they'd left until he returned home that night. He doesn't fault them for it. He knew why they left, of course: drought.
What bothers him is where they are now.
He worries they're hungry in Tijuana, as they were here.
He worries they may not make it across the border.
Sometimes, in his darker moments, he wonders if this is what God predicted in the book of Revelations -- the end of the world, happening slowly and before his eyes.
The next morning, I woke up to find my news feed full of images of tent camps in Tijuana.
It had started raining on the migrants.
"I feel like a street dog," one man told the Los Angeles Times.
"Wet and cold and with no place to go."
Corn crops, shown here, and beans are among the staple foods in the area.
Corn crops, shown here, and beans are among the staple foods in the area.
'Migration with dignity'
I didn't say this to the lonesome father, but it's the reality: His sons have very little chance of settling lawfully in the United States if they are able to cross the border.
That's because there's no legal status for "climate refugees."
The rules that govern the rights of refugees were developed in the aftermath of World War II and during the early Cold War, when western countries like the United States had an interest in protecting people who were persecuted in the communist Soviet Union, Alexander Betts and Paul Collier write in "Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy for a Changing World."Only a few specific groups were protected -- those fleeing persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political beliefs or social group. The 1951 UN refugee convention says people meeting those criteria should be able to seek asylum outside their home states.
Other types of migration -- including people seeking economic opportunity or those fleeing climate change -- are not protected in a similarly codified way.
Those people are typically not "refugees" in the legal sense.
They're migrants. And if they cross borders, they may break national laws.
Not everyone believes that should be so.
Anote Tong, the former president of Kiribati, one of the small island nations in the Pacific, has advocated for what he calls "migration with dignity" -- the opportunity for people from climate-affected areas to relocate if that makes their lives safer or gets them out of danger.
"There's no harm in being prepared," he told me in an interview this fall.
Coffee producers are major employers in the region, and also have struggled.
Coffee producers are major employers in the region, and also have struggled.
That idea runs against the current of nationalism sweeping the globe. From the United States to Hungary, Australia to Denmark, countries have been fortifying walls, filling detention centers and even detaining asylum seekers on castaway islands -- not welcoming them. The United States is accepting far fewer refugees than it has in most years in recent memory.
Attempting to add a "climate refugee" category in international law could pose problems of its own. Among them: How do you define who is and is not a climate refugee? Scientists are getting better at finding human fingerprints on heatwaves, droughts and storms that are being supercharged by global warming. But this is a realm of probabilities and complexities. It's difficult to say, with certainty, "climate change made me move." Then there are political concerns, as well. Some scholars argue it's politically dangerous to try to amend international refugee conventions because this is such an anti-refugee moment in history. The process could lead to refugee rights being stripped instead of added. Others contend that the UN refugee convention is so rarely followed that it's almost irrelevant anyway, especially after the 2015 migrant crisis in Europe.
"If you were to create this whole new category and give people grounds to apply for asylum based on climate, you're likely to get an enormous number of people applying because it's so ill-defined," said Steven Camarota, director of research at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies. "How much below-average rainfall does the rainfall have to be in your region before you're a climate refugee? At present, the primary receiving countries already are experiencing tremendous resistance to the current level of asylees and refugees. It doesn't seem like resettling people in developed counties is going to be much of an answer to this problem. ... A much more effective use of resources is always to help people in place."
It's also unclear that climate change is the main reason people are fleeing Central America, he said; the "pull factors" of wealth and opportunity in the United States may be more important.
"You can think of climate change as one of the push factors," he said, "but it isn't the reason we get the caravan, per se. And it's also important to understand if people were just starving, and they were desperately fleeing the total breakdown of the food chain, why travel 1,500 miles across Mexico to the US border? Mexico has lots of places you could stop to get basic sustenance."
A 2018 report from the World Bank proposes two additional solutions.
First, cut carbon emissions, which is the aim of the Paris Agreement.
Second, help would-be migrants adapt to the warmer world. The international Green Climate Fund, which President Trump promised to walk away from, too, has approved projects to help farmers in Central America to become more productive, blunting the force of drought. USAID also has supported irrigation and farming projects in the region, according to a federal official. The precise circumstances are unclear to her. Perhaps he was hit by a car while walking along the highway. Perhaps he was hitching a ride in a car that crashed. These are the stories people have relayed. What she knows for sure is that he died October 20 near Guatemala City.
Cause of death: severe trauma.
Authorities were able to bring his body back to the village; she is thankful for that. She buried him on the slope of a mountain above the town, in the same earth he used to till.
She doesn't know what exactly will become of her family now.
She hasn't been farming, hasn't been able to.
The nonprofit World Vision has had to help with food.
But when she looks at her youngest child, she finds hope.
He is 3 years old -- and named Germán, like his father, and grandfather, too.
Will he farm this same land? I asked her.
Yes, she told me.
"I imagine he will be just like his dad."
Carlos Duarte contributed to this report from Honduras.

Border Patrol numbers show another jump in the number of children held for more than 10 days
By Priscilla Alvarez, CNN
Updated 7:18 AM ET, Mon March 22, 2021
SOTU Mayorkas full_00000000
Full interview with Secretary Mayorkas on border surge 10:25
Washington (CNN)More than 800 unaccompanied migrant children have been in Border Patrol custody for more than 10 days, according to documents reviewed by CNN, marking yet another jump in the number of children held longer than federal law permits.

As of Sunday, there were 822 children held in Border Patrol facilities, akin to jail-like conditions, for over 10 days, the documents show. The number of kids held for a prolonged period of time has climbed almost daily as the administration races to find shelter to accommodate them and amid constraints related to the coronavirus pandemic.
The average time in custody for unaccompanied children continues to hover around 130 hours, exceeding the 72-hour legal limit, though the number of children in Customs and Border Protection custody dropped slightly to just under 4,900, documents show.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, when pressed by CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union" Sunday, would not provide a timeline on when children at the border will be housed in more humane conditions, only saying it would be "as soon as possible."Mayorkas told Bash that the Biden administration is "working around the clock to move those children out of the Border Patrol facilities into the care and custody of the Department of Health and Human Services that shelters them.""I have said repeatedly from the very outset that a Border Patrol station is no place for a child," the secretary said.
CNN previously reported that children are alternating schedules to make space for one another in confined facilities, some kids haven't seen sunlight in days and others are taking turns showering, often going days without one, according to case managers, attorneys and Border Patrol agents.
Bunk beds have been brought in to one of the processing facilities to help accommodate the influx of children, with one agent saying children are also sleeping on plastic cots and mats on the floor and benches. Officials told CNN they expected the number of migrants arriving at the US border would swell once they took office -- given their drastically different approach to immigration compared to former President Donald Trump's -- but that they did not anticipate a surge this big.
President Joe Biden said Sunday that he would visit the border "at some point" and maintained, "I know what's going on in those facilities" when asked if he wanted to see the situation first hand.
CNN's Devan Cole contributed to this report.

The US may never reach herd immunity. It may not need to
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN
Updated 6:59 PM ET, Tue May 4, 2021

Covid cases are down. Deaths are down. States are opening up. Governors are getting creative to encourage younger Americans to get the shot -- with $100 checks or beer.

Some experts are wondering if the US will ever reach herd immunity, but everyone is trying to figure out how to normalize life anyway.
What's below is taken from various reports by CNN's Health team.
Dramatic fall in cases and deaths. From CNN's report: The weekly average of daily Covid-19 deaths is more than 660, according to Johns Hopkins University data. In mid-January, that seven-day average was roughly 3,400 deaths daily.
And the country has averaged more than 49,400 new Covid-19 cases daily in the past week, according to Johns Hopkins. On January 8, the country averaged more than 251,000 cases every day -- the highest seven-day average of the pandemic.
Track Covid cases here.
What would herd immunity be? CNN's Jen Christensen writes: "As with any disease, how many people need to be immune to provide community protection depends on how infectious it is. For Covid-19, experts think the magic number could be anywhere between 70 to 90% of a population immune to the virus. The world is nowhere near that level."

Step one: vaccinations. Vaccinations have been the key to bringing US case counts down, according to experts and there are coming changes in how vaccinations will be allocated and who will be eligible.
For seniors. Most older Americans have been vaccinated -- 83% of Americans over 65 have had one dose and 70% are fully vaccinated.
For adults. The White House announced Tuesday a new, more ambitious goal to get 70% of US adults at least one vaccination shot by July 4 and 160 million people -- half the country -- fully vaccinated by then.

Current status. 56% of the adult population has one shot and 40% -- about 105 million people -- are fully vaccinated. But the rate of vaccination is slowing.
The federal government will divert more vaccine to local pharmacies, pop up clinics, mobile clinics and push immediate walk-in appointments.
I went to an indoor mall for the first time in a year and found an empty storefront taken over by a vaccination site. They were grabbing people near the food court.
The Biden administration will also push new vaccine allocations to rural health clinics, spend on outreach for rural Americans. It will change its allocation process in another way, shifting more supply to states with higher demand.

For teens. The FDA will likely issue emergency approval for the the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for use in kids 12-15 next week. That starts a process to amend the emergency use authorization for these kids.
For kids. Pfizer said it plans to ask the FDA for emergency use authorization to use its vaccine in kids 2-11 in September.
An ongoing study on pregnant women could wrap in July or August, according to CNN's report.
Young people affected by new variants. In Oregon, Democratic Gov. Kate Brown said younger people were showing up in her state's hospitals. She issued new Covid restrictions and told young people it's their responsibility to get vaccinated.

Free beer. Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy even announced the state also plans to offer a free beer to anyone over the age of 21 who shows their completed vaccination card at thirteen participating breweries throughout the state. The campaign is called "A shot and a beer." Get it?
Free money. Republican West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice wants to offer people 16-35 a $100 savings bond and said state officials will be targeting young people on social media.
"If we have to go door-to-door, we'll go door-to-door," Justice said in a statement.

The herd immunity approach won't work long-term. We don't know how long immunity from either exposure or vaccination will last. It could require periodic boosters or an annual vaccine like the flu. Here's a video on what we don't know about Covid reinfection from CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen.
Note: A booster would not require full reauthorization, FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said Monday.
There will be a re-surge. Here's Wen on the danger of too few people getting vaccinated now, when cases are down, particularly since the virus is mutating and changing in places where it is running rampant.

"What I really worry about is that those people who are already on the fence don't get vaccinated (and) we don't reach herd immunity come the fall," she said over the weekend.
"And then with the winter ... we have a big resurgence, maybe we have variants coming in from other countries, and we could start this whole process all over again and have another huge pandemic come the winter."
Herd immunity is hard to do. Lauren Ancel Meyers runs the Covid-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas and she ticked off for CNN the reasons the US and the world may never get there.
Vaccinating so many people would be nearly impossible;
this particular virus spreads too rapidly;
more contagious variants threaten to make vaccines less effective;
there are entire countries and pockets of the US that have few fully vaccinated people;
there are vaccine access and equity issues;
children are not yet vaccinated;
and about a quarter of the population is hesitant or unwilling to get vaccinated.
The US may never reach herd immunity. But! Most people will still be able to get back to their pre-pandemic lives if case numbers continue to fall, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Health, told CNN on Monday.
"We may not get to zero, we probably won't," Jha said. "But if we can get the infections at very low levels, most of us can get back to our lives in normal ways. I think we can probably live with that."
Israel has achieved extremely low case rates with a 50% vaccination rate. The more vaccinations, the closer the experts say we'll be to normal, even if it's not technically controlled.
Just be free. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an order Monday to make it impossible for local governments in the state -- where about 27.5% of the population has been vaccinated -- to implement their own restrictions, arguing the falling case counts and deaths mean restrictions are no longer necessary. His move drew criticism from officials in Miami and Orange County.

🤷🏾‍♂️🤷🏾‍♂️
Texas judge mulls whether to dismiss NRA's bankruptcy petition
By Sonia Moghe, CNN
Updated 6:58 AM ET, Tue May 4, 2021
Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president and chief executive officer of the NRA, arrives prior to a speech by President Donald Trump at the National Rifle Association Annual Meeting at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, April 26, 2019.
Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president and chief executive officer of the NRA, arrives prior to a speech by President Donald Trump at the National Rifle Association Annual Meeting at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, April 26, 2019.
(CNN)For nearly a month, attorneys have argued over whether the National Rifle Association's petition to file for bankruptcy in Texas should be dismissed, and whether its business dealings should be overseen by a court-appointed trustee or an examiner.

The virtual trial in a North Texas bankruptcy court included testimony from top current and former NRA officials, including Chief Executive Officer Wayne LaPierre, who testified on April 7 that he had kept news of the impending bankruptcy filing from the NRA's own general counsel, chief financial officer and other salaried NRA officials.

New York Attorney General Letitia James' office asked US Bankruptcy Judge Harlin Hale to dismiss the bankruptcy petition, saying it had been filed as a way to "remove the NRA from regulatory oversight."
Texas attorney Gerrit Pronske, who is representing James' office in court, argued during closing arguments on Monday that the bankruptcy filing should be dismissed for being filed in "bad faith," pointing to a public letter to NRA members on the day the organization filed for bankruptcy in which LaPierre wrote: "The NRA is not 'bankrupt' or 'going out of business.' "
"We are as financially strong as we have been in years," the letter signed by LaPierre read.
Gregory Garman, an attorney for the NRA, argued Monday that the organization has $40 million in "unfunded future litigation." But Pronske countered that financial statements showed the NRA has "plenty of cash on hand."

"I would submit, as a part of a good faith filing, you have to have some problems with your financial condition and you have to have debt issues either now or in the foreseeable future," Pronske said. "The NRA does not have a debt problem ... it has a regulatory problem."
James' office has asked Hale to dismiss the bankruptcy case with prejudice, so that the NRA cannot refile for bankruptcy in another venue.
'Exodus from New York'
The NRA's headquarters is in Fairfax ,Virginia, but it's been incorporated in the state of New York since shortly after the Civil War -- for 150 years. In January, the NRA filed for bankruptcy and as part of its petition sought to be reincorporated in Texas, a move that came five months after James' office filed a suit seeking to dissolve the organization.
James' office alleged the organization violated New York laws governing nonprofits by routinely going around the organization's internal controls to take part in spending that was "inappropriate and wasteful use of charitable assets."
The suit alleges NRA leadership used millions from the group's reserves to fund lavish trips on private jets, meals and other personal expenses and that money was diverted to benefit NRA insiders and favored vendors, that LaPierre handpicked associates to "facilitate his misuse of charitable assets" and that the NRA board did not follow an appropriate process to determine "reasonable" compensation for NRA executives, including LaPierre.

LaPierre testified during the 12-day-long bankruptcy trial that he currently makes $1.3 million, after taking a 20% pay reduction "voluntarily" when the organization had to make cuts to other employees' salaries last year.
"I think my compensation has always been reasonable," LaPierre testified on Thursday.
He also testified that he believes the NRA "is in a much better place today."
"I think it's stronger. I think the controls are stronger," LaPierre testified. "I think the possibility of any overrides of controls are not gonna happen. The protections are in place. I feel very good about where we are."

James' office argued that if Hale does not dismiss the NRA's bankruptcy petition, he should appoint a trustee to monitor the financial operations of the organization, saying that "there is evidence of fraud, dishonesty, incompetence and mismanagement" by current leadership.
Garman denied on Monday that the NRA's bankruptcy filing was a strategy to avoid the New York attorney general's litigation and pointed to a letter from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo directing his administration to urge companies to "weigh reputational risks" for business ties with the NRA in 2018.
"This is the beginning of our exodus from New York," Garman said Monday. "Because public policy permits us to be in a place where we can exercise our Constitutional rights."
Precedent-setting case
If the NRA's bankruptcy petition is approved it would set a "dangerous" precedent by not allowing the New York attorney general's case against the organization to go forward, said Brian Mason, an attorney arguing on behalf of the NRA's largest creditor, advertising firm Ackerman McQueen.
"If this case is not dismissed, your honor, it's going to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of federalism. It will throw gasoline on the ideological fires that are already raging out of control in this country," Mason said.
Pronske, who has practiced bankruptcy law for 38 years, called the NRA's filing the "worst abuse" of bankruptcy law he's ever seen, and said that if the case is not dismissed it would be a court precedent "instruction booklet" on how to file Chapter 11 "with complete impunity and with complete success."
"If this case is not dismissed, your honor, you would be telegraphing that if you don't like what's going on in your state court lawsuit, come on down to Dallas," Pronske argued.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story contained a transcription error in a quote from attorney Gregory Garman.

Trump allies worry Giuliani raid sent 'strong message' to ex-President's inner circle
By Gabby Orr
Updated 1:30 PM ET, Sat May 1, 2021 A Wednesday raid by federal agents of an apartment and office belonging to former New York City mayor and one-time Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has left allies of the former President feeling uneasy about what could come next, according to sources close to Trump.

"This was a show of force that sent a strong message to a lot of people in Trump's world that other things may be coming down the pipeline," one Trump adviser told CNN.
The searches, which Giuliani and his attorney Robert Costello have criticized as unnecessary due to what they claim is his ongoing cooperation with investigators, were linked to a criminal probe of the former mayor's business dealings in Ukraine and resulted in the seizure of several communications devices.
According to the Trump adviser, the raid ignited a sense of fear inside the former President's orbit that Justice Department officials may be more willing to pursue investigations of the 45th president or his inner circle than many Trump allies had previously believed. Two other people close to the former President, who echoed these sentiments, declined to be quoted for this story.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James is currently conducting a civil probe into allegations that the Trump Organization improperly inflated and deflated the value of its assets for tax purposes. Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. "I can't for the life of me think why you would need to send seven FBI agents to go and collect a cellphone and laptop," said the adviser, who also described the Giuliani raid as "overkill."
But the raid has also raised the question of whether Giuliani's seemingly steadfast loyalty to Trump could withstand the weight of potential criminal charges. Giuliani has not been charged and has denied any wrongdoing.
"Even the most loyal people have their breaking point," said a person close to the former President. The Trump adviser separately added that a potential shift in Giuliani's fealty to his former client "wouldn't shock me at all."I think we've seen some more surprising instances of things like that happening, especially with Michael Cohen," the person close to Trump said.
Indeed, longtime Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who once said he would be willing to "take a bullet" for his former boss, became a self-avowed Trump critic in 2018 after he flipped on the then-President following an FBI raid of his own home, office and hotel room. The raid was part of a probe led by the US Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, which later resulted in charges of tax fraud, false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations that Cohen pleaded guilty to.

During an appearance on CNN earlier this week, Cohen himself speculated that Giuliani could "give up Donald in a heartbeat" if faced with an indictment.
"Prior to Donald becoming president, Rudy didn't like Donald and Donald didn't like Rudy," Cohen claimed. "He certainly doesn't want to follow my path down into a 36-month sentence."
A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to CNN's request for comment in time for publication.
In an email to CNN, Costello said the former mayor "has done nothing wrong" and claimed that Giuliani has repeatedly offered "to answer any questions the SDNY might have about anything including crimes, attempted crimes, conspiracy to commit crimes, (or) aiding and abetting crimes."
In a statement released by Costello earlier this week, Giuliani denied any wrongdoing and claimed the search warrants that resulted in raids of his office and apartment indicated a "corrupt double standard" by the Justice Department in its treatment of Trump associates versus Democrats.
"Republicans who are prominent supporters and defenders of President Trump... are subjected to false charges and procedures used in the past, if at all, in cases involving terrorists and organized criminals," read the statement.

Steel prices have tripled. Now Bank of America is sounding the alarm
By Matt Egan, CNN Business
Updated 2:40 PM ET, Thu May 6, 2021 A bubble could be brewing in steel stocks.

The pandemic brought the American steel industry to its knees last spring, forcing manufacturers to shut down production as they struggled to survive the imploding economy. But as the recovery got underway, mills were slow to resume production, and that created a massive steel shortage.
Now, the reopening of the economy is driving a steel boom so strong that some are convinced it will end in tears.
The correction will be very intense. It's just a matter of when and how it happens."
PHIL GIBBS, DIRECTOR OF METALS EQUITY RESEARCH AT KEYBANC CAPITAL MARKETS
"This is going to be short-lived. It's very appropriate to call this a bubble," Bank of America analyst Timna Tanners told CNN Business, using the "b-word" that equity analysts from major banks typically avoid.
After bottoming out around $460 last year, US benchmark hot-rolled coil steel prices are now sitting at around $1,500 a ton, a record high that is nearly triple the 20-year average.

Steel stocks are on fire. US Steel (X), which crashed to a record low last March amid bankruptcy fears, has skyrocketed 200% in just 12 months. Nucor (NUE) has spiked 76% this year alone.
While "scarcity and panic" are lifting steel prices and stocks today, Tanners predicted a painful reversal as supply catches up with what she described as unimpressive demand.
"We expect this will correct — and often when it corrects, it over-corrects," said Tanners, a two-decade veteran of the metals industry who authored a report last week headlined "Steel stocks in a bubble."'A bit frothy'
Phil Gibbs, director of metals equity research at KeyBanc Capital Markets, agreed that steel prices are at unsustainable levels.
"This would be like $170-a-barrel oil. At some point, people will say, 'F this, I'm not going to drive, I will take the bus,'" Gibbs told CNN Business. "The correction will be very intense. It's just a matter of when and how it happens."
New homes cost $36,000 more because of an epic shortage of lumber
New homes cost $36,000 more because of an epic shortage of lumber
Gibbs said he is "more confident the steel price is in a bubble," rather than that steel stocks themselves are in a bubble.
The steel bubble buzz is just the latest debate about the sustainability of booming pockets of the market in this era of rock-bottom interest rates. Bitcoin, ethereum, dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies are on fire. GameStop (GME), AMC (AMC) and their fellow Reddit-fueled stocks skyrocketed earlier this year. And blank-check companies, some backed by celebrities, are raising gobs of money.
Even Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has acknowledged the risk of overspeculation.
"You are seeing things in capital markets that are a bit frothy," Powell said during last week's press conference. "That's a fact. I won't say it has nothing to do with monetary policy, but also it has a tremendous amount to do with vaccination and reopening of the economy."
Yet another shortage as the economy reopens
Steel is just the latest shortage to hit the US economy as it recovers from a pandemic that scrambled supply chains and set off sharp shifts in demand.
Everything from computer chips and lumber to chlorine and tanker truck drivers are in short supply. Manufacturers, restaurants and other businesses are also desperate for workers.
Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency warned this week that there isn't enough copper, lithium and other raw earth minerals available to make global clean energy ambitions a reality. The world risks "running out of copper," Bank of America strategists said in a recent note to clients. Much like lumber, the steel industry was caught off guard by the rapid recovery in demand that began last summer — especially in the auto industry.
"All of a sudden people were buying lots of cars," said Tanners, the Bank of America analyst.
And it took time for America's aging steel mills to resume the production they had sharply cut at the onset of the pandemic. Steel inventories shrank rapidly and shipments were delayed, just as steel buyers began ordering more than usual.
'Peak' prices?
The good news, for steel buyers at least, is that analysts say all of the US steel production capacity that was idled during the pandemic has returned.
That's why Tanners said she's very confident the shortage will soon end, causing steel prices to collapse. History shows that steel stocks "tend to peak" a month or so before steel prices, Tanners wrote in her report.
She said US Steel in particular is vulnerable to a commodity downturn because it has the most amount of debt and the greatest need to spend to upgrade its plants. But for now, steel stocks may continue to look attractive to investors because the industry is minting money at the moment. The North American flat steel sector is expected to generate record earnings in 2021, according to Citigroup.
"Current steel prices are peak (or close to it) ... and will correct sharply lower at some point," Citi analyst Alexander Hacking wrote in a note to clients Wednesday. "The current scenario presents investors with the classic peak earnings dilemma."
Hacking warned though that steel stocks can't escape a commodity downturn. "We can recall exactly zero examples where steel equities have gone up during 25%+ metal price corrections," he wrote.
The fate of Trump's tariffs
Of course, those predicting a steel downturn may be underestimating the strength of the global economic recovery. A longer lasting boom could lift steel demand enough to keep prices lofty. Another risk is whether tougher environmental regulations in China will limit steel supply there.
One big wildcard is the fate of the tariffs on most imported steel the Trump administration imposed in 2018 to boost the domestic industry.
If the Biden administration rolls back even just some of those tariffs, it would ease supply constraints and weigh on steel prices.
Tanners thinks that is likely to happen in the next 12 months.
"We are protecting an industry where there is scarcity and prices are almost triple historical averages," she said.

