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China, on Friday, imposed unspecified sanctions on Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi "and her immediate family members", the Foreign Ministry in Beijing said. The sanctions were imposed in response to Pelosi's controversial Taiwan visit.
"In disregard of China's grave concerns and firm opposition, Pelosi insisted on visiting China's Taiwan region. This constitutes gross interference in China's internal affairs," the dpa news agency quoted the Ministry as saying in a statement.
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"It gravely undermines China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, seriously tramples on the one-China principle, and severely threatens peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait."
The statement further added, "In response to Pelosi's egregious provocation, China decides to adopt sanctions on Pelosi and her immediate family members in accordance with relevant laws of the People's Republic of China."
Pelosi had visited the self-governing democratic island on Tuesday, prompting Beijing to launch air and sea military drills with live fire in the waters off Taiwan. Earlier in the day, the Foreign Ministry had summoned the Japanese ambassador in retaliation over Tokyo's criticism of China's manoeuvres around Taiwan within the framework of the G7 group.
The Ministry said that a formal protest had been handed over to the envoy. On Thursday, the Ambassadors of the G7 countries and the EU's representatives were similarly summoned.
The G7 had expressed its concern in a statement by its Foreign Ministers, stressing that there was no reason to use a visit by a top US politician to Taiwan as a pretext "for aggressive military activities". Pelosi became the highest-ranking American diplomat to visit Taiwan in a quarter of a century. For the unversed, Beijing sees the self-governing democratic island as part of its territory and rejects any official contact with Taiwan.
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https://www.dnaindia.com/world/report-china-imposes-unspecified-sanctions-on-us-speaker-nancy-pelosi-after-provocative-taiwan-visit-2974120
| 2022-08-05T11:30:43
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| 2022-08-05T11:31:23
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Mental health experts believe several stress factors are leading to a recent spike in suicides in Butler County.
Through July, the county recorded 42 known or suspected suicides, four more than all of 2020.
At the current rate, Butler will report 72 suicides this year, by far the most in recent history, according to coroner records.
The highest number of suicides this century was 52 in 2008, at the height of the Great Recession, the coroner’s office said.
Suicides in Warren County this year are on pace with recent years, according to the coroner’s office. The county has seen 13 suicides through May and had 29 all of last year.
Butler County Coroner Dr. Lisa K. Mannix said it’s “very sad” that the county finds itself heading to a record number of suicides. But there are numerous mental health resources available, she said.
“Together as a community, we can decrease the stigma of mental health and prevent the further loss of life,” she said.
Scott Rasmus, executive director of the Butler County Mental Health & Addiction Recovery Services Board, said two years after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the virus remains a concern for residents and is accentuating mental illness.
Other stress factors, he said, include the return of masking due to COVID-19, talk of global warming and its impact, concerns about another possible recession and the expansion of monkey pox virus.
These factors are coming at a time when the mental health industry, like all businesses, is short-staffed, Rasmus said. That could lead to a delay in mental care services, he said.
“It’s a very stressful time for everyone,” he said.
He called the high number of suicides this year “very concerning” and it “sets off bells and whistles” that those in the mental health field need to do more to address the needs of that at-risk population.
Inflation, money issues and the war in Ukraine also are responsible for pushing stress to alarming levels, according to a poll conducted for the American Psychological Association.
Those surveyed said they’re emotionally stressed due to the rise in prices of everyday items due to inflation, supply chain issues, global uncertainty, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and potential retaliation from Russia.
“The number of people who say they’re significantly stressed about these most recent events is stunning relative to what we’ve seen since we began the survey in 2007,” Arthur C. Evans Jr., APA’s chief executive officer, said in a recent article. “Americans have been doing their best to persevere over these past two tumultuous years, but these data suggest that we’re now reaching unprecedented levels of stress that will challenge our ability to cope.”
Kathy Becker, who has spent her life helping the mentally ill and homeless, said she recently was diagnosed with COVID-19 and she laid in beds for days. She wondered if her energy level would return.
“You start to think, ‘Is this permanent?’” she said. “It was a horrible depression.”
Rhonda Benson, executive director of National Alliance on Mental Illness Butler County, also pointed toward COVID-19 and the isolation that followed as a major factor in suicide increases.
By now, Benson said, people were told the pandemic would be over and life would be back to normal.
But “we don’t see an end anytime soon,” she said. “It’s very difficult for people to adjust. They also have lost hope.”
Benson said when there’s one suicide, especially in a school, other students may attempt suicide. It’s that copycat mentality.
“The more you have, the more you will have,” she said.
Of the 263 suicides the last five years in Butler, 136, or 52%, were committed with a gun, according to the coroner’s office. Benson said it’s important for gun owners to protect their weapons from a loved one contemplating suicide.
“If they’re thinking of suicide, they may look for a gun,” she said.
Sometimes, Benson said, suicide is considered “a last ditch effort to avoid emotional pain. As a general rule, they don’t feel like they have an option. We need to ID a way to resolve that pain besides suicide.”
Last month, Ohioans experiencing a mental health crisis were able to start calling or texting a three-digit number that became the new national suicide prevention hotline for every state in the country.
The 988 hotline launched on July 16, but it won’t immediately replace the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255.
“We’re confident in the system we’re building in Ohio,” said Lori Criss, director of the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. “The transition to 988 will not be overnight.”
Credit: Jenny Kane
Credit: Jenny Kane
Ohioans who are contemplating suicide, or experiencing another mental health or addiction crisis, can call, text, or chat the 988 number. Family members worried a loved one is experiencing one of those crises may also contact the number.
Criss said those experiencing a life-threatening emergency should call 911, but the 988 hotline is intended to alleviate some 911 calls.
The 988 number also hopes to connect a caller to someone in-state more effectively. In the last 12 months, 79,358 calls were made in Ohio to the national hotline, and the department estimated that the 988 line could get at least 179,000 calls and texts in the first year.
Those in the mental health field hope the 988 number can get a person the help they need faster and hopefully save lives.
When someone commits suicide, the loss rips through a family, a community, according to Becker. One death impacts so many, she said.
“We have lost a lot of valuable lives,” she said. “We all lose in the long run.”
Rasmus agreed: “You have to think of the loss of life. All the lost potential. It’s a sad loss.”
AREA SUICIDE RATES
Butler County
2017: 44
2018: 42
2019: 47
2020: 38
2021: 49
2022 through July: 42
Warren County
2017: 24
2018: 17
2019: 30
2020: 21
2021: 29
2022 through May: 13
SOURCES: Butler and Warren county coroner’s offices
HOW TO RECEIVE HELP
Call the Butler County Crisis Hotline & Heroin Hopeline at 844-4CRISIS or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.
HOW BUTLER COUNTY SUICIDES WERE COMMITTED
Over the last five years, there have been 263 suicides. 204 men, 59 women, according to the coroner’s office. Guns (136) were the top means of suicides, followed by hanging (71) and the remaining (56) were done in a number of different ways.
About the Author
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https://www.journal-news.com/local/butler-county-on-pace-for-record-number-of-suicides-this-year/KHSVQI6RHRGMRIC3RI3U4HUGSM/
| 2022-08-05T11:32:36
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| 0.958873
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ISTANBUL (AP) — Three more ships carrying thousands of tons of corn have left Ukrainian ports, officials said Friday, in the latest sign that a negotiated deal to export grain trapped since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly six months ago is slowly materializing. But major hurdles lie ahead to get food to the countries that need it most.
The ships bound for Ireland, the United Kingdom and Turkey follow the first grain shipment to pass through the Black Sea since the start of the war. The passage of that vessel heading for Lebanon earlier this week was the first under the breakthrough deal brokered by Turkey and the United Nations with Russia and Ukraine.
The Black Sea region is dubbed the world's breadbasket, with Ukraine and Russia key global suppliers of wheat, corn, barley and sunflower oil that millions of impoverished people in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia rely on for survival.
While the shipments have raised hopes of easing a global food crisis, much of the grain that Ukraine is trying to export is used for animal feed, not for people to eat, experts say. The first vessels to leave are among more than a dozen bulk carriers and cargo ships that had been loaded with grain but stuck in ports since Russia invaded in late February. And the cargoes are not expected to have a significant impact on the global price of corn, wheat and soybeans for several reasons.
For starters, the exports under the deal are off to a slow, cautious start due to the threat of explosive mines floating off Ukraine's Black Sea coastline.
And while Ukraine is a major exporter of wheat to developing nations, there are other countries, such as the United States and Canada, with far greater production levels that can affect global wheat prices. And they face the threat of drought.
“Ukraine is about 10% of the international trade in wheat, but in terms of production it is not even 5%,” said David Laborde, an expert on agriculture and trade at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.
The three ships left Friday with over 58,000 tons of corn, but that is still a fraction of the 20 million tons of grains that Ukraine says are trapped in the country's silos and ports and that must be shipped out to make space for this year's harvest.
Around 6 million tons of the trapped grain is wheat, but just half of that is for human consumption, Laborde said.
There is an expectation that Ukraine could produce 30% to 40% less grain over the coming next 12 months due to the war, though other estimates put that figure at 70%.
Grain prices peaked after Russia’s invasion, and while some have since come down to their pre-war levels, they are still higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Corn prices are 70% higher than at the end of February 2020, said Jonathan Haines, senior analyst at data and analytics firm Gro Intelligence. He said wheat prices are around 60% higher than in February 2020.
One reason prices remain high is the impact of drought on harvests in North America, China and other regions, as well as the higher price of fertilizer needed for farming.
“When fertilizer prices are high, farmers may use less fertilizer. And when they use less fertilizer, they will produce less. And if they will produce less, supply will continue to remain insufficient,” Laborde said.
The three ships that departed Ukraine on Friday give hope that exports will ramp up to developing nations, where many are facing the increased threat of food shortages and hunger.
“The movement of three additional vessels overnight is a very positive sign and will continue to build confidence that we’re moving in the right direction," Haines said. “If the flow of grain from Ukraine continues to expand, it will help relieve global supply constraints."
The Turkish-flagged Polarnet, carrying 12,000 tons of corn, left the Chornomorsk port destined for Karasu, Turkey. The Panama-flagged Navi Star left Odesa's port for Ireland with 33,000 tons of corn. The Maltese-flagged Rojen left Chornomorsk for the United Kingdom carrying over 13,000 tons of corn, the U.N. said.
It added that the Joint Coordination Center — run by officials from Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and the U.N. overseeing the deal signed in Istanbul last month — authorized the three ships and inspected a ship headed for Ukraine. The Barbados-flagged Fulmar S was inspected in Istanbul and is headed for the Chornomorsk port.
The checks seek to ensure that outbound cargo ships carry only grain, fertilizer or food and not any other commodities and that inbound ships are not carrying weapons. The vessels are accompanied by Ukrainian pilot ships for safe passage because of explosive mines strewn in the Black Sea.
After Turkey, which has relations with both Russia and Ukraine, helped broker the food deal two weeks ago, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin later Friday in Sochi, Russia. That meeting follows another face-to-face meeting the two leaders had in Iran three weeks ago.
In other developments Friday:
— Ukraine’s presidential office said that at least eight civilians were killed and 16 others were wounded in the latest Russian shelling.
The eastern Donetsk region has been facing the most intensive Russian barrage, and Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko repeated his call for all residents to evacuate.
“Shellings and bombings are going round the clock, and people who refuse to evacuate risk being killed on their pillows,” Kyrylenko said in televised remarks.
In Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv, three districts have come under massive shelling. Several apartment buildings and a street market were damaged, and three people were wounded.
Russian shelling also targeted the city of Zaporizhzhia and several towns along the frontline in the region. For a second straight day, the Russians also shelled the city of Nikopol that faces the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant across the Dnieper River. Dozens of houses were damaged.
The Russians also hit the southern city of Mykolaiv.
___
Batrawy reported from Dubai.
Credit: Khalil Hamra
Credit: Khalil Hamra
Credit: Nina Lyashonok
Credit: Nina Lyashonok
Credit: Nina Lyashonok
Credit: Nina Lyashonok
Credit: Nina Lyashonok
Credit: Nina Lyashonok
Credit: Nina Lyashonok
Credit: Nina Lyashonok
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https://www.journal-news.com/nation-world/3-more-ships-with-grain-depart-ukraine-ports-under-un-deal/S3TROQYXCRBNZMXNKKRJPR4KT4/
| 2022-08-05T11:32:42
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| 0.962283
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| 2022-08-05T11:32:43
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| 0.746824
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China said Friday that more than 100 warplanes and 10 warships have taken part in the live-fire military drills surrounding Taiwan over the past two days, while announcing mainly symbolic sanctions against U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her family over her visit to Taiwan earlier this week.
The official Xinhua News Agency said Friday that fighters, bombers, destroyers and frigates were all used in what it called “joint blockage operations."
The military’s Eastern Theater Command also fired new versions of missiles it said hit unidentified targets in the Taiwan Strait “with precision.”
The Rocket Force also fired projectiles over Taiwan into the Pacific, military officers told state media, in a major ratcheting up of China’s threats to attack and invade the island.
The drills, which Xinhua described as being held on an "unprecedented scale," are China's most strident response to Pelosi's visit. The speaker is the highest-ranking U.S. politician to visit Taiwan in 25 years.
Dialogue and exchanges between China and the U.S., particularly on military matters and economic exchanges, have generally been halting at best. Climate change and fighting trade in illegal drugs such as fentanyl were, however, areas where they had found common cause, and Beijing's suspension of cooperation could have significant implications for efforts to achieve progress in those issues.
China and the United States are the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 climate polluters, together producing nearly 40% of all fossil-fuel emissions. Their top climate diplomats, John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua, maintained a cordial relationship that dated back to the Paris climate accord, which was made possible by a breakthrough negotiated among the two and others.
China under Kerry’s prodding committed at last year’s U.N. global climate summit in Glasgow to working with the U.S. “with urgency” to cut climate-wrecking emissions, but Kerry was unable to persuade it to significantly speed up China’s move away from coal.
On the Chinese coast across from Taiwan, tourists gathered Friday to try to catch a glimpse of any military aircraft heading toward the exercise area.
Fighter jets could be heard flying overhead and tourists taking photos chanted, “Let’s take Taiwan back," looking out into the blue waters of the Taiwan Strait from Pingtan island, a popular scenic spot in Fujian province.
Pelosi's visit stirred emotions among the Chinese public, and the government's response "makes us feel our motherland is very powerful and gives us confidence that the return of Taiwan is the irresistible trend," said Wang Lu, a tourist from neighboring Zhejiang province.
China is a “powerful country and it will not allow anyone to offend its own territory,” said Liu Bolin, a high school student visiting the island.
His mother, Zheng Zhidan, was somewhat more circumspect.
“We are compatriots and we hope to live in peace,” Zheng said. “We should live peacefully with each other.”
China's insistence that Taiwan is its territory and its threat to use force to bring it under its control have featured highly in ruling Communist Party propaganda, the education system and the entirely state-controlled media for more than seven decades since the sides were divided amid civil war in 1949.
Taiwan residents overwhelmingly favor maintaining the status quo of de facto independence and reject China's demands that the island unify with the mainland under Communist control.
On Friday morning, China sent military ships and war planes across the mid-line of the Taiwan Strait, the Taiwanese Defense Ministry said, crossing what had for decades been an unofficial buffer zone between China and Taiwan.
Five of the missiles fired by China since the military exercises began Thursday landed in Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone off Hateruma, an island far south of Japan’s main islands, Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said. He said Japan protested the missile landings to China as “serious threats to Japan’s national security and the safety of the Japanese people.”
Japan's Defense Ministry later said they believe four other missiles fired from China’s southeastern coast of Fujian flew over Taiwan.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Friday that China’s military exercises aimed at Taiwan represent a “grave problem” that threatens regional peace and security.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said China's actions were in line with “international law and international practices," though she provided no evidence.
“As for the Exclusive Economic Zone, China and Japan have not carried out maritime delimitation in relevant waters, so there is no such thing as an EEZ of Japan," Hua told reporters at a daily briefing.
In Tokyo, where Pelosi is winding up her Asia trip, she said China cannot stop U.S. officials from visiting Taiwan. Kishida, speaking after breakfast with Pelosi and her congressional delegation, said the missile launches need to be "stopped immediately."
China said it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven industrialized nations and the European Union criticizing the Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan.
Its Foreign Ministry on Friday said Vice Minister Deng Li made “solemn representations” over what he called “wanton interference in China’s internal affairs.”
Deng said China would “prevent the country from splitting with the strongest determination, using all means and at any cost.”
The ministry said the meeting was held Thursday night but gave no information on which countries participated. Earlier Thursday, China canceled a foreign ministers' meeting with Japan to protest the G-7 statement that there was no justification for the exercises.
Both ministers were attending a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Cambodia.
China has promoted the overseas support it has received for its response to Pelosi’s visit, mainly from fellow authoritarian states such as Russia, Syria and North Korea.
China had earlier summoned U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns to protest Pelosi's visit. The speaker left Taiwan on Wednesday after meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen and holding other public events. She traveled on to South Korea and then Japan. Both countries host U.S. military bases and could be drawn into a conflict involving Taiwan.
The Chinese exercises involve troops from the navy, air force, rocket force, strategic support force and logistic support force, according to Xinhua.
They are believed to be the largest held near Taiwan in geographical terms and the closest in proximity — within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the island.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday called the drills a "significant escalation" and said he has urged Beijing to back down.
U.S. law requires the government to treat threats to Taiwan, including blockades, as matters of “grave concern.”
The drills are an echo of the last major Chinese military drills aimed at intimidating Taiwan’s leaders and voters in 1995 and 1996.
Taiwan has put its military on alert and staged civil defense drills, but the overall mood remained calm on Friday. Flights have been canceled or diverted and fishermen have remained in port to avoid the Chinese drills.
In the northern port of Keelung, Lu Chuan-hsiong, 63, was enjoying his morning swim Thursday, saying he wasn’t worried.
“Everyone should want money, not bullets,” Lu said.
___
Associated Press writer Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, air force and naval aviation corps of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) fly planes at an unspecified location in China, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Fu Gan/Xinhua via AP)
Credit: Fu Gan
In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, air force and naval aviation corps of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) fly planes at an unspecified location in China, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Fu Gan/Xinhua via AP)
Credit: Fu Gan
Credit: Fu Gan
In this image made from video and released by China's Xinhua News Agency, the air force and naval aviation corps of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) conducts aerial refueling at an unspecified location in China, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Xinhua via AP)
Credit: Uncredited
In this image made from video and released by China's Xinhua News Agency, the air force and naval aviation corps of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) conducts aerial refueling at an unspecified location in China, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Xinhua via AP)
Credit: Uncredited
Credit: Uncredited
Tourists pose for photos on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists pose for photos on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists pose for photos at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists pose for photos at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists pose for photos at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists pose for photos at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists pose for photos at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists pose for photos at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Ships move through the Taiwan Strait as seen from the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Ships move through the Taiwan Strait as seen from the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
A boat moves through the water at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
A boat moves through the water at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists pose for photos on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists pose for photos on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists take photos on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists take photos on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Children pose for photos at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Children pose for photos at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
A fighter jet flies in the direction of Taiwan seen from the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
A fighter jet flies in the direction of Taiwan seen from the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists stand on rocks on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists stand on rocks on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists pose for photos on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Tourists pose for photos on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Credit: Ng Han Guan
Taiwan Air Force Mirage fighter jets taxi on a runway at an airbase in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Johnson Lai)
Credit: Johnson Lai
Taiwan Air Force Mirage fighter jets taxi on a runway at an airbase in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Johnson Lai)
Credit: Johnson Lai
Credit: Johnson Lai
Taiwan Air Force Mirage fighters sit on the tarmac at an airbase in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Johnson Lai)
Credit: Johnson Lai
Taiwan Air Force Mirage fighters sit on the tarmac at an airbase in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Johnson Lai)
Credit: Johnson Lai
Credit: Johnson Lai
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https://www.journal-news.com/nation-world/china-halts-climate-military-ties-over-pelosi-taiwan-visit/UJHJI57ML5EY7IDYNIA2UMHLDU/
| 2022-08-05T11:32:49
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en
| 0.938809
|
LONDON (AP) — A British court has rejected a request from the parents of a comatose boy to allow them to move their son to a hospice when hospital doctors withdraw his life-support treatment.
Barring any further legal action, the decision would open the door for doctors at the Royal London Hospital to end life-sustaining treatments for 12-year-old Archie Battersbee. He has been in a coma since early April and doctors believe he is brain dead.
“I return to where I started, recognizing the enormity of what lays ahead for Archie’s parents and the family. Their unconditional love and dedication to Archie is a golden thread that runs through this case,'' High Court Judge Lucy Thies wrote. “I hope now Archie can be afforded the opportunity for him to die in peaceful circumstances, with the family who meant so much to him as he clearly does to them.''
Archie’s care has been the subject of weeks of legal battles as his parents sought to force the hospital to continue life-sustaining treatments and doctors argued there was no chance of recovery and he should be allowed to die.
The family asked for permission to move Archie to a hospice after British courts ruled it was in his best interests to end treatment, and the European Court of Human Rights refused to intervene. The hospital said Archie’s condition was so unstable that moving him would hasten his death.
The dispute is the latest U.K. case pitting the judgment of doctors against the wishes of families. Under British law, it is common for courts to intervene when parents and doctors disagree on the treatment of a child. In such cases, the best interests of the child take primacy over the parents’ right to decide what they believe is best for their offspring.
Credit: Hollie Dance
Credit: Hollie Dance
Credit: Jonathan Brady
Credit: Jonathan Brady
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https://www.journal-news.com/nation-world/uk-court-bars-parents-from-moving-comatose-boy-to-hospice/HZ4CW3RI3JBSXFH2UQ4U75RTYM/
| 2022-08-05T11:32:55
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en
| 0.976558
|
WASHINGTON (AP) — The American job market has defied raging inflation, rising interest rates, growing recession fears. Month after month, U.S. employers just kept adding hundreds of thousands of workers, at a pace that regularly outpaced the expectations of most economists.
Yet cracks have begun to appear in one of the nation's pillars of economic strength. Job openings are down, and the number of Americans signing up for unemployment benefits is up.
“When we look across the labor market, we are seeing broad indications of cracks beginning to show,’’ said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo. “Overall conditions aren’t nearly as strong as what we were seeing three to six months ago.’’
The Labor Department on Friday well report how many jobs were created in July and whether the super-low U.S. unemployment rate has begun to tick higher.
Forecasters, on average, expect the economy to have picked up another 250,000 jobs last month, according to a survey by the data firm FactSet. That would be a solid number in normal times but would mark a big deceleration for 2022: Employers have been hiring an average 457,000 workers a month so far this year.
The unemployment rate is expected to remain at 3.6% — just off a 50-year low — for the fifth consecutive month.
There are, of course, political implications in the numbers being released Friday: Rising prices and the risk of recession are likely to weigh on voters in November’s midterm elections, potentially making it tougher for President Joe Biden’s Democrats to maintain control of Congress.
The economic backdrop is troubling: Gross domestic product — the broadest measure of economic output — fell in both the first and second quarters; consecutive GDP drops is one definition of a recession. And inflation is roaring at a 40-year high.
The resiliency of the current labor market, especially the low jobless rate — is the biggest reason most economists don’t believe a downturn has started yet, though they increasingly fear that one is on the way. History isn’t entirely reassuring: The unemployment rate was even lower — 3.5% — when an 11-month recession began in December 1969.
Recession is not an American problem alone.
In the United Kingdom, the Bank of England on Thursday projected that the world's fifth-largest economy would slide into recession by the end of the year.
Russia's war in Ukraine has darkened the outlook across Europe. The conflict has made energy supplies scarce and driven prices higher. European countries are bracing for the possibility that Moscow will keep reducing — and perhaps completely cut off — flows of natural gas, used to power factories, generate electricity and keep homes warm in winter.
If Europeans can’t store enough gas for the cold months, rationing may be required by industry.
Economies have been on a wild ride since COVID-19 hit in early 2020.
The pandemic brought economic life to a near standstill as companies shut down and consumers stayed home. In March and April 2020, American employers slashed a staggering 22 million jobs and the economy plunged into a deep, two-month recession.
But massive government aid — and the Federal Reserve's decision to slash interest rates and pour money into financial markets — fueled a surprisingly quick recovery. Caught off guard by the strength of the rebound, factories, shops, ports and freight yards were overwhelmed with orders and scrambled to bring back the workers they furloughed when COVID hit.
The result has been shortages of workers and supplies, delayed shipments -- and rising prices. In the United States, inflation has been rising steadily for more than a year. In June, consumer prices jumped 9.1% from a year earlier — the biggest increase since 1981.
The Fed underestimated inflation's resurgence, thinking prices were rising because of temporary supply chain bottlenecks. It has since acknowledged that the current spate of inflation is not, as it was once referred to, " transitory."
Now the central bank is responding aggressively. It has raised its benchmark short-term interest rate four times this year, and more rate hikes are ahead.
Higher borrowing costs are taking a toll. Rising mortgage rates, for instance, have cooled a red-hot housing market. Sales of previously occupied homes dropped in June for the fifth straight month.
Real estate companies — including lending firm loanDepot and online housing broker Redfin — have begun laying off workers.
The labor market is showing other signs of wobbliness.
The Labor Department reported Tuesday that employers posted 10.7 million job openings in June — a healthy number but the lowest since September.
And the four-week average number of Americans signing up for unemployment benefits — a proxy for layoffs that smooths out week-to-week swings — rose last week to the highest level since November, though the numbers may have been exaggerated by seasonal factors.
Friday’s jobs report comes at a critical moment for President Biden, who has maintained that the economy is merely slowing down rather than heading into a recession. Inflation has dogged public support for Biden, yet the administration has stressed that the 3.6% unemployment rate and solid job gains are signs of a healthy economy.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the administration expects the pace of hiring to fall further in the coming months because the unemployment rate is already near historic lows and fewer potential workers are available.
A slower pace of hiring and reduced levels of wage growth could also suggest that inflationary pressures are easing, but it has the White House attempting to convince the American public that less growth is a positive at a moment when Republican lawmakers are saying a recession has already started; they cite the drop in GDP over the first half of the year.
“We’re expecting it to be closer to 150,000 jobs per month,” Jean-Pierre said at Thursday’s briefing. “This kind of job growth is consistent with the lower level of unemployment numbers that we’ve been seeing.”
Economist House at Wells Fargo expects employers to keep adding jobs for a few months. But rising interest rates, she said, will gradually choke off economic growth.
“We are actually looking for outright declines in hiring come the first quarter, maybe second quarter of next year,’’ she said. “As monetary policy continues to tighten, that’s going to have an effect on overall business conditions and therefore demand for workers.
“Our expectation is that the U.S. economy will slip into recession, probably at the start of the year.’’
____
Josh Boak in Washington and Courtney Bonnell in London contributed to this story.
Credit: Mary Altaffer
Credit: Mary Altaffer
Credit: Mary Altaffer
Credit: Mary Altaffer
Credit: Mary Altaffer
Credit: Mary Altaffer
Credit: Mary Altaffer
Credit: Mary Altaffer
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https://www.journal-news.com/nation-world/with-recession-anxiety-growing-hiring-may-be-cooling-off/GN4WOTPUZ5HDLN4AH4LKZWF4NY/
| 2022-08-05T11:33:01
|
en
| 0.965872
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(The Hill) – Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) announced Thursday evening that she has reached a deal with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) that could pave the way for Democrats to pass their budget reconciliation package.
The deal would remove a provision closing the so-called carried interest loophole from the package announced last week by Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
Sinema said she and Schumer have also reached agreement on protecting manufacturing from the impact of a proposed 15 percent corporate minimum tax, which business leaders in Arizona warned would dampen economic growth.
The announcement paves the way for Sinema to vote Saturday for a motion to proceed to a budget reconciliation package that would reform the tax code, tackle climate change, reduce the cost of prescription drugs and shrink the federal deficit.
“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” Sinema said, signaling that she plans to vote to begin debate on the bill.
“Subject to the parliamentarian’s review, I’ll move forward,” she said.
A Democratic source familiar with the agreement said it would include a new excise tax on stock buybacks that would bring in more than enough revenue to cover the removal of the carried interest provision.
The Democrat said the bill will still reduce the deficit by $300 billion, citing a number that Schumer and Manchin have touted over the past week.
Senate Democrats had waited anxiously for days for a positive sign from Sinema, whom they feared was angry after being left out of a final round of talks.
With Sinema’s vote, Democrats now have the support of all 50 members of their caucus to pass what would become President Biden’s biggest domestic legislative achievement. It would reduce the federal deficit by between $100 billion to $300 billion, according to various estimates, an accomplishment Democrats can pitch to voters at a time of 40-year-high inflation.
“I am pleased to report that we have reached an agreement on the Inflation Reduction Act that I believe will receive the support of the entire Senate Democratic conference,” Schumer said in a separate statement confirming the deal.
He said the agreement “preserves the major components” of the deal he announced with Manchin last week to lower drug costs, fight climate change, close tax loopholes and reduce the deficit.
“The final version of the reconciliation bill, to be introduced on Saturday, will reflect this work and put us one step closer to enacting this historic legislation into law,” Schumer said.
Biden called for Senate Democrats to pass the package as soon as possible following Sinema’s announcement.
“Tonight, we’ve taken another critical step toward reducing inflation and the cost of living for America’s families,” Biden said in a statement.
“The Inflation Reduction Act will help Americans save money on prescription drugs, health premiums and much more,” he continued.
Democrats expect to vote to begin debate on the more-than-700-page bill sometime Saturday afternoon.
That will begin up to 20 hours of floor debate followed by an open-ended series of amendment votes, known as a vote-a-rama, and then a vote on final passage of the legislation.
Sinema in her statement promised to work with colleagues to address the carried interest preferential tax rate, which allows asset managers to pay a 20 percent capital gains rate on income they earn from advising clients on profitable investments.
“Following this effort, I look forward to working with Sen. [Mark] Warner [D-Va.] to enact carried interest reforms, protecting investments in America’s economy and encouraging continued growth while closing the most egregious loopholes that some abuse to avoid paying taxes,” she pledged.
The announcement capped off several days of intense discussions between Sinema, Schumer and Manchin.
Democratic senators said Sinema wasn’t happy about being left out of the secret negotiations Schumer and Manchin held last month to add sweeping tax reform and climate provisions to the budget package.
The Arizona senator had previously made clear that she opposed eliminating the carried interest tax rate as well as reforms that would effectively raise corporate taxes and threaten economic growth. Those priorities appeared to be somewhat overlooked in the Schumer-Manchin deal.
Sinema held back her support for the legislation and insisted on changes to soften the tax hit on manufacturers from a 15 percent corporate minimum tax, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.
Manchin held at least two long conversations with Sinema on the Senate floor in recent days to win her over.
Multiple people familiar with the issue said Sinema wanted to exempt U.S. manufacturing companies from the 15 percent corporate minimum tax that Schumer and Manchin inserted in the Inflation Reduction Act. That bill caught almost every senator — including Sinema — by surprise when it became public last week
Exempting manufacturing companies from the book minimum tax would cost about $45 billion over ten years, according to one Senate estimate floated this week.
Book is a tax accounting term that in effect would make it harder for companies to avoid declaring profit and therefore increase what they would pay in taxes.
Sinema also told colleagues that she opposed closing carried interest loophole, which critics say allows wealthy money managers to pay a lower effective tax rate than many middle-income Americans.
And the Arizona senator wanted $5 billion in drought resiliency funding for her home state, according to two Democratic senators.
The statements released by Sinema and Schumer Thursday evening made no mention of drought relief. However, her pledge to vote to move forward indicates her concerns on the corporate minimum tax structure, carried interest and drought have been satisfied.
Sinema declined to answer reporters’ questions when she emerged from her Capitol basement hideaway Thursday afternoon.
She came under heavy pressure from business leaders in Arizona to oppose the corporate minimum tax.
“In the face of record-high inflation, supply chain backlogs and a major labor crunch, now is not the time to hammer manufacturers with new taxes,” Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Danny Seiden said in a statement earlier Thursday.
“Arizona job creators will continue to urge lawmakers to reject this manufacturers tax and instead focus on policies that encourage job growth and strengthen our state and economic competitiveness,” he said.
The Schumer-Manchin deal would have established a 15 percent minimum tax for corporations with more than $1 billion in annual profits, though it exempted green-energy and microchip manufacturing tax credits from getting wiped out by that minimum tax threshold.
Republicans said that proposal would have hit manufacturing companies especially hard by superseding a key reform of former President Trump’s 2017 Tax Credits and Jobs Act allowing companies to fully expense capital expenditures for a given year.
Full expensing under the Tax Credits and Jobs Act is due to phase out over the next four years.
Sinema told the Arizona Chamber of Commerce in April that she would be “unwilling to support any tax policies that would put a break on … economic growth, or stall business and personal growth for America’s industries.”
She made clear to senior White House officials and Senate Democratic colleagues early during the negotiations over the budget reconciliation bill that she would not support increasing the 21 percent corporate tax rate, a key achievement of the 2017 tax reform law.
“The entire country knows that I am opposed to raising the corporate income tax. That was true yesterday and it is true today,” Sinema told the Arizona Chamber of Commerce earlier this year.
Republican critics of the Schumer-Manchin deal said that preventing full and immediate expensing of capital expenditures would effectively increase taxes on many corporations.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who worked closely with Sinema in drafting last year’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, warned in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that it would “essentially” place a “tax on manufacturing.”
He pointed out that the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that nearly 50 percent of the new tax would hit manufacturers.
“Imposing this new tax on U.S. companies, and restricting certain U.S. manufacturers from writing off investment costs immediately, would make America less competitive and drive investments and jobs overseas,” he warned.
Sinema’s request for $5 billion in drought resiliency funding also loomed as a potential problem, sources warned.
Guaranteeing access to more water to states lower in the Colorado River basin such as Arizona, Nevada and California may come at the expense of upper-basin states such as Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico.
“We are facing historic drought in Colorado. The state has had the worst wildfires in our state’s history. There is very little water in the Colorado River. And I think it would be great if we could do something on drought, but it has to be something that meaningfully improves the situation in Colorado and in the upper basin of the Colorado River,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), who is up for reelection in November.
Bennet warned that any drought resiliency language must provide an “enduring solution to the problem, otherwise it’s not worth doing.”
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https://cw33.com/news/nexstar-media-wire/sinema-announces-deal-with-schumer-on-taxes-and-climate/
| 2022-08-05T11:34:04
|
en
| 0.965482
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U.S. immigration authorities are planning to issue photo ID cards to immigrants in deportation proceedings in a bid to slash paper use and help people stay up-to-date on required meetings and court hearings, officials said.
The proposal from Immigration and Customs Enforcement is still being developed as a pilot program, and it was not immediately clear how many the agency would issue. The cards would not be an official form of federal identification, and would state they are to be used by the Department of Homeland Security.
The idea is for immigrants to be able to access information about their cases online by using a card rather than paper documents that are cumbersome and can fade over time, officials said. They said ICE officers could also run checks on the cards in the field.
“Moving to a secure card will save the agency millions, free up resources, and ensure information is quickly accessible to DHS officials while reducing the agency’s FOIA backlog,” an ICE spokesperson said in a statement, referring to unfulfilled public requests for agency documents. Homeland Security gets more Freedom of Information Act requests than any other federal agency, according to government data, and many of those involve immigration records.
The proposal has sparked a flurry of questions about what the card might be used for and how secure it would be. Some fear the program could lead to tracking of immigrants awaiting their day in immigration court, while others suggest the cards could advertised by migrant smugglers to try to induce others to make the dangerous trip north.
The Biden administration is seeking $10 million for the so-called ICE Secure Docket Card in a budget proposal for the next fiscal year. It was not immediately clear if the money would cover the pilot or a broader program or when it would begin.
The administration has faced pressure as the number of migrants seeking to enter the country on the southwest border has increased. Border Patrol agents stopped migrants more than 1.1 million times from January to June, up nearly one-third from the same period of an already-high 2021.
Many migrants are turned away under COVID-19-related restrictions. But many are allowed in and either are detained while their cases churn through the immigration courts or are released and required to check in periodically with ICE officers until a judge rules on their cases.
Those most likely to be released in the United States are from countries where expulsion under the public health order is complicated due to costs, logistics or strained diplomatic relations, including Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
At shelters, bus stations and airports along the U.S.-Mexico border, migrants carefully guard their papers in plastic folders. These are often the only documents they have to get past airport checkpoints to their final destinations in the United States. The often dog-eared papers can be critical to getting around.
An immigration case can take years and the system can be confusing, especially for immigrants who know little English and may need to work with an array of government agencies, including ICE and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which issues work permits and green cards. U.S. immigration courts are overseen by the Justice Department.
Gregory Z. Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said migrants have mistakenly gone to ICE offices instead of court for scheduled hearings that they then missed as a result. He said so long as immigrants’ privacy is protected, the card could be helpful.
“If ICE is going to be using this new technology to enable non citizens to check in with ICE, or to report information about their location and address, and then to receive information about their case — where their court hearings might be, what the requirements might be for them to comply with the law — that would be a welcome approach,” Chen said.
It was not clear whether Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration would accept the cards for airport travel or whether private businesses would consider it valid.
The United States doesn’t have a national photo identification card. Residents instead use a range of cards to prove identification, including driver’s licenses, state ID cards and consular ID cards. What constitutes a valid ID is often determined by the entity seeking to verify a person’s identity.
Talia Inlender, deputy director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at University of California, Los Angeles’ law school, said she was skeptical that using a card to access electronic documents would simplify the process for immigrants, especially those navigating the system without a lawyer, and questioned whether the card has technology that could be used to increase government surveillance of migrants.
But having an ID could be useful, especially for migrants who need to travel within the U.S., Inlender said.
“Many people are fleeing persecution and torture in their countries. They’re not showing up with government paperwork,” Inlender said. “Having a form of identification to be able to move throughout daily life has the potential to be a helpful thing.”
That has some Republican lawmakers concerned that the cards could induce more migrants to come to the U.S. or seek to access benefits they’re not eligible for. A group of 16 lawmakers sent a letter last week to ICE raising questions about the plan.
“The Administration is now reportedly planning yet another reckless policy that will further exacerbate this ongoing crisis,” the letter said.
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https://cw33.com/news/nexstar-media-wire/us-to-issue-id-cards-to-migrants-awaiting-deportation-proceedings/
| 2022-08-05T11:34:10
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en
| 0.970148
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Washington (AP) — Reining in the soaring prices of insulin has thus far been elusive in Congress, although Democrats say they’ll try again — as part of their economic package that focuses on health and climate.
The price of the 100-year-old drug has more than tripled in the last two decades, forcing the nation’s diabetics to pay thousands of dollars a year for the life-saving medication. Democrats are considering capping the cost of that drug for at least some, although it’s unclear what the final proposal will look like and how many insulin users will get a price break.
Here’s a look at how insulin became so expensive and why it’s so difficult to bring the price of the drug down.
HOW MANY PEOPLE IN THE U.S. USE INSULIN AND FOR WHAT?
Roughly 8.4 million Americans use insulin, according to the American Diabetes Association. Not everyone who has diabetes needs insulin, but for those who do, it’s an important medication. For more than 1 million of those people with type 1 diabetes, regular access to the medication is a necessity and they will die without it.
“People require insulin, it’s not an option and nobody should have to decide between life-sustaining medication or food and rent,” said Dr. Robert Gabbay, the chief scientific and medical officer for the American Diabetes Association.
Insulin also helps control glucose levels for patients with other forms of diabetes. Some insulin users have rationed the drug because of its expense and risk numerous health complications as a result.
HOW EXPENSIVE IS INSULIN?
The price varies.
Some people on private insurance pay hundreds of dollars monthly for the drug. For most Medicare beneficiaries, the average out-of-pocket cost per insulin prescription was $54 in 2020 — an increase of nearly 40% since 2007, a study released last month by the Kaiser Family Foundation found. Others live in one of 22 states where the copay for a 30-day supply has been capped between $25 to $100.
The cost has led some to use less insulin than their doctor prescribes or postpone paying for other medical care.
WHY IS INSULIN SO EXPENSIVE?
Only three manufacturers — Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi — produce insulin, allowing those companies to control much of the market.
“They’ve been historically raising their list prices for their respective products in lockstep with one another,” Dr. Jing Luo, a professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, said. “There hasn’t been a lot of pricing pressure.”
And making a generic drug for insulin hasn’t been easy, with new manufacturers having to clear regulatory hurdles and questions over how a generic drug should be categorized, Luo added. A generic insulin is slated to come on the market in 2024 at no more than $30 a vial, which could drive down some of the price.
HOW DO DEMOCRATS PLAN TO CAP THE PRICE OF INSULIN?
That remains to be seen.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said some language that limits the price of insulin will be added to the economic bill, but it’s not clear what that price point will be and who all will be protected by that price cap.
Democrats had proposed a $35 monthly cap for those who get the drug through Medicare or private insurers as part of a bigger package that was derailed in the Senate. But it was left out of the scaled down package now headed for a congressional vote.
WHY IS THE COST OF INSULIN SO DIFFICULT TO CAP?
Capping the price of insulin will be very expensive.
Insulin is not only getting more expensive, but the number of people using it is also increasing.
A bipartisan bill proposed earlier this year that would cap insulin prices could cost about $23 billion over the next decade, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. While the bill would reduce insulin costs for many consumers, it would drive up government costs and premiums charged by Medicare and private insurers, according to the office’s analysis.
And that’s one of the reasons why price caps can be controversial.
“If your health insurance company says, voluntarily, nobody who buys insulin in our plan will have to pay more than $25, the question is who is paying the balance of that?” Luo said. “That then means their cost will go up, which means they’ll raise premiums on everyone.”
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https://cw33.com/news/nexstar-media-wire/why-is-insulin-so-expensive-and-the-cost-so-difficult-to-cap/
| 2022-08-05T11:34:17
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| 0.957215
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(The Hill) – Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) announced Thursday evening that she has reached a deal with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) that could pave the way for Democrats to pass their budget reconciliation package.
The deal would remove a provision closing the so-called carried interest loophole from the package announced last week by Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
Sinema said she and Schumer have also reached agreement on protecting manufacturing from the impact of a proposed 15 percent corporate minimum tax, which business leaders in Arizona warned would dampen economic growth.
The announcement paves the way for Sinema to vote Saturday for a motion to proceed to a budget reconciliation package that would reform the tax code, tackle climate change, reduce the cost of prescription drugs and shrink the federal deficit.
“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” Sinema said, signaling that she plans to vote to begin debate on the bill.
“Subject to the parliamentarian’s review, I’ll move forward,” she said.
A Democratic source familiar with the agreement said it would include a new excise tax on stock buybacks that would bring in more than enough revenue to cover the removal of the carried interest provision.
The Democrat said the bill will still reduce the deficit by $300 billion, citing a number that Schumer and Manchin have touted over the past week.
Senate Democrats had waited anxiously for days for a positive sign from Sinema, whom they feared was angry after being left out of a final round of talks.
With Sinema’s vote, Democrats now have the support of all 50 members of their caucus to pass what would become President Biden’s biggest domestic legislative achievement. It would reduce the federal deficit by between $100 billion to $300 billion, according to various estimates, an accomplishment Democrats can pitch to voters at a time of 40-year-high inflation.
“I am pleased to report that we have reached an agreement on the Inflation Reduction Act that I believe will receive the support of the entire Senate Democratic conference,” Schumer said in a separate statement confirming the deal.
He said the agreement “preserves the major components” of the deal he announced with Manchin last week to lower drug costs, fight climate change, close tax loopholes and reduce the deficit.
“The final version of the reconciliation bill, to be introduced on Saturday, will reflect this work and put us one step closer to enacting this historic legislation into law,” Schumer said.
Biden called for Senate Democrats to pass the package as soon as possible following Sinema’s announcement.
“Tonight, we’ve taken another critical step toward reducing inflation and the cost of living for America’s families,” Biden said in a statement.
“The Inflation Reduction Act will help Americans save money on prescription drugs, health premiums and much more,” he continued.
Democrats expect to vote to begin debate on the more-than-700-page bill sometime Saturday afternoon.
That will begin up to 20 hours of floor debate followed by an open-ended series of amendment votes, known as a vote-a-rama, and then a vote on final passage of the legislation.
Sinema in her statement promised to work with colleagues to address the carried interest preferential tax rate, which allows asset managers to pay a 20 percent capital gains rate on income they earn from advising clients on profitable investments.
“Following this effort, I look forward to working with Sen. [Mark] Warner [D-Va.] to enact carried interest reforms, protecting investments in America’s economy and encouraging continued growth while closing the most egregious loopholes that some abuse to avoid paying taxes,” she pledged.
The announcement capped off several days of intense discussions between Sinema, Schumer and Manchin.
Democratic senators said Sinema wasn’t happy about being left out of the secret negotiations Schumer and Manchin held last month to add sweeping tax reform and climate provisions to the budget package.
The Arizona senator had previously made clear that she opposed eliminating the carried interest tax rate as well as reforms that would effectively raise corporate taxes and threaten economic growth. Those priorities appeared to be somewhat overlooked in the Schumer-Manchin deal.
Sinema held back her support for the legislation and insisted on changes to soften the tax hit on manufacturers from a 15 percent corporate minimum tax, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.
Manchin held at least two long conversations with Sinema on the Senate floor in recent days to win her over.
Multiple people familiar with the issue said Sinema wanted to exempt U.S. manufacturing companies from the 15 percent corporate minimum tax that Schumer and Manchin inserted in the Inflation Reduction Act. That bill caught almost every senator — including Sinema — by surprise when it became public last week
Exempting manufacturing companies from the book minimum tax would cost about $45 billion over ten years, according to one Senate estimate floated this week.
Book is a tax accounting term that in effect would make it harder for companies to avoid declaring profit and therefore increase what they would pay in taxes.
Sinema also told colleagues that she opposed closing carried interest loophole, which critics say allows wealthy money managers to pay a lower effective tax rate than many middle-income Americans.
And the Arizona senator wanted $5 billion in drought resiliency funding for her home state, according to two Democratic senators.
The statements released by Sinema and Schumer Thursday evening made no mention of drought relief. However, her pledge to vote to move forward indicates her concerns on the corporate minimum tax structure, carried interest and drought have been satisfied.
Sinema declined to answer reporters’ questions when she emerged from her Capitol basement hideaway Thursday afternoon.
She came under heavy pressure from business leaders in Arizona to oppose the corporate minimum tax.
“In the face of record-high inflation, supply chain backlogs and a major labor crunch, now is not the time to hammer manufacturers with new taxes,” Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Danny Seiden said in a statement earlier Thursday.
“Arizona job creators will continue to urge lawmakers to reject this manufacturers tax and instead focus on policies that encourage job growth and strengthen our state and economic competitiveness,” he said.
The Schumer-Manchin deal would have established a 15 percent minimum tax for corporations with more than $1 billion in annual profits, though it exempted green-energy and microchip manufacturing tax credits from getting wiped out by that minimum tax threshold.
Republicans said that proposal would have hit manufacturing companies especially hard by superseding a key reform of former President Trump’s 2017 Tax Credits and Jobs Act allowing companies to fully expense capital expenditures for a given year.
Full expensing under the Tax Credits and Jobs Act is due to phase out over the next four years.
Sinema told the Arizona Chamber of Commerce in April that she would be “unwilling to support any tax policies that would put a break on … economic growth, or stall business and personal growth for America’s industries.”
She made clear to senior White House officials and Senate Democratic colleagues early during the negotiations over the budget reconciliation bill that she would not support increasing the 21 percent corporate tax rate, a key achievement of the 2017 tax reform law.
“The entire country knows that I am opposed to raising the corporate income tax. That was true yesterday and it is true today,” Sinema told the Arizona Chamber of Commerce earlier this year.
Republican critics of the Schumer-Manchin deal said that preventing full and immediate expensing of capital expenditures would effectively increase taxes on many corporations.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who worked closely with Sinema in drafting last year’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, warned in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that it would “essentially” place a “tax on manufacturing.”
He pointed out that the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that nearly 50 percent of the new tax would hit manufacturers.
“Imposing this new tax on U.S. companies, and restricting certain U.S. manufacturers from writing off investment costs immediately, would make America less competitive and drive investments and jobs overseas,” he warned.
Sinema’s request for $5 billion in drought resiliency funding also loomed as a potential problem, sources warned.
Guaranteeing access to more water to states lower in the Colorado River basin such as Arizona, Nevada and California may come at the expense of upper-basin states such as Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico.
“We are facing historic drought in Colorado. The state has had the worst wildfires in our state’s history. There is very little water in the Colorado River. And I think it would be great if we could do something on drought, but it has to be something that meaningfully improves the situation in Colorado and in the upper basin of the Colorado River,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), who is up for reelection in November.
Bennet warned that any drought resiliency language must provide an “enduring solution to the problem, otherwise it’s not worth doing.”
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https://www.wowktv.com/news/nexstar-media-wire/sinema-announces-deal-with-schumer-on-taxes-and-climate/
| 2022-08-05T11:34:18
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| 0.965482
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U.S. immigration authorities are planning to issue photo ID cards to immigrants in deportation proceedings in a bid to slash paper use and help people stay up-to-date on required meetings and court hearings, officials said.
The proposal from Immigration and Customs Enforcement is still being developed as a pilot program, and it was not immediately clear how many the agency would issue. The cards would not be an official form of federal identification, and would state they are to be used by the Department of Homeland Security.
The idea is for immigrants to be able to access information about their cases online by using a card rather than paper documents that are cumbersome and can fade over time, officials said. They said ICE officers could also run checks on the cards in the field.
“Moving to a secure card will save the agency millions, free up resources, and ensure information is quickly accessible to DHS officials while reducing the agency’s FOIA backlog,” an ICE spokesperson said in a statement, referring to unfulfilled public requests for agency documents. Homeland Security gets more Freedom of Information Act requests than any other federal agency, according to government data, and many of those involve immigration records.
The proposal has sparked a flurry of questions about what the card might be used for and how secure it would be. Some fear the program could lead to tracking of immigrants awaiting their day in immigration court, while others suggest the cards could advertised by migrant smugglers to try to induce others to make the dangerous trip north.
The Biden administration is seeking $10 million for the so-called ICE Secure Docket Card in a budget proposal for the next fiscal year. It was not immediately clear if the money would cover the pilot or a broader program or when it would begin.
The administration has faced pressure as the number of migrants seeking to enter the country on the southwest border has increased. Border Patrol agents stopped migrants more than 1.1 million times from January to June, up nearly one-third from the same period of an already-high 2021.
Many migrants are turned away under COVID-19-related restrictions. But many are allowed in and either are detained while their cases churn through the immigration courts or are released and required to check in periodically with ICE officers until a judge rules on their cases.
Those most likely to be released in the United States are from countries where expulsion under the public health order is complicated due to costs, logistics or strained diplomatic relations, including Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
At shelters, bus stations and airports along the U.S.-Mexico border, migrants carefully guard their papers in plastic folders. These are often the only documents they have to get past airport checkpoints to their final destinations in the United States. The often dog-eared papers can be critical to getting around.
An immigration case can take years and the system can be confusing, especially for immigrants who know little English and may need to work with an array of government agencies, including ICE and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which issues work permits and green cards. U.S. immigration courts are overseen by the Justice Department.
Gregory Z. Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said migrants have mistakenly gone to ICE offices instead of court for scheduled hearings that they then missed as a result. He said so long as immigrants’ privacy is protected, the card could be helpful.
“If ICE is going to be using this new technology to enable non citizens to check in with ICE, or to report information about their location and address, and then to receive information about their case — where their court hearings might be, what the requirements might be for them to comply with the law — that would be a welcome approach,” Chen said.
It was not clear whether Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration would accept the cards for airport travel or whether private businesses would consider it valid.