Fact check: Here's what Florida's new elections law actually does
By Daniel Dale
Updated 5:10 PM ET, Fri May 7, 2021

Washington (CNN)On Thursday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an elections bill that makes it more difficult to vote.

The Florida law is part of a cross-country Republican effort -- in the wake of President Donald Trump's lies about the integrity of the 2020 election -- to impose new restrictions on voter access.
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DeSantis said Thursday that the new law will make Florida elections more secure. But Florida elections were already highly secure: DeSantis boasted in November about how well the 2020 general election had gone, saying Florida was now being seen as "the state that did it right and that other states should emulate," while Republican Secretary of State Laurel Lee, a DeSantis appointee, said in December that her department had "successfully administered three safe, secure and orderly elections" in 2020.
County elections supervisors from both parties have criticized various provisions of the new law. Voting rights activists, some of whom have already filed lawsuits, say the new law is an undemocratic effort to suppress the votes of racial minorities and others.
We can't list every provision of a 48-page bill. But since elections laws tend to be the subject of furious political spin, here is a simple look at 10 of the law's most significant provisions.
Limits on drop boxes
The law reduces the number of hours that ballot drop boxes can be made available to voters.
The law says drop boxes can only be used during early voting hours, other than boxes located at an office of a local elections supervisor. This means that, except at supervisors' offices, drop boxes are allowed for a maximum of 12 hours per day. Previous Florida law did not limit the hours drop box could be open, though the DeSantis administration sent out controversial instructions in October 2020 that tried to insist on hours limits.
The new requirement to match drop box hours to early voting hours, except for boxes at supervisors' offices, also means reductions in the number of days the boxes can be open. For example, boxes not at supervisors' offices can no longer be open on Election Day or the day before, since Florida ends its early voting period two days before Election Day.

The law also requires that each drop box be monitored in person by an employee of the supervisor's office; previous law only said they had to be "secure." (Drop boxes are very secure without in-person monitoring; many counties around the country use video surveillance.) And the law creates a vague requirement about where counties need to put their drop boxes, saying boxes "must be geographically located so as to provide all voters in the county with an equal opportunity to cast a ballot, insofar as is practicable." One Republican elections supervisor, Alan Hays of Lake County, told CNN that he has "no idea" what that wording means. The law says that if "any" drop box is left accessible to voters in a manner that violates the new rules, the supervisor is subject to a civil penalty of up to $25,000.
Double the work required to apply for mail-in ballots
The law requires Florida voters to do extra labor to obtain mail-in ballots.
Under the previous law, a voter had to file just one application to get a mail-in ballot for every election during two election cycles. In other words, under the previous law, a Florida resident could have filed an application in 2021 to get a mail-in ballot for both the 2022 congressional midterms and the 2024 presidential election. Now, a voter's application gets them a mail-in ballot for a single election cycle. So an application filed in 2021 would obtain a 2022 ballot but not a 2024 ballot as well.
The new law does include a grandfather clause. Voters who filed applications before the 2020 election will still get mail-in ballots for the 2022 election as previously planned.
New voter ID requirements
The law requires voters to provide a form of identification -- their driver's license number, Florida identification card number, or last four digits of their Social Security number -- to obtain a mail-in ballot. (Florida already had identification requirements for in-person voting.) Under the old law, a voter could file a change of address by calling an elections supervisor and providing their date of birth. Now, the voter making that call has to provide both their date of birth and one of the above kinds of identification.
A limit on ballot collection
The law makes it a first-degree misdemeanor to possess or deliver more than two mail-in ballots per election, other than a voter's own ballot and the ballots of "immediate" family members. In other words, it is now a crime for someone in Florida to drop off the sealed ballots of, say, two elderly neighbors and a disabled cousin, or two nieces and a nephew who work long hours and don't have cars. (There is an exception for ballots collected during supervised voting periods at nursing homes and assisted living facilities.)
DeSantis said this provision is aimed at preventing political operatives from collecting large numbers of ballots to submit, a practice DeSantis and other Republicans describe as "ballot harvesting." The previous law already prohibited people from getting paid to deliver more than two ballots other than their own and those of immediate family members, but that previous law let volunteers deliver an unlimited quantity of ballots.
A restriction on unsolicited mail-in ballots
The law says state and local governments are not allowed to send a voter a mail-in ballot unless the voter has requested one. (There are exceptions for ballots sent to overseas voters and voters with disabilities, and for local referenda.) In 2020, because of the coronavirus pandemic, some state officials around the country decided to send out mail-in ballots to registered voters without requiring a request.
A ban on donations to elections agencies
The bill prohibits agencies and elections officials from accepting a donation from an individual or non-governmental entity to fund election-related expenses, voter education, voter outreach or voter registration. (There is an exception for donations of space to be used as a voting site.)
Similar prohibitions are being promoted by Republicans in other states. They appear to be, at least in part, a response to hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020 donations from Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. Some Republicans called the donations inappropriate, while some local elections officials said the money was needed to fund changes necessitated by the pandemic.
Broadened restrictions on "solicitation"
The law broadens Florida's restrictions on the "solicitation" of voters within 150 feet of voting locations.
The law adds drop boxes to the list of voting locations covered by the 150-foot no-solicitation zone. And the new law says illegal solicitation in the 150-foot zone includes not only seeking votes, seeking signatures and handing out leaflets but "engaging in any activity with the intent to influence or effect of influencing a voter."
The new law does not explicitly ban people from giving out food and drink to voters within the 150-foot zone. But since even giving out a cup of water might well be perceived by some as an activity with the intent to influence a voter, the law could deter people from providing such refreshments within the zone. (The law says nonpartisan staff or volunteers working with local elections supervisors are permitted to hand items to voters.)
A mandatory warning about registration efforts
The law requires any third-party organization that conducts voter registration work to tell residents that the organization might not deliver their application on time for the next election, and to also explain to residents that they can submit a registration form on their own rather than relying on the group to send it in.
Voter registration groups say this mandatory warning will reduce trust in their efforts and make it more difficult for them to get people registered.
More rights for partisan observers
The law says that a candidate, party official, political committee official or a designate of these people has to be given "reasonable access," if they request it, to "review or inspect ballot materials" -- before votes are counted. The law says these ballot materials include "voter certificates on vote-by-mail envelopes, cure affidavits, corresponding comparison signatures, duplicate ballots, and corresponding originals."
Hays, the Republican supervisor in Lake County, noted that a single ballot might include more than 15 different races. He said it doesn't make sense to allow so many people into the room with elections staffers while they are doing critical high-intensity work.
"The worst possible time to have a conflict in an elections office is in the last three weeks of an election," Hays said. He said he intends to define "reasonable access" as allowing the partisan observers to watch the proceedings from outside the room -- through large interior windows and on a 55-inch television screen. "We have nothing to hide but we will not allow the administration of the election to be interrupted," he said.
Increased vacancy-filling power for the governor
The new law eliminates the previous requirement that an election be held to replace a local official who resigns to run for another office. Under the new law, the governor gets the power to fill these "resign-to-run" vacancies.
This provision may have an immediate impact, since county commissioners from heavily Democratic Broward County are among the candidates running to fill the congressional vacancy left by the April death of Rep. Alcee Hastings.

Wyoming state senator running against Cheney for House seat reveals he impregnated 14-year-old when he was 18
By Daniella Diaz, CNN
Updated 1:37 PM ET, Sat May 22, 2021
Wyoming state Sen. Anthony Bouchard, R-Cheyenne, who is challenging Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) in the primary race, speaks to supporters after a rally against Cheney on January 28, 2021, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Wyoming state Sen. Anthony Bouchard, R-Cheyenne, who is challenging Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) in the primary race, speaks to supporters after a rally against Cheney on January 28, 2021, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
(CNN)A Republican Wyoming state senator who's running against US Rep. Liz Cheney for her House seat told a local newspaper he impregnated a 14-year-old girl when he was 18-years-old after he referenced the incident during a Facebook Live stream.

Anthony Bouchard told the Casper Star-Tribune newspaper on Thursday he married the girl after she turned 15 when they were both living in Florida.
He said they were able to get married at the time because under Florida law, a judge could approve the marriage if a pregnancy was involved and a parent consented. The state of Florida put a ban on child marriage into law in 2018, with some narrow exceptions for 17-year-olds.
The news came after he jumped on Facebook Live earlier Thursday to disclose this part of his life because he was made aware of a "political opposition research company" and unnamed reporter who were investigating him.
"It was a story when I was young, two teenagers, girl gets pregnant, you've heard those stories before," he said in the Facebook Live video. "She was a little younger than me, so it's like Romeo and Juliet story. A lot of pressure, pressure to abort a baby. I'm going to tell you, I wasn't going to do it."

Bouchard said in the Facebook Live video that he's since "almost become" estranged from his son but added, "I still love him."
Bouchard did not immediately respond to CNN's request for comment Saturday.
He told the Star-Tribune after the live stream that they got divorced three years after they married and said his former wife killed herself when she was 20.
He said this disclosure won't stop him from running for office.
"Bring it on," he said in the Facebook Live video. "I'm going to stay in this race, we're going to continue to raise money, because my record stands on its own."CNN previously reported that Bouchard and Wyoming state Rep. Chuck Gray have so far offered themselves up as pro-Donald Trump candidates for the GOP nomination in this heavily Republican congressional seat and have unapologetically backed Trump's baseless electoral claims, which Cheney has warned are a grave threat to democracy.
But Cheney still has significant support, and some Wyoming Republican political operatives who are not aligned with any candidate don't view Bouchard or Gray to be strong candidates.

Washington (CNN)President Joe Biden will host the family of George Floyd at the White House on Tuesday to mark the one-year anniversary of his death at the hands of police, a White House official confirmed to CNN.

The White House visit comes as lawmakers are likely to miss the President's initial May 25 deadline for passing a bipartisan police reform bill. Press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that the White House has "confidence in the negotiators," but did not offer a concrete timeline for when Biden wants a bill on his desk, saying only that he'd like it "as quickly as possible."
Biden first met with the Floyd family in June 2020 when he traveled to Houston to offer condolences ahead of George Floyd's funeral. The President has spoken to members of the family on a few occasions over the past year, including a conversation last month with George Floyd's brother, Philonise Floyd, after a jury convicted former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the killing.
Psaki had said this week that the White House will commemorate the anniversary of Floyd's death, telling reporters that "it was a moment that impacted millions of Americans and certainly the President on a personal level."
Biden had set May 25 -- the anniversary of George Floyd's death -- as his goal during his joint address to Congress in April, Psaki said, "because he feels it's important to be bold, to be ambitious, and that's exactly what he feels we're hopefully working toward."
But with the House entering a work period on Thursday and not returning to Washington until June, the passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is all but impossible ahead of that deadline. The Democrat-led chamber had passed the measure in March, but it was never passed by the Senate.

The legislation includes provisions to set up a national registry of police misconduct, a ban on racial and religious profiling by law enforcement and overhaul qualified immunity.
Earlier this week, one of the key sticking points that remained was Section 242, the federal law that sets the standard for criminally prosecuting police. Some progressive Democrats have balked at the idea of any compromise on key issues like Section 242 and qualified immunity.

He was executed for murder 4 years ago. Now someone else's DNA has been found on the murder weapon
By Dakin Andone, Martin Savidge and Maria Cartaya, CNN

Updated 10:02 AM ET, Sat May 22, 2021

(CNN)Ledell Lee maintained his innocence until the end.

Before he was executed by the state of Arkansas in April 2017, Lee gave some of his last words to the BBC, telling the broadcaster, "My dying words will always be, as it has been: I am an innocent man."
Now, four years after Lee was put to death for the 1993 murder of Debra Reese, attorneys for his family say someone else's DNA was found on the murder weapon, raising new questions about Lee's conviction. "I think if those results had been had before he was executed, he'd still be alive," Lee Short, who had been Ledell Lee's attorney, told CNN.
Attorneys representing Lee's family, including those with the Innocence Project and the American Civil Liberties Union, commissioned DNA testing of the handle of the wooden club that was used to kill Reese. Last month, they said the results showed the DNA of an unknown man.
That DNA appears to match DNA also found on a bloody white shirt that had been wrapped around the murder weapon, the attorneys said, but it's unclear if that DNA was from the blood or other biological material like skin cells.
The attorneys also had DNA testing done for six hairs that were found at the crime scene and presented at trial in the state's case against Lee. The summary says that testing ruled Lee out as a potential source in five of the six hairs.

The Innocence Project previously said in a January 2020 statement that there was "no physical evidence directly (connecting) Lee to Reese's murder." On Friday, the Innocence Project told CNN the results of the DNA testing also did not show an "absolute or conclusive" connection to Lee.
Nina Morrison, senior litigation counsel at the Innocence Project, said in a statement last month that while the results were "incomplete and partial, it is notable that there are now new DNA profiles that were not available during the trial or post-conviction proceedings in Mr. Lee's case."Morrison said attorneys had entered that DNA in the national DNA database in hopes of identifying the unknown male, but there have been no potential matches.
The DNA was finally tested after attorneys filed a lawsuit in January 2020 on behalf of Lee's family, seeking to have the DNA samples from the case released. They received the results last month.
Citing the ongoing investigation, Lee's family, the Innocence Project and the ACLU turned down interview requests from CNN. Lee's sister, Patricia Young, provided a statement through the Innocence Project, saying this was a "difficult time of year" for the family as they mourned the loss of her brother. "We are glad there is new evidence in the national DNA database and remain hopeful that there will be further information uncovered in the future," Young said. "We ask for privacy for our family in this difficult time."
Earlier requests to test DNA were denied
Lee was convicted of capital murder in 1995, two years after 26-year-old Debra Reese was found dead, strangled and beaten with a small wooden bat.
Several of Reese's neighbors told investigators they saw Lee nearby. But the lawsuit filed on behalf of his family last year insisted, "No physical evidence directly tied Mr. Lee to the murder of Ms. Reese."

(CNN)Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during an interview on a conservative podcast this week, compared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision to continue to require members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor to steps the Nazis took to control the Jewish population during the Holocaust.

Greene, in a conversation with the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody Real America's Voice TV show "The Water Cooler," attacked Pelosi and accused her of being a hypocrite for asking GOP members to prove they have all been vaccinated before allowing members to be in the House chamber without a mask.
"You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany," Greene said. "And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about."

Jewish groups were quick to condemn Greene's remarks.
"You can never compare health-related restrictions with yellow stars gas chambers and other Nazi atrocities. Such comparisons demean the Holocaust and contaminate American political speech," the American Jewish Congress said in a tweet in response to Greene's comments. "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene must immediately retract and apologize."
Greene's office did not immediately respond to CNN's inquiry about her comments. A CNN survey of members of Congress discovered that every Democrat of Congress in both the House and Senate are fully vaccinated. In the Senate, 92% of Republicans say they are vaccinated, but only 44.8% of House Republicans would say if they have received the necessary shots. More than 100 Republicans in the House still won't disclose their vaccine status. That prompted Pelosi to leave the mask mandate in place, despite new guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that said vaccinated people can safely be indoors without wearing masks. Greene, who has refused to disclose her personal vaccine status, said Pelosi's heavy hand is unnecessary.
"This is a woman that doesn't care about people's safety," Greene said on the podcast. "This is a woman that is hyper-focused on her own power and control."
Pelosi's office declined to comment on Greene's remarks. Multiple lawmakers on both sides of the aisle reacted to Greene's comments Saturday.
"This is evil lunacy," Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney tweeted about Greene's comments. Cheney, who was ousted from her House Republican leadership post earlier this month over criticism of former President Donald Trump, has publicly warned that the current direction of the Republican Party is "dangerous."
For his part, Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who is one of the fiercest critics of Trump within the GOP and has previously spoken out against Greene, tweeted, "Absolute sickness," while linking to the same clip of Greene's comments. Democratic Reps. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey and David Cicilline of Rhode Island tweeted their criticism of Greene's remarks.
"As antisemitic violence rises it is disgusting that a republican member of Congress is comparing mask requirements to the Holocaust," Pascrell tweeted.
Cicilline called Greene, "A troubled person who is unfit to serve in Congress."
This story has been updated to include comments from members of Congress.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correctly identify where Marjorie Taylor Greene made her comments. They were on David Brody's Real America Voice show "The Water Cooler."New York (CNN)After being under investigation by federal prosecutors for more than two years, Rudy Giuliani got a glimpse late last month of the possible charge authorities are eyeing for him: a breach of foreign lobbying laws connected to his work in Ukraine.

The potential crime, detailed on search warrants that federal agents executed on his Manhattan home and office, has often been dismissed by critics as a paperwork violation.
But legal experts say that particularly in Giuliani's case, a charge under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires that individuals disclose with the Department of Justice lobbying activities on behalf of foreign governments or officials, should be regarded as a serious infraction, one with geopolitical implications.
In recent years, it has been used to go after other allies of former President Donald Trump, including Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort. "A FARA violation is much more than a failure to register with DOJ," said Daniel S. Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who was director of investigations for the House Intelligence Committee during the first impeachment of Trump, an inquiry that probed Giuliani's efforts in Ukraine.
In Giuliani's case, Goldman said, the set of allegations "goes to the heart of our national security and our diplomatic and foreign relations."
Prosecutors are examining whether Giuliani may have been lobbying for Ukrainian officials when he sought the ouster of the then-US Ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, and urged Ukraine to investigate Trump's political rival, then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, while pursuing those outcomes as Trump's attorney.
Giuliani has not been charged with a crime. He has said his activities in Ukraine were done in his capacity as Trump's lawyer and that he "never represented a Ukrainian national or official before the United States government."
And while prosecutors appear to have enough evidence to have obtained search warrants, FARA investigations sometimes don't result in charges.
"There has historically been reluctance [to bring such cases] because it is sometimes a challenging charge," said Ryan Fayhee, a former national security prosecutor.
Ukraine FM: Giuliani 'was definitely playing politics'
Ukraine FM: Giuliani 'was definitely playing politics' 03:24
It is also possible that prosecutors could pursue other charges against Giuliani. They have repeatedly stressed that the grand jury investigation is ongoing, and on Thursday they disclosed in a court filing opposing Giuliani's request to unseal affidavits supporting an earlier search of his iCloud account that "[a]lthough there has been public reporting about the existence of this investigation, much of the information set forth in the affidavits is not publicly known."

They also noted that the affidavits include "discussion of significant quantities of materials that have not been publicly revealed and were obtained pursuant to search warrants and subpoenas" as well as "information provided by individuals to the Government pursuant to subpoena or otherwise."
In executing the search warrants in April, authorities seized 18 electronic devices, the Justice Department said, and they took the devices following a period during which Giuliani and Trump made efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. In order to use that material as evidence, however, prosecutors would need to obtain additional search warrants specific to other possible crimes. Months ago, prosecutors pursued inquiries related to his work in other countries, CNN has reported, but the probe is now focused primarily on his Ukraine-linked activities.
However, even if Giuliani pushed Yovanovitch's exit and pressured the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into the Bidens to advance Trump's interests, he would still be vulnerable to a FARA charge if he had also sought those results on behalf of a Ukrainian official, Goldman said.
"The Yovanovitch stuff is pretty clear cut, because that was a specific action that Giuliani was promoting and trying to influence the US government to do," he said. "So if you can show that he was working on behalf of a specific business partner in Ukraine or [former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Viktor] Shokin, even if he was doing it for what he perceived to be Trump's political benefit, it doesn't have to be for one reason."
Used to prosecute other Trump allies
Though FARA cases had been rare in recent decades, the Justice Department made a significant push to prioritize them in the past few years.
In 2017, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations with Russia's ambassador and admitted to making false statements in foreign lobbying filings about his work for Turkey. (Trump subsequently pardoned Flynn.)
Trump and legal team approached about Giuliani legal costs
Trump and legal team approached about Giuliani legal costs
In 2018, both former Trump adviser Rick Gates and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in connection to FARA violations (Trump subsequently pardoned Manafort).
And in March 2019, the DOJ decided to accelerate its pursuit of foreign influence operations, in part by appointing a prosecutor who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller's team to lead a revamped unit intended to crack down on unregistered foreign agents.
But it can be difficult to make charges stick
FARA prosecutions haven't always worked in the government's favor, however.
In 2019, for instance, former Barack Obama White House counsel Greg Craig was indicted and charged with two crimes: making false statements to the FARA unit and concealing material information in connection with work he performed for Ukraine.
During the investigative phase, Craig's case had bounced between several prosecutors' offices, including the Manhattan US Attorney's office, where prosecutors declined to bring charges, determining that they didn't have sufficient evidence.
After Craig was charged months later by the US Attorney's office in Washington, DC, the case fell apart. First, prior to the trial, a judge threw out the false statement charge against Craig. Then, he was acquitted at trial.