The United States doesn’t have a national photo identification card. Residents instead use a range of cards to prove identification, including driver’s licenses, state ID cards and consular ID cards. What constitutes a valid ID is often determined by the entity seeking to verify a person’s identity.
Talia Inlender, deputy director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at University of California, Los Angeles’ law school, said she was skeptical that using a card to access electronic documents would simplify the process for immigrants, especially those navigating the system without a lawyer, and questioned whether the card has technology that could be used to increase government surveillance of migrants.
But having an ID could be useful, especially for migrants who need to travel within the U.S., Inlender said.
“Many people are fleeing persecution and torture in their countries. They’re not showing up with government paperwork,” Inlender said. “Having a form of identification to be able to move throughout daily life has the potential to be a helpful thing.”
That has some Republican lawmakers concerned that the cards could induce more migrants to come to the U.S. or seek to access benefits they’re not eligible for. A group of 16 lawmakers sent a letter last week to ICE raising questions about the plan.
“The Administration is now reportedly planning yet another reckless policy that will further exacerbate this ongoing crisis,” the letter said.
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https://www.wowktv.com/news/nexstar-media-wire/us-to-issue-id-cards-to-migrants-awaiting-deportation-proceedings/
| 2022-08-05T11:34:25
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| 0.970148
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https://sportspyder.com/nfl/new-york-jets/articles/40296873
| 2022-08-05T11:34:30
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| 0.738227
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Washington (AP) — Reining in the soaring prices of insulin has thus far been elusive in Congress, although Democrats say they’ll try again — as part of their economic package that focuses on health and climate.
The price of the 100-year-old drug has more than tripled in the last two decades, forcing the nation’s diabetics to pay thousands of dollars a year for the life-saving medication. Democrats are considering capping the cost of that drug for at least some, although it’s unclear what the final proposal will look like and how many insulin users will get a price break.
Here’s a look at how insulin became so expensive and why it’s so difficult to bring the price of the drug down.
HOW MANY PEOPLE IN THE U.S. USE INSULIN AND FOR WHAT?
Roughly 8.4 million Americans use insulin, according to the American Diabetes Association. Not everyone who has diabetes needs insulin, but for those who do, it’s an important medication. For more than 1 million of those people with type 1 diabetes, regular access to the medication is a necessity and they will die without it.
“People require insulin, it’s not an option and nobody should have to decide between life-sustaining medication or food and rent,” said Dr. Robert Gabbay, the chief scientific and medical officer for the American Diabetes Association.
Insulin also helps control glucose levels for patients with other forms of diabetes. Some insulin users have rationed the drug because of its expense and risk numerous health complications as a result.
HOW EXPENSIVE IS INSULIN?
The price varies.
Some people on private insurance pay hundreds of dollars monthly for the drug. For most Medicare beneficiaries, the average out-of-pocket cost per insulin prescription was $54 in 2020 — an increase of nearly 40% since 2007, a study released last month by the Kaiser Family Foundation found. Others live in one of 22 states where the copay for a 30-day supply has been capped between $25 to $100.
The cost has led some to use less insulin than their doctor prescribes or postpone paying for other medical care.
WHY IS INSULIN SO EXPENSIVE?
Only three manufacturers — Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi — produce insulin, allowing those companies to control much of the market.
“They’ve been historically raising their list prices for their respective products in lockstep with one another,” Dr. Jing Luo, a professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, said. “There hasn’t been a lot of pricing pressure.”
And making a generic drug for insulin hasn’t been easy, with new manufacturers having to clear regulatory hurdles and questions over how a generic drug should be categorized, Luo added. A generic insulin is slated to come on the market in 2024 at no more than $30 a vial, which could drive down some of the price.
HOW DO DEMOCRATS PLAN TO CAP THE PRICE OF INSULIN?
That remains to be seen.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said some language that limits the price of insulin will be added to the economic bill, but it’s not clear what that price point will be and who all will be protected by that price cap.
Democrats had proposed a $35 monthly cap for those who get the drug through Medicare or private insurers as part of a bigger package that was derailed in the Senate. But it was left out of the scaled down package now headed for a congressional vote.
WHY IS THE COST OF INSULIN SO DIFFICULT TO CAP?
Capping the price of insulin will be very expensive.
Insulin is not only getting more expensive, but the number of people using it is also increasing.
A bipartisan bill proposed earlier this year that would cap insulin prices could cost about $23 billion over the next decade, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. While the bill would reduce insulin costs for many consumers, it would drive up government costs and premiums charged by Medicare and private insurers, according to the office’s analysis.
And that’s one of the reasons why price caps can be controversial.
“If your health insurance company says, voluntarily, nobody who buys insulin in our plan will have to pay more than $25, the question is who is paying the balance of that?” Luo said. “That then means their cost will go up, which means they’ll raise premiums on everyone.”
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https://www.wowktv.com/news/nexstar-media-wire/why-is-insulin-so-expensive-and-the-cost-so-difficult-to-cap/
| 2022-08-05T11:34:32
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| 0.957215
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https://sportspyder.com/nfl/new-york-jets/articles/40296961
| 2022-08-05T11:34:36
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https://sportspyder.com/nfl/new-york-jets/articles/40297102
| 2022-08-05T11:34:42
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https://sportspyder.com/nfl/new-york-jets/articles/40297280
| 2022-08-05T11:34:48
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https://sportspyder.com/nfl/new-york-jets/articles/40297308
| 2022-08-05T11:34:54
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https://sportspyder.com/nhl/winnipeg-jets/articles/40296908
| 2022-08-05T11:35:06
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https://sportspyder.com/nhl/winnipeg-jets/articles/40296909
| 2022-08-05T11:35:12
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https://sportspyder.com/nhl/winnipeg-jets/articles/40296910
| 2022-08-05T11:35:19
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ANALYSIS-Banks are Twitter deal escape hatch Musk would struggle with
The banks that agreed to finance Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter Inc have a financial incentive to help the world's richest person walk away but would face long legal odds, according to people close to the deal and corporate law experts. Twitter has sued Musk to force him to complete the transaction, dismissing his claim that the San Francisco-based company misled him about the number of spam accounts on its social media platform as buyer's remorse in the wake of a plunge in technology stocks.
The banks that agreed to finance Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter Inc have a financial incentive to help the world's richest person walk away but would face long legal odds, according to people close to the deal and corporate law experts.
Twitter has sued Musk to force him to complete the transaction, dismissing his claim that the San Francisco-based company misled him about the number of spam accounts on its social media platform as buyer's remorse in the wake of a plunge in technology stocks. The Delaware Court of Chancery, where the dispute between the two sides is being litigated, has set a high bar for acquirers being allowed to abandon their deals, and most legal experts have said the arguments in the case favor Twitter.
Yet there is one scenario in which Musk would be allowed to abandon the acquisition by paying Twitter only a $1 billion break-up fee, according to the terms of their contract. His $13 billon bank financing for the deal would have to collapse. Refusing to fund the deal would weigh on the banks' reputation in the market for mergers and acquisitions as reliable sources of debt. However, the banks would have at least two reasons to help Musk get out of the acquisition, three sources close to the deal said.
The banks stand to earn lucrative fees from Musk's business ventures such as electric car maker Tesla Inc and space rocket company Space, provided they continue to curry favor with him. They also face the prospect of hundreds of millions of dollars in losses if Musk is forced to complete the deal, the sources said. This is because, as with every big acquisition, the banks would have to sell the debt to get it off their books.
They would struggle to attract investors given the downturn in pockets of the debt market since the deal was signed in April, and the fact that Musk would be seen as an unwilling buyer of the company, the sources said. The banks would then face the prospect of selling the debt at a loss. It is unclear whether the banks that agreed to finance the acquisition -- Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Corp , Barclays Plc, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc, BNP Paribas SA, Mizuho Financial Group Inc and Societe Generale SA -- will attempt to get out of the deal.
The banks are waiting for the outcome of the legal dispute between Musk and Twitter before making any decisions, according to the sources. The trial is scheduled to start in October. Spokespeople for Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, Mitsubishi and Mizuho declined to comment, while BNP Paribas and Societe Generale did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
There is a catch to the banks serving as Musk's escape hatch. He would have to show in court that the banks refused to deliver on their debt commitments despite his best efforts, according to the terms of his deal contact with Twitter. This would be challenging to prove given Musk's public statements against the deal as well as private communications between Musk and the banks that Twitter may uncover in its request for information, four corporate lawyers and professors interviewed by Reuters said.
"Musk would have to convince the judge he is not responsible for the bank financing falling through. That is hard to show, it would require a great degree of deftness from him and the banks," said Columbia Law School professor Eric Talley. Musk and Twitter representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
HUNTSMAN PRECEDENT Even if the banks can show they are not acting at Musk's behest, they would find it difficult to get out of the Twitter deal, the legal experts said. They pointed to the case of chemical maker Hunstman Corp, which in 2008 sued the banks that walked away from financing its $6.5 sale to Hexion Specialty Chemicals.
Hexion, owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management Inc, abandoned the deal after Huntsman's fortunes deteriorated, but a Delaware judge ruled that the transaction should go ahead. The two banks financing the deal, Credit Suisse Group AG and Deutsche Bank AG, then refused to fund it, arguing the combined company would be insolvent. Huntsman sued the banks and, one week into the trial, they settled. The banks agreed to a $620 million cash payment and the provision of a $1.1 billion credit line to Hunstman, which had also secured earlier a $1 billion settlement payment from Apollo.
The banks balking at funding Musk's deal would also have to show that Twitter would be insolvent if the acquisition happened, or that terms of their debt commitment were somehow breached, a high bar based on the deal documents that have been made public, the legal experts said. "If the banks try to get out of the deal, they will walk into the same fight that Musk has taken on, where Twitter has the better legal arguments," said Eleazer Klein, co-chair of law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP's mergers, acquisitions and securities group.
(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/business/2134440-analysis-banks-are-twitter-deal-escape-hatch-musk-would-struggle-with
| 2022-08-05T11:35:20
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| 0.976418
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https://sportspyder.com/nhl/winnipeg-jets/articles/40297113
| 2022-08-05T11:35:25
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Lhi marketing expert turned producer, Janak Bhanushali is all set for a giant professional leap
After giving 20 years of his life to film marketing, Janak Bhanushali is getting into film production. The reason behind this leap is an inspiration to bring change in the way industry produces content. As a producer, Janak aims to hunt genuine and fresh talent with whom he can produce content that can be remembered in long term.
- Country:
- India
New Delhi [India], August 5 (ANI/ATK): After giving 20 years of his life to film marketing, Janak Bhanushali is getting into film production. The reason behind this leap is an inspiration to bring change in the way industry produces content. As a producer, Janak aims to hunt genuine and fresh talent with whom he can produce content that can be remembered in long term. Sharing his plans Janak Bhanushali who is the CEO of HiFi Mad company says that he has always chosen challenges that are tough to execute. He now looks forward to being the person who produces content that is good and something that stays with people for years.
"I chose this role to give more chances to upcoming talent than the ones who are already established. Exposure only helps the youth and the well-deserved influencers to do better. And I feel long-term good content creation is the need of the hour. I want to create something that adds value to everything and stays for a long time in the hearts of people," he says. "After seeing so much content being created, I feel the right talent should get their due. I along with my brand, HiFi Mad, will look for people and content that would be cherished for years as a timeless piece," Janak adds.
Janak Bhanushali has been behind the successful marketing campaigns of over 900 movies and 3000 songs in the past. He has worked with a long list of big celebs including Akshay Kumar, Shilpa Shetty, Shehnaaz Gill, Rakhi Sawant, and more. Janak has also built a wide network of micro and macro influencers. He has given exposure to various such influencers by producing content that brings high engagement. Being highly active on the digital medium, Janak Bhanushali himself is quite popular on Instagram. Thanks to his interesting personality and quirky posts, Janak boasts of followership of thousands.
Recently he also collaborated with SuperFan as the Director-Global Media and Entertainment Partnerships for SuperFan Studio. Under this association, he will be guiding the way forward in building and scaling partnerships in the industry. This story is provided by ATK. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/ATK)
(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/business/2134447-lhi-marketing-expert-turned-producer-janak-bhanushali-is-all-set-for-a-giant-professional-leap
| 2022-08-05T11:35:28
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| 0.967843
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https://sportspyder.com/nhl/winnipeg-jets/articles/40297114
| 2022-08-05T11:35:31
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https://sportspyder.com/nhl/arizona-coyotes/articles/40237675
| 2022-07-31T12:28:24
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https://sportspyder.com/nfl/tampa-bay-buccaneers/articles/40239830
| 2022-07-31T12:28:30
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https://sportspyder.com/cf/connecticut-huskies-football/articles/40239407
| 2022-07-31T12:28:42
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| 2022-07-31T12:28:48
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Demi Vollering (SD Worx) says her legs “exploded completely” as she attempted to keep pace with Annemiek van Vleuten (Movistar) on Stage 7 at the Tour de France Femmes.
The two Dutch GC favourites battled it out in the first mountain test on Saturday, with Van Vleuten producing a ride for the ages to crack her rival and seize the yellow jersey with one stage remaining. Vollering gapped Van Vleuten on the descent from Petit Ballon to hint at a sustained charge, but her compatriot duly swept her up before riding away.
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Van Vleuten leads the general classification by 3’14” from Vollering ahead of Sunday’s finale.
Tour de France Femmes
Slappendel: Vos could be a 'very dark horse' to win Stage 1
"I'm so empty, I tried so hard. I'm just not strong enough yet," said Vollering. "I was hoping I could have hung on a little bit longer but I couldn't.
"I knew when I was with Annemiek alone, I knew it would be a long day. I tried to focus on my breathing and not think about what was coming, just centimetre after centimetre I tried to hang on.
"I knew that I needed to hang on as long as possible and was trying to focus on how good I was feeling. At one moment, she was setting this speed and I needed to stand up and my legs exploded completely. It was a bit too much."
- TDF Femmes: How to watch Stage 8 with Super Planche on the menu
- Should teams regret not taking advantage of Van Vleuten mechanical?
- Opinion: Van Vleuten rode away, raised the bar and made every one of her rivals better
A despondent Vollering revealed she was at a loss to explain her rival's climbing prowess.
"I said to her [van Vleuten], 'it's not normal what you did', and she said, 'I have so much more training experience and overall experience'," said Vollering.
"Then she said to me, 'it will come to you'. So, let's hope."
Van Vleuten’s heroics were made even more impressive given she had been "so, so sick" with a stomach bug earlier in the race, and was on the verge of quitting after Stage 2.
“[I was] super close [to retiring],” she said. “Because on day two I couldn’t even put my things in my suitcase.
"I had all the symptoms apart from having flu. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, I was super tired. The last thing I was thinking about was racing.
”My team-mates had to push me also all the time so I was really in a bad situation."
Only a dramatic collapse can now stop Van Vleuten from leaving France draped in yellow, although a 123.3km finale from Lure to La Super Planche des Belles Filles could yet throw up some fireworks.
Highlights: Van Vleuten rips field apart to soar into yellow
- - -
Stream the Tour de France Femmes live and on-demand on discovery+. You can also watch all the action live on eurosport.co.uk.
Brabantse Pijl
Vollering streaks clear to take De Brabantse Pijl
Cycling
Balsamo takes first victory in rainbow jersey with opening stage win at Volta Comunitat Valenciana
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| 2022-07-31T12:29:10
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| 0.971852
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Sarina Wiegman has sought to play down any notion of her England side being favourites for the Euro 2022 final - a theory perhaps mischievously suggested by her Germany counterpart Martina Voss-Tecklenburg.
Voss-Tecklenburg brought up previous England-Germany fixtures at Wembley Stadium to give credence to her suggestion, but it was one that drew short shrift from a typically inscrutable Wiegman during the latter's media duties ahead of Sunday's showdown.
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The weight of history certainly is in Germany's favour in terms of Euros titles however, with Die Nationalelf going for their ninth crown while the Lionesses seek their first.
Euro 2022
'Difficult conversations a turning point' - Mead hails England culture ahead of final
“I think there’s pressure on both teams," Wiegman said.
“I think we both want to win the final and we both have very good squads and it’s going to be a very tight game. It’s going to be very exciting.
"We don’t feel under any more or less pressure. It’s two teams trying to win.
- 'Difficult conversations a turning point' - Mead hails England culture ahead of final
- 'A moment of reflection' - Williamson believes Lionesses success can impact wider society
- Euro 2022 final: How we got here and will super-sub Russo be the key?
“When you reach a final, you’re one of the best teams in the tournament. We have a very good team too and we don’t fear anyone.”
In her original comments, Voss-Tecklenburg had said: “The pressure is all on England. Everyone knows the history between Germany and England and Wembley – the goals and penalties.
“But that’s all in the past, so the pressure is actually on England.
"I believe the pressure is more on them than us.”
Wiegman, who admitted she will have some "hard choices" to make in terms of selection given her fully-fit squad, predicted the game will be a tough battle.
She said: "It may be a little physical. Germany can be direct, physical. They are straightforward. That’s what we expect.
"We have seen a few things we might exploit – but you’ll see that [on Sunday].”
Euro 2022
'A moment of reflection' - Williamson believes Lionesses success can impact wider society
Euro 2022
Euro 2022 final: How we got here and will super-sub Russo be the key?
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https://www.eurosport.com/football/uefa-women-s-championship/2022/sarina-wiegman-hits-back-at-germany-boss-martina-voss-tecklenburg-s-pressure-claim-ahead-of-euro-202_sto9069680/story.shtml
| 2022-07-31T12:29:16
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| 0.953936
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Superbikes
WorldSBK 2022: Toprak Razgatlioglu wins superpole after big scare for Jonathan Rea at Most
Toprak Razgatlioglu profited from an overly eager Jonathan Rea disappearing into the gravel to take victory in the superpole race at the Autodrom Most. Victory carried the defending WSBK champion closer to championship leader Alvaro Bautista and Rea in second.
00:02:08, 7 minutes ago
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https://www.eurosport.com/superbikes/czech-republic/2022/worldsbk-2022-toprak-razgatlioglu-wins-superpole-after-big-scare-for-jonathan-rea-at-most_vid1724981/video.shtml
| 2022-07-31T12:29:23
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| 0.843399
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https://sportspyder.com/cf/kentucky-wildcats-football/articles/40239904
| 2022-07-31T12:33:09
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| 2022-07-31T12:33:15
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https://sportspyder.com/nfl/pittsburgh-steelers/articles/40239510
| 2022-07-31T12:33:21
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| 2022-07-31T12:33:27
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| 2022-07-31T12:33:33
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| 2022-07-31T12:33:39
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| 2022-07-31T12:34:00
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| 2022-07-31T12:34:06
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HDFC hikes lending rate by 25 bps; home loan to be costlier
The rate hike comes ahead of the RBI's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting later next week. It is widely expected that MPC would hike interest rates to tame high inflation.
The rate hike comes ahead of the RBI's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting later next week. It is widely expected that MPC would hike interest rates to tame high inflation.
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IndustrySpeak / City / Careers / Data & Analytics / RealtyTV / RealtyCheck / Delhi-NCR / Pune / Mumbai / Chennai / Hyderabad / Kolkata / Ahmedabad / Social Analytics
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https://realty.economictimes.indiatimes.com/amp/news/allied-industries/hdfc-hikes-lending-rate-by-25-bps-home-loan-to-be-costlier/93248431
| 2022-07-31T12:35:33
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| 0.908492
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CBI seizes AgustaWestland helicopter from Pune premises of builder Avinash Bhosale
RKW Developers Pvt Ltd, which is owned by the Wadhawan family of DHFL Group, had allegedly joined the Association in 2017 by paying crores of rupees for the membership and maintenance of the chopper, they said.
NEW DELHI: The CBI seized an AgustaWestland helicopter from the premises of builder Avinash Bhosale in Pune on Saturday in connection with the Rs 34,615-crore DHFL scam case, officials said Saturday.
It is alleged that the AW109SP helicopter was purchased by Varva Aviation, owned by an Association of Persons, in 2011 for Rs 36 crore, they said.
RKW Developers Pvt Ltd, which is owned by the Wadhawan family of DHFL Group, had allegedly joined the Association in 2017 by paying crores of rupees for the membership and maintenance of the chopper, they said.
It was reasonably apprehended that funds used by RKW Developers for buying stake in the Association were sourced from loans sanctioned by various banks of the 17-member consortium which was cheated by DHFL and its former CMD Kapil Wadhawan and Director Dheeraj Wadhawan, among others, to the tune of Rs 34,615 crore, they said.
After getting input about the investment, the CBI on Saturday seized the helicopter from a hangar at the premises of builder Avinash Bhosale at Baner Road, Pune, they said.
The CBI has recently charge-sheeted Bhosale in a separate case of corruption in DHFL and Yes Bank, they said.
The federal probe agency had booked Dewan Housing Finance Ltd, the Wadhawan brothers and others on June 20 in the bank fraud case worth Rs 34,615 crore, making it the biggest such case probed by the agency, officials said.
It was alleged that they had cheated a consortium of 17 banks led by Union Bank of India by siphoning off Rs 34,615 crore bank loans by diverting them using falsified account books of DHFL.
They allegedly used shell companies and a parallel accounting system known as 'Bandra Books' to siphon off public funds in DHFL by disbursing money to fictitious entities as retail loans.
The agency acted on a complaint from Union Bank of India, the lead bank of the consortium which had extended credit facilities to the tune of Rs 42,871 crore to DHFL between 2010 and 2018.
The bank has alleged that the Wadhawans in criminal conspiracy with others misrepresented and concealed facts, and committed a criminal breach of trust to cheat the consortium by defaulting on loan repayments from May 2019 onwards.
The audit of DHFL account books showed that the company allegedly committed financial irregularities, diverted funds, fabricated books, and round-tripped funds to "create assets for Kapil and Dheeraj Wadhawan" using public money.
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https://realty.economictimes.indiatimes.com/amp/news/regulatory/cbi-seizes-agustawestland-helicopter-from-pune-premises-of-builder-avinash-bhosale/93247462
| 2022-07-31T12:35:34
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| 0.978583
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Unitech founder Ramesh Chandra granted medical bail by Delhi HC
The court noted that from the medical record, it was clear that Chandra's condition was "quite serious" and his ailments "have assumed larger proportions" on account of age.
NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court has granted eight-week medical bail to realty firm Unitech's founder Ramesh Chandra in a money laundering case against him. Justice Jasmeet Singh released Chandra on medical grounds and asked him to furnish a personal bond to the tune of Rs 25,000 with a surety bond of the like amount.
The court noted that from the medical record, it was clear that Chandra's condition was "quite serious" and his ailments "have assumed larger proportions" on account of age.
"He is suffering from cognitive impairment and dementia. He is also in need of cardiological as well as neurological assistance and has had numerous falls, weight loss, memory loss, etc.," noted the court in its order dated July 28.
"For the above reasons, I am of the view that the petitioner needs to be enlarged on medical bail for a period of eight weeks," the court said.
While directing his release, the court asked Chandra not to use any mobile phone and to remain in his house except for visits to the hospital.
Chandra, represented by advocate Vishal Gosain, submitted that he was 85 years old and was suffering from cognitive impairment, neurological and cardiological ailments and was in urgent need of medical attention.
There may be a situation where urgent life-saving medication, oxygen, and injection may also be required but the same will not be available while he is in custody, he further said.
In the order, the court asked Chandra not to communicate with, or come into contact with any of the prosecution witnesses, or any member of the victim's family, or tamper with the evidence of the case.
The court also said that for every trip to and from the hospital, he shall inform the investigating officer concerned before leaving and after returning back.
The Enforcement Directorate told the court that all necessary medication as well as medical assistance was being provided to the accused in jail and if he is released on medical bail, he would interfere with the investigation.
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https://realty.economictimes.indiatimes.com/amp/news/regulatory/unitech-founder-ramesh-chandra-granted-medical-bail-by-delhi-hc/93247419
| 2022-07-31T12:35:36
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| 0.987103
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Dems seem headed for climate, health win after ups and downs
It’s been more than a year in the making and has seen plenty of ups and downs. Now, a Democratic economic package focused on climate and health care faces hurdles but seems headed toward party-line passage by Congress next month.
Approval would let President Joe Biden and his party claim a triumph on top priorities as November’s elections approach. They have not forgotten that they came close to approving a far grander version of the bill last year, only to see Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., one of their most conservative and contrarian members, torpedo it at the eleventh hour.
This time, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has crafted a compromise package with Manchin, to the surprise of everyone, transforming the West Virginian from pariah to partner. The measure is more modest than earlier versions but still checks boxes on issues that make Democrats giddy.
Here's what they face:
WHAT'S IN IT?
The measure would raise $739 billion in revenue over 10 years and spend $433 billion. More than $300 billion would be left for trimming federal deficits.
Those are meaningful cuts in red ink. But they’re tiny compared with the $16 trillion in new debt the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will accumulate over the next decade.
The package would save consumers and the government money by curbing prescription drug prices, and it would subsidize private health insurance for millions of people. It would bolster the IRS budget so the tax agency can collect more unpaid taxes.
The plan would foster clean energy and offshore energy drilling, a balance demanded by Manchin, a champion of fossil fuels. It also would collect new taxes from the largest corporations and wealthy hedge fund owners.
It's a fraction of the $3.5 trillion package that Biden proposed early in his presidency, which also envisioned sums for initiatives such as paid family leave and universal preschool. It's also smaller than the roughly $2 trillion alternative the House passed last November after Manchin demanded cuts then derailed the deal anyway, citing inflation fears.
___
IT'S NOW CALLED THE “INFLATION REDUCTION ACT,” BUT ...
... will it do that? It certainly could, but there are dissenters.
First, some context.
By one inflation measure the Federal Reserve studies closely, prices jumped 6.8% in June from a year ago, the biggest increase in four decades. That followed government figures showing the economy shrank anew last quarter, fueling recession worries.
“Improved tax collection, drug savings, and deficit reduction would put downward pressure on inflation,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said Friday. In what passes for a rave review, the bipartisan fiscal watchdog group called the legislation “exactly the kind of package lawmakers should put in place to help the economy in a number of ways.”
“Deficit reduction is almost always inflation-reducing," Jason Furman, a Harvard University economics professor who was a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, wrote Friday in The Wall Street Journal. He said the measure would also “reduce inflation by slowing the growth of prescription-drug prices."
A more sobering assessment came from the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Wharton Budget Model, which analyzes economic issues.
“The act would very slightly increase inflation until 2024 and decrease inflation thereafter," the group wrote Friday. “These point estimates are statistically indistinguishable from zero, thereby indicating low confidence that the legislation will have any impact on inflation."
A chorus of Republicans say Democrats' bill would be widely damaging. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., calls it “a giant package of huge new job-killing tax hikes, Green New Deal craziness that will kill American energy, and prescription drug socialism that will leave us with fewer new life-saving medicines."
___
CHANGES AHEAD
The 725-page measure will probably still change somewhat.
Schumer said this past week that Democrats planned to add language aimed at reducing patients' costs of insulin, the diabetes drug that can cost hundreds of dollars monthly.
Insulin price curbs were a highlight of Democrats' bigger package last year, including a $35 monthly cap for patients who get the drug through Medicare or private insurers. But that fell out this year as the measure was trimmed.
Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, have produced a bill capping insulin's price. That measure's prospects diminished after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cost about $23 billion and actually increase the price of insulin. The two lawmakers also haven't produced the 10 Republicans who would be needed to succeed in the 50-50 Senate, where most bills need 60 votes.
It's unclear what the Democrats' new insulin language would do. Prior language that required private insurers to set a $35 monthly insulin cap may violate the chamber's rules, which only allow provisions primarily affecting the federal budget.
In addition, under the process Democrats are using to move the measure through the chamber by a simple majority, with Vice President Kamala Harris' tiebreaking vote, it would face multiple amendments in a voting session that can run through the night, and there is no telling whether some will pass.
___
PROSPECTS
Every Republican seems poised to vote “no.”
Democrats will need all 50 of their own votes in the Senate, where unpredictable Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., has yet to state her view.
Democrats can lose no more than four House votes to succeed there. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Friday that when the Senate approves the package, “We’ll pass it.”
Schumer wants Senate passage next week. He acknowledged that timeline is “going to be hard" because it will take time for the chamber's parliamentarian to make sure the bill conforms to Senate rules.
This will also take luck. All 50 Democrats, including both independents who support them, will have to be healthy enough to show up and vote.
That's not guaranteed. The latest, extremely contagious COVID-19 variant is spreading around the country. And the chamber has 33 senators who are 70 years old or more, including 19 Democrats.
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., 77, was the latest senator to announce he'd contracted the disease. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., 82, has been out after hip surgery. Both are expected back next week.
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https://www.wbaltv.com/article/dems-seem-headed-for-climate-health-win-after-ups-and-downs/40760617
| 2022-07-31T12:35:39
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| 0.956798
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HDFC hikes lending rate by 25 bps; home loan to be costlier
The rate hike comes ahead of the RBI's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting later next week. It is widely expected that MPC would hike interest rates to tame high inflation.
NEW DELHI: Mortgage lender HDFC Ltd on Saturday increased its benchmark lending rate by 25 basis points, a move that will make loans dearer for both existing and new borrowers.
The rate hike comes ahead of the RBI's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting later next week. It is widely expected that MPC would hike interest rates to tame high inflation.
"HDFC increases its Retail Prime Lending Rate (RPLR) on housing loans, on which its Adjustable Rate Home Loans (ARHL) are benchmarked, by 25 basis points (bps), with effect from August 1, 2022," the housing finance company said in a statement.
This is the fifth hike effected by HDFC in two months. In all the rate has been increased by 115 basis points since May this year.
The revised rates for new borrowers range between 7.80 per cent and 8.30 per cent, depending on credit and loan amount. The existing range is 7.55 per cent to 8.05 per cent.
For existing customers, the rates will rise by 25 basis points or (0.25 per cent).
HDFC follows a 3-month cycle for repricing its loans to existing customers. So, the loans will be revised in sync with the increased lending rate based on the date of the first disbursement of each customer.
Financial institutions are on an interest rate hike spree following the increase in repo rate by 40 basis points and 50 basis points, respectively, announced by the RBI in May and June.
CIDCO said the complex is in Bamandongri in Navi Mumbai and was built in quick time between April 4 and July 9 this year due to the use of modern precast technology, a system in which concrete is cast in a reusable mould, treated and transported to the construction site.
The Haryana Real Estate Regulatory Authority (HRERA) has issued multiple orders pertaining to 17 builders directing them to refund homebuyers' money along with interest at the rate of 9.70 per cent within 90 days.
|
https://realty.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/allied-industries/hdfc-hikes-lending-rate-by-25-bps-home-loan-to-be-costlier/93248431
| 2022-07-31T12:35:42
|
en
| 0.965655
|
ET RealEstate privacy and cookie policy has been updated to align with the new data regulations in European Union. Please review and accept these changes below to continue using the website.
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CBI seizes AgustaWestland helicopter from Pune premises of builder Avinash Bhosale
RKW Developers Pvt Ltd, which is owned by the Wadhawan family of DHFL Group, had allegedly joined the Association in 2017 by paying crores of rupees for the membership and maintenance of the chopper, they said.
NEW DELHI: The CBI seized an AgustaWestland helicopter from the premises of builder Avinash Bhosale in Pune on Saturday in connection with the Rs 34,615-crore DHFL scam case, officials said Saturday.
It is alleged that the AW109SP helicopter was purchased by Varva Aviation, owned by an Association of Persons, in 2011 for Rs 36 crore, they said.
RKW Developers Pvt Ltd, which is owned by the Wadhawan family of DHFL Group, had allegedly joined the Association in 2017 by paying crores of rupees for the membership and maintenance of the chopper, they said.
It was reasonably apprehended that funds used by RKW Developers for buying stake in the Association were sourced from loans sanctioned by various banks of the 17-member consortium which was cheated by DHFL and its former CMD Kapil Wadhawan and Director Dheeraj Wadhawan, among others, to the tune of Rs 34,615 crore, they said.
After getting input about the investment, the CBI on Saturday seized the helicopter from a hangar at the premises of builder Avinash Bhosale at Baner Road, Pune, they said.
The CBI has recently charge-sheeted Bhosale in a separate case of corruption in DHFL and Yes Bank, they said.
The federal probe agency had booked Dewan Housing Finance Ltd, the Wadhawan brothers and others on June 20 in the bank fraud case worth Rs 34,615 crore, making it the biggest such case probed by the agency, officials said.
It was alleged that they had cheated a consortium of 17 banks led by Union Bank of India by siphoning off Rs 34,615 crore bank loans by diverting them using falsified account books of DHFL.
They allegedly used shell companies and a parallel accounting system known as 'Bandra Books' to siphon off public funds in DHFL by disbursing money to fictitious entities as retail loans.
The agency acted on a complaint from Union Bank of India, the lead bank of the consortium which had extended credit facilities to the tune of Rs 42,871 crore to DHFL between 2010 and 2018.
The bank has alleged that the Wadhawans in criminal conspiracy with others misrepresented and concealed facts, and committed a criminal breach of trust to cheat the consortium by defaulting on loan repayments from May 2019 onwards.
The audit of DHFL account books showed that the company allegedly committed financial irregularities, diverted funds, fabricated books, and round-tripped funds to "create assets for Kapil and Dheeraj Wadhawan" using public money.
CIDCO said the complex is in Bamandongri in Navi Mumbai and was built in quick time between April 4 and July 9 this year due to the use of modern precast technology, a system in which concrete is cast in a reusable mould, treated and transported to the construction site.
The Haryana Real Estate Regulatory Authority (HRERA) has issued multiple orders pertaining to 17 builders directing them to refund homebuyers' money along with interest at the rate of 9.70 per cent within 90 days.
|
https://realty.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/regulatory/cbi-seizes-agustawestland-helicopter-from-pune-premises-of-builder-avinash-bhosale/93247462
| 2022-07-31T12:35:49
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en
| 0.97378
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Wildfires in West explode in size amid hot, windy conditions
Wildfires in California and Montana exploded in size overnight amid windy, hot conditions and were quickly encroaching on neighborhoods, forcing evacuation orders for over 100 homes Saturday, while an Idaho blaze was spreading.
In California's Klamath National Forest, the fast-moving McKinney fire, which started Friday, went from charring just over 1 square mile (1 square kilometer) to scorching as much as 62 square miles (160 square kilometers) by Saturday in a largely rural area near the Oregon state line, according to fire officials. The fire burned down at least a dozen residences and wildlife was seen fleeing the area to avoid the flames.
“It's continuing to grow with erratic winds and thunderstorms in the area and we're in triple digit temperatures," said Caroline Quintanilla, a spokeswoman at Klamath National Forest.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency Saturday as the fire intensified. The proclamation allows Newsom more flexibility to make emergency response and recovery effort decisions and access federal aid.
It also allows “firefighting resources from other states to assist California crews in battling the fires,” according to a statement from the governor's office.
Meanwhile in Montana, the Elmo wildfire nearly tripled in size to more than 11 square miles (about 28 square kilometers) within a few miles of the town of Elmo. Roughly 200 miles (320 kilometers) to the south, Idaho residents remained under evacuation orders as the Moose Fire in the Salmon-Challis National Forest charred more than 67.5 square miles (174.8 square kilometers) in timbered land near the town of Salmon. It was 17% contained.
A significant build-up of vegetation was fueling the McKinney fire, said Tom Stokesberry, a spokesman with the U.S. Forest Service for the region.
“It’s a very dangerous fire — the geography there is steep and rugged, and this particular area hasn’t burned in a while," he said.
A small fire was also burning nearby, outside the town of Seiad, Stokesberry said. With lightning predicted over the next few days, resources from all over California were being brought in to help fight the region’s fires, he said.
McKinney’s explosive growth forced crews to shift from trying to control the perimeter of the blaze to trying to protect homes and critical infrastructure like water tanks and power lines, and assist in evacuations in California’s northernmost county of Siskiyou.
Deputies and law enforcement were knocking on doors in the county seat of Yreka and the town of Fort Jones to urge residents to get out and safely evacuate their livestock onto trailers. Automated calls were being sent to land phone lines as well because there were areas without cell phone service.
Over 100 homes were ordered evacuated and authorities were warning people to be on high alert. Smoke from the fire caused the closure of portions of Highway 96.
The Pacific Coast Trail Association urged hikers to get to the nearest town while the U.S. Forest Service closed a 110-mile (177-kilometer) section of the trail from the Etna Summit to the Mt. Ashland Campground in southern Oregon.
Oregon state Rep. Dacia Grayber, who is a firefighter, was camping with her husband, who is also in the fire service, near the California state line when gale-force winds awoke them just after midnight.
The sky was glowing with strikes of lightning in the clouds, while ash was blowing at them, though they were in Oregon, about 10 miles (about 16 kilometers) away. Intense heat from the fire had sent up a massive pyrocumulonimbus cloud, which can produce its own weather system including winds and thunderstorms, Grayber said.
“These were some of the worst winds I've ever been in and we’re used to big fires," she said. “I thought it was going to rip the roof top tent off of our truck. We got the heck out of there."
On their way out, they came across hikers on the Pacific Coast Trail fleeing to safety.
“The terrifying part for us was the wind velocity," she said. “It went from a fairly cool breezy night to hot, dry hurricane-force winds. Usually that happens with a fire during the day but not at night. I hope for everyone's sake this dies down but it's looking like it's going to get worse."
In western Montana, the wind-driven Elmo fire forced evacuations of homes and livestock as it raced across grass and timber, according to The National Interagency Fire Center, based in Idaho. The agency estimated it would take nearly a month to contain the blaze.
Smoke shut down a portion of Highway 28 between Hot Springs and Elmo because of the thick smoke, according to the Montana Department of Transportation.
Crews from several different agencies were fighting the fire on Saturday, including the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Fire Division. Six helicopters were making drops on the fire, aided by 22 engines on the ground.
In Idaho, more than 930 wildland firefighters and support staff were battling the Moose fire Saturday and protecting homes, energy infrastructure and the Highway 93 corridor, a major north-south route.
A red flag warning indicated that the weather could make things worse with the forecast calling for “dry thunderstorms," with lightning, wind and no rain.
In Hawaii, fire crews and helicopters have been fighting flames Saturday evening on Maui near Paia Bay. The Maui County Emergency Management Agency said roads have been closed and have advised residents and travelers to avoid the area. It is unclear how many acres have burned. A red flag warning is in effect Sunday.
Meanwhile, crews made significant progress in battling another major blaze in California that forced evacuations of thousands of people near Yosemite National Park earlier this month. The Oak fire was 52% contained by Saturday, according to a Cal Fire incident update.
As fires raged across the West, the U.S. House on Friday approved wide-ranging legislation aimed at helping communities in the region cope with increasingly severe wildfires and drought — fueled by climate change — that have caused billions of dollars in damage to homes and businesses in recent years.
The legislative measure approved by federal lawmakers Friday combines 49 separate bills and would increase firefighter pay and benefits; boost resiliency and mitigation projects for communities affected by climate change; protect watersheds; and make it easier for wildfire victims to get federal assistance.
The bill now goes to the Senate, where California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein has sponsored a similar measure.
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Boone reported from Boise, Idaho.
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https://www.wbaltv.com/article/wildfires-in-west-explode-in-size/40762511
| 2022-07-31T12:35:49
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en
| 0.969681
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Unitech founder Ramesh Chandra granted medical bail by Delhi HC
The court noted that from the medical record, it was clear that Chandra's condition was "quite serious" and his ailments "have assumed larger proportions" on account of age.
NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court has granted eight-week medical bail to realty firm Unitech's founder Ramesh Chandra in a money laundering case against him. Justice Jasmeet Singh released Chandra on medical grounds and asked him to furnish a personal bond to the tune of Rs 25,000 with a surety bond of the like amount.
The court noted that from the medical record, it was clear that Chandra's condition was "quite serious" and his ailments "have assumed larger proportions" on account of age.
"He is suffering from cognitive impairment and dementia. He is also in need of cardiological as well as neurological assistance and has had numerous falls, weight loss, memory loss, etc.," noted the court in its order dated July 28.
"For the above reasons, I am of the view that the petitioner needs to be enlarged on medical bail for a period of eight weeks," the court said.
While directing his release, the court asked Chandra not to use any mobile phone and to remain in his house except for visits to the hospital.
Chandra, represented by advocate Vishal Gosain, submitted that he was 85 years old and was suffering from cognitive impairment, neurological and cardiological ailments and was in urgent need of medical attention.
There may be a situation where urgent life-saving medication, oxygen, and injection may also be required but the same will not be available while he is in custody, he further said.
In the order, the court asked Chandra not to communicate with, or come into contact with any of the prosecution witnesses, or any member of the victim's family, or tamper with the evidence of the case.
The court also said that for every trip to and from the hospital, he shall inform the investigating officer concerned before leaving and after returning back.
The Enforcement Directorate told the court that all necessary medication as well as medical assistance was being provided to the accused in jail and if he is released on medical bail, he would interfere with the investigation.
CIDCO said the complex is in Bamandongri in Navi Mumbai and was built in quick time between April 4 and July 9 this year due to the use of modern precast technology, a system in which concrete is cast in a reusable mould, treated and transported to the construction site.
The Haryana Real Estate Regulatory Authority (HRERA) has issued multiple orders pertaining to 17 builders directing them to refund homebuyers' money along with interest at the rate of 9.70 per cent within 90 days.
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https://realty.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/regulatory/unitech-founder-ramesh-chandra-granted-medical-bail-by-delhi-hc/93247419
| 2022-07-31T12:35:54
|
en
| 0.981086
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Fans who attended Saturday’s CenterPoint Energy Dayton Air Show had a nearly perfect weather day to watch the featured flying acts and to visit the displays, but here is what to know about today’s final day of the 48th annual event.
Weather an early issue
Gates at the air show open at 9 a.m. today.
The weather forecast calls for showers likely before 10 a.m., then partly sunny skies with a high near 80 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. Flying acts are scheduled to perform from noon to 4:15 p.m. today.
Parking is different
Leave early and be patient, as traffic will likely be heavy as it was Saturday when many people took to social media to express frustration with how traffic concerns about getting to the show.
General admission parking is now entirely on the east side of North Dixie Drive across from the air show’s entrance.
Be aware also that part of North Dixie Drive directly in front of the gateway will be blocked to give general admission patrons a safer walk to the entrance.
Chalet, Pavilion, and Flight Line Hangar ticket holders with P-Lot parking passes will now park on the south side of the airport off West National Road. More than 30 shuttle buses will shuttle attendees to their chalets or pavilions, the show has said.
Handicap Parking, VIP Parking and C-Lot Parking lots have not changed.
Credit: Marshall Gorby
Credit: Marshall Gorby
Featured performers
Today, the feature flying show will be held from 12 to 4:15 p.m. But there will be plenty to see on the ground. A few of the ground-based “static displays” include the Air Force B-52 Stratofortress, F-15 and the Army CH-47F.
The show schedule is the same both days, but all acts and times are subject to change depending on weather or other factors.
This year, the Navy’s Blue Angels are the headline act. With their new F/A-18 Super Hornets, the Blue Angels can reach up to 700 mph and fly as close as 18 inches apart.
The Air Force Thunderbirds and the Navy Blue Angels alternate as the show’s crowning performance every other year.
Ticket information
General admission tickets, priced at $20-$30, are available online, a Kroger near you or can be purchased at the gate. Tickets are to be used for one day. Children under the age of 5 have free admission.
Visit daytonairshow.com or call 800-514-3849.
Parking details
General admission for parking is $15 per car and $25 for RVs, buses and other large vehicles.
Take Exit 64 Northwoods Blvd from I-75. Follow signs to appropriate lots. Stay in right lane.
More information on parking can be found https://daytonairshow.com/parking-and-directions/.
Flying lineup
Flag Drop and National Anthem
U.S. Army Golden Knights
Kevin Coleman
U.S. Air Force F-16 Viper Demo
Vampire Airshows
U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III
Tora! Tora! Tora!
Kent Pietsch
USMC Fat Albert
U.S. Navy Blue Angels
Credit: Marshall Gorby
About the Author
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https://www.journal-news.com/local/dayton-air-shows-final-day-what-to-know-about-todays-show/G5AK76LKJRDNTEUASB2EFI4DO4/
| 2022-07-31T12:35:58
|
en
| 0.938821
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Country Music Hall of Famer and Grammy winner Barbara Mandrell retired from music more than two decades ago, but the Grand Ole Opry still feels like home to her.
Mandrell, 73, made a rare public appearance on Saturday night at the Opry to celebrate her 50th anniversary of being an Opry member.
“Here we are at home again,” Mandrell told The Associated Press in an interview backstage at the Opry House before the long-running radio and TV program. “50 years. Not everybody gets that blessing.”
Born in Texas and raised in California, Mandrell was just 23 when she became a member in July of 1972. But she was already a seasoned entertainer by the time she came to Nashville, after her teenage years were spent playing steel guitar and appearing regularly on the California-based country TV show “Town Hall Party.”
Over her decades-long career, the actor, multi-instrumentalist and singer turned millions of fans onto country music in the ‘70s and ’80s, not only through her popular TV show “Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters,” but also through hits like “Sleeping Single in a Double Bed,” “If Loving You is Wrong (I Don’t Want to be Right)” and “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool.”
She became the first country artist to earn back-to-back entertainer of the year awards from the Country Music Association, crossing over with R&B covers and bringing glamour and showmanship to the genre. Her performances were a showcase of her musicality, whether she was singing to the top of the rafters, playing pedal steel, the banjo or the saxophone.
“It’s called show business. You need to show them something,” Mandrell said. “Otherwise, they could sit at home and listen to your recordings or listen to you on the radio. You’ve got to give them something that entertains them.”
With her sisters Louise and Irlene, Mandrell used the power of television to bring new ears to country music, as well as gospel music. Her musical guests were a mixture of R&B, pop and country artists.
“So many would say things like, ‘I never listened to country music, but now, boy, I’m watching every Saturday night and I love it,’” Mandrell said.
This Saturday night, Mandrell was still a champion of country music. Before the show began, Mandrell watched Carrie Underwood from side stage as Underwood did her soundcheck of “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool,” stopping to give her a hug and greeting Underwood’s band members.
Underwood said growing up, Mandrell’s voice was always around.
“She has been such an inspiration to me and so many others that stand on the shoulders of great female artists like her,” Underwood told the Opry crowd.
During the Opry show, Mandrell enthusiastically applauded the all-female artist lineup, including CeCe Winans, Linda Davis and Suzy Bogguss, as they performed her hits.
“I already feel on top of the world. I feel the deepest of gratitude and excitement because I am such a huge fan of these ladies,” said Mandrell.
From her seat in the middle of the crowd, Mandrell waved and blew kisses at her fans, who snapped photos of the country star.
Mandrell hasn’t played music or sung — other than in church — since she retired in 1997. Her last concert ever was held at the Opry House and made into TV special called, “Barbara Mandrell and the Do-Rites: The Last Dance.”
Dressed smartly in a hot pink pantsuit and surrounded by 50 vases of roses bought by her fans, Mandrell gave another goodbye from the same Opry stage 25 years later.
“I chose my home to do my final performance on and it was this one,” Mandrell said. “God bless you!” she told fans before she walked off stage into the shadows.
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https://www.opry.com/
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Follow Kristin M. Hall at https://twitter.com/kmhall
Credit: Mark Humphrey
Credit: Mark Humphrey
Credit: Mark Humphrey
Credit: Mark Humphrey
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https://www.journal-news.com/nation-world/barbara-mandrell-returns-to-the-opry-for-50th-anniversary/BYXGL5SUORH5NHNHZI5VXB2JFA/
| 2022-07-31T12:36:04
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en
| 0.967636
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California claims to know how much climate-warming gas is going into the air from within its borders. It's the law: California limits climate pollution and each year the limits get stricter.
The state has also been a major oil and gas producer for more than a century, and authorities are well aware some 35,000 old, inactive oil and gas wells perforate the landscape.
Yet officials with the agency responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions say they don't include methane that leaks from these idle wells in their inventory of the state's emissions.
Ira Leifer, a University of California Santa Barbara scientist said the lack of data on emissions pouring or seeping out of idle wells calls into question the state’s ability to meet its ambitious goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.
Residents and environmentalists from across the state have been voicing concern about the possibility of leaking idle or abandoned wells for years, but the concerns were heightened in May and June when 21 idle wells were discovered to be leaking methane in or near two Bakersfield neighborhoods. They say that the leaking wells are "an urgent public health issue," because when a well is leaking methane, other gases often escape too.
Leifer said these “ridealong” gases were his biggest concern with the wells.
"Those other gases have significant health impacts,” Leifer said, yet we know even less about their quantities than we do about the methane.
In July, residents who live in the communities nearest the leaking wells protested at the California Geologic Management Division’s field offices, calling for better oversight.
“It’s clear that they are willing to ignore this public health emergency. Our communities are done waiting. CalGEM needs to do their job,” Cesar Aguirre, a community organizer with the Central California Environmental Justice Network, said in a statement.
Robert Howarth, a Cornell University methane researcher, agreed with Leifer that the amount of methane emissions from leaking wells isn’t well known and that it’s not a major source of emissions when compared with methane emissions from across the oil and gas industry.
Still, he said, “it’s adding something very clearly, and we shouldn’t be allowing it to happen.”
A ton of methane is 83 times worse for the climate than a ton of carbon dioxide, when compared over twenty years.
A 2020 study said emissions from idle wells are “more substantial” than from plugged wells in California, but recommended more data collection on inactive wells at the major oil and gas fields throughout the state.
Robert Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist and co-author on that study, said they found high emissions from some of the idle wells they measured in the study.
In order to get a better idea of how much methane is leaking, the state of California is investing in projects on the ground and in the air. David Clegern, a spokesperson for CARB, said the agency is beginning a project to measure emissions from a sample of properly and improperly abandoned wells to estimate statewide emissions from them.
And in June, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a budget that includes participation in a global effort to slash emissions called the Methane Accountability Project. The state will spend $100 million to use satellites to track large methane leaks in order to help the state identify sources of the gas and cap leaks.
Some research has already been done, too, to find out how much methane is coming from oil and gas facilities. A 2019 Nature study found that 26% of state methane emissions is coming from oil and gas. A new investigation by the Associated Press found methane is billowing from oil and gas equipment in the Permian Basin in Texas and companies under report it.
Howarth said even if methane from idle oil and gas wells isn't a major pollution source, it should be a priority not just in California, but nationwide, to help the country meet its climate pledges.
“Methane dissipates pretty quickly in the atmosphere,” he said, “so cutting the emissions is really one of the simplest ways we have to slow the rate of global warming and meet that Paris target.”
A new Senate proposal would provide hundreds of millions dollars to plug wells and reduce pollution from them, especially in hard hit communities.
___
Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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https://www.journal-news.com/nation-world/california-not-counting-methane-leaks-from-idle-wells/KQ2E4Y3Q5FHJPNN62KEOSE4LKM/
| 2022-07-31T12:36:11
|
en
| 0.96468
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BERLIN (AP) — Pilots with Germany's Lufthansa have voted in favor of possible strike action, a union announced Sunday, saying that walkouts can still be avoided but calling the result an “unmistakable signal” to the company in a pay dispute.
The Vereinigung Cockpit union is calling for a 5.5% pay increase this year and an automatic adjustment for inflation starting next year. It has argued that Lufthansa hasn't yet made a negotiable offer in six rounds of talks.
The union said that 97.6% of pilots who took part in a ballot approved its call. It said in statement that the vote “doesn't yet necessarily lead to strike measures, but it is an unmistakable signal to Lufthansa to take the cockpit staff's needs seriously.”
The dispute comes on top of a separate altercation with a union representing Lufthansa ground staff in Germany. A one-day strike on Wednesday in that standoff led to the cancellation of over 1,000 flights.