Washington (CNN)Federal authorities investigating alleged sex trafficking by GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz have secured the cooperation of the congressman's ex-girlfriend, according to people familiar with the matter.

The woman, a former Capitol Hill staffer, is seen as a critical witness, as she has been linked to Gaetz as far back as the summer of 2017, a period of time that has emerged as a key window of scrutiny for investigators. She can also help investigators understand the relevance of hundreds of transactions they have obtained records of, including those involving alleged payments for sex, the sources said.
News of the woman's willingness to talk, which has not been previously reported, comes just days after the Justice Department formally entered into a plea agreement with Joel Greenberg, a one-time close friend of Gaetz whose entanglement with young women first drew the congressman onto investigators' radar.
Former Matt Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg pleads guilty to six federal charges
Former Matt Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg pleads guilty to six federal charges
CNN reported last week that investigators were pressing for the woman's cooperation. The sources would not say whether she had reached a formal cooperation agreement. Information from Greenberg in the lead-up to his plea agreement has already helped investigators further their scrutiny of the congressman. As he worked towards a plea deal with federal prosecutors in recent months, Greenberg told investigators that Gaetz and at least two other men had sexual contact with a 17-year-old girl, CNN has learned. Gaetz has repeatedly denied he ever had sex with a minor or paid for sex.
"Congressman Gaetz doesn't seem to be named nor referenced in Mr. Greenberg's plea," said Gaetz spokesman Harlan Hill. "Congressman Gaetz has never had sex with a minor and has never paid for sex. Mr. Greenberg has now pleaded guilty to falsely accusing someone else of sex with a minor. That person was innocent. So is Congressman Gaetz."
Justice Department spokesman Joshua Stueve declined to comment to CNN. The ex-girlfriend's lawyer Timothy Jansen also declined to comment.
Greenberg plea agreement
That allegation by Greenberg, described to CNN by multiple people familiar with the matter, is referenced briefly in an 86-page plea agreement that a federal judge accepted on Monday and is now at the center of the ongoing investigation into Gaetz. But prosecutors did not include any names in the court filing.
According to the plea agreement, Greenberg had sex with the girl "at least seven times when she was a minor" and "introduced the Minor to other adult men, who engaged in commercial sex acts with the Minor" in central Florida.

Greenberg's cooperation on the subject is a primary reason that 27 of the 33 charges he had been facing were wiped away. The extent to which he backs it up will have an impact on his final prison sentence. But already, a Gaetz associate, one of the men accused by Greenberg, has denied the allegation in a meeting with federal prosecutors, the associate told CNN.
Gaetz and his representatives have attacked Greenberg's credibility in recent days, pointing to the fact that Greenberg admitted in his plea agreement to falsely accusing someone of having sex with a minor. "If the government is brave enough to call Joel Greenberg as a witness, [Marc] Mukasey and [Isabelle] Kirshner are champing at the bit to take him on," a person close to Gaetz's defense team said, referring to the congressman's two high-profile attorneys.
"We're ready for a fair fight on the facts and the law. Anywhere. Anytime. But the steady stream of leaks by anonymous sources undermines the integrity of this process. It is simply and unequivocally improper," the attorneys said in a statement to CNN.
Asked earlier this week about Greenberg's readiness to potentially testify against Gaetz, Fritz Scheller, Greenberg's defense attorney, said, "Mr. Greenberg has pled guilty pursuant to a plea agreement and has certain requirements and obligations on him and he intends to honor that."

As part of his plea agreement, Greenberg is required to cooperate fully with the federal government in other ongoing investigations and prosecutions.
Gaetz, who has not been charged with a crime, is also under investigation over allegations of prostitution and public corruption, CNN has reported. He has long denied having sex with the 17-year-old in public statements and interviews.
Gaetz associate meets with federal investigators
The Gaetz associate who met with the Justice Department earlier this month told CNN that investigators spent the bulk of the meeting asking questions about the congressmen and parties with young women, including the 17-year-old. Investigators appeared to be focused on encounters that took place in the summer of 2017, the associate said.
The associate, who was one of the men Greenberg told investigators had engaged in a sex act with the 17-year-old, denied to investigators that he had ever met the woman or had sexual contact with her in 2017, he told CNN. He also says he provided them with an independently administered polygraph exam that he had taken days before the meeting.
Details of the associate's meeting with investigators and the polygraph exam were first reported by Politico.
He shared with CNN details of his contact with investigators on the condition his name not be used.
Gaetz probe includes scrutiny of potential public corruption tied to medical marijuana industry
Gaetz probe includes scrutiny of potential public corruption tied to medical marijuana industry

Investigators also briefly asked questions about possible influence peddling revolving around the medical marijuana industry and a 2020 Florida Senate race in which a third-party candidate ran as a spoiler, the associate added.
The associate said his meeting with investigators followed a December 2020 subpoena that requested communications and payments between him and Gaetz, Greenberg, and another man, from January 2016 to the present.
The subpoena indicated a grand jury was investigating allegations "involving commercial sex acts with adult and minor women, as well as obstruction of justice," the associate said.
There are new signs of investigative activity too, after sources had recently told CNN the FBI was mostly done gathering evidence.
One person familiar with the matter said that federal investigators have sought information from new witnesses as recently as this month, including communications and payments from a group of men that included Gaetz and Greenberg.
Decisions on whether to charge Gaetz have yet to be made and will fall to prosecutors in the public integrity section of the Justice Department. That decision is likely to take some time, CNN has reported, as the Justice Department considers whether there's sufficient evidence for an indictment. Thousands of residents in Goma, a major city in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, are spending the night outdoors following eruption of Mount Nyiragongo earlier Saturday, according to a spokesman for the Norwegian Refugee Council.

"There has not been a massive panic movement, but people are really worried," said Tom Peyre-Costa, the council's spokesman for west and central Africa. Evacuees first walked towards Rwanda, Peyre-Costa told CNN. The border was closed, so they went back to Goma and headed to an area north of the city. Peyre-Costa posted to Twitter video of people leaving the city
"Everywhere in the city you see people walking with their belongings, their children and even their goats and whatever they could grab. Most of them are just sitting by the road waiting to be able to go back any time soon," Peyre-Costa said.
The volcanic eruption seems to have subsided, according to the Goma Volcano Observatory, which monitors the volcano. Authorities in the city activated an evacuation plan as a precaution.
The volcano's last major eruption in 2002 killed 250 people and displaced thousands.
Goma is on the edge of Lake Kivu on the Democratic Republic of Congo's border with Rwanda. The current metro area population of Goma in 2021 is 670,000, according to a projection by the UN, World Bank and others.

Peyre-Costa said a number of nongovernmental organizations in the region believe Goma's population is closer to 1 million.
Patrick Kakesa of the International NGO Safety Organisation (INSO) said in a statement at 11 p.m. that the lava appears to be flowing towards the border with Rwanda. INSO advised humanitarian workers living in the Munigi camp a short distance from northern Goma to move to villages further to the west.
Peyre-Costa and 11 of his colleague evacuated as a precaution.
"If the situation stays the same we may be able to return tonight, so we'll see. We are on standby. We don't know what's going to happen," he said.
Volcanologist Honore Chiraba of the Goma Volcano Observatory told CNN there are two fractures in the volcano. Chiraba is following the volcanic activity closely with the governor of North Kivu, the province where the city of Goma is located. "The lava is flowing but not very fast," Chiraba said. "At this stage we don't think anyone is injured but we can't know for sure."
A post on the verified Twitter account of the British Embassy in the Democratic Republic of Congo said Saturday, "Nyiragongo volcano, close to city of Goma, began erupting this evening. Current assessments indicate eruption doesn't threaten the city itself. All should remain vigilant & Brits concerned should reach out to us ... We continue to monitor the situation closely."
The 11,500-foot-high volcano is one of several near the DRC's border with Rwanda and Uganda, an area of tropical rain forest and rare mountain gorillas.

Biden weathers his first foreign crisis after months focusing on domestic troubles
By Kevin Liptak, Kaitlan Collins and Jeff Zeleny, CNN
Updated 10:16 AM ET, Sat May 22, 2021
Biden celebrates ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas

Biden celebrates ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas 03:25
(CNN)It was before 8 a.m. ET on Wednesday and President Joe Biden was on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the fourth time in a week.

Outside, Biden's helicopter was idling as he ran behind schedule. Amid the flurry of 80 calls between Washington and the Middle East, this one had not been planned in advance, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Awaking early at the White House to reports of intensified airstrikes against targets in Gaza, Biden had a distinctly sharper message for Netanyahu than what he had relayed previously. After seven days of holding off public comment, officials said the President's patience was wearing thin.
The conversation was described by people familiar with the matter as "candid," "direct" and "firm" -- all the diplomatic bywords for tense. Previously, Biden had pressed Netanyahu for his objectives and endgame in bombing Gaza, questions officials say did not yield clear answers. This time, he expressed more conviction that he expected the bombing to conclude.
More than a day later, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire. Even after Netanyahu called Biden back to inform him of the development, the President and his aides remained skeptical. It would take another phone call from the Prime Minister later that afternoon -- their sixth in 11 days -- to convince Biden the truce was real.

"One of the reasons why we were able to do the ceasefire in 11 days is I didn't do what other people have done. I don't talk about what I tell people in private. I don't talk about what we negotiate in private," Biden said on Friday as the ceasefire entered its second day, taking credit for a strategy he suggested eluded his predecessors -- including former President Barack Obama -- during previous Middle East fighting.
The conflict amounted to the first major foreign crisis of a presidency focused overwhelmingly on domestic matters. It marked a critical juncture for American Democrats, whose calls on Biden to deliver a more forceful response to Israel's actions were mostly rebuffed. For the President, it created an inflection point in an up-and-down relationship with Netanyahu that goes back more than 40 years.

Yet for all its significance, officials signaled the burst of fighting was unlikely to prompt Biden to realign his priorities back to the Middle East, a region of murky and intractable battles he'd sought to avoid as president.
"We think there are some opportunities here, but we have to be very realistic," said Brett McGurk, the Middle East and North Africa coordinator on Biden's National Security Council. "We do not want to set unachievable objectives and waste time pursuing those."
Biden prepares to set his sights overseas
The bloody conflict, furious behind-the-scenes diplomacy and carefully calibrated public response acted as a precursor to an intensive stretch for Biden on the world stage. He is expected to nominate his first slate of high-profile ambassadors at some point in the coming days, according to people familiar with the matter. The announcement, which is likely to include an ambassador nominee to Israel, had been delayed as the White House compiles a diverse list of names, mindful the first batch of ambassadorships "could not be dominated by a group of rich, white donors," an official familiar with the search told CNN. Biden administration unable to continue $300 weekly pandemic unemployment benefits that GOP governors are slashing
By Jeff Zeleny and Tami Luhby, CNN
Updated 7:53 AM ET, Fri May 21, 2021
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US President Joe Biden presents the Medal of Honor to 94-year-old retired Army colonel Ralph Pukett, Jr., for conspicuous gallantry while serving during the Korean War, in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on May 21, 2021. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
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WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 20: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the conflict in the Middle East from Cross- Hall of the White House on May 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. Israel and Hamas announced that they would agree to a cease-fire, which will take into effect on Friday, following days of fighting that claimed more than 200 lives. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
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DETROIT, MICHIGAN - JULY 31:  Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden (L)  speaks while Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) listens during the Democratic Presidential Debate at the Fox Theatre July 31, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan.  20 Democratic presidential candidates were split into two groups of 10 to take part in the debate sponsored by CNN held over two nights at Detroit's Fox Theatre.  (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
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WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 20: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the conflict in the Middle East from Cross- Hall of the White House on May 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. Israel and Hamas announced that they would agree to a cease-fire, which will take into effect on Friday, following days of fighting that claimed more than 200 lives. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
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The Labor Department has exhausted its options for continuing to pay an extra $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits to jobless people in the 22 GOP-led states that are ending them early, an administration official told CNN Thursday.

Roughly 3.6 million out-of-work Americans will forgo a total of $21.7 billion in benefits as a result of the state actions, according to an analysis by The Century Foundation. Texas, Indiana and South Carolina are among those terminating the pandemic jobless programs early.
"There is nothing we can do," the official said, adding that the department has tried to figure out a solution. "Taking away their lifeline isn't going to help anything."
Are you at risk of losing your benefits early? Tell us about it here.
Over the past two weeks, a succession of Republican governors has opted to terminate one or more of the programs contained in the historic federal expansion of the unemployment system. They have cited workforce shortages and the improving economy as the reasons behind their decisions.
Biden's plan to slash child poverty depends on whether the IRS can find those who need the cash most
Biden's plan to slash child poverty depends on whether the IRS can find those who need the cash most
The enhanced payments -- which Congress first approved in its massive coronavirus relief plan in March 2020 and twice extended -- are keeping Americans from returning to the labor market, the governors say. At least four states will offer return-to-work bonuses instead.
In addition to providing the $300 weekly supplement, lawmakers expanded benefits to freelancers, the self-employed, independent contractors and certain people affected by the pandemic and extended the duration of payments for those in the regular state unemployment program.
Those collecting regular state benefits, which typically last 26 weeks, will continue to receive those payments but will not get the $300 boost. However, those in the other two programs -- the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation programs -- will lose all their benefits.
The pandemic programs are scheduled to end in early September in the states that are continuing them. The Labor Department is likely to release a letter on Friday outlining how the federal government is unable to counter the decisions by the Republican governors, the administration official said. The letter is a response to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and a labor advocacy group, both of which have urged the Biden administration to keep offering the benefits. Sanders on Thursday sent a letter to Labor Secretary Marty Walsh asking him to commit to holding states accountable for their role in administering the benefits.
"Democrats in Congress secured life-saving unemployment aid to workers so they wouldn't have to go back to work for starvation wages or without childcare," Sanders tweeted, adding that he asked Walsh "to ensure Republican governors do not strip that assistance away."
In a speech last week, President Joe Biden said that laid-off Americans must return to work if they are offered suitable positions but stressed that he doesn't see much evidence of people staying home because of the more generous federal payments. "The people who claim Americans won't work even if they find a good and fair opportunity underestimate the American people," he said.

Biden's plan to slash child poverty depends on whether the IRS can find those who need the cash most
By Katie Lobosco, CNN
Updated 7:19 AM ET, Fri May 21, 2021

Washington (CNN)President Joe Biden's ambitious plan to send families with kids thousands more dollars starting in July could slash child poverty in half -- but only if the federal government can successfully deliver the money to all eligible households.

While the vast majority of eligible families will receive the monthly payments automatically, very low-income households who fall below the income threshold that requires people to file federal taxes will likely have to submit some information to the Internal Revenue Service so the agency knows where to deliver the money.
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More than 3 million children live in households that could be at risk of missing out, according to separate estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Propel, a private company that runs an app called Fresh EBT used by one in four recipients of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, known as SNAP.
A Propel survey found that 15% of its users, who are likely eligible for the expanded child tax credit, had yet to file either a 2019 or 2020 tax return as of mid-April. That means the IRS doesn't likely have their information if they didn't use the non-filer tool available last year to get a stimulus payment. They'll have to file a return now or use an online portal the government plans to release allowing parents to submit personal information.
"Things are heading in the right direction. The word is getting out and we're seeing many households taking the necessary step to file taxes. But we are still going to see millions of kids missing out," said Stacy Taylor, head of partnerships and policy at Propel.

Stimulus payment delivery was hard, too
About 8 million households missed out on getting the first stimulus payments, worth up to $1,200 per person, for the same reasons: they hadn't filed a recent federal tax return and the IRS had no way to reach them. The agency also posted a similar online portal last year so people could claim their stimulus payments, of which about half of non-filers eligible for a payments used. The tool couldn't resolve all the challenges for the homeless, who may not have internet access, a bank account or a permanent address.
First enhanced child tax credit payments to go out July 15
First enhanced child tax credit payments to go out July 15
But not all of those families are at risk of failing to receive the child tax credit payments. Many of them aren't eligible because they don't have children. Plus, people have had the opportunity to file a 2020 tax return now. Some who don't normally file had more of an incentive to do so this year in order to claim a stimulus payment they initially missed out on. About 2 million people received the payment after filing a 2020 return, according to the IRS.
A survey of a group of 500 low-income households in Washington, DC, found that 40% did not initially receive their stimulus payments. Now that number is down to 18%.
Who's eligible for the child tax credit?
The temporary benefit will be sent to the households of more than 65 million children, or about 88% of the children in the United States. Eligible parents will receive $3,600 for each child under 6 and $3,000 for each child under age 18. Until now, the credit was up to only $2,000 per child under age 17. At least half of the amount will go out in monthly payments starting this summer and the remainder will be lumped in with next year's tax refund.
The enhanced portion of the credit will be available for single parents with annual incomes up to $75,000 and joint filers making up to $150,000 a year.
Congress also made the child tax credit fully refundable so more low-income families can benefit. Previously, if the credit exceeded the taxes owed, parents could only receive up to $1,400 as a refund. These households also must have earned income of at least $2,500. The change could make 20 million more children eligible. How to reach those most in need
The IRS is responsible for implementing the payments because they are an advance on an expanded child tax credit authorized by the most recent Covid relief legislation.
Families who aren't otherwise required to file a tax return should so that the agency knows that they qualify for the cash -- and the IRS is making a simplified online form available to help those who are not familiar with the tax filing process.
The online portal will allow parents to update their family size, marital status and income as well as opt out of the monthly payments in favor of receiving the tax credit as a lump sum next year when they file their return.
The IRS has said more details are coming soon. It did not provide further details when asked by CNN this week.
A report from Propel and the University of Michigan recommends that the government make the tool mobile friendly because about one-in-four adults with low incomes rely solely on a smart phone to access the internet and more than half lack internet at home. It also recommends that the tool allow people to update their bank account information, which may have changed since they last filed a tax return.
Normally, families claim the child tax credit on their federal tax return. But this year is different because the relief package directed the IRS to send out monthly payments in advance aimed at helping people recover from the pandemic.
While the move offers a boosted payment, it's a temporary expansion. But there is Democratic support for making it permanent. One of Biden's recent proposals, the American Families Plan, calls for increasing the payments through 2025.
IRS is underfunded, understaffed
The government announced earlier this week that the IRS is still on track to start delivering the advance child tax credit payments on July 15.
The agency was also tasked with sending out the three rounds of stimulus payments and handled the recent tax season while implementing tax code changes included in the Covid relief bill passed in March. Meanwhile, it had a backlog of 2019 returns to process after many IRS workers were sent to work from home during the pandemic.
The IRS has managed the additional work with a budget that has been cut about 20% over the past decade, leaving it with antiquated technology and a smaller staff.
"No doubt, finding people who have not filed a 2019 or 2020 tax return will be difficult for the IRS," said Elaine Maag, a principal research associate in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center where she studies income support programs for low-income families.
But, she added, "no other agency is in a better position to deliver payments to people right now than the IRS."
CNN's Tami Luhby contributed reporting.

There are countervailing storylines that complicate the pandemic recovery. Millions of Americans remain unemployed while companies big and small are reporting extreme difficulty in finding workers.

That's prompted a push by Republican governors -- 22 so far -- to reject the $300-per-week unemployment benefits that were included in the Democrats' Covid relief bill this past March.
The pandemic benefits run out in September anyway, so these states are turning down money the federal government has already approved, cutting off money earmarked for more nearly 2 million out-of-work Americans.
The idea is that, with the economy reopening thanks to the vaccines, the boosted checks might be keeping workers on the sidelines -- and taking them away will essentially force them back into the job market. That would help smaller businesses that are not as well equipped as larger companies to draw workers with higher pay or other perks.
There's something of a Rorschach test here. You can look at the plight of business owners and think the government should cut support that's making it hard for them to hire. Or you can look at a person whose wages are normally low enough that $300 per week is enough to keep them out of the labor force and think maybe businesses should raise pay.

I went to Anneken Tappe, the senior writer at CNN Business who covers the US economy, to get her thoughts on the labor shortage and what's behind it. Our conversation was conducted by email.
Is there a labor shortage?
WHAT MATTERS: Republican governors are rejecting expanded federal unemployment benefits for their citizens because they say there is a labor shortage; restaurants can't open, goes the storyline, because workers would rather collect unemployment and not work. What's really happening? TAPPE: America's labor market is in a weird spot. On the one hand, some employers just can't find workers to stem rising demand for goods and services. Meanwhile, millions of people remain unemployed or out of the labor market (which means they aren't actively looking for work). As of April, America was still down 8.2 million jobs compared to February 2020.
So what gives?
Millions of American workers still need the enhanced unemployment assistance, which provides an additional $300 per week. It is earmarked to end in September. Research from Bank of America recently found that the pandemic-era benefits indeed do keep people from looking for work -- but only if people made less than $32,000 per year before, which is less than half the national median income. For these low-income workers, it makes sense not to work but to collect benefits, while for higher-income earners it doesn't. As for the claim that restaurants can't open because workers would rather stay home, the data isn't really showing that. In April, the hospitality sector added 331,000 jobs, half of which were in restaurants and bars. No other sector even came close to adding that many jobs. Still, the sector is still down 2.8 million jobs compared to pre-pandemic times, so economists expect more jobs to be added over the coming months.
Why don't companies raise wages?
WHAT MATTERS: The counter-argument is that workers in less desirable jobs are underpaid. I'm no economist, but couldn't companies just pay workers a higher wage to bring them into the work force?

The Biden administration on Saturday granted humanitarian protection for Haitians in the United States, allowing an estimated 100,000 people to apply to remain lawfully in the US, according to the Department of Homeland Security and an administration official.

The decision will allow Haitians in the US the opportunity to apply for Temporary Protected Status -- a form of humanitarian relief that can be granted when it is deemed unsafe to return to one's home country.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced a new 18-month designation for the humanitarian program. Eligible Haitian nationals currently residing in the US as of May 21 will be able to apply for the protections.
"Haiti is currently experiencing serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic," Mayorkas said in a statement.
President Joe Biden tweeted a link to the announcement Saturday, writing, "Today my Administration announced a new 18 month designation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti."
BuzzFeed was the first to report on the decision.
The decision was met with praise from advocates and applauded by Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez.

"As Haiti passes through an acute political and security crisis and faces enduring humanitarian challenges, this decision provides urgently needed protections for eligible Haitians in the United States," the New Jersey Democrat said in a statement.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the move "welcome news" in a Saturday evening statement and pushed for immigration reform.
"It is imperative that the Dream and Promise Act, passed by the House, is enacted, so that we can provide a path to permanent residence and eventual citizenship to TPS holders," she said.

A link between Covid-19 vaccination and a cardiac illness may be getting clearer
By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN Senior Medical Correspondent

Updated 9:40 AM ET, Thu June 10, 2021
Why Biden's July 4 vaccination goal faces uphill battle

Why Biden's July 4 vaccination goal faces uphill battle 02:02
(CNN)Vaccine advisers to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say there has been a higher-than-expected number of cases of a heart ailment among young people, most often males, who've recently received their second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines. The CDC says the reports of the ailment are "rare" and that "most patients who received care responded well to medicine and rest and quickly felt better."

The advisers' statement, posted June 1 on the CDC website, strikes a different note from their statement about two weeks earlier, which said that the rates of myocarditis -- inflammation of the heart muscle -- were not higher among vaccinated people than among unvaccinated people. 
The new report comes as the Israeli Ministry of Health finds a "likelihood of a link" between the second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine and myocarditis, most commonly among males ages 16 to 30.
The June 1 report by a work group of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices states that within 30 days of receiving the second dose of either Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, "there was a higher number of observed than expected myocarditis/pericarditis cases in 16-24-year-olds."

This outside group of experts, many of them physicians at academic medical centers, advises the CDC, but doesn't represent the agency itself. The CDC has not said if the number of cases of the heart ailments is higher than expected.

The CDC says on its website that benefits of Covid-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks "including the risk of myocarditis or pericarditis," which is swelling of the tissue around the heart. The agency says it is "actively monitoring these reports, by reviewing data and medical records, to learn more about what happened and to see if there is any relationship to COVID-19 vaccination."
The cases occurred mostly among male adolescents and young adults age 16 years or older, typically within several days after vaccination and more often after getting the second shot than after the first, according to the CDC. The agency advises people to be on the lookout for certain symptoms following Covid-19 vaccination, such as chest pain, shortness of breath and heart palpitations.

The myocarditis assessments come at a time when the Biden administration has been encouraging young people to get vaccinated to protect themselves and others.

"For young people who may think this doesn't affect you, listen up, please: This virus, even a mild case, can be with you for months. It will impact on your social life. It could have long-term implications for your health that we don't even know about yet or fully understand yet," President Joe Biden said at a White House briefing June 2, urging young people to get vaccinated for themselves and "to protect those more vulnerable than you: your friends, your family, your community."
There's concern the President's effort could be hindered by parental worries over the risk of myocarditis following vaccination.
Medical groups, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Heart Association say even if there is a very small risk of getting myocarditis after vaccination, it is heavily outweighed by the risk of complications from Covid-19.
"Young people need to be protected, and they also need to not be a reservoir for the virus," said Dr. Nelson Michael, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, noting that his son and daughter, who are in their 20s, were vaccinated against Covid-19.
The CDC has reached out directly to state health departments and medical societies, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups about the myocarditis reports. The agency has also issued several statements on its website in the past few weeks about myocarditis following the two mRNA vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, including one for physicians and one for the public.
Aside from these pages, CDC officials have not directly communicated to the public about any possible risk of myocarditis with the vaccines. CDC declined CNN's request to speak with an expert, instead issuing a statement by a spokesman.

Top Texas Democrat slams 'out of control' governor in fight over restrictive voting bill
By Keith Allen and Paul LeBlanc, CNN
Updated 7:48 PM ET, Wed June 23, 2021

(CNN)The top Democratic Party official in Texas on Wednesday blasted Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's recent decisions to veto a portion of the state budget that funds the Texas Legislature and to convene a special legislative session next month, calling the moves "beyond shameful" as the party squares off with the governor over a slew of voting restrictions.

"Gov. Abbott is out of control and is defunding an entire co-equal branch of the state government because Texas Democrats effectively stopped key pieces of his far-right legislative priorities this session -- including his voter suppression bill, SB 7," Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa told CNN in a statement on Wednesday.
While Abbott hasn't detailed the agenda for the July 8 special legislative session, he previously promised to revive the voting restrictions that had been effectively killed by Democrats during the regular legislative session last month. House Democrats in the state had walked out on the final days of the regular legislative session, forcing the expiration of the election bill with a slate of new voting provisions.
The measure would make mail-in voting more difficult by requiring voters to supply more information, prohibiting local elections officials from sending absentee ballot applications to anyone who has not requested one or from working with get-out-the-vote groups that are encouraging Texans to vote by mail.
Additionally, it would prohibit the after-hours and drive-thru options that voting rights advocates said helped Black and Latino voters in the Houston area cast their ballots in the 2020 election. SB 7 would also make it easier to overturn an election, allowing courts to throw out results if enough ballots were cast illegally that it could have made a difference -- rather than proving that fraud actually altered the outcome of a race.

"It is beyond shameful that Abbott is holding hostage the salaries of public servants who work for the Texas legislature in an unethical and unconstitutional political game," Hinojosa added Wednesday.
Republicans in Texas have sought to join Florida, Georgia and other GOP-controlled states that have seized on former President Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election and adopted restrictions that will make it harder for some of their residents to vote.
It's not clear whether, once the agenda is set, Republicans will enter the special session set on approving SB 7 as it's currently drafted or will seek to make further changes.

Signs the 2020 recession may already be over
By Paul R. La Monica, CNN Business
Updated 2:33 PM ET, Mon June 28, 2021

New York (CNN Business)America's Covid-induced recession has been a painful one — but it could ultimately be short.

The official arbiter, the National Bureau of Economic Research, hasn't said this downturn is over. Yet it sure feels like the economy is back in recovery mode with upbeat signs in jobs, housing and stocks.
Some experts think this recession is a mirror image of the one in 1918, which was also sparked by a pandemic: the global influenza outbreak. That downturn lasted just 7 months and was the second shortest on record.
Could the Covid recession follow a similar path? We'll have to wait for a ruling from the NBER, the organization that declares the beginning and end of economic cycles — which usually takes several months until after a recession is over to declare the end.
There are certainly pockets of the economy still far from pre-February 2020 levels, like small businesses, retail and restaurants.
But plenty of areas are getting better. GDP is growing again, surging for the past three quarters after dips in the first half of last year. The job market is recovering too, as workers in hard-hit services sectors return to employment. Earnings have rebounded along with the stock market. The housing market continues to sizzle.

And it's pretty much back to business as usual for many major cities.

"We're not in a downturn anymore. Things are incredibly robust and it's almost a euphoria," said Ivan Kaufman, chairman and CEO of Arbor Realty Trust (ABR), a real estate firm that lends to apartment owners and commercial real estate firms.

Default rates are relatively low for Kaufman's company's clients, he said, adding that rents — which took a brief hit last year — are starting to climb again. Demand for leases is climbing as well.

The demise of urban America may have been exaggerated.
"The issue that existed with Covid was that nobody was going into cities," Kaufman said. "That phenomenon created some vacancies. But that is over."
'Strong...to quite strong'
Urban real estate isn't the only sector of the economy that has come roaring back. Money management firm ClearBridge Investments has a recession risk dashboard that looks at a dozen economic indicators, including retail sales, housing, commodity prices, the job market and trucking shipments.

ClearBridge said earlier this month that most of these measures bottomed out in May 2020 and all 12 indicators are now flashing recovery signs.
Analysts at ClearBridge said in a report that with this in mind, they think the recession may have ended about a year ago — just four months after it began. They even used a joke from "Meet the Parents" to describe the economy, saying that is "strong ... to quite strong."

Meanwhile investors aren't acting like this is still a recession. The biggest concern now is whether or not the economy will heat up too quickly, forcing the Federal Reserve to taper bond purchases and raise rates sooner than anticipated. "Every recession is different and this is an unusual one. But the market has clearly moved on from the pandemic," said Matt Peron, director of research at Janus Henderson Investors. "Investors are focused on inflation. It's the number one, two and three risk."
Fear the double dip?
Beyond worries about the Fed taking away the proverbial punch bowl and cutting back on stimulus too soon, Peron said, investors also fear the central bank will not act quickly enough to tamp down inflation pressures before they run out of control.

"The Fed has to walk a tightrope," Peron said, adding that a central bank mistake could lead to a so-called double dip recession, when the economy quickly contracts again after a recovery.
That's what happened after the historically brief recession of 1980, which at only six months is the shortest on record. A series of sharp rate hikes by the Fed helped lead to another recession that lasted from July 1981 to November 1982.
But many Wall Street experts and economists believe the Fed won't be forced to raise rates anytime soon or that inflation will run amok.

"A period of persistent inflation driven by higher wages feeding into higher prices could lead to tighter financial conditions and put this young expansion in jeopardy," strategists at Nuveen said in a report Monday. "But we remain in the camp that expects inflation to moderate from here."
The strategists believe the labor market and supply shortages caused by the pandemic should soon abate. That will reduce pressure on wage growth, a key component of inflation.
They also think companies have made enough investments to boost productivity, which should mean they won't have to pass on the costs of higher commodity prices to consumers.
"We've likely already seen the highest monthly inflation readings of 2021," the Nuveen strategists said.
If that's the case, the economy could continue to expand for the foreseeable future. The only question now is when the NBER will actually come out and officially declare an end to the 2020 recession.

Jason Smith thought he'd have an easier time filling jobs at his three auto repair shops after Indiana's governor announced that pandemic unemployment benefits would end in mid-June.

But it hasn't worked out that way so far.
While he is getting more applications for the auto technician, service consultant and administrative assistant postings, the job seekers haven't responded to his requests for interviews. Smith has reached out to more than three dozen people in the last month, but he only heard back from a few, who said they weren't interested in the position.

"I thought it was going to be a situation where it's like: 'Everyone, let's get back to work,' " said Smith, who had to transfer staff from his other locations in and around Merrillville, Indiana, to open a third shop in June. "We're getting applications, but we aren't getting any responses."

Indiana is one of at least 26 states that are ending at least one of the pandemic unemployment benefits programs early, citing widespread worker shortages. (An Indiana state judge ruled Friday afternoon that the benefits must continue while a lawsuit challenging the termination works its way through the court system. Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb is considering an appeal.)
Share your story: Employers, are you seeing more people looking for work in states that are ending pandemic unemployment benefits early?

Omar says she supports adding a 'reality-based' Republican to January 6 committee
By Paul LeBlanc, CNN
Updated 7:43 PM ET, Tue June 29, 2021

Washington (CNN)Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar said Tuesday that she would support adding a "reality-based" Republican to the select committee being established by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to investigate the January 6 insurrection.

Asked by CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead" about the possibility of Pelosi appointing a GOP lawmaker to the panel, Omar said, "I certainly believe that the goal was always to make sure that this was a bipartisan effort. The American people are interested in finding out, as much as we are, what the truth is -- what led to the insurrection and what took place as part of that insurrection on January 6."
"And so if the speaker believes that she can find Republicans that are reality-based, that will engage in fact-finding, that can be trusted by the American people, then I support it," the Minnesota Democrat said.
Pelosi on Monday introduced a resolution to form the select committee that is expected to get a vote in the chamber Wednesday.
According to the resolution, the committee will be made up of 13 members. Eight of them will be appointed by Pelosi and the rest will be picked in consultation with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican. While Pelosi did not tip her hand as to who she plans to choose to chair or to serve on the committee, an aide told CNN that she is seriously considering a Republican as one of her eight selections.

It remains to be seen how cooperative McCarthy will be, as his role on January 6 could be a focal point of any investigation.
The select committee will corral the various House Democratic investigations into the events surrounding the deadly insurrection into a single effort to examine what led to pro-Donald Trump supporters breaching the Capitol and disrupting the certification of President Joe Biden's November election win.
While Republicans have accused Democrats of continuing to investigate the events for political reasons, Democrats have insisted that a definitive investigation needs to be undertaken, particularly as some Republicans have tried to downplay the violence that occurred or to spread conspiracy theories about who carried out the attack.

Asked Tuesday if she wanted to serve on the select committee, Omar said, "I certainly could serve if the speaker asks," but added, "I think right now I am quite busy in the work that I am doing on my other committees, so that's not something that I am pursuing."
Pelosi chose to go the route of a select committee after Senate Republicans used a filibuster to block legislation that would've created an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the riot.

Tensions rise in policing talks as negotiations hit a delicate phase
By Jessica Dean and Manu Raju, CNN
Updated 7:04 PM ET, Tue June 29, 2021
Former police chief: Our profession is in crisis

Former police chief: Our profession is in crisis 03:35
(CNN)High-stakes talks over a major revamp of policing laws are at a precarious state, with influential law enforcement groups divided, lawmakers struggling to bridge a gap on long-standing sticking points and skepticism among many congressional Republicans about the need for legislation at a time of rising crime in the United States.

The complicated dynamic comes at a crucial time: After blowing past two deadlines, lawmakers say they need to make a decision by August on whether they can reach a deal or pull the plug. And now it's anyone's guess whether a deal can be reached, a sharp shift from just weeks ago when the talks were seen as the most likely to produce a bipartisan accord amid high-profile episodes of deadly police violence.
California Rep. Karen Bass, the lead House Democratic negotiator, told CNN on Tuesday that "one of the problems right now" is how some of the law enforcement groups are approaching the prospect of new legislation.
"I think the big thing going on in law enforcement, is whether or not they want to be open to reform. ... So, I think that they are looking at the bills as something we are doing to them, as opposed to something we want to do with them."
Bass added the organizations are "all in conflict with each other" and are "all fighting each other."
"They have longstanding conflicts with each other, so the infighting in law enforcement is impacting what we're doing," she said.
The negotiators -- Bass, Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat of New Jersey, and Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican of South Carolina -- announced last week in a joint statement that they had "reached agreement on a framework," adding they "look forward to continuing our work toward getting a finalized proposal across the finish line."

But several sources familiar with the matter told CNN that there remain ample areas of disagreement, and Bass confirmed on Tuesday that the hot-button issue of qualified immunity -- protections given to police officers in civil court -- remains unresolved.
Complicating the matter is the lack of appetite among congressional Republicans to back any deal that can be portrayed as targeting the police -- just as the GOP is settling on a midterm election message that relies heavily on law-and-order themes. And without strong backing from law enforcement groups, the prospects of winning sufficient support among Republicans grow slimmer.

"I wouldn't call it infighting, I'd call it different priorities," one law enforcement official involved with negotiations told CNN, underscoring that each law enforcement group serves its own specific constituency leading to different takes on what they're willing to accept.

Some civil rights groups involved in the negotiations have pointed to the National Sheriffs' Association and the National Association of Police Organizations as the two groups most resistant to reforms, according to a source familiar with the talks.
The National Sheriffs' Association pushed back on any accusation of infighting in a statement to CNN.
"Members of Congress, in particular the Senate, are reaching out to different law-enforcement groups asking them to separately weigh in on various proposals and what in their opinions would be good reform," Sheriff Greg Champagne, a former Nationals Sheriff's Association president, said in the statement. "All of the groups are obviously doing that and now for someone to say because the separate responses are not in lockstep with each other that there is infighting is a gross overstatement of this process."

The National Association of Police Organizations did not respond to a request for comment.
Other law enforcement groups, like the National Fraternal Order of Police, say they're "still talking and still willing to talk."
"We're not fighting with anybody," Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police told CNN of any relationships with other law enforcement groups.
Man shot in the back in Times Square, NYPD says
Man shot in the back in Times Square, NYPD says
"I'd say it's unfortunate that rather than keeping their sleeves rolled up and continuing to try to find consensus, that some elected officials have seen fit to try to find a convenient culprit for the predicament they find themselves in," Pasco said, adding he's still hopeful progress can be made.
Pasco said his organization has explained its position to Senate negotiators on both sides of the aisle and "kept no secrets from either side."
Bass said on Tuesday some outside law enforcement groups could be "intimidating" Republicans who campaigned on defending the police in successful House races across the country.
"I think it could be that they are intimidating people because they did do a whole campaign in the last year," Bass said. "I think it's too bad that law enforcement, if they are, would intimidate Republican members to resist reforms to modernize their profession."
'Frustration' and finger pointing
Bass described the current situation as "resistance from the outside, from law enforcement, concern from the civil rights and activist community that time is running out."
Bass added: "You know me, I'm always hopeful, although recently I have been discouraged. I'm back being hopeful again."
"Republicans have repeatedly moved the goalpost throughout this process," a Democratic source familiar with the talks told CNN. "There was a proposal on the table that had the support of police unions and civil rights groups, but Republicans tore it up and continued to make unreasonable demands. It doesn't seem that they're serious about getting something done."
Scott's office declined to comment, but Scott, the lead GOP negotiator, sees things as moving forward.
"Of course, the process for finalizing any bill of this nature is difficult," explained one source familiar with Scott's thinking. "Despite challenges, we continue to move forward with the negotiation process in order to continue ironing out specifics within the broader agreed upon framework."
"It's important to note that the senator is still just as committed as he's always been to ensuring any final bill honors the families of Walter Scott and George Floyd and everyone else who's been affected, while at the same time providing needed resources for police officers who are doing that important job of keeping our communities safe," the source added.
Frustration and concern have been growing over the last few days among civil rights groups involved in the negotiations over what they see as an outsized influence the National Sheriffs' Association and the National Association of Police Organizations, now have in the negotiations, according to another source familiar with the negotiations.
Republican resistance grows over Biden's infrastructure and policing plans
Republican resistance grows over Biden's infrastructure and policing plans
On June 15, the NAPO published a newsletter titled "Urgent, Action Needed! Senator Booker Proposes Horrible Police Reform Bill" saying the group had been excluded from negotiations between Booker, the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Fraternal Order of Police, and called on its members to reach out to their members of Congress. The newsletter called this its "best and maybe only chance to save American law enforcement from a catastrophe."
On Monday, the NAACP, along with a number of other civil rights groups, took the notable step of releasing statements singling out some law enforcement groups as trying to dilute a policing bill and control the negotiations.
"Many in law enforcement agree that meaningful change is necessary, but unfortunately, a few are committed to standing in the way with a goal of obstructing the process," NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement. "Police unions and partisan politicians should not control and dilute the terms of the police reform bill, nor delay any of its progress."
Up until Monday, the NAACP had not called out any of the other parties involved in the negotiation and had only expressed optimism at progress.
As the talks stretch on into July, the legislative clock is ticking and outside groups are becoming more vocal about the process, making reaching a deal all-the-more difficult.
"Last year, law enforcement was very interested and supportive, especially of parts of the bill, like the accreditation piece, but why do you want to defend people who bring down the profession?" Bass asked. "And so, things like qualified immunity are not targeted at the average officer that's doing his or her job, it's targeted at people who are violating the constitutional rights of folks. So, why would you want to protect that?"
Bass added: "My concern is I know they're concerned about the diminishing of their ranks, their retirement and people not signing up, but I frankly think until they embrace reform, the image of law enforcement right now is pretty bad."
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Indigenous people are trekking across the US with a 25-foot totem pole. Here's why
By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

Updated 12:49 PM ET, Sun July 11, 2021

People in Miami look on at a totem pole crafted by the House of Tears Carvers of the Lummi Nation. The group will soon embark on a national tour with the totem pole, ending in the nation's capital on July 29.
(CNN)For the House of Tears Carvers, totem poles are more than masterful works of art -- they're a medium for storytelling, for raising consciousness, for healing.

The group of artisans from the Lummi Nation, one of the original inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest, has for decades hauled its masterful works of art around the country to unite communities around issues of local and national concern.
This year, they're taking a 25-foot, 5,000-pound totem pole all the way to the nation's capital.
Organizers are calling the journey the "Red Road to DC," a two-week national tour that will begin July 14 in Washington state and culminate in Washington, DC. Along the way, the House of Tears Carvers plan to stop with the totem pole at a number of sites sacred to Indigenous peoples.

Their goal: To protect those sacred sites from the existential threats of the climate crisis and extractive industries -- and to ensure tribal nations have a seat at the table when decisions affecting them are made. "By going out and uniting and informing the public, we create a greater voice," said Jewell "Praying Wolf" James, House of Tears lead carver and a citizen of the Lummi Nation. "We have an opinion, and we want to be heard."
Upon its arrival in Washington, DC, the totem pole will be presented to President Joe Biden's administration: partially in recognition of the climate actions it has taken so far and also as a reminder of the promises the federal government made to the first inhabitants of this land.
A fight to protect sacred sites
The totem pole will travel to key cultural sites where battles over land and water rights are playing out, including Bears Ears in Utah, the Black Hills in South Dakota and the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.

By connecting these places through one journey, organizers hope to bring attention to the challenges each individual community faces and ultimately, build momentum for the last stop in Washington, DC.

"The Lummi Carvers are offering their totem pole as a way to gather the prayers and hopes of many different tribal nations, to bring people together and help each area and tribal nation understand they are not alone," said Judith LeBlanc, director of the Native Organizers Alliance, one of the journey's sponsors.
"That collectively, by building and utilizing the power of our prayers and our beliefs and our hopes and our organizing, we are able to make transformational change happen."
Mackinaw City, Michigan, is one of the stops on the tour. There, the Bay Mills Indian Community has been fighting the existing Line 5 pipeline, as well as a plan to build a new pipeline tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac.
The Straits of Mackinac connect Lakes Michigan and Huron, and are sacred waters for the Bay Mills Indian Community and other tribal nations in the area.
Under a treaty made in 1836, the tribe ceded land to the US for the creation of Michigan. In turn, tribal citizens were granted the right to fish, hunt and gather in that territory, which includes the waters of the Great Lakes and the Straits of Mackinac, said Whitney Gravelle, chairwoman of the Bay Mills Indian Community. "We have this connection with land and water and the Straits of Mackinac that is deeply tied to our cultural, our traditional and our spiritual identity," Gravelle said, noting that both Line 5 and any additional construction "can actually cause damage to numerous archaeological resources, artifacts and other paleo landscapes that all describe and are a part of our history here in the state of Michigan, as well as in the Great Lakes."
When the totem pole stops in Mackinaw City on July 27, the community plans to hold a water ceremony on the Straits of Mackinac, as well as songs and other activities. It will be a day of celebration, Gravelle said, honoring not just the sacredness of the waters but the tribe's relationship to them.
That the totem pole will pass through so many other sacred places before reaching her own community is not lost on Gravelle.
"[The totem pole] is going to collect all of that good spiritual energy as it travels and touches the sacred places -- all of that good medicine," she added. " When it arrives in Washington DC and is presented at the White House, I can only hope and pray that that good energy and that good medicine stays there."
The meaning behind the totem pole
The House of Tears Carvers' first totem pole journey took place after the 9/11 attacks.
James thought about all the people whose lives had been forever altered by the tragedy and decided to carve a totem pole. With a group of other Lummi Nation citizens, he took the pole across the country, collecting good thoughts and prayers for the children who lost parents that day, before bringing it to its final destination at a park in Monroe, New York.
In the years since, James has made several similar journeys in an effort to alleviate pain tied to trauma, achieve social and environmental justice and fight for tribal sovereignty.