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https://www.journal-news.com/nation-world/pilots-with-germanys-lufthansa-back-possible-strike-action/V5PG6FZXQJDG3I54ZHXDVQOWLM/
| 2022-07-31T12:36:18
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en
| 0.969602
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The cigar-chomping Ramos, known for his visionary “win-win” outlook, attention to detail, a thumbs-up sign and firm handshake, served as president from 1992 to 1998, succeeding the democracy icon, Corazon Aquino. She was swept into the presidency in 1986 after an army-backed and largely peaceful “People Power” revolt toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was also a cousin of Ramos.
The uprising, which became a harbinger of change in authoritarian regimes worldwide, came after Ramos, the head of the Philippine Constabulary, and Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile withdrew their support from Marcos following a failed coup.
Roman Catholic Cardinal Jaime Sin then summoned Filipinos to surround and shield the military and constabulary camps in the capital region where the defectors and their forces dug in, sparking crucial government defections that eventually drove Marcos, his family and cronies to U.S. exile.
After Aquino rose to the presidency, Ramos became the military chief of staff and later defense secretary, successfully defending her from several violent coup attempts.
Ramos won the 1992 presidential elections and became the largely Roman Catholic nation’s first Protestant president. His term was marked by major reforms and attempts to dismantle telecommunications and other business monopolies that triggered a rare economic boom, bolstered the image of the impoverished Southeast Asian country and drew praise from business leaders and the international community.
His calm bearing in times of crises earned him the moniker "Steady Eddie.”
A son of a longtime legislator and foreign secretary, Ramos graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1950. He was a part of the Philippine combat contingent that fought in the Korean War and was also involved in the Vietnam War as a non-combat civil military engineer.
Ramos is survived by his wife, Amelita “Ming” Ramos, a school official, pianist, sports and an environmental advocate, and their four daughters. Their second child, Josephine “Jo” Ramos-Samartino, passed away in 2011.
Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.
FILE - Former Philippine President Fidel Ramos speaks at a news conference on Nov. 21, 2016 in suburban Makati city, east of Manila. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)
Credit: Bullit Marquez
FILE - Former Philippine President Fidel Ramos speaks at a news conference on Nov. 21, 2016 in suburban Makati city, east of Manila. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)
Credit: Bullit Marquez
Credit: Bullit Marquez
FILE - U.S. President Bill Clinton, left, and Philippine President Fidel Ramos toast during the state luncheon tendered by the latter in Malacaniang palace in Manila on Nov. 13, 1994. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Marcy Nighswander, File)
Credit: Marcy Nighswander
Credit: Marcy Nighswander
FILE - U.S. President Bill Clinton, left, and Philippine President Fidel Ramos toast during the state luncheon tendered by the latter in Malacaniang palace in Manila on Nov. 13, 1994. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Marcy Nighswander, File)
Credit: Marcy Nighswander
Credit: Marcy Nighswander
FILE - Philippine President Fidel Ramos, left, escorts South African President Nelson Mandela as they review an honor guard on March 1, 1997, at the Malacanang palace in Manila. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Pat Roque, File)
Credit: Pat Roque
FILE - Philippine President Fidel Ramos, left, escorts South African President Nelson Mandela as they review an honor guard on March 1, 1997, at the Malacanang palace in Manila. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Pat Roque, File)
Credit: Pat Roque
Credit: Pat Roque
FILE - Philippine President Fidel Ramos, left, and his Chinese counterpart Jiang Zemin smile to photographers prior to their bilateral meeting at the Palace of the Golden Horses in Kuala Lumpur on Dec. 15, 1997. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)
Credit: Bullit Marquez
FILE - Philippine President Fidel Ramos, left, and his Chinese counterpart Jiang Zemin smile to photographers prior to their bilateral meeting at the Palace of the Golden Horses in Kuala Lumpur on Dec. 15, 1997. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)
Credit: Bullit Marquez
Credit: Bullit Marquez
FILE - President Fidel Ramos, right, offers a toast to Prince Charles during a dinner on July 3, 1997, at the Malacanang palace in Manila. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Pat Roque, File)
Credit: Pat Roque
FILE - President Fidel Ramos, right, offers a toast to Prince Charles during a dinner on July 3, 1997, at the Malacanang palace in Manila. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Pat Roque, File)
Credit: Pat Roque
Credit: Pat Roque
FILE - Philippine President Fidel Ramos, second left, urges other presidents to wave with hands during a brief photo session prior to the summit of APEC leaders in Subic, west of Manila, on Nov. 25, 1996. From left are Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, President Ramos, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Fred Chartrand, File)
Credit: Fred Chartrand
FILE - Philippine President Fidel Ramos, second left, urges other presidents to wave with hands during a brief photo session prior to the summit of APEC leaders in Subic, west of Manila, on Nov. 25, 1996. From left are Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, President Ramos, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Fred Chartrand, File)
Credit: Fred Chartrand
Credit: Fred Chartrand
FILE - Philippine President Benigno Aquino III, center, Vice-President Jejomar Binay, left, and former President Fidel Ramos, right, link arms as they sing a patriotic song to celebrate the 25th "People Power" anniversary on Feb. 25, 2011, at the People Power Monument along EDSA highway at suburban Quezon city, northeast of Manila, Philippines. Ramos was one of the leaders of the near bloodless four-day people power revolution 25 years ago that ousted the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos from 20-year-rule and helped install Aquino's mother Corazon "Cory" Aquino to the presidency. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)
Credit: Bullit Marquez
FILE - Philippine President Benigno Aquino III, center, Vice-President Jejomar Binay, left, and former President Fidel Ramos, right, link arms as they sing a patriotic song to celebrate the 25th "People Power" anniversary on Feb. 25, 2011, at the People Power Monument along EDSA highway at suburban Quezon city, northeast of Manila, Philippines. Ramos was one of the leaders of the near bloodless four-day people power revolution 25 years ago that ousted the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos from 20-year-rule and helped install Aquino's mother Corazon "Cory" Aquino to the presidency. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)
Credit: Bullit Marquez
Credit: Bullit Marquez
FILE - President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, right, shakes hands with former President Fidel Ramos during the ruling party LAKAS-CMD (Christian Muslim Democrats) meeting on Jan. 14, 2006, at the Malacanang palace in Manila. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Pat Roque, File)
Credit: Pat Roque
FILE - President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, right, shakes hands with former President Fidel Ramos during the ruling party LAKAS-CMD (Christian Muslim Democrats) meeting on Jan. 14, 2006, at the Malacanang palace in Manila. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Pat Roque, File)
Credit: Pat Roque
Credit: Pat Roque
FILE - U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney speaks during a joint news conference with his Philippine counterpart Fidel Ramos in the Philippines at the Armed Forces headquarters on Feb. 19, 1990. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Alberto Marquez, File)
Credit: Alberto Marquez
FILE - U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney speaks during a joint news conference with his Philippine counterpart Fidel Ramos in the Philippines at the Armed Forces headquarters on Feb. 19, 1990. Ramos, a U.S.-trained ex-general who saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars and played a key role in a 1986 pro-democracy uprising that ousted a dictator, has died. He was 94. Some of Ramos's relatives were with him when he died on Sunday, July 31, 2022, said his longtime aide Norman Legaspi. (AP Photo/Alberto Marquez, File)
Credit: Alberto Marquez
Credit: Alberto Marquez
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OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — A rare Democrat in a deeply Republican state, U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas is one of the most vulnerable incumbents seeking reelection this year. In the final months of her congressional campaign, she is focusing on Republicans' strict opposition to abortion rights.
An online ad she released last week highlights how Amanda Adkins, the Republican favored to emerge from Tuesday's primary for a rematch with David in November, opposed abortion without exceptions. The ad points to Adkins' support of an amendment to the Kansas Constitution on the ballot Tuesday that would make clear there is no right to abortion in the states.
“There were a lot of people who would not have known that I have an opponent who is extreme on this issue,” Davids, who beat Adkins in 2020, said in an interview. “It’s not hypothetical anymore.”
That's a sign of how the Supreme Court's decision in June to repeal a woman's federal constitutional right to abortion has scrambled the political dynamics heading into the fall elections, when control of Congress is at stake. A half-dozen of the most vulnerable House members — all of them women, all representing swaths of suburban voters — see the issue as one that could help them win in an otherwise difficult political climate.
In addition to Davids, these incumbents include Reps. Angie Craig of Minnesota, Cindy Axne of Iowa, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Abigail Spanberger and Elaine Luria of Virginia, and Susan Wilds of Pennsylvania. They all face Republican opponents who support the high court's abortion ruling. Some are contending with rivals who back efforts to ban abortion in all circumstances, including when the mother's life is at risk.
It's unclear whether the focus on abortion alone may be enough to mean reelection for many of these Democrats, who are running at a time of high inflation and frustration with President Joe Biden's performance.
“In a close, toss-up election, which I think all of these are, it can make a difference,” said national pollster Christine Matthews, a self-described moderate who has worked for Republicans. “It’s not going to be what drives everyone to make a vote choice, but it will drive some people to make a vote choice.”
Twenty-two percent of U.S. adults named abortion or women's rights in an open-ended question as one of up to five problems they want the government to address in the next year, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in June. That has more than doubled since December.
Since the Supreme Court decision, as state governments have moved to act on abortion rights, AP-NORC polling has found a majority of people in the United States saying they want Congress to pass legislation guaranteeing access to legal abortion nationwide.
Overwhelming majorities also think states should allow abortion in specific cases, including if the health of the pregnant woman is endangered or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
Like those questioned overall, a majority of suburbanites think abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to AP-NORC polling. Suburbanites also were slightly more likely than city residents and significantly more likely than people living in rural areas to say abortion or women’s rights are among the top issues for the government to address, according to the AP-NORC poll from June.
That's particularly important in districts such as Axne's in Iowa, which includes Des Moines' teeming suburbs. Dallas County, west of Des Moines, has been one of the country's fastest-growing counties since 2000, with the cornfields from decades ago now covered in new homes, schools and commercial developments.
In an interview, Axne was adamant that she would make abortion a central theme of her campaign. Axne's GOP opponent is state Rep. Zach Nunn, who indicated in a primary debate that he opposes abortion without exceptions.
“I can’t even believe I have to say this. I have an opponent who would let a woman die to bear a child,” Axne said. “This is crap we don’t see in this country. This is the stuff we talk about in other countries and women not having rights.”
In Michigan, Rep. Elissa Slotkin faces state Sen. Tom Barrett, who supports only an exception to save a woman's life.
“That’s more extreme than the 1931 law that’s on our books," Slotkin said in an interview. “So I think that that’s an important contrast to make.”
The Adkins, Barrett and Nunn campaigns did not reply to telephone, email and text messages seeking comment for this story.
In Virginia, Yesli Vega, the Republican challenging Spanberger in a district that spans the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and Richmond, has not dismissed the debunked theory that pregnancy is unlikely in cases of rape. In audio published by Axios late last month, Vega was asked during a campaign event in May whether “it’s harder for a woman to get pregnant if she’s been raped.”
Vega responded, Axios reported, “Maybe, because there’s so much going on in the body. I don’t know. I haven’t seen any studies. But if I’m processing what you’re saying, it wouldn’t surprise me, because it’s not something that’s happening organically. Right? You’re forcing it.”
The answer was reminiscent of what Todd Akin, a Missouri congressman who was the Republican nominee for Senate in 2012, said during that campaign. In discussing his opposition to exceptions for rape victims, Akin claimed, "If it's legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down."
The comments were viewed as a major contributor to his loss to Democrat Clare McCaskill, a vulnerable incumbent.
In Virginia, Spanberger released a digital ad last week declaring that Vega’s “views don’t represent Virginia.”
Earlier, Spanberger had said Vega's comment was “extreme and ignorant" and “horrifying and disrespectful to the millions of American women who have or will become pregnant due to sexual violence.”
One of the Spanberger's campaign digital posts used this headline: “Republican congressional candidate pulls a Todd Akin on abortion."
Representatives for Vega did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Some Republicans warn that Democrats risk overplaying their hand.
In Minnesota, for example, Craig is facing Republican Tyler Kistner, whom she narrowly beat in 2020 in a district that covers Minneapolis' southeastern suburbs.
Craig has begun running digital ads attacking Kistner, who opposes abortion, but would allow for exceptions in cases of rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother.
“Tyler Kistner wants to take away our rights," a woman's voice proclaims in an ad.
Kistner consultant Billy Grant said Craig is “trying to scare you" and noted that the Republican's team is weighing a counter to the attack that portrays him as “pro-life, but who understands both sides."
“The rest of America really is not a single-issue voter on that and they are concerned about the economy," Grant said.
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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics
Credit: John Hanna
Credit: John Hanna
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Credit: J. Scott Applewhite
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Start your week smart: Kentucky, Biden, Chinese rocket, Monkeypox, Mega Millions
We’ve endured much as a nation this year: rampant inflation, fierce political discord, extreme weather conditions and an ongoing pandemic. Nothing, however, may be as troubling as the coming candy apocalypse. Hershey warned last week that due to capacity constraints and ongoing supply chain issues, it may not be able to meet consumer demand for Halloween candy this fall. The horror … the horror.
Here’s what else you need to know to Start Your Week Smart.
The weekend that was
• Days after deadly flooding in eastern Kentucky claimed the lives of at least 25 people, more rain today will threaten some of the hardest-hit areas as rescuers are still looking for missing residents and thousands struggle to recover without cell service and power.
• President Joe Biden tested positive for Covid-19 again on Saturday, per a letter from presidential physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor, in what is likely a “rebound” Covid-19 positivity that the doctor noted is “observed in a small percentage of patients treated with Paxlovid.”
• Remnants of a massive Chinese rocket that was descending uncontrollably back to Earth reentered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean at roughly 12:45 p.m. ET on Saturday, the US Space Command said on Twitter.
• New York City officials declared monkeypox a public health emergency on Saturday, saying the city is the epicenter of the state’s outbreak and the move will boost measures to help slow the spread of the disease.
• The chase for the second-largest Mega Millions jackpot has ended – with a single ticket sold in the Chicago area for the whole $1.337 billion.
The week ahead
Tuesday
Primary season rolls on as we get ever closer to the 2022 midterm elections, with voters in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Washington heading to the polls. Results in Arizona will be closely watched as the election there is shaping up to be a proxy fight between former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.
Tuesday is also the day the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases a key reading on the health of the job market. The bureau’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey – known as the JOLTS report – will show the number of job openings available in June. In May, there were 11.3 million job openings, which outnumbered available workers by nearly 2 to 1.
Thursday
Bucking the “if it’s Tuesday, it’s primary day” trend, voters in Tennessee will instead cast their ballots on August 4 as three Democratic candidates hope to win their party’s nomination to take on Republican Gov. Bill Lee in November, who is running unopposed in the GOP primary.
The government’s monthly employment report for July drops on August 5 as fears of a recession deepen. The US economy added a better-than-expected 372,000 jobs in June and the unemployment rate held steady at 3.6% – still close to a 52-year low.
Want more 5 Things?
Voters head to the polls on Tuesday in a series of closely watched Republican primaries in Arizona. Listen to the Sunday edition of the CNN 5 Things podcast to hear CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan talk about his trip to the state, where he asked voters how they feel about former President Donald Trump’s election lies and the current state of the GOP.
Photos of the week
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
An airplane drops fire retardant ahead of the Oak Fire near Jerseydale, California, on Sunday, July 24.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Cole Burston/Getty Images
Pope Francis blesses the water of Lac Ste. Anne while visiting the Canadian province of Alberta on Tuesday, July 26. During his trip to Canada this week, he apologized for the Catholic Church's role in the abuse of Canadian Indigenous children in residential schools.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Natacha Pisarenko/AP
A woman in Buenos Aires holds a photo of Maria Eva Duarte de Perón, Argentina's most famous first lady, as she waits to visit her tomb on the 70th anniversary of her death on Tuesday, July 26. Eva Perón, better known by her nickname Evita, championed the rights of the poor, pushed for more social programs and argued for women's suffrage. She died of cancer at the age of 33.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Sanchit Khanna/Hindustan Times/Getty Images
Relatives and friends of Indian track athlete Neeraj Chopra celebrate in Panipat, India, after he won a silver medal in the javelin Sunday, July 24, at the World Championships in Oregon. He's just the second Indian ever to medal at the World Championships.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Cheney Orr/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Anti-abortion protesters demonstrate inside the Indiana Capitol building on Tuesday, July 26. Abortion-rights protesters were also in the building as Indiana lawmakers convened a special session this week to consider more restrictions on abortion. Indiana is the first state to hold such a session since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
From President Biden/Twitter
US President Joe Biden works at the White House next to his dog, Commander, while he was recovering from Covid-19 on Monday, July 25. He's now out of isolation and "feeling great" after testing negative.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Joshua Bessex/AP
Young fans get autographs from Buffalo quarterback Josh Allen while attending the NFL team's training camp in Pittsford, New York, on Monday, July 25.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Liu Li/VCG/Getty Images
Twin giant pandas are cooled off with water at the Chongqing Zoo in China on Tuesday, July 26.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters
An effigy of the demon Ghantakarna is burned during the Ghantakarna festival in Bhaktapur, Nepal, on Tuesday, July 26. The burning is meant to symbolize the destruction of evil and drive out evil spirits and ghosts.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Odelyn Joseph/AP
Children in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, sleep on the floor of a school turned into a shelter on Saturday, July 23, after they were forced to leave their homes because of gang clashes in the area.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Haydar Karaalp/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Security forces stand in front of Iraq's Parliament after hundreds of angry protesters, loyal to the powerful cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, broke into Baghdad's heavily protected Green Zone on Wednesday, July 27, to denounce the nomination of a new prime minister. Al-Sadr told protesters at the Parliament building that their "message" had been received and that they should return home.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Allison Dinner/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
A woman who became sick in the hot weather is helped by fellow migrants and US Border Patrol agents as migrants wait to be processed in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Tuesday, July 26.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Matt Rourke/AP
Christopher Morel slides into home to score a run for the Chicago Cubs during a Major League Baseball game in Philadelphia on Saturday, July 23. The Cubs won 6-2 in 10 innings.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Nariman El-Mofty/AP
Medic volunteer Nataliia Voronkova gives a medical tactical training session to soldiers in a bomb shelter as air raid sirens go off in Dobropillia, Ukraine, on Friday, July 22.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images
WNBA star Brittney Griner arrives to a hearing at the Khimki Court outside Moscow on Wednesday, July 27. Griner has been detained in Russia since February, when authorities said they found cannabis oil in her luggage at a Moscow airport and accused her of smuggling significant amounts of a narcotic substance. The US State Department has classified her as wrongfully detained.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Hamdan Khan/AP
Villagers evacuate a flooded area in Lasbella, Pakistan, on Tuesday, July 26. Torrential rains caused deadly flooding and infrastructure damage.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Harley Palangchao/AP
Boulders fall near a vehicle in Bauko, Philippines, during an earthquake on Wednesday, July 27. At least five people died and 130 others were injured after a 7.0-magnitude quake struck the northern Philippines on Wednesday, according to authorities in the Southeast Asian country.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Lincoln Ho/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
A woman becomes emotional on Tuesday, July 26, as Pope Francis holds Mass at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Huizhong Wu/AP
A Taiwanese frigate fires an anti-air missile as part of military drills off the island's eastern coast on Tuesday, July 26. It was part of the annual Han Kuang exercises held across Taiwan and its outlying islands. This year, the drills have taken on a greater significance amid growing concerns over China's intentions toward Taiwan — a self-governing island that Beijing's ruling Communist Party claims as its own.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty Images
People line up at a Covid-19 testing station in Shanghai, China, on Saturday, July 23. The highly transmissible BA.5 variant is spreading rapidly worldwide and is seen as a great threat by authorities in China — the last major country adhering to a stringent zero-Covid strategy.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Hans Peter Lottermoser/SEPA.Media/Getty Images
Noah Okafor and Benjamin Sesko, teammates with the Austrian soccer club Red Bull Salzburg, celebrate a goal during a preseason match against Liverpool on Wednesday, July 27.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Bruna Prado/AP
A guest dances Wednesday, July 27, in Van Gogh Alive, a multimedia exhibition in Rio de Janeiro featuring projections of paintings by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty Images
US President Joe Biden meets virtually with CEOs and labor leaders on Monday, July 25, to discuss the importance of passing a bill aimed at boosting semiconductor production in the United States. The House passed the bill on Thursday, a day after the Senate.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
Ukrainians fire artillery toward Russian forces in Ukraine's Kharkiv region on Wednesday, July 27.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images
Officers from the Chicago Police Department, wearing buttons that depict fallen Chicago police officer Ella French, tear up during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about law enforcement safety on Tuesday, July 26. French was shot in the line of duty during a traffic stop last year.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Michel Lunanga/AFP/Getty Images
People protest against the United Nations in Goma, Congo, on Tuesday, July 26. At least five people were killed and about 50 were wounded during the second day of protests.
Children dressed as chess pieces perform before the Chess Olympiad in Chennai, India, on Tuesday, July 26.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Carlin Stiehl/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Brandi Carlile introduces fellow singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell for a rare performance Sunday, July 24, at the Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island. Mitchell, 78, had a brain aneurysm in 2015, one that required rehabilitation and physical therapy to recover. Ever since, she has been largely out of the public eye.
Photos: The week in 31 photos
Matias Delacroix/AP
A young fencer strikes a pose for her parents as they take photos in Caracas, Venezuela, on Sunday, July 24.
The latest edition to the “Predator” franchise is set 300 years ago in the Comanche Nation, where a young female warrior fights to protect her tribe against one of the first highly-evolved Predators to land on Earth. “Prey” lands on Hulu on Friday.
‘Bullet Train’
This action/comedy starring Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock and a host of other actors places five assassins aboard a fast moving bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka, where they find out their missions have something in common. “Bullet Train” rolls into theaters on Friday.
Take CNN’s weekly news quiz to see how much you remember from the week that was! So far, 43% of fellow quiz fans have gotten an 8 out of 10 or better this week. How well can you do? (Click here)
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BEIJNG — The speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, confirmed Sunday she will visit four Asian countries this week but made no mention of a possible stop in Taiwan that has fueled tension with Beijing, which claims the island democracy as its own territory.
Pelosi said in a statement she is leading a congressional delegation to Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan to discuss trade, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, security and "democratic governance."
Pelosi has yet to confirm news reports that she might visit Taiwan. Chinese President Xi Jinping warned against meddling in Beijing's dealings with the island in a phone call Thursday with his American counterpart, Joe Biden.
Beijing sees official American contact with Taiwan as encouragement to make its decades-old de facto independence permanent, a step U.S. leaders say they don't support. Pelosi, head of one of three branches of the U.S. government, would be the highest-ranking elected American official to visit Taiwan since then-Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1997.
The Biden administration didn't explicitly urge Pelosi to avoid Taiwan but tried to assure Beijing there was no reason to "come to blows" and that if such a visit occurred, it would signal no change in U.S. policy.
"Under the strong leadership of President Biden, America is firmly committed to smart, strategic engagement in the region, understanding that a free and flourishing Indo-Pacific is crucial to prosperity in our nation and around the globe," Pelosi's statement said.
Taiwan and China split in 1949 after the communists won a civil war on the mainland. Both sides say they are one country but disagree over which government is entitled to national leadership. They have no official relations but are linked by billions of dollars of trade and investment.
The United States switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, but maintains informal relations with the island. Washington is obligated by federal law to see that Taiwan has the means to defend itself.
Washington's "One China policy" says it takes no position on the status of the two sides but wants their dispute resolved peacefully. Beijing promotes an alternative "One China principle" that says they are one country and the Communist Party is its leader.
Members of Congress publicly backed Pelosi's interest in visiting Taiwan despite Chinese opposition. They want to avoid being seen as yielding to Beijing.
Beijing has given no details of how it might react if Pelosi goes to Taiwan, but the Ministry of Defense warned last week the military would take "strong measures to thwart any external interference." The foreign ministry said, "those who play with fire will perish by it."
The ruling party's military wing, the People's Liberation Army, has flown growing numbers of fighter planes and bombers around Taiwan to intimidate the island.
"The Air Force's multi-type fighter jets fly around the treasured island of the motherland, tempering and enhancing the ability to maintain national sovereignty and territorial integrity," military spokesman Col. Shen Jinke said on Sunday, referring to Taiwan.
Pelosi said her delegation includes U.S. Reps. Gregory Meeks, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Mark Takano, chairman of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs; Suzan DelBene, vice chair of the House Ways and Means Committee; Raja Krishnamoorthi, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and chair of the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Andy Kim, a member of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees.
A visit to Taiwan would be a career capstone for Pelosi, who increasingly uses her position in Congress as a U.S. emissary on the global stage. She has long challenged China on human rights and wanted to visit Taiwan earlier this year.
In 1991, as a new member of Congress, Pelosi irked Chinese authorities by unfurling a banner on Tiananmen Square in central Beijing commemorating those killed when the Communist Party crushed pro-democracy protests two years earlier.
"It's important for us to show support for Taiwan," Pelosi, a Democrat from California, told reporters this month.
But she had made clear she was not advocating U.S. policy changes.
"None of us has ever said we're for independence, when it comes to Taiwan," she said. "That's up to Taiwan to decide."
On Friday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby tried to tamp down concerns.
"There's no reason for it to come to that, to come to blows," Kirby said at the White House. "There's no reason for that because there's been no change in American policy with respect to One China."
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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In 2012, Dana Cardile says she was at her then-boyfriend's house in Yonkers, N.Y. They were arguing, and he called the police. It was around 9 p.m. A group of officers arrived and told Cardile to show them her driver's license.
She alleged later in a lawsuit that on the way to retrieve her license from her car, she was violently assaulted by four male officers — pushed to the ground, kicked, grabbed by her throat and lifted to her feet, and repeatedly thrown against the trunk of her car. Cardile claimed that what happened was unprovoked. Officers took her to a holding cell, and after she requested medical care, according to her lawsuit, the police took her to a Yonkers hospital several hours later. There, she was treated for a fractured hand and injuries to her arm and shoulder.