The group geared up for the national journey earlier this year by taking the new 25-foot totem pole on a regional tour along the West Coast and areas of the South. The pole, which has drawn well-wishers and crowds throughout its travels, was crafted from a 400-year-old Western Red Cedar tree and took about two months to complete.
Some of the images depicted on the pole reference Native heritage, stories and mythologies.
The full moon at the top is a nod to Grandmother Moon, who watches over the waters of the Earth. The eagle is a symbol of power and strength, while the Chinook salmon is there for its importance to tribal nations in the Pacific Northwest and the area's ecosystem. Seven tears represent seven generations of trauma that resulted from colonization, James said.
Other images on the pole demonstrate the group's commitment to certain social justice issues. An image of a child in jail symbolizes the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border, while the red handprints represent the decades-long crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
"There's a story to be told, and like all stories, there are many plots tied to it," James said. "If you can understand all the plots, then you understand the message of the totem pole."
A ceremony and exhibit in DC
After the totem pole passes through the sacred sites on the tour, Indigenous leaders and organizers will present it to the Biden administration on July 29 in Washington, DC.
A ceremony will be held on the National Mall outside the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, where an exhibition about the House of Tears Carvers' totem pole journeys is on view.
The totem pole will be on display at the museum for two days before it is transferred to a more permanent home, which has not yet been announced.
While in the nation's capital, organizers and demonstrators plan to lobby on Capitol Hill for the right to be included and consulted on any decisions about projects of legislation that could affect tribal communities.
"I think the Biden administration has acknowledged the need to engage with tribal nations, but I think they need to be reminded that the time is now, and also that we need to be a part of the decision making," LeBlanc said.

Biden gives an angry cry for action on voting rights but stops short of calling for filibuster reform
By Kevin Liptak, Paul LeBlanc and Kate Sullivan, CNN
Updated 6:11 PM ET, Tue July 13, 2021

President Joe Biden issued a dire and angry warning Tuesday that the very underpinnings of American democracy were under threat, calling an ongoing assault on voting rights the gravest challenge to American democracy since the Civil War.

But he stopped short of embracing changes to Senate procedure that might open the door to new laws protecting those rights, a step activists have said is essential as they urge the President to say and do more on an issue he's said is the most important of his presidency.
The President's speech in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy, was meant as an opening salvo in what officials say will be an ongoing push against restrictive voting laws being passed around the nation.
In it, Biden took particular aim at his predecessor Donald Trump and other Republicans who have refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, accusing them of fomenting a pattern of denial that is fracturing the country's foundations.
"In America, if you lose, you accept the results," Biden said inside the soaring atrium of the National Constitution Center. "You follow the Constitution, you try again. You don't call facts 'fake' and then try to bring down the American experiment just because you're unhappy. That's not statesmanship. That's selfishness."
It was the most forcefully Biden has inveighed against Trump since taking office. At one point, accusing Republicans of shirking truth and responsibility for upholding the Constitution, he bellowed: "Have you no shame?"
One of the fieriest speeches of Biden's presidency to date, Biden's remarks reflected the fury he and fellow Democrats have cultivated as Republicans follow Trump's lead in denying the election results. He predicted it is likely Republicans will use a similar strategy in the 2022 midterms, saying "we have to prepare now."
He called efforts to call the election in question "dark" and "sinister" on Tuesday, saying they reflected "human nature at its worst."
"Bullies and merchants of fear, peddlers of lies, are threatening the very foundation of our country," Biden said.
Still, his avoidance of the filibuster issue proved disappointing to some of the activists who want Biden to embrace changes that would allow new legislation in Congress.
"Supporters of democracy will continue to organize and advocate, but we cannot organize our way out of this threat. It is up to our elected officials to hear supporters and act to protect our democracy," said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, after Biden's speech.
Asked on his way out of the venue why he did not raise the filibuster, Biden told reporters only: "I'm not filibustering now."
He began his speech by recounting the stories of Americans who voted in the last election, lauding them for their efforts to cast their ballots amid the Covid-19 pandemic. He noted the 2020 contest had the most votes cast in any election in American history.
But he quickly turned his focus to the attacks on the 2020 election process, calling it the most scrutinized in American history. He alluded to Trump's complaints about the election results, saying those who would deny the election result are simply denying facts.
"The Big Lie is just that: A big lie," Biden said.
Since the November election, state lawmakers have enacted 28 laws in 17 states that restrict ballot access, according to a June tally by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
Biden decried Republican obstruction to a sweeping election reform bill that Democrats argue is a necessary counter to state-level efforts to restrict voting access. The President stressed that he would work to pass that legislation, the For the People Act, as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
RELATED: Seventeen states have enacted 28 new laws making it harder to vote
But he seemed to quietly acknowledge the low likelihood that either bill becomes law, saying instead he would "engage in an all-out effort" to educate Americans about laws limiting voting across the country.
In recent days, the eyes of voting rights advocates have been fixed on Texas, where GOP lawmakers are mounting another push for restrictive voting laws during a 30-day special legislative session that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott says he wants to see focused in part on "election integrity." Texas Democratic lawmakers have fled the state in an attempt to deny the special session a quorum, which would prevent any new laws from being passed.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who Biden has tasked with leading the administration's voting right efforts, planned to meet with the Texas Democrats later Tuesday.
The President and his team had repeatedly previewed a major push on voting rights after Republicans in the US Senate blocked a sweeping election reform bill last month, but it remains unclear how much he can accomplish.
Passing new voting legislation in Congress will almost certainly require altering filibuster rules, since Democrats' slim majority in the Senate isn't enough to overcome GOP opposition -- and it's not clear Democrat have the votes to pass a bill anyway.

And Biden has said his efforts must go beyond simply limiting dark money in politics or making Election Day a federal holiday -- two items included in the major bill blocked by Republicans last month. He said in June that Democratic efforts must expand to limit the ability of election boards to toss out results or replace officials based on ideology.
RELATED: Biden administration spotlights voting rights as advocates push the President to do more
Civil rights advocates have pushed the President to do more, and one -- the Rev. Al Sharpton -- told CNN after the speech that Biden was non-committal when Sharpton asked about his stance on the filibuster.
"He said, 'We're working through, Rev, where we are going to be there.' He didn't commit Thursday or today, but that's what he and I talked about. I waited to bring that up to him," Sharpton said.
Additional pressure on Biden to act came earlier this month when a Supreme Court decision limited the ability of minorities to challenge state laws they say are discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act. The high court upheld two provisions of an Arizona voting law. The first provision says in-person ballots cast at the wrong precinct on Election Day must be wholly discarded. Another provision restricts a practice known as "ballot collection," requiring that only family caregivers, mail carriers and election officials can deliver another person's completed ballot to a polling place.
This story has been updated from more from Biden's speech on Tuesday.
CNN's Kate Sullivan, Paul LeBlanc and Betsy Klein contributed to this report.

Biden tries to hold the center as Democrats clash over police and public safety
By Greg Krieg, CNN
Updated 10:13 AM ET, Tue July 13, 2021

Eric Adams on Democrats' 'misplaced' priorities on gun violence 09:29
(CNN)President Joe Biden convened a small summit of local leaders in late June to discuss his plans to combat nationwide surge in violent crime. This week, he did it again -- this time encouraging cities to use resources from his Covid-19 relief package to fund a range of new public safety measures.

Among those in attendance on Monday at the White House: Eric Adams, the projected Democratic nominee to become the next mayor of New York City and darling of moderates desperate to divorce the party's brand from a movement that took flight in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder by a police officer in Minneapolis.
Calls to "Defund the Police" have almost entirely subsided since last summer, when the backlash to racist police violence set off protests across the country. In the cauldron of those heated demonstrations, emboldened progressive activists pushed for a dramatic reallocation of public funding away from police departments and toward social services, along with other preventive strategies designed to limit interactions between officers and nonviolent potential offenders.
The slogan, grabby but simplistic, briefly enjoyed some public support by mainstream liberal organizations. But it faded from all but the most hardcore activists' rhetoric as the 2020 election season heated up and public polling suggested it was a loser with most voters. The phrase lives on now mostly as a cudgel: one Republicans attempt to foist on Democrats in general election campaigns, regardless of their actual positions, and moderate Democrats try to hang like a millstone around the necks of their more progressive primary rivals, whether they subscribe to it or not.
Adams, a retired captain in the New York Police Department, pinned much of his successful mayoral primary campaign on a pledge to restore public safety in a city that, like so many others around the country, has seen more than a year of rising violent crime and shootings. He was also a willing foil to the "defund" crowd, which he largely dismissed as disconnected and privileged, promising stepped-up policing and the return of a controversial plainclothes NYPD anti-crime unit. In the end, Adams' message resonated in many of the hardest hit neighborhoods.
Two days after the election, holding a narrow but solid lead, Adams stepped out and declared himself the "face of the new Democratic Party" -- and warned that candidates who ignored his example risked not only their own fates, but the party's congressional majorities next year.

"If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, then they're going to have a problem in the midterm elections, and they're going to have a problem in the presidential elections," Adams said.
The moderate wing of the party has celebrated the brash Brooklynite's declarations, though his victory, in a closed primary that attracted fewer than a million voters, is unlikely to settle any long-running ideological debates. That is also a reflection of the reality that Adams' views on crime and punishment are, by his own description, "complicated," as he told CNN in May.

"I support closing Rikers (Island jail), but also support closing the pipeline that feeds Rikers," he said.
In many ways, Adams is an ideal match and ally for Biden. The President's winning coalition last year largely predicted Adams' in June, a parallel the Brooklyn borough president enjoys pointing out. Adams applauded Biden's approach on public safety after Monday's meeting, which came on the heels of a 72-hour span that saw 125 people killed in more than 360 shootings nationwide, according to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive.

"(Biden is) sending a loud message that this country and cities like New York are no longer going to normalize the level of violence that's taking place in our inner cities, handgun violence, something we have ignored on a federal level," Adams told CNN's Victor Blackwell.
Misplaced priorities
Adams' frustration with the federal government's inaction in response to gun violence puts him in line with Democrats of all stripes. But he has also offered more pointed criticism of what he describes as years of neglect -- through both Democratic and Republican administrations -- of handgun violence in predominantly minority and working class urban areas.

Asked by CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday if he believed national Democrats' priorities -- specifically, their focus on assault weapons -- have been misplaced, Adams didn't flinch.
"Yes, I do," he said. "And it's almost insulting what we have witnessed over the last few years. Many of our presidents, they saw these numbers. They knew that the inner cities, particularly where Black, brown and poor people lived, they know -- they knew -- they were dealing with this real crisis."
Adams' comment risked rankling some leading anti-gun violence activists -- in nonpartisan, moderate and progressive spheres -- who view those priorities as deeply intertwined.
Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, whose nonprofit group is part of Everytown for Gun Safety, one of the nation's largest gun control advocate organizations, told CNN in a statement that she believes "the single most important piece of legislation Congress could send to the President's desk would be to close loopholes in the background check system."
"This is a complex, multifaceted issue that requires a holistic approach, including funding for violence intervention programs and cracking down on illegal gun trafficking," Watts said, "both of which continue to be a focus for President Biden."

Frustration from the left
On the left, frustration with Adams' rhetoric and some of Biden's initiatives, which include his push for local governments to use money from his American Rescue Plan to hire more police officers, reflects the underlying forces that drove the "defund" movement.
Kina Collins, a longtime anti-gun violence activist leader currently running a progressive primary challenge to incumbent Democratic Rep. Danny Davis in Illinois' 7th district dismissed the debate over defunding -- "I call it funding our communities," she said -- as overly simplistic, but questioned whether a surge of police would have the desired effect.
"Here in the city of Chicago, in my district, the Chicago Police Department was given nearly $300 million from COVID relief, on top of their $1.7 billion that they already had allocated in the city budget. They dispatched a thousand police officers on July 4 weekend and guess what, 100-plus people were shot, 19 fatally," said Collins, who served as a member of the Biden transition team's task force on gun violence. "There were police officers who were shot -- so the people who are supposed to be protecting us in these communities have now become a part of the vicious cycle of being gun violence survivors."
The answer, Collins said, will not come from "pouring more money into an already-bloated police budget that doesn't make us any safer," but through investing in "violence interruption" programs that identify and train people within high-risk communities "who can identify high potential shooters and those who have the high risk to be shot at and deescalating those situations."
On the campaign trail, Adams discussed preventive measures but never wavered from the argument that more robust policing was the quickest and most effective tool for combating the current rise in violent crime.
"Don't let people fool you," Adams told CNN in May. "I've never went to one meeting, where people sat inside that meeting and said 'I don't want a cop on my block.' Never. And in fact, I've gone to meetings where we said, 'We're going to take the cop off your block' and they would be ready to fight you because of that."
Biden searches for common ground
Biden's latest initiative, as detailed in a memo from the administration, tries to square both schools of thought -- a familiar exercise for a President who, from the moment he clinched the nomination in 2020, has sought to forge a working consensus within an ideologically divided party. His gathering on Monday included law enforcement, elected officials and a community violence intervention experts.
Speaking afterward, Biden ticked off a varied approach to turning back the violent tide, but put particular emphasis on a piece of common ground: preventing guns from entering communities in the first place.
"While there's no one-size-fit-all approach, we know there are some things that work," Biden told reporters. "And the first of those that work is stemming the flow of firearms."

Abortion rights groups sue to block Texas law that allows citizens to enforce 'heartbeat' ban
By Devan Cole, CNN
Updated 9:42 PM ET, Tue July 13, 2021
A timeline leading to Roe v. Wade

A timeline leading to Roe v. Wade 01:36
Washington (CNN)A group of abortion rights organizations and providers filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday seeking to block enforcement of a recently passed Texas law that would allow private citizens to sue individuals thought to have assisted in violating the state's so-called heartbeat ban.

The suit -- brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights, Whole Woman's Health, Planned Parenthood Center for Choice and other groups -- is challenging SB 8, which was signed into law in May by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. The law bars most abortions at the onset of a fetal heartbeat, which can occur as early as six weeks into pregnancy and before many people know they are pregnant.
The plaintiffs in the suit take specific aim at a provision that gives individuals a monetary incentive to enforce the law, as well as a unique aspect of the measure that opens anyone who aided in accessing such an abortion to legal liability -- including "someone who accompanies her sister to an abortion clinic and pays for the abortion, or a sexual assault counselor who calls an abortion clinic on behalf of a patient," according to the filing.
SB 8 "deputizes private citizens to enforce the law, allowing 'any person' other than government officials to bring a civil lawsuit against anyone who provides an abortion in violation of the act, 'aids or abets' such an abortion, or intends to do these things," the lawsuit states.
"In effect, SB 8 places a bounty on people who provide or aid abortions, inviting random strangers to sue them," lawyers for the plaintiffs write, referring to the potential for the person bringing the suit to be awarded at least $10,000 in damages for each illegal abortion should they win.

Tuesday's lawsuit is the latest abortion-related challenge to come before a federal court in recent months, with a high-profile case out of Mississippi having been taken up by the Supreme Court in May, rekindling a potentially major challenge to Roe v. Wade at the majority conservative court.
In the Texas case, the groups argue that if the law takes effect in September, it "will create absolute chaos in Texas and irreparably harm Texans in need of abortion services."
"In particular, the burdens of this cruel law will fall most heavily on Black, Latinx, and indigenous patients who, because of systemic racism, already encounter substantial barriers to obtaining health care, and will face particular challenges and injuries if forced to attempt to seek care out of state or else carry an unwanted pregnancy to term," they argue.
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Noting a challenge in fighting the law, the lawsuit states that "the Legislature attempted to insulate its patently unconstitutional law from judicial review," by preventing state officials -- such as the attorney general, local prosecutors or the health department -- from directly enforcing it and it instead "deputizes private citizens." Still, the suit names Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, as one of the defendants, as well as a number of other state officials who could play a role in enforcing the law.
CNN has reached out to Paxton's office for comment on the lawsuit.

When Abbott signed the bill into law nearly two months ago, Texas joined South Carolina, Oklahoma and Idaho in codifying bans this year on abortion at the onset of a fetal heartbeat. Texas GOP state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the bill's sponsor in the Senate, told CNN before the bill's signing that "it was time for Texas to pass a heartbeat bill. We looked at what other states had done, looked at what the Supreme Court and other federal courts have said about abortion and what states can do, and took all that into account to come up with Senate Bill 8."
Opponents, including state Democrats, have blasted the bill's provisions, including the $10,000 sum that could go to people who win suits against individuals who allegedly help with violations of the bill, with Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier saying earlier this year that "it's just like a lottery, basically."
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"If this oppressive law takes effect, it will decimate abortion access in Texas -- and that's exactly what it is designed to do," Nancy Northup, the president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement on Tuesday.
"The state has put a bounty on the head of any person or entity who so much as gives a patient money for an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, before most people know they are pregnant. Worse, it will intimidate loved ones from providing support for fear of being sued," she added.
CNN's Caroline Kelly contributed to this report.

Biden fires top official at Social Security Administration after he refuses to resign
By Jeff Zeleny and Rachel Janfaza, CNN
Updated 9:54 PM ET, Fri July 9, 2021
Andrew Saul testifies during his confirmation hearing to be commissioner of the Social Security Administration in 2018.
Andrew Saul testifies during his confirmation hearing to be commissioner of the Social Security Administration in 2018.
(CNN)President Joe Biden on Friday fired Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul after he refused to submit his resignation as the President had requested, a White House official told CNN.

Biden had asked for the top two officials at the Social Security Administration to submit their resignations, the White House official told CNN, but only Saul refused. Deputy Commissioner David Black agreed to submit his resignation, the official said, and it was accepted.
"Since taking office, Commissioner Saul has undermined and politicized Social Security disability benefits, terminated the agency's telework policy that was utilized by up to 25 percent of the agency's workforce, not repaired SSA's relationships with relevant Federal employee unions including in the context of COVID-19 workplace safety planning, reduced due process protections for benefits appeals hearings, and taken other actions that run contrary to the mission of the agency and the President's policy agenda," the White House official said.
The President has appointed Kilolo Kijakazi as acting commissioner while the search for a commissioner and deputy commissioner is conducted.
She is currently the deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy at the Social Security Administration. Prior to that position, she served as a fellow at the Urban Institute, a program officer for the Ford Foundation, and a senior policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She holds a doctorate in public policy and has led and participated in research regarding Social Security, racial equity, economic security and retirement security.
The Washington Post was first to report on Saul's dismissal.
Saul's six-year term was not set to expire until January 19, 2025.
The White House cited a Supreme Court ruling establishing the President's ability to remove Saul from the role, according to the Post.
But in an interview with the Post on Friday, Saul said he does not intend to leave his role, questioning whether it was legal for the White House to have dismissed him from the position.

"I consider myself the term-protected Commissioner of Social Security," he said.
Saul told the Post he first heard the news of his dismissal in an email Friday morning from the White House Office of Personnel, calling his dismissal a "Friday Night Massacre."
"This was the first I or my deputy knew this was coming," he told the newspaper. "It was a bolt of lightning no one expected. And right now it's left the agency in complete turmoil."
Biden's decision to oust Saul was met with dismay by Republican leaders in Washington.

"This removal would be an unprecedented and dangerous politicization of the Social Security Administration," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a Friday tweet before the news of Saul's firing broke.
"Social Security Commissioner Saul has bipartisan backing," Iowa's Sen. Chuck Grassley said earlier Friday, warning of politicizing the agency.
But on the other side of the aisle, Rep. Bill Pascrell said Friday that he welcomes the "overdue" removal of Saul and Black.
Pascrell -- a New Jersey Democrat who's the chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight -- had for months been calling for the duo to be fired to "protect Social Security" and wrote a letter to the President in March expressing that he wanted them out of the agency.

"The leadership of the Social Security Administration under these men has been marked by a stunning streak of disregard, callousness, and destruction of the agency," Pascrell said Friday in a statement. "Saul and Black acted as foxes in the henhouse. Their agenda was not to protect Social Security but to impose cruelty on America's seniors and disabled. Their removal is overdue and welcome."
"Once again, the President has moved with decisiveness to build a better nation. Social Security is in deep trouble. I look forward to the nomination of a new commissioner who will be a partner for the Biden administration and be dedicated to protecting this program, not dismantling it. It's a new day," Pascrell said.

Saul and Black are not the first Trump appointees to be removed by the Biden White House, nor is Saul the first to question the legal authority President Joe Biden holds in removing his predecessor's appointees.
Last winter, the Biden administration made an effort to remove multiple Trump appointees across various government agencies and boards.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in February dismissed hundreds of members across 42 advisory boards, including a number of last-minute Trump appointees such as former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, Trump's deputy campaign manager.

This story has been updated with further details and background information.
CNN's Rachel Janfaza, Kristen Holmes, Tara Subramaniam and Liz Stark contributed to this report.

Fauci says Americans who are fully vaccinated do not need booster shots at this time
By Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN
Updated 10:33 AM ET, Sun July 11, 2021

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that the US government is not yet telling Americans who are fully vaccinated that they need a booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, based on the current data, despite Pfizer saying it might be time for a third shot.

Appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," Fauci told CNN's Jake Tapper that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Food and Drug Administration is saying right now, "given the data and the information we have, we do not need to give people a third shot, a boost, superimposed upon the two doses you get with the mRNA (Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccine) and the one dose you get with (Johnson & Johnson)."
Fauci said that there are ongoing studies evaluating if and when the US will recommend booster shots.
"There's a lot of work going on to examine this in real time to see if we might need a boost. But right now, given the data that the CDC and the FDA has, they don't feel that we need to tell people right now you need to be boosted," Fauci said.
Drugmaker Pfizer said Thursday it is seeing waning immunity from its coronavirus vaccine and says it is ramping up efforts to develop a booster dose and will soon publish data about a third dose of its vaccine that could protect people from variants.
The company also said it would seek FDA emergency use authorization for a booster dose in August.

Hours after Pfizer issued its statement, however, the FDA and CDC issued a rare joint statement saying fully vaccinated Americans "do not need a booster shot at this time."
The two agencies said they, along with the National Institutes of Health, "are engaged in a science-based, rigorous process to consider whether or when a booster might be necessary. This process takes into account laboratory data, clinical trial data, and cohort data -- which can include data from specific pharmaceutical companies, but does not rely on those data exclusively."
On Sunday, Tapper asked Fauci if he was worried that if the CDC and FDA change their recommendations and later recommend booster shots that it could undercut trust in the two federal agencies or lead some critics to accuse the agencies of "flip-flopping."
Fauci replied that the CDC and FDA make their formal recommendations "based on data that's evidence that proves we need to go in this direction."
"Before you get that data, there will always be people, well-meaning people and well-meaning companies will say, 'You know, the way we look at the situation it looks like you might need a booster so let's go ahead and give a booster.' But that's not a formal recommendation," Fauci said.
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Fauci added, "Data evolves. You get more information as the time goes by. So when you get to the point, where you have enough information to make a firm recommendation, that is not flip-flopping. That is making recommendations as the data evolve."

Prices keep soaring: Inflation rockets to a 13-year high
By Chris Isidore, CNN Business
Updated 11:26 AM ET, Tue July 13, 2021

Prices keep rising in the United States, putting a squeeze on American consumers' wallets. That trend got worse in June.

The consumer price index, the nation's key inflation measure, jumped 0.9% in June, the largest one-month increase in 13 years. Over the last 12 months, prices were up 5.4%, the biggest jump in annual inflation in nearly 13 years.

Much of the rise in prices is due to gasoline prices, which are far above last summer's levels. The pandemic caused sharp drop in driving and the price of oil. But travel is back -- and so is demand for gas and oil. Gas prices rose 45.1% compared to a year earlier.
Food prices are up 2.4% in the last 12 months, but prices for dining out rose 4.2%. Restaurants are having trouble attracting help as they try to reopen, which has led to higher wages. That increased cost is getting passed onto customers.
But volatile food and fuel prices aren't the only drivers of higher costs. Stripping out those categories, so-called core CPI rose 0.9% in June and 4.5% over the last 12 months. That represented the biggest 12-month increase in that closely watched measure in 30 years.
Record prices for used cars accounted for more than a third of the overall rise in prices. Used car prices were up 10.5% in June — the largest one-month jump in records that go back nearly 70 years, and a stunning 45.2% over the last 12 months.
New car prices are also up 5.3% over the last year, hitting record levels.
Car prices are being driven up by strong consumer demand for cars, along with a limited supply due to a shortage of computer chips needed to build the cars. Rental car companies, a key seller of used cars, already sold off much of their fleet of cars last year to raise cash during the pandemic and now don't have enough cars to rent.

Although prolonged inflation can be a cause for concern, there's reason to believe that this recent rise in prices -- although pronounced -- will be temporary. Inflation is soaring in part because prices are returning to normal levels after the economy fell into a recession. That makes year-over-year comparisons seem electric, showing up as big increases.

That is particularly true for the price of travel. For example, airfares are up 24.6% over the last 12 months, while hotel and motel prices rose 15.1%. But both are still below where they stood in June of 2019, ahead of the pandemic.
Economists, including those at the Federal Reserve, have signaled they believe this burst of inflation will pass. But if prices continue to exceed expectations, it could prompt the central bank to raise interest rates in an attempt to cool off the economy. The Fed, however, recently signaled it expects to keep rates this low into 2023.
Some experts agree with the Fed's take that inflation pressures will start easing in the second half of this year.
Every aspect of American life is getting more expensive
Every aspect of American life is getting more expensive
"The headline inflation numbers have been eye-popping in recent months, but underlying inflation remains under control," said Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial.

He noted prices few areas like used and rental cars, airfares and hotels are skyrocketing, and that "once again, comparisons with weak prices a year earlier are overstating inflation. Both factors will wash out of the data in the near term."
But not all economists are convinced the pandemic-fueled effect on inflation will be short-lived.
Sung Won Sohn, economics professor at Marymount University, said "the inflation picture looks less and less transitory," adding that "the supply bottlenecks, a surge in demand and the base effect explain some of the increases, but it is difficult to argue that everything will be back to normal in a few months."

For example, he pointed to labor shortages that he believes are likely to lead to increased wages.
"No doubt these higher labor costs will be reflected in higher prices in the future," he said.
Beyond economists, average Americans are becoming more concerned about prices too.
A survey of consumers by the Federal Reserve found that consumers expect about this level of inflation — a 4.8% annual increase — to last for at least the next year. That's the highest level since the Fed started the survey in 2013.

Former Oklahoma City Thunder employee turned in by coworkers pleads guilty in US Capitol riot
By Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN
Updated 5:44 PM ET, Wed July 14, 2021

A former Oklahoma City Thunder employee turned in by her former coworkers pleaded guilty on Wednesday to a misdemeanor charge for her part in the US Capitol insurrection.

Danielle Doyle, 37, pleaded guilty to illegally demonstrating inside the US Capitol on January 6 and agreed to pay $500 in restitution for damage done to the building during the riot. Prosecutors have cut the same deal for other defendants that face similar allegations to Doyle, who was not violent or destructive inside the building.
Doyle's plea comes in a flurry of deals involving defendants that face lesser charges, with two more defendants scheduled to plead guilty later this week.

The charges have a potential maximum of six month in jail, though it is likely Doyle will be ordered to serve much less, or even no jail time, when she is sentenced in October. Only two rioters have been sentenced so far, one of whom received jail time.
Federal prosecutors identified Doyle after two of her former coworkers at the Oklahoma City Thunder, Oklahoma's NBA team, reported her to the FBI after they noticed her in CNN video of the riot. Employees for the team had circulated a video of the clip, which showed Doyle inside the Capitol, according to a filing supporting her arrest.

A review of Doyle's LinkedIn profile shows that she worked for the team from 2010 to 2020 in ticket sales, and the organization confirmed to CNN in March that she had resigned in December 2020 to take a position elsewhere.
Investigators also found surveillance footage allegedly showing Doyle climbing through a broken window and walking down a staircase and through a hallway in the overrun Capitol building.
Fifteen other rioters have pleaded guilty so far in the massive federal investigation, according to CNN's reporting.

What the American accused of plotting to kill Haiti's President told police
By Caitlin Hu, Etant Dupain and David Shortell, CNN

Updated 4:45 AM ET, Wed July 14, 2021

Could the traveling pastor with a history of humanitarian work also have masterminded an intricate murder plot to seize power in Haiti?

Christian Emmanuel Sanon, the latest American citizen to be arrested in connection to the assassination of Haiti's President, has been accused by authorities of orchestrating a complex multinational hit job in order to realize his own political ambitions.
"He came with the intention to take over as President of the Republic," Haitian National Police Director General Leon Charles said of Sanon in a press conference on Sunday. He was also the first person one of the alleged men involved in the killing of President Jovenel Moise called after the attack, Charles said.
The street where Sanon was arrested.
The street where Sanon was arrested.
But Sanon has insisted on his innocence, according to a source close to the investigation who cannot be named because they are not authorized to discuss the affair.

The 63-year-old was arrested over the weekend during a police raid in an otherwise peaceful hilltop neighborhood in the capital Port-au-Prince, according to the source. The houses there are large and gated, and just a stone's throw away from the residence of acting Prime Minister Claude Joseph, who currently leads the country.
Inside a sprawling complex whose doors read "International Medical Village," police found boxes of ammunition and holsters for rifles and pistols, CNN's source said. According to a police statement, they also found 24 unused shooting targets, a cap labeled "DEA," and four Dominican Republic license plates. Judicial notices affixed to the property warn that it is now a sealed site amid the ongoing investigation.
Exclusive: A wild chase followed the assassination of Haiti's President
Exclusive: A wild chase followed the assassination of Haiti's President
Sanon told police that he had no knowledge of the attack on the President and that he hadn't known the weaponry and other seized materials were in the building, according to the source. He also told police that he was a Christian pastor, and emphasized that the building was neither his home nor his property, the source said.

Police have accused Sanon of recruiting the men who allegedly killed the President. One person who works nearby said they had noticed an uptick in activity during the past month, describing foreigners who were "muscular like bodyguards, wearing camouflage pants" frequently walking back and forth between the apparent medical complex and a house across the street.
But when asked about the 26 Colombians and two other Haitian-Americans who are suspects in the investigation, Sanon emphasized that "he doesn't know anything at all," according to the source. "He doesn't know. He doesn't know. This is what he said since the day authorities interviewed him."

Police have not announced any formal charges against Sanon, and it is not yet clear if Sanon has retained legal representation to address the charges. CNN was not able to reach him for comment.
'Dr. Christian Sanon: Leadership for Haiti'
According to police, Sanon was born in the seaside Haitian village of Marigot, and returned to the Caribbean country in June, on a private plane accompanied by hired guards.
Though little is known about Sanon in the years preceding his arrest, publicly available information indicates he was involved in a range of charitable initiatives.

In the early 2000s, Sanon helped to run medical clinics in Haiti for the Rome Foundation, a now-shuttered Florida-based non-profit that once carried out humanitarian work abroad.
"Dr. Sanon offers not only medicine for the body but also medicine for the soul. Unwavering, Dr. Sanon gives the good news of Jesus Christ to those who are searching for real answers in a Satan-controlled country," reads a 2004 "leadership profile" posted on an archived version of the Rome Foundation's website.
Larry Chadwell, the former president of the organization, told CNN in a brief interview that Sanon went to medical school in the Dominican Republic and was licensed to practice in Haiti but not the United States. A biography of Sanon posted by the Florida Baptist Historical Society says he graduated from the University Eugenio Maria de Hostos in the Dominican Republican.
Several tied to Haiti assassination plot were previously US law enforcement informants
Several tied to Haiti assassination plot were previously US law enforcement informants
A person who worked with Sanon in the early 2000s, when Sanon was with the foundation, told CNN that Sanon, a minister, was a convincing speaker who was responsible for pulling in many donations to the organization. "He's very articulate, very believable," the person said.

Sanon also spearheaded an initiative within the organization to build a hospital in the Tabarre district, according to the person and Dr. Ludner Confident, a Haitian-born doctor who helped with the organization's fundraising.
Confident called Sanon a "legitimate humanitarian" and "somebody who was trying to help."
"The whole organization was made of Christian people who have a good heart to help the poor," Confident said.
But Sanon also had bigger ideas for Haiti. Videos posted to a YouTube account under the name of "Dr Christian Sanon" in August 2011, show Sanon saying the country needs "a new leadership that will change the way of life" in the country.
The video, labeled "Dr. Christian Sanon: Leadership for Haiti," also showed Sanon describing the country's leadership as corrupt, and appearing to slam then-President Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly as "weak" and "selling his soul."
The investigation continues
View inside the International Medical Village compound.
View inside the International Medical Village compound.
With Sanon in custody, three US citizens have now been allegedly linked to the attack. James Solages and Joseph Vincent, both naturalized US citizens originally from Haiti, were detained last week.
Haitian police are currently in pursuit of 10 new local suspects, according to a Haitian government source. In total, at least 39 people have been implicated in the assassination so far.
The official Twitter account of Haitian National Police (PNH) named three of those suspects on Tuesday: Joseph Felix Badio, former Senator John Joel Joseph and Rodolphe Jaar (aka Dodof). Each is suspected of murder, attempted murder and armed robbery, according to the police notices, and were described by police as "armed and dangerous."
Haiti on edge as theories about President's assassination fill the vacuum
Haiti on edge as theories about President's assassination fill the vacuum
Several suspects also worked as US law enforcement informants, according to people briefed on the matter.
At least one of the men arrested in connection to the assassination by Haitian authorities previously worked as an informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA said in a statement in response to CNN.
"At times, one of the suspects in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise was a confidential source to the DEA," the DEA said in a statement.
Following the assassination of President Moise, the suspect reached out to his contacts at the DEA. A DEA official assigned to Haiti urged the suspect to surrender to local authorities and, along with a US State Department official, provided information to the Haitian government that assisted in the surrender and arrest of the suspect and one other individual," the DEA said.
The DEA said it is aware of reports that some assassins yelled "DEA" at the time of their attack. The DEA said in its statement that none of the attackers were operating on behalf of the agency.
Other suspects also had US ties, including working as informants for the FBI, the people briefed on the matter said. The FBI said in response to CNN's reporting that it doesn't comment on informants, except to say that it uses "lawful sources to collect intelligence" as part of its investigations.
The US has sent senior FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents to assist in the investigation, and State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Tuesday that the US is still evaluating requests for assistance from the Haitian government, which has asked for troops to help protect key infrastructure in a country with rampant criminal violence.
"We are evaluating how best we can support the needs of the Haitian government at the moment. As I said, right now much of that focuses on the ongoing investigation into the killing of President Moise," he said. "In addition to the interagency team, the FBI and DHS have been engaged on the ground as well to determine the investigative assets and the investigative support that Haiti may need on this investigation."
Asked about the request for security assistance, Price said, "we know in this case there may be needs for protection in the context of critical infrastructure."
"We're taking a close look at that as well," he said Tuesday.
Reporting contributed by CNN's Natalie Gallon and Matt Rivers in Port-au-Prince, Mitchell McCluskey in Atlanta, and Evan Perez, Jennifer Hansler and Jasmine Wright in Washington.

Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy to meet on Thursday as 1/6 committee hearing looms
By Ryan Nobles, CNN
Updated 9:36 AM ET, Thu July 15, 2021
Avlon: Kevin McCarthy is afraid of Donald Trump

Avlon: Kevin McCarthy is afraid of Donald Trump 03:43
(CNN)House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy is expected to meet with former President Donald Trump on Thursday, Trump announced in a statement, coming as the California Republican is considering which members of his conference to appoint to a special committee tasked with investigating the deadly January 6 riot at the US Capitol.

"Kevin McCarthy will be meeting with me this afternoon at Trump National in Bedminster, N.J. Much to discuss!" Trump announced in a statement Thursday.
McCarthy can appoint five members of the committee that will investigate the insurrection, which was perpetrated by Trump's supporters and came hours after the former president held a rally encouraging his followers to fight Congress' certification of President Joe Biden's victory.
This story is breaking and will be updated.

What the new CDC guidance for schools means for children
By Deblina Chakraborty, CNN

Updated 5:29 AM ET, Thu July 15, 2021
Desks are arranged in an elementary school in Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania. In the fall, vaccinated teachers and students no longer need to wear masks inside schools, according to new CDC guidance.
Desks are arranged in an elementary school in Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania. In the fall, vaccinated teachers and students no longer need to wear masks inside schools, according to new CDC guidance.
(CNN)Five full days a week, every week: After more than a year of remote learning, hybrid schedules and missed experiences, getting back to school -- "normal" school -- is all many parents and students want. But with Covid-19 surging again in some US states and concerns over new virus variants growing, what classrooms will look like exactly in the fall is still evolving.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidance last week on the importance of having all schools opened for in-person, full-time instruction in the fall. To safely keep schools open, the CDC recommended what it calls "a layered mitigation strategy." This is a systematic strategy involving multiple interventions to reduce risk, such as including the use of indoor masks for unvaccinated students and teachers.
How to speak to someone who's hesitant to get vaccinated
How to speak to someone who's hesitant to get vaccinated
What happens if schools reopen but don't enforce these procedures? For example, what should parents do if schools don't require masks? Should vaccinated children over 12 feel comfortable removing their masks in schools? And when might vaccines be available for younger children?
We asked CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen for her thoughts. Wen is an emergency physician and visiting professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. She's also author of a book coming out later this month, "Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health."
CNN: With the more contagious Delta variant circulating, are these CDC guidelines enough to keep students, teachers, staff and their families safe?
Dr. Leana Wen: Yes. At this point, we have plenty of data that schools can be very safe from a Covid-19 transmission standpoint if mitigation measures are followed. The CDC has been very thoughtful in its guidance, which cites numerous scientific articles to explain its strategic approach.
The Delta variant leaves children vulnerable to Covid-19. Here's how to protect your children
The Delta variant leaves children vulnerable to Covid-19. Here's how to protect your children
Specifically, the CDC is saying that indoor masking is important for unvaccinated people. That's because the unvaccinated are still at high risk for getting and transmitting coronavirus. Vaccination protects people very well, so, consistent with the rest of the guidance for vaccinated individuals, the CDC is saying vaccinated people don't need to mask indoors. It recommends weekly testing for unvaccinated students and staff, which could be more frequent for individuals involved in certain, higher-risk extracurricular activities. And there are other mitigation measures, too, such as an investment in improved ventilation using federal Covid relief funds and keeping students at home when they are having any possible symptoms of Covid-19. All these measures added together will substantially reduce transmission risk in schools.

At least two dead and four injured after an acetic acid leak at a facility near La Porte, Texas
By Joe Sutton, CNN

Updated 11:58 PM ET, Tue July 27, 2021
At least 2 people are dead after a chemical leak at the LyondellBasell plant in La Porte, officials said Tuesday.
At least 2 people are dead after a chemical leak at the LyondellBasell plant in La Porte, officials said Tuesday.
(CNN)At least two people are dead and four others injured after an acetic acid leak at the LyondellBasell facility near La Porte, Texas, officials said Tuesday.

"The leak has been isolated, and air monitoring at the facility perimeter indicates no offsite impact. There is no shelter in place or other protective actions being recommended at this time. Emergency officials are working to gather information on potential injuries," the La Porte Office of Emergency Management said in a tweet.

"Right now we can confirm two fatalities," Harris County Fire Marshal's Office spokeswoman Rachel K. Neutzler tells CNN.

At least four people sustained burns, according to a statement from LyondellBasell, provided to CNN by La Porte's public information officer Lee Woodward.
The statement said there was "an acetic acid leak" at the facility.
"Our on-site incident response team responded quickly, and the leak is stopped. Emergency responders from the City of La Porte and Channel Industries Mutual Aid are on scene," the LyondellBasell statement said.

"We are working closely with responders to confirm all employees are accounted for. Air monitoring demonstrated no levels of concern for the community," the statement said.
In an earlier tweet, the emergency management office they said there was no impact expected on the surrounding community.
The first report came in at around 7:30 p.m., Woodward told CNN.
"LyondellBasell La Porte requested support from La Porte EMS regarding a mass casualty incident at their facility," he said. The area is in unincorporated Harris County, adjacent to the City of La Porte, Woodward said.
LyondellBasell specializes in plastics, chemicals and refining.
This is a developing story and will be updated.

How race permeates the politics of gun control
Analysis by Brandon Tensley, CNN

Updated 7:55 PM ET, Sat August 28, 2021

Washington (CNN)When Americans talk about guns, what's arguably most interesting isn't what we say about the devices themselves. It's what we betray about whose voices -- and lives -- matter when it comes to our country's virulent gun culture.

Recall the killing of Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Black man. In July 2016, two police officers pulled him over in a Saint Paul, Minnesota, suburb. When Castile, buckled into his seat, reached for his ID, he informed one of the officers, Jeronimo Yanez, that he had a gun -- one that he was legally permitted to carry. Presumably familiar with the horrors that the police tend to visit on Black Americans, Castile just wanted to ward off any trouble. But Yanez lost control, hitting Castile with five of the seven shots he fired. Castile died later that night.
Instead of hurrying to condemn the shooting, as it had done when police officers killed White gun owners, the National Rifle Association initially sought refuge in saying nothing.
The Second Amendment is not about guns -- it's about anti-Blackness, a new book argues
The Second Amendment is not about guns -- it's about anti-Blackness, a new book argues
As Emory University African American studies professor Carol Anderson writes in her new book, "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America," "The NRA broke its silence only after inordinate pressure from African American members led the gun manufacturers' lobby to issue a tepid statement that the Second Amendment was applicable 'regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation.' "

The NRA's perfunctory response to Castile's death shone a light on the way that race permeates the politics of gun control.
Decades ago, when Congress actually passed an assault weapons ban (one that, notably, was allowed to expire in 2004), the broad concern was around guns in the hands of people of color -- Black Americans, specifically. Our modern Congress finds itself paralyzed now that we're increasingly facing a different dimension of the issue: White people's guns, and the consequences of their contested rights to have them.
Or as University of St. Thomas history professor Yohuru Williams says in the new CNN Films documentary, "The Price of Freedom," "Throughout our history, the fear that African Americans could have access to firearms and use those firearms to the detriment of Whites is pervasive."
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Black self-defense
Understanding this history requires looking back at the social and political pieties that helped to spur the US's contemporary gun rights movement. Consider how, in the 1960s, fear of the Black Panthers played a role in motivating conservative politicians -- and even the NRA -- to push for new gun control legislation. The Panthers, formed to challenge police brutality, advocated for Black self-defense via gun ownership and "copwatching."
To no one's surprise, the backlash against this vision of protection was swift. In 1967, in response to the Panthers' activities, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act, named after Republican Assemblyman Don Mulford and which repealed a California law that permitted people to carry loaded firearms in public.
Two members of the Black Panther Party are met on the steps of the state capitol in Sacramento, California, May 2, 1967.
Two members of the Black Panther Party are met on the steps of the state capitol in Sacramento, California, May 2, 1967.
Of the bill, Reagan said later that it'd "work no hardship on the honest citizen." This citizen, we can assume, was White.
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"The Mulford Act criminalized the open carry of firearms, and was designed specifically to disenfranchise and to disarm members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense because they were demonstrating in public -- carrying firearms openly to shed a spotlight on police violence against Black and brown people in California," Harvard University historian Caroline Light says in "The Price of Freedom."
Crucially, while unthinkable today, the NRA's position on gun regulation until the late '70s -- when more and more (White) people began viewing guns as a means of protecting themselves and their status -- was noticeably divorced from full-bore Second Amendment arguments, as UCLA School of Law professor Adam Winkler charts.
A different gun rights advocate
How distant all that seems now.