"The uniform makes them feel like 'we can do what we want, and you sit there and shut up,'" says Cardile, who was 37 at the time of the incident.
In her federal civil rights lawsuit, filed two years after the incident, Cardile alleged that the officers used unreasonable and excessive force. The city of Yonkers denied wrongdoing — but settled with Cardile for $50,000.
Civil suits like this are often the only recourse citizens have for holding police officers accountable, and for some people the only way to obtain any sense of justice.
Yonkers is a small city just north of New York City. The Yonkers Police Department does not look like the community it serves. Yonkers is 19% Black and 40% Latino. But the police force of about 600 officers is nearly 75% white, according to the department.
NPR obtained records of payouts by the city of Yonkers for incidents of alleged police misconduct that took place between 2007 and 2020. When the city of Yonkers settled cases, it was made clear that the city and the officers involved in the lawsuits denied any wrongdoing.
We focused on this period because the incidents that resulted in payouts occurred as the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating the Yonkers Police Department and recommending areas for reform.
Even with the extra scrutiny from the Justice Department, the payouts by the city over alleged misconduct did not seem to have signaled that there were deeper systemic issues within the police department. Over the years, the number of incidents that resulted in a payout fluctuated: They peaked at 17 in 2012, dropped to a low of two in 2016, and bumped back up to eight in 2018.
Among our findings:
Christina Gilmartin, director of communications for the mayor of Yonkers, says lawsuits are settled for a variety of reasons and stressed that there is no admission of liability.
"Typically," she says, "there is some investigation after a claim is filed. Decisions are made based on the strength of the claim, the assessment of the damages, the anticipated cost of defense."
Settlements are paid for out of general tax revenues, she says, and are approved by the city council.
And according to Frank DiDomizio, public information officer for the Yonkers Police Department, "the Police Department does not play a role in the settlements."
He also noted, in a statement to NPR, that "we are an agency that averages 160,000 calls for service per year." He added that the NPR investigation only identified about 300 officers named in lawsuits over roughly 15 years, a tiny fraction "compared to the total contacts with the public."
"There is no policy ... of using less force."
When the Department of Justice began investigating the Yonkers Police Department in the summer of 2007, it was looking for a pattern of unlawful policing.
The Justice Department found what it called "significant concerns."
Two years into its investigation, it outlined findings in a 26-page letter to the city. It said that the Yonkers police did not have a "comprehensive" policy on the use of force, and that its manual contained little guidance for officers about when and how to use force.
Rather than providing definitions or legal standards of "reasonable" or "justified" force, the DOJ found that the Yonkers Police Department left it up to individual officers to define these terms for themselves. For example, its manual instructed officers to apply force to "appropriate" areas of the body, without giving further explanation. Regarding its policy on "deadly" use of force, the manual did not classify actions such as using an object to strike someone on the head, or putting them in a chokehold, as potentially fatal. The DOJ said the manual's piecemeal approach was "dangerous" and noted that the Yonkers police manual lacked information about how officers might use de-escalation techniques in lieu of force.
"There is no policy, nor even a suggestion, of using less force," the Justice Department concluded.
It outlined key areas of reform for the police department, including a recommended revamp of its use of force policies, and changes in how incidents involving force are reported.
The Justice Department inquiry was prompted by Karen Edmonson, who lives in Yonkers and worked for the Yonkers NAACP at the time. Around 2006, residents were reaching out to her with their stories about police misconduct. She says the first complaint she received was from a man who said he was assaulted by officers, then assaulted again in the waiting area of a Yonkers hospital where they took him for treatment. "I'll never forget that case," Edmonson says. "I was so furious about that."
Edmonson started spreading the word that she was collecting more stories. She opened up "town halls," at places like the public library, where people could come and describe what they experienced with police. "I called it therapy. People were coming and venting; they wanted to be heard. And I was listening," she says.
Eventually, Edmonson collected about 60 complaints of officer misconduct and forwarded those to the DOJ. "My job was to show the pattern," she said. "That was the only way to get the DOJ to come in."
Edmonson said she had hoped the DOJ's intervention would help reform the department and set things right: "My goal was for institutional best practices, to make it stop, and to make it a better police department."
Some reforms did take place. But our investigation found that despite the complaints Edmonson collected and the more than 100 payouts by the city of Yonkers while the Justice Department was providing oversight, incidents of alleged police abuse continued.
From broken bones to missing teeth
In state and federal court documents, plaintiffs claimed they were punched, kicked, tackled, or choked — sometimes as officers used racial slurs. Many alleged they were beaten with officers' batons or guns. Some claimed that officers kneeled on their backs and necks while they were face down on the ground.
One plaintiff alleged that officers put him in the back of a police car after arresting him, sprayed mace directly in his face and shut the doors, leaving him without ventilation. He claimed that police then took him to the parking lot of a local hospital and assaulted him again before bringing him inside for treatment. In a different case, a man alleged that as he was being choked and kicked by police, another officer arrived on the scene, called it a "party," and asked the other officers, "How could y'all start without me?"
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In almost half of the 102 cases we reviewed, people said they were hospitalized. Plaintiffs alleged in court documents that they had suffered a range of injuries: broken and fractured bones, head traumas, internal bleeding, loss of consciousness, eyes swollen shut, broken and missing teeth, and wounds that needed to be closed up with stitches or staples. Some claimed they faced repeated surgeries and chronic pain.
Most of the payouts in these cases were relatively small — sometimes as little as $1,500. The largest was a $1.15 million settlement to a woman severely injured by an officer who had responded to a call at a local bar. According to allegations in court records, she suffered a broken jaw, severe bruising to her face and other injuries.
Ray Fitzpatrick, an attorney who represents the city of Yonkers, said that since this large payout in 2017, the city has not seen any incidents involving use of force that are "very, very troubling." But our investigation found that the city paid $268,500 to settle 12 lawsuits alleging excessive use of force that occurred since that payout in 2017. In one, a man alleges that as he was retrieving his driver's license from his car, he was tasered and beaten. He claims he had to be treated for fractures to his face at a Yonkers hospital. While not admitting wrongdoing, the city of Yonkers settled his case for $50,000.
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Rewarding repeat offenders
After we had amassed a list of payouts over alleged misconduct, NPR discovered that the names of certain officers appeared over and over again. Ten officers were named in four or more settled cases for incidents that allegedly happened since 2007, and six officers were named in six or more cases.
There may be even more such cases since the court documents we reviewed left many officers unnamed. We counted more than 300 officers who were identified by name. Many others appeared simply as "John Doe."
We found that one officer, Alex Della Donna, was involved in at least nine settlements over alleged misconduct that happened after the DOJ started its investigation. The city has paid out $402,500 for cases that he was involved in. One case is still being litigated, although Della Donna retired at age 45 in late 2021.
NPR made numerous attempts to contact Della Donna, by phone and by email and through the police union, but was unable to reach him.
A plaintiff in one of those cases, who was 15 at the time, stated in her court complaint that police stopped her for driving a stolen vehicle. She alleges that police pointed a weapon at her, opened the driver's side door and pulled her out. She claims she hit the ground face first. She alleges that Della Donna and four other male officers severely beat her, that she suffered a broken nose and several missing teeth, and needed to be hospitalized. In her complaint, she says she heard officers laughing at her missing teeth; then she lost consciousness. She received a $33,000 settlement.
Another woman alleged in a court complaint that Della Donna coerced her to have sex with him at least seven times in an unmarked vehicle while he was on duty, promising her that in exchange he would get her drug charges dropped. In the court complaint, she claimed she was worried the charges could lead her to being deported and losing her children. She claims that she became suicidal. She received a $20,000 settlement.
Della Donna faced a disciplinary hearing 11 months after the suit alleging sexual assault was filed. His supervisors wrote that "his sexual relationship with a criminal defendant exhibited a ... lack of professionalism that reflected unfavorably upon the department." They revoked 30 days of paid leave and ordered him to retake an ethics training course.
In general, officers who were involved in frequent payouts were rarely disciplined, and when they were, their penalties were light.
That wasn't Della Donna's first disciplinary hearing. In another incident, according to department disciplinary records, Della Donna allegedly pinned down a man being held in the city jail. The records say he used his knee on the man's neck, even though the man wasn't resisting. Della Donna's supervisors revoked four days of paid leave.
Despite that disciplinary hearing and several subsequent lawsuits alleging misconduct, Della Donna received 14 departmental awards. In total he received 59 awards throughout the course of his nearly 15 years with the Yonkers Police Department.
This was part of another pattern we discovered: Even as the city of Yonkers was paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars involving complaints against these 10 officers, the Yonkers Police Department was rewarding many of them.
One officer, for example, was promoted to sergeant just three years after the city made the last of four payments in cases in which he was one of the defendants. Three of the four cases resulted in a settlement; the other was a jury verdict. The city paid out more than $417,000 in those cases. From the time of the first lawsuit to the last, the officer received 38 departmental awards.
Another officer, now retired, has been named in six cases — all alleging excessive force. The city has so far paid out more than $130,000 to settle those cases. In response to a request, the city could not provide any disciplinary records for this officer. During the years the city was negotiating the settlements, the officer received eight departmental awards.
Overall, of the 10 officers named at least four times in lawsuits where the city made a payout, seven of them received some kind of department commendation.
The Yonkers Police Department says the awards and any payouts for alleged misconduct are separate matters. "Officers receive departmental awards for specific incidents that they are involved in, exclusive from any previous events," says DiDomizio, the public information officer for the Yonkers Police Department.
He added: "Only the details surrounding a particular event are taken into consideration when reviewing departmental recognitions. Although an Officer may have had an incident(s) in the past that resulted in litigation, it does not preclude them from being recognized for an exemplary job during another incident that is deserving of an award."
"A couple of dollars to shut up?"
Victims who got paid said they still feel that justice wasn't done. What they wanted was for the cops to be held accountable.
The Yonkers Police Department — because of the oversight from the Department of Justice and reforms pushed by former Police Commissioner John Mueller — has made changes.
In 2017, it updated its use of force policy to include de-escalation practices and techniques. It now requires officers to issue verbal warnings, when "practical." And it requires officers to de-escalate a situation if a subject being arrested stops resisting.
Officers must also now wear name tags.
The number of times officers reported using force went down while Mueller was in charge, and the crime rate in Yonkers went down too. Mueller left the force in April of this year.
However, complaints leading to payouts, though up and down over the years, persist.
The department and the city of Yonkers say the settlements are meant to compensate people for harm done. Andrew Quinn, a lawyer for the union representing Yonkers police officers, said that settlement amounts are determined by estimating how much income a person and their dependents will have lost while recovering from injuries.
For some people, the settlements are meaningful, according to Rose Weber, a civil rights lawyer who has represented many plaintiffs in Yonkers. "From the perspective of many of my clients, who are very low-income, what seems like a low settlement to you or me, could be life-changing for them." She recalled one plaintiff who was able to get off the streets and pay rent in an apartment for a year or so after receiving his settlement.
Edmonson, the former NAACP activist who held the public "town halls" that helped get the Justice Department involved in Yonkers, sees it differently.
"People who came and told their stories wanted to see certain officers go to jail. Others wanted to feel heard and feel a sense of some justice," she says. " It's not about getting money. Money won't fix the emotional trauma."
Cardile, the woman who claims she was pushed to the ground and pulled up by the neck at her boyfriend's house, says the $50,000 settlement she received was not entirely satisfying.
"I didn't care about the money," she said. "They were giving me a couple of dollars to shut up? I wanted those officers to lose their jobs, or their pensions."
Without accountability, Cardile said of officers who engage in misconduct, "they're free to do this to somebody else."
METHODOLOGY: HOW WE COMPILED THE DATA
Records of payouts to plaintiffs involving police misconduct are not easily tracked. We asked the city of Yonkers through a public records request for cases it settled. It had to create a list and it identified 140 cases. We independently found 10 other cases. We then narrowed the overall list in the following ways:
— We eliminated cases in which the incident happened before 2007, the year the Justice Department began investigating the Yonkers police.
— We did not count cases where we learned from the city's legal department that payouts took place before a court case was filed.
— We did not count cases where we could not locate court documents in federal or state court databases.
We tried to corroborate as much information as possible — including the specific allegations against officers — in court records.
That winnowed our list from the 140 cases the city said it settled to the 102 cases we analyzed here.
Of the 102 cases, 95 were settlements in which the city paid out money to the plaintiff but admitted no wrongdoing. Seven payouts were jury verdicts in which the city and/or the officer was found liable after the plaintiff had the opportunity to make their case in court.
Among those cases, we counted the allegations asserted in the court complaints; most cases included multiple allegations. The categories of allegations that we cite are derived from those court records, either from the type of violation claimed under the law, or in some instances, from the background facts alleged to support the claim. In some cases, we combined categories that were similar. For example, we combined the separate allegations of assault, battery, and excessive force into one category: assault and/or excessive force. There are more allegations listed in court records that we did not include.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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| 2022-07-31T12:37:58
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Growing up, thriller author Megan Miranda spent time at her grandparent's house in the Poconos. There wasn't any cell service — it was just her and her family out there in the woods, cut off from society. "During the day, it would be this grand adventure," recalls Miranda. "But at night I would just stare out into the darkness thinking, 'what is out there?' "
So began Miranda's long obsession with the duality of nature — at once, a beautiful serene place, and also, with just a slight change of perspective, a terrifying one.
"You step inside the woods and it feels like legends can almost be real," she says on a recent hike near her home in North Carolina. "It's a place where things are hidden, but also you can hide. It's just a great place for thrillers."
Nature — woods, lakes, and the ocean — has become a consistent, often menacing character in Miranda's more than a dozen thrillers. Her latest novel, The Last To Vanish, takes readers to a small hiking town in North Carolina, pushed up against the Appalachian Trail. There, 7 people have disappeared in the woods over the last 25 years. Were they all accidents — hikers doomed by nature — or was it something more sinister?
As we hike through the wetlands trail near Miranda's home, the green trees glisten from recent rain, the air thick with moisture. The woods are lush and full in mid-July and you can't really see past 20 feet. It was on a hike just like this that the idea for Last to Vanish came to her.
"It had just rained," explains Miranda as we walk, "and inside the woods, it still sounded like it was raining. I took out my phone right then and started taking notes. It reminded me of this idea of echoes of the past, of a town where everything you are seeing already happened. I went home and started writing immediately."
That seed of an idea turned into a much more complex web. The main character, a young woman named Abby, is an outsider who moved to the small fictional town of Cutters Pass a decade ago. She works at the inn at the base of the mountain, the last place so many hikers were seen alive.
From The Last To Vanish:
He arrived at night in the middle of a downpour. The type of conditions more suitable for a disappearance. I was alone in the lobby, removing the hand-carved walking sticks from the barrel behind the registration desk, replacing them with our stash of sleek navy umbrellas when someone pushed through one of the double doors at the entrance. The sound of rain cascading over the gutters, the rustle of hiking pants, the screech of boots on polished floors. A man stood just inside as the door fell shut behind him, with nothing but a black raincoat and some sob story about his camping plans. Nothing to be afraid of. The weather. A hiker.
The room where Miranda writes her thrillers is on the second floor of her home in Davidson, North Carolina. There are elements of her new book around the room: hiking sticks she and her husband got on a trip to the Great Smoky Mountains lean against a bookshelf and there are pictures of her and her family hiking, hung up around her desk.
Her method of writing includes keeping spreadsheets that detail the story. "I don't have a murder wall," Miranda explains with a laugh, "it's all on a piece of paper." Columns include dates, plot points, major turning points (ex: a body is found), and clues (ex: there's glass in her toes, blood in the hall but nowhere else.)
She pulls out the spreadsheet for The Last To Vanish. "I'll try not to give any spoilers," she says as she trails her finger down the page. It lands on a clue halfway down: a window is left open in a cabin. "I remember writing that and thinking like, is that something I will use or is that something I won't use?" she says. It's not giving away too much to divulge that the open window ends up being important.
A thriller writer who is scared of many things
On our hike, we pass a pond filled with frogs. We stop to listen, enchanted by the sounds of the woods. The recent rain has made the trail muddy, and as we navigate a few patches, I notice Miranda is deep in thought; her writing brain spinning. Spending time in the woods can do that to you.
"Right now, I was like, 'What would this be like to run on when it's a little muddier?' How can I use that? It changes so much, whether it's been rainy, or what season of the year it is." She looks off to the side of the trail, into the dense landscape of trees and bushes. "You know, we're focused on the trail right now, but there's this whole other part to it where you'd get quite tangled if you ran away," I ask her if she's always thinking about running away. "I'm not," she says laughing, "I just have that on my mind."
Growing up, Miranda's mom was an avid mystery book reader who brought her daughter to the library once a week. Miranda remembers leaving the library holding a stack of books. Nancy Drew was an early favorite — but she's always loved books that had an element of wilderness to them: Hatchet, Where The Red Fern Grows, and Bridge to Terabithia.
The question of the unknown — the what-ifs — was always alluring to Miranda, who started solving mysteries, first in the field of science — working in biotech after college and becoming a high school science teacher — before she tried her hand at writing thrillers.
As we make our way down the trail, I ask Miranda what scares her. "I have an overactive imagination, so I am afraid of many things," she says. She's especially afraid of being alone in the woods at night. Feeling vulnerable and on edge, not knowing what else is out there. "The idea that you hear footsteps behind you and you can't see it and they stop when you stop," she says, "that to me is this terrifying idea." That feeling when the hair on the back of your neck stands up, you feel the tension in your shoulders, and you have a sharp focus on just getting to safety — that's the feeling Miranda is trying to capture in her books.
And yet, it's intriguing that someone who spends her life writing books with tension and murder is seemingly afraid of most things. How does someone who scares so easily, not just read — but write — thrillers?
"I think it's almost a safe way to explore it," she says, "It is like you're taking a journey and you know you're making it through to the other side. I think there is a comforting element and that relief at the end of it." Because in fiction, unlike in life, the murders and the mysteries have a resolution, or an answer or an explanation, which is really the safest way to feel scared.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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At the Police Training Academy in Madison, Wis., there are 46 recruits in two groups for the class of 2022. Nikki Acker, 36, is one of nine female trainees in the group who are new to policing.
Part of their training today is how to handcuff a person. Their shoes squeak on the blue floor mats as they practice.
Acker used to be a teller at a credit union and worked in property management. She's 5'4" and never imagined being a police officer until she got a job working as a clerk in the records department.
"I guess I had in my mind the stereotype of these big guys with military backgrounds," she laughs, "and once I started learning more and getting involved in reading reports and seeing the calls, I learned that they're so much more than that."
They're often people with good communication skills, she says, problem-solving skills — and she felt that type of job was something she could do.
Despite all the controversy surrounding policing, her husband and friends encouraged her to try it.
"And if I don't, who does?" she says.
Women in policing
Women make up just 12% of the law enforcement officers in the country and 3% of police leadership. One of the efforts to increase those numbers is called the 30x30 initiative.
The program aims to have women make up 30 percent of the recruits in police training classes by 2030.
Maureen McGough, chief of staff at the Policing Project at New York University School of Law, is one of the founders of the initiative.
"It's not just about getting women in the door," she says, "but on transforming police agencies by taking a deep look at policies, procedures and culture."
Nearly 200 agencies across the country have signed onto the project. Interest surged after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the protests that followed. The Madison Police Department was one of the first to pledge its support.
The agency already has one of the highest percentages of female police officers on the job — 28% of Madison's 509 sworn police officers. That's a distinction the department emphasizes in a recruitment video.
Several decades ago, a former police chief focused on creating a more diverse police force — convinced that it would be beneficial. Other leaders stayed true to the commitment.
"There's been a lot of scrutiny of the profession, understandably and justifiably so," says Madison Asst. Police Chief Paige Valenta, the highest-ranking woman on the force.
While many agree that police departments should reflect the communities they serve, critics argue that efforts to hire women and people of color can't eliminate longstanding bias and racism in policing.
Valenta says the challenging atmosphere has made recruiting difficult throughout the country.
"It's not traditionally been a profession that's been very welcoming to women," says Valenta. "S0, I do think there's a long way to go nationally, but I do think that we have been doing a lot of good things and are way ahead of the curve in Madison."
Bringing change started small
Some changes designed to improve the experience of women in the ranks are simple, low-cost steps, says Valenta — like using inclusive language and saying "patrol officer" instead of "patrolman."
Women can wear a load-bearing vest instead of a belt full of equipment around the waist. Sgt. Theresa Magyera, who oversees recruitment and training at the Academy, says despite changes there are still barriers.
"The really difficult part of the job revolves around kids and families," Magyera says. "I was in patrol when I got pregnant, and I stayed working until I was 14 weeks pregnant."
Pregnant officers can be assigned light duty and work inside. Madison police stations also have breast-feeding rooms for officers with infants.
Magyera did not return to a patrol assignment. Instead, she landed the 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift as the Academy's training director. New recruits are often assigned to afternoons or night shifts and that makes finding daycare for children challenging. Female officers with children who work a daytime shift often don't try for promotions so they can keep their family-friendly hours. Something a male officer rarely has to contemplate.
What can also be daunting are the physical aspects of the entrance exam. For example, applicants must be able to do 15 pushups to get in the door, then 18 at the beginning of training and 23 at the end. Magyera says the training team offers help to women and men who don't pass the fitness test on the first try.
"We allow them a second-chance opportunity," Magyera says. "We give them specific exercises to help them increase their pushup count or their sit-up count and they come back and they pass it and that's a huge win for us."
On her way to answer a dispatch call, patrol officer Nicole Schmitgen chuckles as she remembers her struggle. "I was still in grad school when I applied the first time. I couldn't get my pushups."
She succeeded the second time, after other recruits and her sister helped her train.
"I'm hopeful that people, especially women, can realize that this isn't just about the physical aspect of things," she cautions. "Does it help to be fit? Absolutely. But I would say that's only 10 to 20 % of my job."
Benefits and criticism of female cops
Nearly 270,000 people live in Madison. The crime rate is lower than the rest of the country and other cities its size like Fort Wayne, Ind., and Reno Nev. In 2020, there were reports of 738 violent crimes, according to FBI data.
Officer Schmitgen patrols solo — answering 9-1-1 calls and keeping an eye out for trouble in Madison's central district around the state capital and part of the University of Wisconsin campus.
Her patrol car is a rolling office. The dispatch radio is stationed low under the dash. There's a computer and also a rifle. This is Schmitgen's second year on the job. She has a master's degree in social work and says what drew her to law enforcement was Madison's record of community policing and its high percentage of female officers.
She adds while people think policing is about guns, drugs and driving fast — it's more about communication and helping people.
Almost on cue, there's a call on the radio — a dispatcher says officers need to check for a woman at her apartment. She's known to have dementia, and a worried friend says she left a hospital.
Schmitgen types on the computer — looking for more information — and an alert with a picture of the woman pops up. At the apartment, there's no answer but later, police find the woman — safe and sound.
Schmitgen is on to the next call. The summer is a busy time, she says, and the reaction she gets as a female police officer varies.
"I've had calls where the victim is a survivor of sexual assaults and they prefer speaking to a woman and that's my purpose. That's why I'm here," she says. "And then there's where I am being catcalled, I'm being called a bitch, I'm being called everything under the sun. It comes in waves."
University of Wisconsin Law Professor Keith Findley is a member of Madison's Police Civilian Oversight Board. He says a plethora of research shows that women on the force have a positive impact on police departments and communities. He says they are often better at communicating and de-escalating tense situations.
"They are sued less frequently than male counterparts, they make fewer discretionary arrests, especially of non-white residents," Findley says. "They use force less frequently, and excessive force less frequently, than their male counterparts."
Findley says research also shows female police officers are trusted more in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods, both of which are policed more heavily.
Some communities say gender doesn't always bring change
But not everyone agrees. Brandi Grayson scoffs at the idea of gender changing the culture of policing. She's the CEO of the non-profit Urban Triage, a support organization for Black residents and Black communities.
She's also been at the forefront of protests over the deaths of Black men killed by police — including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 and George Floyd in Minneapolis two years ago.
There also have been protests in Madison over fatal police shootings, including the 2015 death of Tony Robinson, a biracial man. Authorities ruled the white officer involved had used lawful deadly force.
Less than 7% of Madison's population is African-American, but Blacks made up 47 percent of those arrested during the first quarter of this year. Police records show that in the nearly 30,000 calls to police during that time, force was used in .21% or 64 of the encounters. Assistant Chief Valenta says it can be complicated to determine whether there's less force used by males or females since it's often a combination of female and male officers responding to a call.
But Grayson maintains it makes little difference if a female police officer is in a patrol car. She says institutions train people to behave in certain ways and even though Madison's police department is already 28% female, it hasn't made a dent in the deep racial disparity when it comes to arresting and incarcerating African-Americans and specifically black youth.
"Maybe, they don't yell as much, but they still arrest us. Maybe they don't shoot us, but we still get arrested, we still get ticketed," she says. "And often times, when you are part of a vulnerable population — and I say vulnerable, I mean oppressed, women are oppressed as well, right? You have to conform or you're out."
It's that allegiance "to the blue," says Grayson, that makes it impossible for the addition of more women or people of color to change policing. She considers the 30x30 initiative more public relations than a reform.
"Until we are honest about what's needed — which means defunding police and investing in people, investing in resources and opportunities and the things we know decrease community violence and decrease arrests — then what are we talking about?" she asks.
Grayson adds there may be a few instances of female police officers acting compassionately, but she says that's just not enough because there are so many other instances of Black youth and Black people being harmed by police.
Ivonne Roman, a co-founder of the 30x30 initiative, argues that the project will make change. She's a former chief of the Newark, N.J., police department, and says while it is difficult to shift the culture of policing, 30% of marginalized people in any group is a tipping point.
"(That's) where they are able to say, 'This isn't right and this is affecting us negatively,' and they don't feel there will be negative consequences associated with it."
Roman says as the 30x30 initiative grows, the influence of a critical mass of women in law enforcement will be key in redefining what policing means.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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This past week, in the midst of many competing events, the nation's news-aware and money-savvy cohorts gave their undivided attention to a professorial-looking fellow calmly reading from a piece of paper.