These days, despite a resurgence in Black gun ownership, the face of the gun rights advocate has changed -- rural White conservatives are now among the most vocal proponents.
Take, for instance, Missouri, where, in the past two decades, "an increasingly conservative and pro-gun legislature and citizenry had relaxed limitations governing practically every aspect of buying, owning and carrying firearms in the state," writes Jonathan M. Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, in his 2019 book, "Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland."
'Judas and the Black Messiah' and the enduring power of the Black Panthers
'Judas and the Black Messiah' and the enduring power of the Black Panthers
"Corporate-gun-lobby-backed politicians, commentators and advertisements openly touted loosened gun laws as ways for white citizens to protect themselves against dark intruders," Metzl explains. "Meanwhile, black men who attempted to demonstrate their own open-carry rights were attacked and jailed rather than lauded as freedom-loving patriots."
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Compare this with the rhetoric of the '90s, when, on signing what became the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (which contained the Federal Assault Weapons Ban), former President Bill Clinton said, "Gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools."
It's the difference between vanquishing the supposed specter of Black criminality -- seen in gangs and the weapons associated with them -- and protecting the property of White conservatives.
Or put another way, the hypocrisy around gun ownership in the US is a broadcast of something indisputably fundamental: the country's struggle to bolster a racial hierarchy.

Labor Day 2021: What's open, what's closed
By Alexis Benveniste, CNN Business
Updated 9:12 AM ET, Sun September 5, 2021
rising wages job openings nela richardson jg orig_00013402

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Economist explains why there are so many job openings
A hiring sign is displayed in a store window in Manhattan on August 19, 2021 in New York City. Despite continued concerns about the Delta variant of the Covid virus, the United States economy continues to grow with the leading economic index jumping 0.9% last month. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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A group of researchers have developed a new material they say is as soft as standard sewing thread and can be worn and washed like normal clothing, but it's as strong as kevlar and as conductive as many metals — and could eventually make athletic apparel into smart "wearables."
The so-called "carbon nanotube threads" work similarly to the wires in a heart-rate measuring electrocardiogram (EKG) device but instead of having to be patched onto the skin, they can be sewn into a T-shirt and worn like normal athleticwear, according to researchers at a lab at the Rice University Brown School of Engineering. And unlike wires, the threads can comfortably move with the wearer, and be washed, stretched and worn repeatedly without breaking down.
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A hiring sign is displayed in a store window in Manhattan on August 19, 2021 in New York City. Despite continued concerns about the Delta variant of the Covid virus, the United States economy continues to grow with the leading economic index jumping 0.9% last month. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Delta drag: Only 235,000 jobs added back to US economy in August

Slow relief funds rollout means renters face uncertain future
A group of researchers have developed a new material they say is as soft as standard sewing thread and can be worn and washed like normal clothing, but it's as strong as kevlar and as conductive as many metals — and could eventually make athletic apparel into smart "wearables."
The so-called "carbon nanotube threads" work similarly to the wires in a heart-rate measuring electrocardiogram (EKG) device but instead of having to be patched onto the skin, they can be sewn into a T-shirt and worn like normal athleticwear, according to researchers at a lab at the Rice University Brown School of Engineering. And unlike wires, the threads can comfortably move with the wearer, and be washed, stretched and worn repeatedly without breaking down.
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New York (CNN Business)The Labor Day holiday bookmarks the end of summer and the beginning of fall, but above all, it celebrates working Americans and the US labor movement.

If you have the day off, you might be curious about what's open and what's closed since many businesses shut down to observe the holiday.
Here are some of the major businesses and institutions that will be open, and those that will be closed, on Monday, September 6.
Open normal hours:
Target
Walmart
Kroger
Trader Joe's
CVS
Walgreens
ShopRite
AMC Theatres

Closed:
Costco
DMV
Public libraries (In New York, the public libraries are closed on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.)
Banks
Post offices
FedEx
UPS

US Capitol Police announces six disciplinary cases against officers from Jan. 6 insurrection
By Sonnet Swire
Updated 9:34 PM ET, Sat September 11, 2021

Washington, DC (CNN)The United States Capitol Police (USCP) announced that disciplinary action has been recommended in six cases against officers following internal investigations into the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

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Violations sustained include three cases for conduct unbecoming, one for failure to comply with directives, one for improper remarks, and one for improper dissemination of information, according to a USCP statement released Saturday. The statement did not specify if the six cases involved six separate officers nor did it name any of them. CNN has reached out to the USCP for clarification.
"The six sustained cases should not diminish the heroic efforts of the United States Capitol Police officers. On January 6, the bravery and courage exhibited by the vast majority of our employees was inspiring," the release said.
The USCP's Office of Professional Responsibility launched 38 internal investigations, and was able to identify the officers involved in 26 of those cases. In 20 of the cases, no wrongdoing was found, according to the statement.
A seventh case regarding an official who is accused of unsatisfactory performance and conduct unbecoming is still pending.
The USCP provided the Department of Justice information on the cases "as part of the ongoing discovery production in the prosecution of the January 6 rioters," and said the US Attorney's Office "did not find sufficient evidence that any of the officers committed a crime," according to the statement.

CNN has reached out to the District of Columbia US Attorney's Office for comment.
CNN has also reached out to the US Capitol Police Labor Committee, the union for Capitol Police officers, but did not receive an immediate response.
In February, six US Capitol Police officers were suspended with pay, while 29 others were placed under investigation, for their actions in the January 6 riot, a department spokesman said at the time.
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Law enforcement officials are bracing for potential clashes and unrest during an upcoming right-wing rally in Washington, DC, as violent rhetoric surrounding the September 18 event has increased online and counterprotests are being planned for the same day, according to an internal Capitol Police memo reviewed by CNN.

Seven more US Capitol riot defendants plead guilty, including armed man who threatened to shoot Pelosi
By Marshall Cohen, Hannah Rabinowitz, Olanma Mang and Andrew Millman, CNN
Updated 4:01 PM ET, Sat September 11, 2021

Seven US Capitol riot defendants pleaded guilty on Friday to charges related to the January 6 insurrection, including one man who threatened to shoot House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

With this latest flurry of court activity, 10% of the more than 600 known federal defendants charged in connection with the deadly riot have pleaded guilty, according to CNN's latest tally.
The most notable defendant to finalize a guilty plea was Cleveland Meredith Jr., who drove from Colorado to Washington, DC, with two guns and 2,500 rounds of ammunition. He missed former President Donald Trump's speech at a rally on January 6, but texted a relative one day later that he was thinking about attending an event with Pelosi and "putting a bullet in her noggin on Live TV."
He pleaded guilty to sending threatening communications and faces a maximum potential prison term of five years, though prosecutors told the judge they'd only seek as much as two years. Meredith has been in jail since his arrest in January and will get credit for time served when he is sentenced in December.
The pace of guilty pleas has picked up in recent weeks, as the Justice Department tries to resolve dozens of lower-level cases involving nonviolent riot defendants, including a married couple from Ohio.
Most of the 61 guilty pleas so far have been for low-level misdemeanors. But several people have pleaded guilty to felonies that could lead to years-long prison sentence, such as conspiring with extremist groups, assaulting police or obstructing congressional proceedings.

Past and future threats
At Meredith's plea hearing, he told the judge that the vulgar and sexist messages he sent about shooting Pelosi were "political hyperbole," before eventually admitting: "I sent the text."

He planned to attend Trump's January 6 rally, but because of car trouble, he arrived in DC after the insurrection. He acknowledged that he brought 2,500 rounds of ammunition, an assault rifle and another gun emblazoned with an American flag in his truck trailer. But as part of his plea agreement, he wasn't required to plead guilty to the weapons charges that were initially filed.
During a separate plea hearing on Friday, a federal judge reminded another defendant that he is banned from returning to DC for a rally planned for September 18 in support of the January 6 rioters.
"You are not allowed to attend that demonstration, do you understand?" US District Judge Rudolph Contreras told defendant Felipe Marquez, who, like most of the Capitol riot defendants, was previously ordered to stay out of DC while his criminal case is moving through the court system.

Marquez pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, which is a misdemeanor. He could face up to one year in jail, though most nonviolent rioters have received lighter sentences.
Few expect the September 18 protest to be anywhere near the size of the massive pro-Trump rally on January 6 that preceded the insurrection, which attracted at least 25,000 people. But law enforcement officials are bracing for potential clashes and unrest, and the US Capitol Police asked its oversight board to approve plans to temporarily reinstall fencing around the complex.
Federal prosecutors say this photograph shows Stephanie Miller (left) and Brandon Miller (right) inside the US Capitol on January 6. (Source: Justice Department)
Federal prosecutors say this photograph shows Stephanie Miller (left) and Brandon Miller (right) inside the US Capitol on January 6. (Source: Justice Department)
Last-minute antics
A married couple from rural Ohio also pleaded guilty Friday to illegally protesting in the Capitol, a misdemeanor akin to trespassing that many of the nonviolent rioters pleaded guilty to already.

After the attack, Stephanie Miller and Brandon Miller falsely claimed on Facebook that the day "was peaceful" and that "the media" was distorting what happened, according to court filings.
Their plea hearing was nearly derailed when the couple balked at a few provisions in the deal their lawyers had negotiated with the Justice Department. Brandon Miller claimed he hadn't been told that he would need to do an interview with investigators about the riot. And Stephanie Miller said she wasn't aware that prosecutors could examine her phone and social media accounts.
After a brief discussion with their lawyers, the Millers both moved forward with their guilty pleas. US District Judge Tanya Chutkan accepted their pleas and scheduled sentencing for December 1.

They're not the only Capitol rioters who raised last-minute objections at their plea hearings. CNN previously reported that several defendants continued to push self-serving narratives about police supposedly inviting them into the Capitol, even as they tried to plead guilty.
More guilty pleas are scheduled to occur in the coming weeks. Only six rioters have been sentenced so far, but more sentencing hearings are peppered throughout the rest of 2021.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified which state defendant Cleveland Meredith Jr. traveled from to Washington, DC. It was Colorado.

Feds cite sedition in search warrant for lawyer's phone
By Katelyn Polantz, CNN Reporter, Crime and Justice
Updated 6:48 PM ET, Fri September 10, 2021

Judges rebuke capitol riot suspects 02:40
(CNN)Federal prosecutors cited seditious conspiracy as a crime under investigation in a recent search that appears to be related to the US Capitol riot probe, according to a court document supporting the search.

The move, made known through the iPhone search of the Oath Keepers-linked Texas lawyer Kellye SoRelle, again raises the possibility that the Justice Department could be considering use of the provocative charge.
Sedition has not been used against any of the more than 600 Capitol riot federal criminal defendants, and is rarely charged. But the possibility of federal authorities attempting to use it as a legal hammer in response to the insurrection has hung over the investigation since the former acting DC US attorney first announced it was under consideration.
The Justice Department so far has shied away from charging Capitol riot defendants with sedition. It's instead opted to bring more than 100 cases alleging a more specific obstruction crime, which carries that same potential weight of prison time but may be less of a legal gauntlet.
The search also is a sign that the federal investigation into right-wing groups whose members took part in the January 6 insurrection continues. The warrant, signed by a magistrate judge in DC District Court, is dated August 30.
The search warrant cited a host of crimes being investigated in line with other major January 6 cases, such as obstruction of Congress, conspiracy and violent entry of the Capitol. But it also included sedition, according to a copy of the warrant documentation provided to CNN by an associate of SoRelle. Mother Jones first reported on the details of the warrant on Thursday.

Even though a criminal code may appear on a search warrant, it doesn't mean it'll lead to that charge -- or any charge. SoRelle has not been charged with a crime. She wasn't available on Thursday to comment to CNN.
In tweets on Wednesday night about having her cell phone searched, SoRelle implied that she believed a conspiracy was targeting her.
She publicly identifies herself as the general counsel for the Oath Keepers, the far-right paramilitary organization that federal prosecutors have zeroed in on in their largest January 6 conspiracy case to date. She doesn't represent any charged Capitol riot defendants, according to federal court records in DC.
Most of the defendants have pleaded not guilty and are headed to trial, though prosecutors have signed up some key cooperators with ties to the group through guilty plea deals. SoRelle says she also works with grassroots groups supportive of former President Donald Trump.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misattributed the outlet that first reported the details of the search warrant. It was Mother Jones.

US Capitol Police announces six disciplinary cases against officers from Jan. 6 insurrection
By Sonnet Swire
Updated 9:34 PM ET, Sat September 11, 2021

Washington, DC (CNN)The United States Capitol Police (USCP) announced that disciplinary action has been recommended in six cases against officers following internal investigations into the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Violations sustained include three cases for conduct unbecoming, one for failure to comply with directives, one for improper remarks, and one for improper dissemination of information, according to a USCP statement released Saturday. The statement did not specify if the six cases involved six separate officers nor did it name any of them. CNN has reached out to the USCP for clarification.
"The six sustained cases should not diminish the heroic efforts of the United States Capitol Police officers. On January 6, the bravery and courage exhibited by the vast majority of our employees was inspiring," the release said.
The USCP's Office of Professional Responsibility launched 38 internal investigations, and was able to identify the officers involved in 26 of those cases. In 20 of the cases, no wrongdoing was found, according to the statement.
A seventh case regarding an official who is accused of unsatisfactory performance and conduct unbecoming is still pending.
The USCP provided the Department of Justice information on the cases "as part of the ongoing discovery production in the prosecution of the January 6 rioters," and said the US Attorney's Office "did not find sufficient evidence that any of the officers committed a crime," according to the statement.

CNN has reached out to the District of Columbia US Attorney's Office for comment.
CNN has also reached out to the US Capitol Police Labor Committee, the union for Capitol Police officers, but did not receive an immediate response.
In February, six US Capitol Police officers were suspended with pay, while 29 others were placed under investigation, for their actions in the January 6 riot, a department spokesman said at the time.
Law enforcement officials are bracing for potential clashes and unrest during an upcoming right-wing rally in Washington, DC, as violent rhetoric surrounding the September 18 event has increased online and counterprotests are being planned for the same day, according to an internal Capitol Police memo reviewed by CNN.

Biden links Elder to Trump on eve of California recall
By Dan Merica, CNN
Updated 11:50 PM ET, Mon September 13, 2021
President Joe Biden arrives to speak at a get out the vote rally for Gov. Gavin Newsom at Long Beach City College, Monday, Sept. 13, 2021, in Long Beach, Calif., as Gavin faces a recall election on Tuesday.
President Joe Biden arrives to speak at a get out the vote rally for Gov. Gavin Newsom at Long Beach City College, Monday, Sept. 13, 2021, in Long Beach, Calif., as Gavin faces a recall election on Tuesday.
(CNN)President Joe Biden on Monday offered his full-throated support of California Gov. Gavin Newsom as the pair attempted to thwart the recall effort against the Democratic governor by linking former President Donald Trump to the lead Republican candidate.

The President's message on the eve of Election Day echoes the way Newsom has closed his campaign: By likening conservative talk radio host Larry Elder, the candidate most likely to replace Newsom if the recall is successful, to the former President, who lost California by nearly 30 percentage points in 2020.
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"All of you know last year I got to run against the real Donald Trump," Biden said, making the sign of the cross across his chest. "Well, this year, the leading Republican running for governor is the closest thing to a Trump clone that I have ever seen in your state."

Biden added: "He is the clone of Donald Trump. Can you imagine him being governor of this state? You can't let that happen."
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The event with Biden represents the crescendo of Newsom's campaign strategy to nationalize the effort to recall him by calling on top Democratic leaders -- from Vice President Kamala Harris to Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar -- to rally on his behalf. The anti-recall campaign also ran television ads featuring former President Barack Obama touting Newsom and a photo with Elder standing next to Trump.

Biden, speaking in California, also touted the importance of the recall election, arguing the results will reverberate beyond just the Golden State.
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"The decision you're about to make isn't just going to have a huge impact on California, it's going to reverberate around the nation, and quite frankly, not a joke, around the world," Biden said.
The decision to nationalize the race against Elder has propelled Newsom's campaign in the closing weeks of the recall, but it has also allowed him to focus less on thornier local issues like homelessness, drought and crime, all issues Elder has tried to use against Newsom.
Newsom continued this message against Elder shortly before the Democratic leader introduced Biden, Trump's successor, to the stage.

"Does it surprise any of you that we have someone on the other side of this that is to the right of Donald Trump," Newsom said.
Newsom continued, saying that while the 2020 was the "most important election in our lifetime," Elder represented the fact that "Trumpism is still on the ballot in California."
"We may have defeated Donald Trump, but we have not defeated Trumpism," Newsom said.
Trump has not endorsed in the California recall, but Elder has run in line with many of Trump's policies. And the former President has buttressed some of Elder's baseless claims of voter fraud before the election is even decided.
For Newsom and his top operatives, the decision to talk about Trump was made to boost turnout. Democrats were worried earlier in the summer that the off-year, off-month recall election would surprise Democratic voters, potentially leading to depressed turnout among the party's most reliable voters and helping Republican overcome their significant party registration disadvantage in the state.

A string of recent polls show Newsom and the anti-recall effort in a strong position headed into Election Day. The most recent survey from the Public Policy Institute of California finding that 58% of likely voters favor keeping Newsom in office, compared to 39% who would like to remove him.
California recall speed read
California recall speed read
The recall is primarily a vote-by-mail election, with every active voter in the state receiving a ballot in the mail before Election Day. And for those ballots to be counted, they must be returned either in person by the close of polls on Tuesday, or they must be postmarked by Election Day and received by county officials by September 21.
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More than 8.4 million pre-election ballots have been cast in the California recall, according to data from Edison Research, making up about 47% of the total votes cast in the state in 2020. Roughly 52% of the ballots for which Edison has data on party were cast by registered Democrats and 25% were cast by registered Republicans.
It's those poll numbers, along with the ballots that have been returned, that have injected Newsom's campaign with unmitigated confidence.
"There's no scenario where we lose tomorrow," Sean Clegg, Newsom's top strategist, told reporters on Monday in Long Beach, where Newsom rallied with Biden.
Clegg said that the Delta surge as a "real inflection moment in this campaign" that spurred voters to not only pay attention to the race, but each candidate's position on Covid-19.

"It was a turning point for us," Clegg said of the Delta surge. "What Delta brought into clear, clear focus was what the stakes are in this election when one party has basically become an anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-public health party."

How the California recall could strengthen the push for Covid mandates
Analysis by Ronald Brownstein
Updated 12:07 AM ET, Tue September 14, 2021
This group could be deciding factor in California recall election

This group could be deciding factor in California recall election 02:43
(CNN)The closely watched California gubernatorial recall election on Tuesday is poised to send precisely the opposite political message that its proponents initially intended.

It was a strong gust of discontent in the state's most conservative regions last year over Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's stringent measures to fight the Covid-19 pandemic that allowed the recall to qualify for the ballot at all. But now a swell of support in the broader statewide electorate for the more recent steps Newsom has taken to combat the Delta variant outbreak -- particularly the vaccine mandates he's imposed for educators, health care workers and state employees -- has positioned him for a potentially resounding victory, according to the latest polls.
Recall proponents had hoped to demonstrate the political potency of the backlash against tough Covid regulations and discourage other states from implementing them; instead, the race now seems more likely to embolden Democrats in California and beyond by documenting the existence of a new "silent majority" of vaccinated Americans ready for tougher measures against the minority of adults who have resisted the shot.
"What we were able to do is take the governor's clear national leadership on vaccine mandates and drive it as the core contrast in the election," says Sean Clegg, a strategist for the Newsom campaign. "I hope what we've shown Democrats ... is to embrace [mandates] as a partisan question, put up our dukes and get Republicans on the wrong side of the fence on this thing."
How a sharp contrast on Covid has reshaped the California recall race
How a sharp contrast on Covid has reshaped the California recall race
Solidly blue California may be uniquely favorable terrain for Democrats to contest this argument. But Newsom's success in gaining the upper hand over the recall by leaning into his support for vaccine mandates may be seen in retrospect as a turning point in the Democratic approach to the pandemic.

Already, Gov. Phil Murphy and Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidates in this November's New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, have also emphatically embraced mandates -- and sharpened their contrast on the issue with their GOP opponents, who are rejecting them. Most dramatically, President Joe Biden last week pivoted from a strategy of relying primarily on inducements and persuasion to increase vaccination rates to a more confrontational approach centered on proposals to require health care workers and employees at larger firms to obtain the vaccine or undergo weekly testing.
Almost uniformly, Republicans have condemned these mandate proposals, with a succession of GOP governors promising to sue Biden once he finalizes his plan. But rather than shrinking from this fight, more Democrats appear to welcome it, believing that Republicans are isolating themselves by agitating so unreservedly for the "rights" and "choices" of the one-quarter of adults who remain unvaccinated when the three-fourths of adults who have received at least one dose are increasingly exasperated with them, polls show. A substantial win for Newsom on Tuesday would likely solidify the resolve among many Democrats that mask and vaccine mandates represent a sound strategy not only for public health but also the next elections.

"Around the issue of mandates there is a lot of support because people want this thing to be over," says Mark Baldassare, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, which conducts regular statewide surveys. "Tell me what's going to allow us to go back to a situation where we're not in fear of getting and spreading this disease. And I think a lot of Democrats and a lot of moderate voters in California, are saying, 'If it's mandates, then so be it.' "
Looming problems for both parties
Even if Newsom survives the recall election, the process could still signal some looming problems for Democrats. A big Election Day surge of GOP voters reluctant to vote by mail could produce a somewhat tighter finish than polls are forecasting. Democrats have been hurt in previous midterm elections by lagging turnout among young people and Latinos, two key party constituencies, and early returns show they are returning ballots at much lower rates than other groups in California; some, though not all, polls have also shown Newsom's support among Latinos eroding compared with his initial 2018 victory.

"The data that we have worked off of illustrates that there is something happening in the Latino community in California that is not receptive to the traditional Democratic playbook and the buttons that they are used to pushing," says former California GOP Chairman Ron Nehring, who is now advising former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, one of the Republicans running to replace Newsom.
Yet a Newsom victory at anywhere near the level that polls are now indicating would underscore the continuing obstacles Republicans face with the voters who compose the core of the modern Democratic coalition not only in California but also nationally: young people, non-White voters and college-educated Whites, particularly those in each group concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas.
Especially telling is how Newsom's Covid response has evolved from his greatest vulnerability to his most powerful motivator for that Democratic coalition.
What you need to know about the California recall
What you need to know about the California recall
"This is the Covid election, and it has been from the beginning," says Dan Schnur, a former Republican communications adviser who teaches political communications at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley. "It wouldn't exist without Covid, and assuming Newsom survives, it'll be because of Covid."
Conservatives had launched multiple efforts to recall Newsom even before the pandemic struck last year, focusing on issues such as taxes, crime and undocumented immigration. But those efforts all foundered until Covid -- and Newsom himself -- provided a bolt of lightning. Last November, while the state was still largely in lockdown, the governor attended a dinner for a close political ally at the exclusive Napa Valley restaurant French Laundry; almost simultaneously a state judge, citing the logistical challenges Covid created, gave recall proponents more time to gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Newsom's ill-advised dinner -- at a time when his children were already attending an in-person private school -- crystallized enough frustration over the state's lengthy lockdowns and shifting policies to attract national Republicans to pour in fundraising help to the recall effort, and with the added time and resources, proponents met California's low bar to qualify the recall. (To qualify for the ballot, the state requires a recall to attract signatures equal to just 12% of the votes in the previous governor's election, the lowest level necessary in any of the 19 states with recall laws for governors.)