The bespectacled reader was Jerome Powell, who bears a weighty title as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank. While he is unknown to most Americans, his economic power is sometimes said to rival that of the president himself.
And while few voters may be thinking of Powell as they go to the polls in November, all will be coping with economic conditions strongly influenced by Powell's little-known institution.
The Fed is the latest Washington power center trying to smile for its closeup — caught in the bright glare of contemporary media attention. Like the Supreme Court, which has been barricaded behind new fencing since it overturned the federal protection for abortion rights, the Fed governors have preferred to exercise their extraordinary authority quietly in near anonymity.
The same could be said for top decisionmakers at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and others responsible for fighting the COVID and monkeypox viruses. Scientists such as Dr. Anthony Fauci have become household names and symbols, praised as saviors and condemned as tyrants.
The curtain has even been drawn back on the Constitution-based oddity known as the Electoral College, an assembly of 535 actual persons who meet at a specified interval every four years and elect the president. Normally a routine exercise noticed by few, the Electoral College has become another focal point in the current congressional investigation of former President Trump's efforts to stay in office after losing the 2020 election.
That particular investigation has even pierced some of the murkiness of the Secret Service, which cannot account for the loss of critical text messages during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
All these institutions are usually run by individuals who operate with little public notice and speak in the code of their own professional expertise. Each agency has its unwritten protocols — which have minimal oversight and scant public knowledge.
And they have an extraordinary level of authority. While their top officials have been appointed by a president at some point, they all operate with remarkable independence thereafter.
The special case of the Fed
Secretive as many parts of the government may be, there are moments when any may be subject to exposure. This past week, it was showtime for the Fed.
Powell was on TV to read out a number set by an internal committee of the Board, a committee he also chairs. It is called the Federal Open Market Committee, and it votes on the "federal funds rate" which governs the cost of loans between financial institutions.
The FOMC consists of the seven presidentially appointed governors of the Federal Reserve and five from among the 12 presidents of the regional Federal Reserve Banks (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond, Cleveland, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Dallas, Kansas City, and San Francisco).
The image has long been that of a crusty collection of aging white males who tend to be conservative financiers. The current board, however, has come to look a good deal more like the country.
The seven presidentially appointed members include the recently confirmed Vice Chair Lael Brainard and two other women. Two of the seven are African Americans, both appointed by President Biden. In partisan terms, three are Republicans, including Powell, and four are Democrats. Three were appointed (or re-appointed) by Trump, four by Biden.
This week, the change in the federal funds rate — the number the nation was waiting to hear — came in at 75, as in 75 basis points (or three-quarters of one-percent). It was instantly fed into countless computer programs and repeated endlessly in the media all over the world.
It moved the financial markets globally in real time, and the remarks Powell read from his notes on old-fashioned paper this week actually cheered some investors and helped the stock market indices to their best 3-day rally in months and the S&P 500 to its best month since 2020.
The federal funds rate can also determine the fate of individual businesses and the direction of entire industries. Not to mention the trajectories of presidents and their political parties.
Powell made clear the FOMC's intent was to restrain the effects of inflation, which last month came in at an annualized rate of more than 9%. As has been widely noted, that was the highest in four decades. This week another number, the "personal consumption expenditures" price index (PCE), came in "hotter" than expected, pointing to the likelihood our current inflation is already in double-digit territory.
The other number, which got far more attention, was this week's Gross Domestic Product reading for June. It showed the economy grew in nominal dollars in the first six months of the year but actually shrank by a little less than a percentage point when the numbers are adjusted for inflation.
That made for the second three-month period in a row with such a reading (the shrinkage for the first quarter of the year had been 1.6 percent). That met one common definition for a recession (although not the one preferred by most economists).
The moment vs. the momentum
After his announcement this week, Powell also read comments suggesting more rate hikes would be likely but not automatic. He noted that the latest increase, the fourth this year, brought the benchmark as high as 2.5% – a hefty move considering that the Fed's rate had been, in effect, zero — an extreme reached twice in recent history. The first was in 2009 in the so-called "Great Recession," the second in the recession of 2020-2021 the followed the onset of COVID.
Powell stuck around onstage answering reporters' questions about recession. The chairman made it clear he did not see a recession at the moment, due to strong production and sales numbers and the continuing strength of hiring in the job market. The unemployment rate is a strikingly low 3.6% as of June.
Powell may well be right about the moment, but he knows that's not the same as the momentum. His own policies contemplate pushing the economy toward, if not into, a recession. That is how those policies seek to break the inflationary cycle.
Politically, the obvious takeaway from such a moment would be that people struggling with higher prices might soon be working fewer hours or losing their jobs entirely. And the consequences of that have been pretty clear in midterm elections for generations.
Still, in the complex economic and political environment of our post-COVID world, it is possible that past experiences are less than perfect predictors.
The performance of equity markets such as the S&P 500 late in the week was taken as evidence the economic picture might be brighter than imagined.
The hope is that the fastest rate hikes since Fed Chairman Paul Volcker's reign of terror began in 1979 can have the desired effect without anything approaching the same degree of collateral damage.
There may be no such thing as a perfect "soft landing," but Powell at this point can at least hope for what he calls "softish."
A storied past
The Fed is now 109 years old, a creation of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 during what we now call the Progressive Era. President Woodrow Wilson and his first session of Congress had the rather idealistic notion of removing certain key economic decisions from the pressures of politics and the markets.
Its initial purpose was to manage the money supply, maintain value and prevent the kind of panics that had periodically plagued the economy in the 1800s. Since World War II, however, it has become increasingly imperative for the Fed to also mind levels of unemployment in making its calculations. This "dual mandate" has complicated Fed operations ever since, and Powell alluded to it this week.
Powell is the 16th person to chair the Fed and the latest to struggle with those decisions and pressures. While some have been more successful than others, all have been caught in the crossfire of criticism while in the job and especially after leaving it. Some who were hailed as heroes in their tenure have subsequently borne blame for bad things that happened later.
Alan Greenspan was dubbed an economic "Maestro" by some journalists (and one biographer) for his 18 years as charman (1987-2006), a period when even sharp increases in the federal funds rate often had relatively manageable consequences. But after he retired, Greenspan was faulted by some for the rapid rise in home valuations and alternative debt instruments that led to the crash of 2008 and the "Great Recession" that followed.
Reagan stuck with the medicine and its medicine man
Volcker, who chaired the Fed from the fateful summer of 1979 until Greenspan took over has been lionized as the man who beat double-digit inflation. Appointed by President Jimmy Carter at a point when inflation had reached nearly 14%, Volcker immediately set about persuading the Board of his day that drastic measures were mandatory
"At the time, the resulting inflationary psychology was so deeply embedded that almost everyone despaired at purging it," wrote financial journalist Robert Samuelson in his book The Great Inflation and its Aftermath in 2008. "Only the unexpectedly savage recession of 1981-82, when unemployment peaked at nearly 11 percent, succeeded in doing so."
That "savage" recession had already begun by the summer of 1981, when Volcker and his board continued raising the federal funds rate past 20%. Volcker was not cooling the economy so much as strangling it.
Even before that recession struck with full force, the "stagflation" of the 1970s had proved too much for Carter. While other issues mattered in Carter's loss to Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, economics had set the stage.
Reagan stuck by the medicine and the medicine man. Volcker and his board raised the federal funds rate as high as 20% in 1981. Srre enough, Republicans suffered losses around the country in the midterms of 1982, especially in governorships. But Reagan's working majority of Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress survived largely intact. He reappointed Volcker the following year, as the medicine continued to prove effective against the underlying disease.
Widely vilified as the man who brought on double-digit joblessness in the early 1980s, Volcker had the satisfaction of seeing both the unemployment number and the inflation rate beaten back down into low-single digits during his second term as chairman. He retired but returned to advise the policymakers dealing with the Wall Street crisis in 2008.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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| 2022-07-31T12:38:16
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More than two years after Georgia Linders first got sick with COVID, her heart still races at random times.
She's often exhausted. She can't digest certain foods.
Most days, she runs a fever, and when her temperature gets up past a certain point, her brain feels like goo, she says.
These are commonly reported symptoms of long COVID.
Linders really noticed problems with her brain when she returned to work in the spring and summer of 2020. Her job required her to be on phone calls all day, coordinating with health clinics that service the military. It was a lot of multitasking, something she excelled at before COVID.
After COVID, the brain fog and fatigue slowed her down immensely. In the fall of 2020, she was put on probation. After 30 days, she thought her performance had improved. She'd certainly felt busy.
"But my supervisor brought up my productivity, which was like a quarter of what my coworkers were doing," she says.
It was demoralizing. Her symptoms worsened. She was given another 90-day probation, but she decided to take medical leave. On June 2, 2021, Linders was terminated.
She filed a discrimination complaint with the government, but it was dismissed. She could have sued but wasn't making enough money to hire a lawyer.
Survey data suggests millions of people aren't working because of long COVID
As the number of people with post-COVID symptoms soars, researchers and the government are trying to get a handle on how big an impact long COVID is having on the U.S. workforce. It's a pressing question, given the fragile state of the economy. For more than a year, employers have faced staffing problems, with jobs going unfilled month after month.
Now, millions of people may be sidelined from their jobs due to long COVID. Katie Bach, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, drew on survey data from the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the Lancet to come up with what she says is a conservative estimate: 4 million full-time equivalent workers out of work because of long COVID.
"That is just a shocking number," says Bach. "That's 2.4% of the U.S. working population."
Long COVID can be a disability under federal law
The Biden administration has already taken some steps to try to protect workers and keep them on the job, issuing guidance that makes clear that long COVID can be a disability and relevant laws would apply. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, employers must offer accommodations to workers with disabilities unless doing so presents an undue burden.
Linders now she thinks back to what she should have asked for after her return to work. She was already working from home due to the pandemic, but perhaps she could have been given a lighter workload. Maybe her supervisor could have held off on disciplinary action.
"Maybe I wouldn't have gotten as sick as I got, because I wouldn't have been pushing myself to do the things that I knew couldn't do, but I kept trying and trying," she says.
Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, has seen COVID play out in similar ways in other patients.
"If someone has to go back 100% when they start feeling a little bit better, they are going to crash and burn fast," she says.
Figuring out accommodations for long COVID can be complicated
The problem with coming up with accommodations for long COVID is that there are so many unknowns. The duration and severity of symptoms varies wildly from person to person.
Gutierrez finds herself stumped by questions on disability forms that ask how long an individual might be out or how long their illness may last.
"This is a new condition," she says. "We don't know."
Accommodations in the workplace might include flexibility in where someone works, extended leave, or a new role in a different department. The goal is to get workers on a path back, says Roberta Etcheverry, CEO of Diversified Management Group, a disability management consulting firm.
But with long COVID, it's difficult to measure whether an employee is in fact on a path back.
"This isn't a sprain or strain where somebody turns an ankle and we know in x amount of months, they're going to be at this point," she says. "It's not — somebody was helping move a patient, and they hurt their back, and they can't do that kind of work anymore. They need to do something else."
With long COVID, symptoms come and go, and new symptoms may arise.
The Labor Department is urging employers not to rule out accommodations for employees who don't get an official long COVID diagnosis.
"Rather than determining whether an employee has a disability, your focus should be on the employee's limitations and whether there are effective accommodations that would enable the employee to perform essential job functions," the Labor Department says in its long COVID guide for employers.
Accommodations may be harder to come by in some jobs
Still, not all employers have the means to offer the kind of accommodation an employee may need given their symptoms.
Bilal Qizilbash believes he would have been fired long ago had he not been the boss of his own company.
"Majority of my team has no idea that I'm working from bed most of the time," says Qizilbash, a COVID long hauler who suffers chronic pain that he compares to wasp stings.
As the CEO of a small business that manufactures health supplements, Qizilbash says he tries to be compassionate and at the same time, ruthlessly efficient. Having one employee whose productivity is severely compromised could end up negatively impacting the whole company, he says.
In other professions, it may be challenging to find accommodations that work, no matter how generous.
In South Florida, Karyn Bishof was a new recruit with the Palm Beach Gardens Fire Rescue team in 2020 when she contracted COVID, likely at a training, she says. She comes from a family of firefighters, and it was her lifelong dream to follow suit. But long COVID has left her with profound brain fog, fatigue, light-headedness and a slew of other symptoms incompatible with fighting fires.
"I couldn't run into a burning building if I can't regulate my temperature," she says. "If I can't control having hypertension, I can't lift up a patient or I'm going to pass out."
Bishof was terminated from her job for not meeting performance-related probationary standards and has since become an advocate for COVID long haulers.
The Labor Department is crowdsourcing ideas for how to keep workers employed
Taryn Williams, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Disability Employment Policy, wants to hear from workers and employers. Through the middle of August, the Labor Department is holding an online dialogue, asking for input on policies that may help with workplace challenges arising from long COVID.
"We want to be responsive," says Williams. "We're considering how can we support these workers in what is a transformative time in their life."
She says the government has encountered situations in the past when there was a sudden rise in the number of people needing accommodations at work. Significant numbers of service members returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries, for example. Williams says such times have led to shifts in disability policy in the U.S.
From her home in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Linders has contributed a number of comments to the Labor Department's online dialogue. Like Bishof, she also spends a lot of time helping other COVID long haulers navigate what she's been through, including qualifying for Social Security disability insurance.
Her advocacy helps her feel as if she's contributing something to society, even if it's not the life she wanted.
"I don't want to be disabled. I don't want to be taking money from the government," she says. "I'm only 45. I was going to at least work another 20 years."
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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| 2022-07-31T12:38:22
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| 0.981476
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The peak of Mauna Kea, a shield volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, is one of the world's most remote places.
The mountain's flat shape, gentle winds, and low humidity make it perfect for watching the stars.
"You add it all up and Mauna Kea is arguably number one in the world as a site for locating telescopes," said Doug Simons, the director of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy.
The land on the mountain had been primarily administered by the university since the 1960s, but changes are on the way. A state law passed last month will transfer authority to a new stewardship authority composed of scientists, university officials and people in the local community.
The law is an important step towards ensuring the protection of Mauna Kea, a mountain native Hawaiians consider sacred, says Dr. Noe Noe Wong-Wilson, the executive director of the Lālākea Foundation, which aims to preserve the cultural practices and traditions of native Hawaiians.
"We do, to this day, believe that Mauna Kea, and the summit area in particular, is the place where the Earth Mother, or Papa, meets the Sky Father, Wākea," she said. "So all life begins at that point. And in our cosmology, and many of our ancient chants, Mauna Kea, the mountain, is the first born out of that union."
More than 11,000 acres of state-owned land on the mountain were leased to the University of Hawaii in 1968. This granted the university the right to use the land for scientific purposes, and to sublease land on the mountain to those wanting to build observatories on its peak. They've had control over managing the land there ever since.
There are now a total of 13 observatories on the mountain, with plans to decommission two of them to help reduce astronomers' footprint on the mountain.
But there are plans to add another, much bigger telescope already under way. The Thirty-Meter Telescope, or "TMT", named after the diameter of its primary mirror, would be one of the world's largest upon completion.
Scientists are excited about the new project, which was first granted a sublease on Mauna Kea in 2014. Its website says the new observatory would be able to provide images 12 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope and four times sharper than the new James Webb Space Telescope.
But there was strong opposition to its arrival.
Activists, including native Hawaiians and conservationists, protested the TMT multiple times between 2014 and 2019, saying its massive size could potentially spoil the land on Mauna Kea's already crowded summit.
Those protests, among other things, have stalled development on the project.
Wong-Wilson said native Hawaiians had been trying for decades to give their input on how the mountain — or mauna, in Hawaiian — should be managed, but their voices were often left unheard.
"Our plea was to consider the overall impact of all this development," Wong-Wilson said. "The decisions just never went our way."
There had been calls for changes to the management structure on the mountain, with many criticizing the University of Hawaii for its management. These re-emerged last year, with Hawaii House Speaker Scott Saiki making his position clear in a February address to the chamber.
"The University has tried to manage Mauna Kea, but for too long the University's work has been shrouded by its inability to appropriately manage cultural practices, resources and education," Saiki said. "This is why the University of Hawaii must no longer manage Mauna Kea and it should cease its work to extend the master lease."
University officials have acknowledged previous criticisms and apologized for them on multiple occasions, citing their continued commitment to protecting the mountain.
The result of those negotiations was a new bill, which proposed to create a new group tasked with managing the land: the Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority. The 11-member panel would include representatives from the university, the observatories, and — most notably for Wong-Wilson — two seats for native Hawaiians.
"This new act is the first time that native Hawaiians, cultural practitioners, and the community really have an opportunity to sit at the decision-making table and help to govern this very important place," Wong-Wilson said.
The authority will begin to administer the mountain jointly with the University of Hawaii in 2023. Then the new body will fully take over in 2028.
One of the first things on its plate will be the negotiation of new land leases on the mountain for its existing observatories. The original lease granted to the University of Hawaii says that all telescopes must stop operating by the time the lease expires in 2033.
John O'Meara, chief scientist at the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, said that means the next few years will be crucial for astronomy in Hawaii.
Once it has full control over the mountain, the group will be tasked with negotiating new leases for the mountain's new and existing observatories to prevent them from being decommissioned.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding how negotiations will go, O'Meara said he thinks the creation of the new authority was a step in the right direction.
"I'm confident that astronomy can thrive in Mauna Kea and in Hawaii before 2033 and after," O'Meara said, "Because we're coming to a place of mutual stewardship — of everybody recognizing that it's the mauna at the center of this and not any one player."
How the authority will act depends on who gets appointed to serve as its members, a process that will be completed when the legislature reconvenes next year.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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https://www.kunm.org/npr-news/npr-news/2022-07-31/on-a-stunning-hawaiian-mountain-the-fight-over-telescopes-is-nearing-a-peaceful-end
| 2022-07-31T12:38:28
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| 0.968098
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You may have come across a meme showing an ancient fish known as Tiktaalik.
It shows the green, eel-like creature crawling out of the sea about 375 million years ago — about the time that scientists say fish developed the physical characteristics to survive on land — only to be directed to turn around.
The joke, as far as the meme goes, is that the fish should crawl straight back into the water to avoid the woes of our modern times.
Now, a new study published in Nature suggests a relative of Tiktaalik – named Qikiqtania wakei – did just that.
Dunno who made this, but yes. pic.twitter.com/JhxAACkTDu
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) December 7, 2021
"You had this evolutionary series of fish evolving to walk, but this one said, 'Eh, not going to do that one. I'm going back in,'" said Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago who co-authored the study.
Shubin was part of the team who discovered Tiktaalik during a 2004 expedition in the Canadian Arctic. Qikiqtania was found on the same trip, but the fossil went mostly unstudied while the team focused on Tiktaalik.
"This new species is a very close cousin of Tiktaalik. We know that by looking at all the features," Shubin said. "In fact, it's a very close cousin of both Tiktaalik and creatures with arms and legs and fingers and toes, so-called tetrapods."
Early tetrapods were likely spending more and more time out of the water during this period, Shubin said. The arrangement of bones and joints in these animals' fins was starting to resemble arms and legs, which would have allowed animals like Tiktaalik to prop themselves up in shallow water and survive on mudflats.
But Tom Stewart, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State who also worked on the study, said Qikiqtania's physiology suggested it was swimming in open water. Qikiqtania's fins are the result of its swimming ancestors crawling onto land, then returning to the water.
"That's an unexpected pattern," he said. "That's not something that would have been predicted before we had a fossil like this."
The study expands paleontologists' understanding of this period in evolutionary history by showing that animals weren't just evolving from water-based fish to land-based tetrapods.
"The transition from life in water to life on land was going both ways," Shubin said.
Qikiqtania is a vivid counterexample to the long-debunked, yet enduring myth that evolution is a linear progression from one species to the next.
"We get introduced to the idea of evolution through images like an ape that slowly stands upright and then produces a man walking," Stewart said. "Those are some of these classic, iconic teaching tools ... but really, evolution doesn't work in that way."
Shubin said evolution was more accurately described as a set of branching paths, rather than a ladder. "Evolution is much more of a bush," Shubin said, "a tree of creatures evolving in many different directions."
We'll see how the memes evolve from here.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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| 2022-07-31T12:38:34
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| 0.976152
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The U.S. military runs more than 3,000 slot machines on American military bases overseas even though the rate of problem gamblers in the military is thought to be around twice that of the rest of the general population, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling, an organization that advocates for services to assist people and families affected by problem gambling.
The slot machines, operated by the U.S. Department of Defense, earn the DOD more than $100 million each year in the name of "morale, welfare, and recreation" for service members, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office that was written in response to demands from Congress.
Slots are often found on bases where there is precious little to do, like Diego Garcia – a 12-sq.-mile island in the Indian Ocean with a population of just over 4,000 people – where the Navy runs 52 slot machines. And they can be played by service members as young as 18 – individuals who wouldn't be allowed to enter most casinos in the U.S. before they turn 21.
Slots have had a contentious history in the military
In 1951, Congress banned slot machines from domestic military bases after passing legislation to that effect. Two decades later, the Army and Air Force removed them from all foreign bases as well, only to restore the foreign slot machines in the 1980s. The military's last accounting in 2017 showed that the machines are located on bases in 12 countries– mostly run by the Army.
The machines are managed by the MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) groups of the respective military branches, which purport to "deliver high-quality, customer-focused programs and services that contribute to resiliency, retention, readiness and quality of life."
A Pentagon report in the early 2000s claimed that without the slot machines, the MWR groups would not be able to afford other amenities for military members such as golf courses and family activity centers. DOD spokeswoman Cmdr. Nicole Schwegman echoed that argument, telling NPR the machines "contribute significantly to the non-appropriated fund and many other recreation and entertainment overseas programs."
It's difficult to know the exact number of problem gamblers among service members since the military stopped screening for it more than a decade ago and has only resumed screening following the 2017 GAO report. However, a 2008 study of 31,000 Air Force recruits found that 6.2% exhibited some of the necessary behaviors to be deemed problem gamblers. A 2016 study on the experiences of returning veterans found that 4.2% were at-risk or problem gamblers after returning from deployment. Taking this and other studies into consideration, the National Council on Problem Gambling conservatively estimates that 4% of military personnel meet the criteria for moderate to severe gambling problems – twice the national average.
"Everything we know about military personnel — that they tend to be young, male, risk-takers, likely to be suffering from higher rates of substance abuse, stress, depression, PTSD or traumatic brain injuries — is conclusively correlated with problem gambling," Keith Whyte, executive director of the NCPG, told NPR.
While deployed overseas, service members are often isolated, separated from friends and family and receive increased pay. For those seeking recreation on base, slot machines are often just a quick walk away.
Congress has tried to step in
In 2018, lawmakers from both parties said they believed the number of problem gamblers in the military could potentially pose a threat to national security, making service members susceptible to blackmail and creating impediments to security clearances.
But legislation introduced by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Steve Daines, R-Mont., to curb this threat and provide aid to those struggling with gambling addiction never made it into law.
Some individual veterans, including those affected by gambling addiction, say they view the machines as a technique in what some in the military call "harm reduction" – the idea that gambling on base might keep someone from doing so off base, where the odds may be worse and the stakes may be higher.
"I spent hours in front of the slot machines on base and usually left plus or minus $50," Ed Grabowski, Navy veteran, told NPR. "I don't see where that is really going to create an issue. I could drop $50 in a pinball machine."
But there are few – if any – studies that suggest that service members are better off playing slots on base than gambling elsewhere.
"From a gambling standpoint, there is no data to say that slot machines are a form of harm reduction," Dr. Timothy Fong, co-director of UCLA's Gambling Studies program, told NPR.
Fong said he is focused on how these machines are regulated. "My concern is they're managed by the DOD – not by a public health institution or by groups that regulate gaming," he said.
Fong said he has met active duty military members who have developed gambling addictions in part because of easy access to slot machines on base. For Fong, one of the most dangerous aspects of gambling addictions is that they are not publicly obvious like other addictions.
The NCPG's Whyte agrees, noting that without some sort of realistic alert system or limit on gambling "the first signs of addiction are often other offenses like theft, fraud, going AWOL, [and] conduct disorders" – all offenses that could lead to a dishonorable discharge.
Often, by the time gambling addiction is discovered, it might be too late.
Aaron Walsh, an Army Apache pilot, lost $20,000 to the Army's slot machines in South Korea, resigned to avoid a court-marshal and ultimately committed suicide.
"I'm angry. That was a life lost needlessly due to the military's failure to take problem gambling seriously, and there are more of those stories," Whyte said.
The government has tried to take steps to address the issue, including through the Department of Veterans Affairs, which runs a program in Brecksville, Ohio, for veterans and active duty personnel struggling with problem gambling. Separately, the annual personal health assessment for all active duty military members now includes three health screening questions aimed at identifying gambling addictions.
The Defense Department says it has "extensive controls in place to minimize potential abuse by limiting hours of operation, limiting access to machines, limiting the number of machines in locations, limiting amount of money played and limiting the potential winnings."
Controls by themselves may not always be enough when access to slots are just steps away.
Army veteran Dave Yeagar says when he arrived at Yongsan Army Base South Korea right after Sept. 11, 2001, he didn't have a gambling problem. He says that even while living near Atlantic City, N.J., he was not tempted to play in the base's slots room like he was on base in South Korea.
"I found myself in there 7 days a week. ... The draw of those rooms and how easy it is to get to them is a lot of what led to my addiction developing," he told NPR, adding there was little oversight back then.
"There were literally days that I would go in there when the slot room opened on a Saturday morning and leave when it closed. Nobody came up to me and said, 'You've been here too long.' Nobody. Nothing," he said.
Yeager, who now mentors active duty members with gambling addictions, says he hasn't heard that anything has changed.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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https://www.kunm.org/npr-news/npr-news/2022-07-31/u-s-military-run-slot-machines-earn-100-million-a-year-from-service-members-overseas
| 2022-07-31T12:38:41
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| 0.972298
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The latest Storm Tracker Forecast from meteorologist Matt Mackie:
Get out and enjoy! Sunday looks like a comfortably warm day. The same can’t be said about the work week… High pressure is in control over the Northeast, leading to mostly calm and quiet conditions.