"There were several recall attempts at Newsom earlier in his term, but none of them really went anywhere until you had Covid," says Nehring. "It was ... the frustration with that erratic response that helped drive the recall to qualify."
A gamble that's likely to pay off
With the recall drawing its strength from voters opposed to Newsom's stringent Covid measures, the governor initially sought to emphasize the state's movement away from those restrictions. As vaccines became widely available, he set June 15 as a reopening day for the state, lifted most public health mandates and regularly touted what he called "the California comeback."
"We had a trajectory that looked very good for us in the sense that Biden was talking about Independence Day [as a turning point], we had a clear stake in the ground to open the state on June 15, people's attitudes were improving ... and in May and June there was a pervasive feeling of optimism," says Clegg, the strategist for Newsom's campaign.
But the Covid surge driven by the Delta variant early this summer upended those plans. Once Delta emerged, Clegg says, the optimistic message of moving beyond Covid increasingly seemed "tone deaf" to the growing public concern, as well as to the public health reality of caseloads and hospitalization numbers that were again rapidly rising.
An observer who declined to give their name watches election workers process ballots (and signatures verified) at vote centers across the state during the California gubernatorial recall election, including the Orange County Registrar of Voters in Santa Ana, on Thursday, Sept. 9, 2021.
An observer who declined to give their name watches election workers process ballots (and signatures verified) at vote centers across the state during the California gubernatorial recall election, including the Orange County Registrar of Voters in Santa Ana, on Thursday, Sept. 9, 2021.
In response, Newsom made a fateful policy and political pivot. Following recommendations from his health advisers, Newsom imposed new mandates for vaccinations or regular testing on state employees and health care workers in late July, and a first-in-the-nation requirement for all K-12 teachers and staff in early August. In July he also imposed a statewide requirement for indoor mask-wearing at K-12 schools (while leaving implementation to local school boards). And he moved his support for those mandates -- and the opposition to them from all the leading GOP candidates -- to the center of his messaging against the recall, both in television advertising and public appearances.
Leaning into tough vaccine mandates amid a recall that was initially boosted by opposition to his stringent Covid responses represented a political gamble for Newsom. But unless all of the latest polls in the state are spectacularly wrong, it's a gamble that has paid off -- with potentially broad implications for the national debate over vaccine mandates. Newsom's response to the Delta wave, says Clegg, "created a new line of scrimmage" in the contest that shifted the advantage toward the governor.
Polls suggest the debate over mandates has helped to solve the greatest problem Newsom always faced in the recall: the risk that Democrats -- who outnumber Republicans in the state by about 2 to 1 -- would slumber through it. That danger was underscored by a late July poll from the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California (Berkeley) that sent shock waves through the state by showing nearly half of likely voters backing the recall and Republicans far more engaged than Democrats. Now the latest surveys from Berkeley and the Public Policy Institute of California have found about three-fifths of likely voters opposing the recall and Democrats far more engaged than earlier this year.
Five places to watch in the California recall
Five places to watch in the California recall
Newsom's huge spending blitz on advertising and organizing partly explains that shift, but California analysts also point to the governor's success at converting the race primarily into a referendum on his policies to combat Covid.

What were for Republican voters "the reasons to remove the governor became for the Democrats the reason to keep him," says Baldassare. "For Democratic voters ... the Delta variant wave has created a sense of urgency and importance to this [recall] that it otherwise would not have had."
Nehring believes the pivot point in the race wasn't the governor's embrace of Covid mandates, but the emergence of firebrand conservative talk radio host Larry Elder as the front-runner in the GOP field.
"What helped Gavin Newsom regain his footing is Larry Elder, more than anything else," Nehring says. "You can literally see the trend line shift when Elder gets in the race and becomes the leading alternative. That forced people to reconsider how they would vote on [recalling Newsom]. Republicans were already energized against Newsom. But when Larry Elder got in the race it served to energize the Democrats."
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A lesson for other Democrats
But others note that, even amid all of Elder's other conservative positions that present tempting targets in left-leaning California, Newsom has focused above all on the opposition from him (and the other top GOP contenders) to mask and vaccine mandates, while linking them to GOP Govs. Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas, who have aggressively fought such requirements.
"Despite the fact that Elder is to the right of most Californians on many issues, it's his approach to the pandemic that has helped Newsom more than anything," says Schnur. "Newsom isn't just running against Larry Elder and Donald Trump; he's running against Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis. He's framed this as a choice not just between two candidates but between two very different approaches the states have taken in response to the pandemic."
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis threatens to fine state counties and cities over vaccine mandates
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis threatens to fine state counties and cities over vaccine mandates
That's clearly struck a chord, most powerfully for Democratic voters, but also for many independents (most of whom oppose the recall in the latest surveys) and even a sliver of Republicans. Both the latest Public Policy Institute of California and Berkeley polls found Newsom winning about two-thirds of likely voters who have been vaccinated, and the latter survey found that only about one-third of voters now say the state is doing "too much" to combat the coronavirus, the complaint that initially boosted the recall. That's roughly the same meager share of the vote that Trump won in California while losing the state by more than 5 million votes.
Maybe the most striking thing about Newsom's revival is that it's come even as the Public Policy Institute of California surveys have found that the share of Californians who believe the state is on the wrong track has increased. That defies the usual laws of political gravity, which hold that incumbents almost always decline as "wrong track" rises. Newsom's reversal of that trend points to his success at focusing voters' attention not only on his own performance and current conditions but also on what Republicans would do if given power in the state, particularly in responding to the persistent coronavirus outbreak.
What California's homelessness crisis has to do with the recall effort against Gavin Newsom
What California's homelessness crisis has to do with the recall effort against Gavin Newsom
Newsom's ability to shift voters' attention toward the GOP alternative may present the race's most important lesson for other Democrats. In the most immediate sense, despite all the visibility of vaccine opponents, he may offer more evidence that the GOP leaders almost uniformly condemning vaccine mandates are playing to the short side of public opinion. Even if California is particularly favorable terrain to contest that argument, the latest CNN national poll conducted by SRSS found roughly 55% majorities supporting vaccine mandates for students, office workers and attendance at large events such as concerts or sporting events. On each front, mandate support rose to about 70% among adults who have been vaccinated; that included more than 40% of vaccinated Republicans, according to figures provided by CNN's polling unit.
More broadly, a solid Newsom victory might move the needle in the internal Democratic debate over how to run in 2022. The dominant view in the White House and the party leadership is that Democrats should run next year primarily by stressing their legislative successes: the new programs for infrastructure, clean energy, education and health care, as well as the expanded tax assistance for families with children, that they hope to pass this fall. A minority view in the party says Democrats are more likely to prevent the usual midterm turnout falloff among voters in the president's party by stressing what Republicans will do if they regain power.
Clegg says Newsom's recovery in the recall lays down a clear marker for the latter approach: "We really did wake up this blue giant, and that's what we have to do in 2022."
Clegg wants Democrats to focus next year not only on the Republican opposition to mask and vaccine requirements for Covid but also on the risk that a congressional GOP majority would take steps that could allow Trump or another Republican nominee to steal the 2024 presidential election.
"Put me," he says, "violently in the camp that says Democrats really need to make this cycle about the stakes if these guys win."
More Democrats may join him there if Newsom decisively turns back the recall on Tuesday.

CALIFORNIA

California Gov. Gavin Newsom will remain in office
By Veronica Rocha, Melissa Macaya, Meg Wagner, Maureen Chowdhury, Mike Hayes and Melissa Mahtani, CNN

Updated 1:27 a.m. ET, September 15, 2021
What you need to know
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom will remain in office after a majority of voters voted "no" in Tuesday's recall election, CNN projects.
The effort to oust Newsom, who was elected in 2018, was launched last year by conservative Californians critical of the governor's record on multiple issues. The effort gained steam after criticism of Newsom's handling of the pandemic.
National Democrats had been closely watching this race as a test of the party's messaging ahead of the 2022 midterms.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom defeated a recall effort. Here are some key takeaways.
California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom defeated a GOP-backed effort to remove him from office, according to a projection from the CNN Decision Desk.

A majority of California voters rejected Tuesday's recall effort and voted "no" on whether they want to remove Newsom from office.

In case you missed it, here's what you need to know about the special election:

Newsom will remain in office: Speaking from Sacramento, Newsom thanked Californians for rejecting the recall effort. He also addressed the divisions in the country, describing democracy like an "antique vase." "You can drop it and smash it in a million different pieces. And that's what we're capable of doing if we don't stand up to meet the moment and push back," he said.

GOP candidate Larry Elder acknowledged defeat: Elder, the leading Republican replacement and one of 46 candidate who qualified to have their name listed in the race to replace the governor, told his supports: "Let's be gracious in defeat." He added: "By the way, we may have lost the battle, but we are going to win the war."

Newsom's re-election bid: A Newsom campaign source says the Democratic governor will wake up Wednesday morning with $24 million of cash on hand for his re-election and an "online army" of volunteers that he can reconnect with as his future unfolds.

Democrats look toward 2022 midterms: The White House and Democrats are looking at the numbers in California with confidence tonight. While President Biden didn't put Newsom over the finish line, he and other Democrats will still bask in the glow of the Covid-19 response: Voters are responding favorably to vaccine and mask mandates – and rejecting Trumpism. With the 2022 midterm elections looming, Democrats see this as an unquestionable boost – only because losing would have been so disastrous for the party.

Read more about how the recall election unfolded here.

How we can repair the damage of the Trump presidency
By Michael D'Antonio

Updated 1:31 PM ET, Tue September 21, 2021
Trump sent Raffensperger a letter asking him to decertify election. See his response

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Reality Check: The politics of 'mental decline'
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Kinzinger asked about reports of Trump's 'mental decline'
Matthew Braynard appears on CNN via a video call.
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Trump sent Raffensperger a letter asking him to decertify election. See his response
President Joe Biden, listens as he is joined virtually by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, to speak about a national security initiative from the East Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2021.
This will be most consequential week of Biden's presidency

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Adam Kinzinger trump biden Afghanistan newday vpx keilar _00005107.png
Kinzinger asked about reports of Trump's 'mental decline'
Matthew Braynard appears on CNN via a video call.
'Justice for J6' rally organizer speaks with CNN

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Trump responds to reporting about Gen. Milley's actions
partisanship biden appointees nominees avlon reality check vpx newday _00010215.png
Avlon calls out GOP senators for blocking Biden's nominees

Blinken cracks up at hearing over GOP senator's conspiracy theory

Trump sent Raffensperger a letter asking him to decertify election. See his response
President Joe Biden, listens as he is joined virtually by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, to speak about a national security initiative from the East Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2021.
This will be most consequential week of Biden's presidency

Trump sends letter to Raffensperger asking to decertify election

Nancy Pelosi asked about special relationship with the UK

Republican goes off on GOP members who think Trump owns the party

'Your way is failing': Tapper pushes back on GOP governor for Covid-19 response

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Keilar Gohmert Split
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Michael D'Antonio is the author of the book "Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success" and co-author, with Peter Eisner, of the book "High Crimes: The Corruption, Impunity, and Impeachment of Donald Trump." James Cohen, PhD, is assistant professor of media studies at City College of New York and co-author with Thomas Kenny of "Producing New and Digital Media." The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)In the torrent of books published about Donald Trump's presidency, few have offered recommendations for both repairing the damage done by his norm-busting term and addressing the vulnerabilities he revealed in our existing system of checks and balances.

Michael D'Antonio
Michael D'Antonio
Take tax returns, for example: Whereas previous presidents made their tax returns public to assure the country they brought no financial conflicts of interest to the Oval Office, Trump declined to follow this tradition. Similarly, he issued pardons to a variety of personal friends -- including Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort. This too departed from presidential norms.

In "After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency," legal scholars Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith offer a blueprint that the government could follow to correct those weaknesses.
The pair advise amending laws so that, contrary to practices established by a Justice Department memo, it's crystal clear that US presidents are subject to obstruction of justice charges while in office. They also recommend that when Congress authorizes a president to use military force abroad, that authorization should be subject to a two or three-year "sunset" clause. This would end so-called "forever wars" like the conflict in Afghanistan and prevent incidents like Trump's 2020 drone strike in Iraq, which escalated tension between the US and Iran. And among their other ideas are proposals to address Trump's misuse of the president's power to appoint "acting" officials who are not subject to confirmation.
The analysis and proposals in "After Trump" address ways that both the Justice Department and any special counsels appointed to conduct investigations can be protected from political pressure when faced with such scenarios, and it's hard to imagine two authors better suited to the task.

Bob Bauer is a former Obama administration White House counsel, a scholar in residence at New York University's law school and co-chair of President Biden's commission to study the Supreme Court. Jack Goldsmith was head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the George W. Bush administration and now teaches law at Harvard. He's also a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and co-founder of Lawfare, an influential online journal devoted to national security.

Although their book is circulating on Capitol Hill, and many of their ideas are already being considered by lawmakers, a conversation with the authors revealed their concern that more immediate crises in Washington might stall the effort to patch vulnerabilities Trump exploited -- which would allow a future president to pick up where Trump left off.
Below is a lightly edited Q&A with the authors.
Michael D'Antonio: Bob was White House counsel to President Obama, and you, Jack, were in the George W. Bush Justice Department. At first, you two were going to collaborate on a book about the counsel's office, right?
Jack Goldsmith: We blocked out a whole day to basically go through and plan that book. And over the course of that day, (we) kept coming back to current events and the extent to which the Trump presidency exemplified the gaps and limitations of the rules and norms of presidential accountability.

The great (post-Watergate) reforms of the 1970s, which were so important in establishing the rules for presidential accountability, had done a great job but had kind of run their course. Or at least their weaknesses had been exposed by the time of the Trump administration. By the end of the day, we basically decided that's the book we should write.
D'Antonio: Some of the history you cite shows presidents conforming to unwritten standards for how to wield presidential power. For example, presidents have generally relied on Department of Justice screenings and recommendations for pardons and grants of clemency. What leads presidents to accept these constraints when a decision is being made?
Bob Bauer: These are questions that are fundamentally influenced by the kind of (legacy) that a president wishes to leave behind, the legacy a president believes that he or she is establishing. And that will include circumstances in which the president, for example, could have exercised legal authority and chose not to do so.

For example, the use of the pardon power to reward friends and punish enemies, or to use it for brazenly political purposes. The choice isn't one that is, for the most part, dictated by constitutional or other more formal considerations, but simply by what the president believes should guide any chief executive's exercise of this authority.
D'Antonio: Presidents have gotten into controversies involving pardons issued as they leave office, but the pardon power seems quite absolute. What do you make of that?
Goldsmith: Congress can't stop the president from pardoning someone. The pardon power is absolute in that sense.
But Congress can punish both the president and the recipient of a pardon after the fact, if that pardon was given to (obstruct) justice, or if that pardon was part of a bribe to secure some benefit from the person who received the pardon.

We propose that Congress make very clear that those types of pardons would be criminal. We also propose that Congress prohibit self-pardons. Most of what Trump did in terms of pardoning his cronies, assuming there was no bribe, cannot be stopped without a constitutional amendment. But on the most egregious examples of pardon for bribe, for obstruction of justice or self-pardon, we do think Congress could take some action.
Jack Goldsmith is a professor of law at Harvard and co-author of "After Trump."
Jack Goldsmith is a professor of law at Harvard and co-author of "After Trump."
D'Antonio: It makes sense to address bribes and obstruction of justice where pardons are given, but where do you come down on investigating presidents and their actions after they leave office?

Bauer: Throughout the whole book, we talk about the risks of the legal process being weaponized; that is, something that is meant to address significant systemic issues for the operation of the government winds up being turned into a weapon to score partisan points. But this cannot mean a pass for presidents who are appropriately investigated for serious violations of the law. So there are risks either way: weaponization of the law or a major failure to enforce it.
D'Antonio: But there have been cases when an investigation might have been useful.
Bauer: We probably would have seen a significant number of questions (answered in) the investigation of Richard Nixon, but it was cut short by the pardon that was issued so rapidly after he left office.
Goldsmith: Bob is right that Nixon almost certainly would have been investigated had (President Gerald R.) Ford not pardoned him. And other presidential administrations have been investigated at the margins. These examples show both that it's possible to do so and that there's hesitancy to do so. And of course, Trump raises all of these issues in the extreme.

D'Antonio: The aftermath of Trump's presidency caused you to propose a host of new laws. For example, you propose that Congress require that presidential candidates disclose their tax returns. But the January 6 attack on the Capitol and the Covid-19 pandemic have distracted us. Are you concerned that the moment to correct what Trump revealed is passing or is some of the process going to take place in the justice system?
Bauer: There is an (ongoing) Manhattan district attorney's office investigation ... (but) a number of these investigations and legal matters don't involve his acts as president. Some occurred before his political career and some occurred during his candidacy, like the hush money payments scandal. So I don't think that the legal tale is complete yet.
Bob Bauer is a scholar in residence at NYU's law school and co-author of "After Trump."
Bob Bauer is a scholar in residence at NYU's law school and co-author of "After Trump."
Goldsmith: If Trump is discovered to have committed prosecutable crimes, and if Attorney General (Merrick) Garland believes that he can make a case, he'll have a question about whether he should do it. He might say yes, and he might say no, but he'll think through the consequences of whether to prosecute or not. And that's a legitimate function for a prosecutor to go through.
D'Antonio: Trump's violation of so many presidential standards could be an argument for the need to clarify what's expected of the president. Without those changes, would we be depending on officials to act with integrity, or fidelity to norms, in a way that Trump did not? And does the public have faith in their institutions?
Goldsmith: We do think that institutional reforms of the presidency help to maintain its legitimacy. So a lot of the changes that we propose for the Justice Department are designed to help the institution demonstrate more credibly that it's acting with integrity.
One of the controversies that arose related to the (2016) FBI investigations of both Hillary Clinton and the Trump campaign was that the FBI did not have a lot of concrete guidance for decision-making in those very contested, highly political contexts. A lot of the controversies and problems that (surrounded) the legitimacy of what the department was doing could have been avoided if there were clear and intelligent rules in place.
Another example is that (Trump administration) Attorney General (William) Barr would often comment publicly on an ongoing investigation in a way that was really harmful to the department's credibility and to the credibility of that investigation. This was inconsistent with things Barr himself had said about the way attorney generals were supposed to behave, but the norm about not commenting on ongoing investigations in the Justice Department did not clearly apply.
D'Antonio: After Watergate, there was a bipartisan effort to address presidential abuse of power, and as you say in your book it did work for a while. With Trumpism dominating the Republican Party, right now that doesn't seem likely. But are there some things you think may be possible?
Bauer: I do think you see that, for example, in areas like war powers there is the basis for some bipartisan agreement to address some of the abuses that we discussed in the book. Trump has forced a reckoning with how serious this problem can be, and what would happen if somebody came into power, Democrat or Republican, (who was) more cunning than Trump, more experienced in the use of levers of power, (and) who could do even more damage than Trump has done.
Goldsmith: It's a very important time to try to achieve some of these reforms. If Congress can exercise its presidential reform muscle, hopefully a few times, it will get stronger. It's a really important year coming up. And so we plan to do whatever we can to help move the process along.

all resources are meant to serve as a STARTING POINT TO ACTION
PLEASE READ: y'all. please do not use these links as your sole resources. like it says above, all of these are meant to serve as a STARTING POINT TO ACTION. i'm disillusioned with carrds to begin with and i've contemplated deleting this entirely because i'm afraid it's doing more harm than good, but i know some people still benefit from the resources listed here, so i'll keep it up. please understand that it's been a little difficult for me to update this lately and respond to all your DMs and keep up to date with everything that's going on because of things i'm dealing with personally. and please remember that we can only do so much by signing petitions and clicking on links. real work is CONSTANT and effortful and goes beyond the screens of our phones.
when i made this back in may, it started out as a place to compile a bunch of links in one place to make knowledge/methods of action more accessible. i now realize that more often than not, it lulls people into a false sense of complacency. i don't want to continue to contribute to that, but i also wanna keep doing everything in my power to help people stay informed. i may try to reboot this, i may not. i'm trying to figure out what the best course of action is moving forward. i'm open to accepting any feedback because honestly, i don't know what to do. i'm just one person and the amount of people that have been coming in angry to my DM's and demanding my attention and energy since May has been a bit overwhelming.
like, i don't ever want it to seem like this carrd is the absolute authority on world issues lmao. it's also difficult because some of the resources people send in are so clearly biased in one way or the other, and having to sift through that with my own judgment is a bit difficult. i will always commit to learning about what's going on in other places, but the reality is, i'm just one person, and i can't adequately represent all sides of every conflict everywhere at all times. no amount of resources in any carrd can represent world issues in a way that's complex enough to do them justice. and that's a truth i've been actively trying to reckon with.
so when y'all use this carrd, please keep that in mind. please realize that these resources are not the end all be all, that the people who are directly affected by an issue know what they're going through better than anyone else, and they'll ALWAYS have varying opinions on the matter. and PLEASE do the work beyond this. educating yourself is a start, but if you can ORGANIZE within your communities, DONATE TO MUTUAL AID, and seek out ways you can tangibly support the world and the people where YOU are, DO IT. because real change stems from the local level.
__________________
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on the NEXT page: Indigenous Communities (cont.), Free MENA (cont.), In Asia and The Pacific (cont.), Protect Sex Workers and Combat Trafficking, Abolish ICE, Fight Antisemitism, Environmentalism, Asian Americans and COVID-19, In Eurasia, In Africa, In Europe, VOTE(U.S.A)

last updated at 1:50pm on february 7th, 2021
getting carrd premium so I'm gonna reboot/start updating this again soon!
new links for Philippines typhoon relief, Indian farmer support