With a good amount of sunshine, temperatures will cruise to afternoon highs in the mid 80’s. Humidity stays manageable throughout the course of the day. Headed to Saratoga? We don’t expect any issues at the track on account of the weather.
Things begin to chance tonight. We will turn slightly muggy and see a few more clouds. That prevents us from getting quite as cool overnight. Most will stay in the 60’s (we had 50’s and even a few 40’s this morning!).
Monday afternoon is only slightly warmer, but the mugginess will make it feel a bit less comfortable out there. Expect highs in the upper 80’s for the Tri Cities, and low to mid 80’s most everywhere else.
Tuesday looks even more humid, with a chance for thunderstorms. Heat peaks later in the work week, with a high of 95 on Thursday. Behind shower and storm chances, we’ll cool down a bit going into the weekend – highs in the mid 80’s for Saturday.
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https://www.news10.com/news/7-31-2022-nice-sunday-then-heat-and-humidity-for-the-workweek/
| 2022-07-31T12:39:55
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| 0.947672
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The effect of three murders within 10 days in the coastal Karnataka district of Dakshina Kannada is evident on the empty roads in the region. Among local residents, the sense is that these murders are evidence of the underlying religious animosity that has been brewing in the region, especially in the aftermath of controversies triggered by right-wing Hindutva groups allied with the ruling BJP over the wearing of the hijab by Muslim girls in state-run educational institutions, attempts to force a boycott of halal meat and the banning of Muslim traders from temple fairs.
When the Karnataka High Court pronounced its judgment on the hijab issue in March this year, Muslim traders shut down their shops to mark their protest against the verdict that went against them. Hindutva activists saw the verdict as their victory. Though tensions remained below the surface, activists on both sides of the communal divide pushed for the boycott of the other community in business activities. Continuous propaganda has been carried out to ensure that the divide between the communities is never bridged.
Congress leader Amala Ramachandra Bhat, who has been vocal against the fanning of communal tensions, says communal animosity, which has been brewing in coastal Karnataka for many years, has been exacerbated by the current political regime. “There may not be murders or open fights but anger among communities fuelled by politicians, which has been there for a long time, has been compounded in the last one year,” he said.
A Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) activist, who did not want to reveal his name, said: “There has been a lot of harassment in the recent past and it has divided communities. There is a lot of frustration against organisations such as Bajrang Dal and other fringe groups, especially when they point at the hijab. They were trying to belittle our community women and we are not going to be at the receiving end.”
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Following the murder of Masood B, 19, in the Bellare village of the region on July 20 by a gang, which included local members of the right-wing Bajrang Dal, there was information with the police of possible retaliation against right-wing Hindutva outfits, say members of groups such as Bajrang Dal and Hindu Jagaran Vedike.
Though Masood was not linked to any political party oroutfits like the PFI and SDPI, the murder carried communal undertones since many of the accused in the case were part of a pro-Hindu outfit.
“You cannot treat the Masood murder in a non-communal way. If there was a fight over brushing the shoulders with a Hindu man, do you think it would have gone to this extent? Even in that case, would they call him again and murder him?” said Bhat.
A member of a right-wing Hindutva group, who was accused of a communal murder in the Dakshina Kannada region a few years ago, said he was asked by the police to stay underground following the death of Masood on July 21 which created an uproar among Muslim youths on social media.
“Following Masood’s murder, the local police got information about a possible retaliation and they asked us to leave our homes. We knew someone would be killed in retaliation but did not know that Praveen (Nettaru), the BJP youth leader who was murdered, was on the radar since he did not have a criminal history or a hate speech history like many of the other pro-Hindu activists. I left my place and changed hideouts often over the last 10 days. There was a WhatsApp message doing rounds to avenge the killing of Masood but Praveen was not on the hitlist,” the member of the right-wing Hindutva group said.
“Praveen’s murder caused fear and it also agitated us. By the nature of Praveen’s killing, it was established that the gang on the other side is active. The latest murder of Mohammed Fazil (on July 28) has again caused fear among Hindutva activists since anyone could be a target now,” he said.
(Reporting from Bellare/Savanoor)
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/bangalore/residents-dakshina-kannada-murders-religious-hijab-halal-8062475/
| 2022-07-31T12:40:18
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| 0.983828
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The Covid-19 tally of Andaman and Nicobar Islands rose to 10,435 on Sunday as eight more people tested positive for the infection, a health bulletin said.
Two new patients have travel history, while six infections were detected during contact tracing, it said.
The Union territory now has 40 active cases, while 10,266 people have recovered from the disease so far, including 10 in the last 24 hours.
A total of 129 patients have succumbed to the infection to date.
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The administration has thus far tested over 7.64 lakh samples for Covid-19, and fully vaccinated 3.47 lakh people.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/city-others/eight-new-covid-19-cases-in-andamans-8062502/
| 2022-07-31T12:40:24
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| 0.962392
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Ellora Caves, the UNESCO world heritage site in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad district, will become the first monument in the country to have a hydraulic lift, a senior official of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) said on Sunday.
Situated around 30 km from Aurangabad city, Ellora is the one of the largest rock-cut temple complexes in the world, housing Hindu, Buddhist and Jain sculptures, and witnesses the highest tourist footfall in the region.
“The ASI has been undertaking several projects to make Ellora Caves, which is spread across a stretch of 500 metres, more tourist-friendly. These projects are either in the process of being sanctioned or being executed,” superintendent archaeologist of Aurangabad circle Milan Kumar Chauley told PTI.
Of the 34 caves in the complex, cave number 16, popularly known as Kailash Cave, is a double-storey structure and tourists have to climb a staircase or go up a ramp to enjoy the view from the top, he said.
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While the cave has a staircase and a ramp for smooth movement of wheelchairs, the ASI has proposed the installation of small lifts on both sides of the structure, he said.
“There will be no construction activity for installing these lifts. The mechanism will be small with 9 square feet area, in which a person in a wheelchair can easily go to the first floor,” the official said.
The move will make Ellora the first world heritage site in the country under the ASI to have a lift facility, Chauley said, adding that the higher authorities had given principle approval for the project earlier this month.
Tourists will also be able to see Kailash Cave, a single monolithic structure surrounded by hills, from the top and a route for the same will be constructed on the upper hill, he said.
The ASI plans to install lights for some paintings and carry out conservation work on some parts and the paperwork is underway to figure out the cost of the project, the official said.
The ASI has been undertaking several small improvements to make the cave complex, which sees the footfall of 2,000 to 3,000 visitors including international travellers on a regular day, more accessible and tourist friendly.
“We plan to increase the number of ticket counters at Ellora and set up a centralised counter for visitors who want to hire guides. There will be a single entry and exit point for the complex and we also plan to do some landscaping with selfie points for tourists to make the experience more enjoyable,” Chauley said.
The ASI plans to set up three to four toilet blocks with sanitary pad disposal machines as well, he said, adding that the electric vehicle service in the cave premises will commence next month.
All these projects were in different stages of sanction and implementation, and may take a year to complete, Chauley said.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/city-others/ellora-caves-first-monument-in-india-hydraulic-lift-asi-official-8062479/
| 2022-07-31T12:40:31
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| 0.957325
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A day after three Jharkhand Congress MLAs were caught in Howrah district of West Bengal carrying lakhs of cash as part of a suspected conspiracy to topple the Hemant Soren-led government, Bermo Congress MLA Kumar Jaimangal Singh filed a complaint against all three of his party colleagues. However, no case has been registered in the matter yet.
In his complaint, Jaimangal said that the act was “unconstitutional, illegal, downright criminal which breaks the constitutional structure of the party” and he urged the authorities to book all three MLAs.
The complaint letter read: “I want to complain against the offer of gratification to topple the present JMM-Congress government which came to power with a thumping majority. He said that MLAs Irfan Ansari, Rajesh Kacchap and Naman Bixel Kongeri called him to reach Kolkata and offered him Rs 10 crore.”
“…Irfan Ansari told me that he had been promised the Health Ministry in the new government… (The MLAs told me) that Sarma (Himanta Biswa Sarma) is doing this with the help of top shots of the BJP sitting in Delhi,” the letter further said.
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Meanwhile, the Congress has suspended all three MLAs.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/city-others/jharkhand-congress-bermo-mla-complaint-party-mlas-caught-cash-west-bengal-8062357/
| 2022-07-31T12:40:37
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| 0.978649
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Rohingya refugees in Haryana’s Nuh district have alleged harassment on the part of the police days after a special search operation was carried out at their camps to ensure that “anti-national elements had not taken shelter” there.
Refugees at three camps – Chandeni-2, Saddik Nagar and ward 7 near Jogipur – that The Indian Express visited on Friday said hundreds of policemen arrived for a “verification” drive and searched their houses for at least two to three hours. The police later impounded motorcycles, rehris (carts) and other vehicles from the camps, they said.
Superintendent of police (Nuh) Varun Singla, however, said no one was harassed during the raids. “The raids were conducted as part of a special operation to ensure that no anti-national element had taken shelter in the Rohingya camps. We have a database of all Rohingya refugees and we verified their information. No one was harassed. Over 30 vehicles were seized as they did not have valid documents.”
At the Chandeni-2 camp in Ferozepur Namak, Mohammad Ismail said that on July 26 around 5 am, police personnel arrived and told everyone to assemble outside in a line along with their UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) cards for “verification”.
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“We were all asleep when the police knocked on our doors. Bola checking karna hai… thoda darr lag raha tha ki arrest toh nahi kar rahe (The police said it is for checking… We feared that we were being arrested). They took out a list and checked the names and documents of people living here. The police searched each house. Since I came here from Myanmar in 2012, such a raid has happened only twice, but no vehicles were seized previously. I assumed that this was a random checking, but then we got calls from other camps that their camps were also raided the same day,” said Ismail.
“It reminded us of the harassment that we had faced back home,” said Mohammad Rafique, a construction worker at the Chandeni-2 camp.
A person at the camp in ward 7, requesting anonymity, alleged that he was beaten up with a stick by the police. “For hours, they made us stand in the open and we were not allowed to eat anything. I walked to a shop to get some biscuits for my children when a policeman hit me with a stick,” he said, showing his bandaged leg.
At ward 7, Taiyab – who goes by his first name – said around 5.20 am on Tuesday, policemen arrived and made announcements on a mike asking everyone to assemble in an open ground behind the camp. “People were panicking, so they called me and assured me that a verification drive was being conducted. They said they are looking for anti-social elements who may have taken shelter in or infiltrated the camps,” he said.
The police said raids were conducted at Rohingya camps in Shahpur Nangli, Chandeni-1,2, 3, Ferozepur Namak, Saddik Nagar, Punhana, ward 7 near the bus stand, and on Jogipur Road.
The refugees complained that with the police seizing their vehicles, their livelihoods had been affected. “We don’t have any documents apart from the UNHCR card and, hence, we cannot purchase vehicles. People here have bought second-hand vehicles from locals in Nuh so they can sell vegetables or scrap. The police have impounded vehicles citing that we do not have valid documents and we will have to pay hefty fines to get them from the court. My livelihood has been affected. How will my family survive? I have got a challan of Rs 23,000 for a motorcycle that I bought for Rs 8,000,” said Abdul Matlob at the Sadikk Nagar camp, showing a copy of the challan.
SP Singla said they had received many complaints from across the district regarding vehicles plying illegally, especially in the context of illegal mining. “As part of a district-wide operation, we have seized 361 suspected vehicles and challans have been issued to 268 vehicles under the Motor Vehicles Act, while vehicles, including dumper trucks, earth moving machines and others which were used for illegal mining, have been confiscated. There is no link between the raid at the Rohingya camps and the DSP murder investigation,” he said, in an apparent reference to the murder of a Haryana Police DSP who was allegedly mowed down by a truck during a raid to check illegal mining in Nuh.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/haryana-police-search-rohingya-camps-to-identify-anti-nationals-refugees-allege-harassment-8062151/
| 2022-07-31T12:40:43
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| 0.985739
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The Howrah police Sunday arrested three Jharkhand Congress MLAs – Irfan Ansari, Rajesh Kachchap and Naman Vixel Kongari – who were detained in West Bengal on Saturday after a huge amount of cash was found in their vehicle, officers said. The cash recovered amounts to Rs 49 lakh, the police said, adding that a driver and an associate were also arrested.
SP Howrah (Rural) Swati Bhangalia told The Indian Express that an investigation is underway. “This is a huge sum of unaccounted money. From where they got the cash is part of the investigation. For now, five people have been arrested because they failed to give a reasonable explanation for the cash,” she said. All five were arrested after prolonged questioning that lasted over 24 hours.
The MLAs were travelling from Jamtara in Jharkhand to East Midnapore in West Bengal by road when the police intercepted their car in Howrah. According to police sources, during investigation they found that the MLAs had gone to Guwahati on Friday and returned on Saturday. However, on being asked the purpose of their visit, they were unable to give a proper explanation, officers said.
The police said they had received a tip-off that a group of people with a huge amount of cash was travelling in a car on Saturday. After being caught the MLAs initially claimed that they were planning to buy sarees from Burrabazar, a popular marketplace in Kolkata where sarees are available at cheaper rates, for a tribal festival in Jharkhand, officers said.
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A case has been lodged at Panchla police station under section 420 (cheating and fraud), 120B (criminal conspiracy), 171E (bribery) and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of the Indian Penal Code and section 8/9 of the Prevention of Corruption Act.
The arrest has also triggered a political blame game in West Bengal. BJP state president Sukanta Majumdar said, “The way the TMC is reacting it seems it was the TMC’s money which they were trying to siphon off with the help of Sonia Gandhi and the Congress.”
TMC spokesperson and state general secretary Kunal Ghosh slammed Majumdar’s statement. “Majumdar is suffering from an identity crisis. About this money recovery, one person who can explain better is Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury who appears to be an expert in cash recoveries,” Ghosh said in an apparent reference to Chowdhury’s earlier statements related to the recovery of cash in the SSC scam. “Also, there is a possibility that the money was to be used to destabilise the Jharkhand government as well,” he added.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/kolkata/jharkhand-congress-mlas-arrested-bengal-detained-huge-sums-8062398/
| 2022-07-31T12:40:49
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| 0.986314
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AAP councillor Mohammad Akbar ‘Bholi’, 55, was shot dead inside his gym at about 8.15am in Malerkotla Sunday. Akbar had won his maiden municipal contest on a Congress ticket in February 2021 but had switched allegiance to AAP ahead of the 2022 Vidhan Sabha polls. In January 2020, his elder brother Mohd Anwar – a Congress councillor – had also been shot dead.
On Sunday morning, he was jogging in his gym, which he runs free of cost for youngsters, when an unidentified person shot him dead. “According to the video footage, one person dressed in a black T-shirt without any mask shot at Akbar as he got close to the youngster to talk to him,” said sources.
Video footage shows that the youngster took out his revolver and fired at Akbar the moment the latter got close to him, and fled from the spot. Police sources claimed that the youngster was accompanied by another person and they had come to the gym on a bike.
Waseem Sheikh of Muslim Sikh front Punjab said, “Akbar was president of our front but then last year he joined the Congress to contest the municipal council polls in Malerkotla. He used to run this gym free of cost for youngsters as he wanted them to stay away from drugs and stay fit.”
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Notably, Mohd Akbar’s elder brother Mohd Anwar was the owner of Rani Mahal palace where gangster Abdul Rashid Ghuddu was killed in November 2019, when Ghuddu was out on parole. Anwar himself was shot at when he was pillion riding a two-wheeler. Anwar was a close aide of former Congress minister Razia Sultana. Mohd Akbar joined active politics after his brother’s death.
Apart from the gym, Akbar owned a garments business, a real estate firm and a few other ventures. Malerkotla MLA Mohd Jameel Ur Rehman expressed shock at his murder and stated that the guilty must be punished.
Meanwhile, SSP Avneet Kaur Sidhu said the police were investigating the case.
An FIR has been lodged against unknown persons on charges of murder.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ludhiana/punjab-aap-malerkotla-councillor-shot-dead-gym-8062432/
| 2022-07-31T12:40:55
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| 0.989266
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The Central Railway (CR) has decided to do away with its existing system of growing vegetables on the empty land patches along the railway tracks on its Mumbai suburban network and replace them with flowering shrubs and ornamental plants.
The farming of vegetables along the tracks in one of India’s most crowded urban conglomerate was once a novelty, but it also attracted criticism when it was found that in many places irrigation was provided by drainage water flowing nearby.
The move to replace the vegetable farms with flower beds will beautify the railway route, officials said, adding that the plan is to bring around 150 acres of railway land at around 115 locations in the Mumbai division under floriculture cultivation.
For the last several decades, green vegetables, such as spinach, fenugreek and okra, were being cultivated on empty railway lands along the tracks. To save these open spaces from encroachment, the railways had allowed its employees to carry out farming on lease there under the ‘Grow More Food’ scheme.
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However, objections were raised when it came to light that waste water was often used for irrigation.
The railway officials said the cultivation of flowers alongside the tracks will make the train journey more pleasant for the passengers and also end the problem of growing vegetables using drainage water.
Shivaji Sutar, chief public relations officer of the Central Railway, told PTI that it has decided not to renew the existing licences issued for vegetable cultivation on railway lands anymore.
“Instead, cultivation of flowers, medicinal herbs and ornamental plants will be permitted on the leased railway land and we have identified around 150 acres of land at around 115 locations in Mumbai division of the Central Railway,” he said.
Another railway official said the CR had earlier invited expression of interest (EOI) from interested individuals, firms and agencies, but they did not receive expected response.
As per the EOI, the 150 acres of land is spread across several locations on the CR’s suburban network. At some locations like Kharghar and Kopar Khairane in Navi Mumbai, the land used for this purpose is as big as three to four acres.
He said that they had received responses from some interested parties, but they were willing to set up plant nurseries on railway land instead of cultivating flowers and other ornamental or medicinal plants and hence the authorities turned down their proposal.
Apart from this, the railway is going to develop “green patches” next to the platforms of 125 suburban stations to beautify the area around them under the new policy of the Railway Board.
Recently, the Indian Railway has come up with a policy for beautification of its land into an “environment friendly area” with the help of individuals, NGOs, trusts, charitable institutions, corporate houses, government bodies and self-help groups (SHGs) with the participation of people.
Under the plan, the railways will give its land free of cost to individuals, social organisations, NGOs and corporate houses and they will have to develop green patches and maintain them for a year. In return, they will be allowed to display their name on the plot.
The official said that they have already invited EOI for the beautification of the approach areas of suburban railway stations and it is scheduled to open by August 22 and a meeting is scheduled a few days before it.
According to the CR, the move will not only make the area around the station beautiful and clean, but also deter passengers from throwing garbage on the tracks.
“Beautification of railway land will help keep the area around the tracks clean and beautiful,” Sutar said, adding that barring a few patches, the land is spread around 125 suburban stations in Mumbai.
Every day, around 40 lakh commuters travel on Central Railway’s suburban network.
Vinayak Shewale, station master of the Sandhurst Road station on the main line of Central Railway, has already created a green patch next to the tracks by cleaning the open area and planting various ornamental and flower plants with the help of his colleagues.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/flower-beds-replace-vegetables-along-rail-tracks-mumbai-suburban-8062466/
| 2022-07-31T12:41:01
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| 0.976225
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Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party, floated by late Ram Vilas Paswan’s rebellious relatives, on Sunday expelled its state general secretary Sudhir Kumar Ojha, days after he filed a petition in a Bihar court against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
According to a party statement, state president and MP Prince Raj ordered the expulsion of Ojha, charging him with “anti-party activities”.
Although the statement made no mention of the petition filed by Ojha at Muzaffarpur a couple of days ago, party sources admitted that the development had come as a huge embarrassment to RLJP chief Pashupati Kumar Paras, who is a Union minister.
Ojha is known as a serial litigant who remains in news for the pleas he keeps filing against politicians, movie stars and even foreign heads of state. In the PIL filed on Friday, on behalf of another Muzaffarpur resident Vinayak Kumar, Ojha had prayed for booking Modi, besides Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnav and Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, among others, for “violating the Constitution by introducing privatisation in different sectors”.
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Ojha’s prayer, which alleges that privatisation militates against the Right to Equality guaranteed by the Constitution, has been posted for hearing on August 6 by the court of Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (East), Muzaffarpur.
Paras, who is late Paswan’s younger brother, had split the LJP last year rallying along all MPs barring the deceased leader’s son and heir apparent Chirag. Prince Raj, a nephew of Paras and the late Paswan, was appointed state president after the Election Commission froze the LJP symbol and recognised as separate parties the splinter groups headed by Paras and Chirag, whose faction is called Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas).
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/patna/bihar-union-ministers-party-sacks-court-against-pm-8062480/
| 2022-07-31T12:41:07
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| 0.962462
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CUET UG Admit Card 2022 Date and Time: The National Testing Agency (NTA) will release the admit cards for the Common University Entrance Test undergraduate (CUET UG) 2022 tomorrow, i.e. August 1, for the Phase II candidates. Once released, registered candidates will be able to download their hall tickets from the official CUET UG website — cuet.samarth.ac.in — by logging in through their registered credentials.
This time, only the hall tickets of the phase II students will be released. These candidates had already received an advance city intimation slip from the official CUET website in the second week of July. This slip carries a unique date sheet along with the name of the city allotted to individual candidates. Now, the candidates will be given the exam date, time and exam centre address.
CUET UG Admit Card 2022: How to download
Step 1: Visit the official CUET website — cuet.samarth.ac.in.
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Step 2: On the home page, click on the student login section.
Step 3: Key in your application number and date of birth to login.
Step 4: You will be able to see links for city intimation slip and admit card.
Step 5: Download and save both for future reference.
The Phase I exams were conducted on July 15, 16, 19 and 20, and the second phase exams are scheduled to take place on August 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 and 20.
In the phase I exams, a lot of students alleged that the NTA changed their exam centres in the last few hours which made it difficult for candidates to travel to the new location and led to some students missing their exam. However, the UGC has announced that these students will not be offered a retest. “In some cases, a few students reached the centres after 9.30 pm, after the commencement of the first session in the morning slot. It is a common practice and it has already been conveyed to students that if they come 30 minutes after the commencement of the examination, they are not permitted to enter the centre,” UGC chairperson Prof M Jagadesh Kumar said.
The students who wish to request a change if their exam city can request a change by sending an email to the NTA. Candidates may call NTA at 011-40759000 or send an e-mail at cuet-ug@nta.ac.in.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/education/cuet-ug-admit-card-2022-date-and-time-released-hall-tickets-for-phase-ii-students-released-at-cuet-samarth-ac-in-check-how-to-download-exam-date-other-details-8061806/
| 2022-07-31T12:41:13
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| 0.953718
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The news of Bipasha Basu and Karan Singh Grover expecting their first child has been hitting headlines for a few days now. While the couple is yet to comment on this pregnancy news, they shared some photos from a recent family get-together.
It was Bipasha’s sister Soni Basu’s daughter’s birthday. This is the first time when Bipasha has shared her photos after the reports of her pregnancy made news.
In one of the photos, Bipasha was seen posing with the birthday girl Nia, while in another, the ‘Basu babes’ posed for the click which had the birthday girl, Bipasha, her sisters Soni and Vijayeta Basu, and mom Mamta Basu striking a smile for the camera. Bipasha Basu shared a snap with her nephew too.
Actor and Bipasha’s husband Karan Singh Grover too shared some photos from the family time.
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It was Bipasha’s brother-in-law and Vijayeta Basu’s husband Karan Talreja’s birthday as well. Here are some photos of Bipasha and Karan with the man of the hour.
While fans were trying to spot Bipasha’s baby bump, it is hard to come to any conclusion from the photos. Many fan pages also shared Bipasha’s clicks and said that she is ‘cleverly hiding her baby bump’.
Bipasha and Karan got married in 2016. The couple is yet to confirm the news of their pregnancy.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/bipasha-basu-karan-singh-grover-photos-from-a-family-get-together-fans-try-to-spot-bipashas-baby-bump-8062399/
| 2022-07-31T12:41:19
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| 0.975994
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Television actor Shilpa Shinde has confirmed her participation in the upcoming season of the dance reality show Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa. The show is making a comeback after five years and it will focus on celebrities from different walks of life, showcasing their best dance moves along with choreographer partners.
Hoping that Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa will be a great experience just like Bigg Boss, the actor said in a statement, “I am really excited to again associate with COLORS. My fans eagerly anticipated my return to television after my stint on Bigg Boss, and they are the reason why I am doing this show. I know that they will be excited to see me back on television and what better show to entertain them than Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa.”
Being a non-dancer herself, Shipa said that she is looking forward to performing in front of an audience. “This is a big platform and I hope that I live up to the expectations of my fans and entertain them till the end of the show,” she added.
Filmmaker Karan Johar and Bollywood actors Madhuri Dixit Nene and Nora Fatehi have been roped in and will be seen as judges. The show will soon air on COLORS TV.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/television/shilpa-shinde-to-participate-in-the-dance-reality-show-jhalak-dikhhla-jaa-8062338/
| 2022-07-31T12:41:25
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| 0.96404
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A study by Australia’s Monash University has identified a new way to restore insulin production in the pancreatic cells. The development is being seen as a major breakthrough that could one day lead to eliminating the need for daily insulin injections, and develop no therapies for diabetes treatment. The research, published in the Nature journal Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, was led by diabetes experts Professor Sam El-Osta, Dr Keith Al-Hasani and Indian-origin Dr Ishant Khurana, from the Monash Department of Diabetes.
Breakthrough
Insulin, a hormone produced by beta cells in the pancreas, helps regulate blood sugar levels in the body. In Type 1 diabetes, beta cells produce less or no insulin at all.
As part of their study, researchers at the Monash University used donated pancreatic stem cells of a deceased 13-year-old Type 1 diabetes patient, and were able to “reactivate” them to produce insulin. This was done using a drug — GSK-123 — which is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, but is not licensed for diabetes treatment. In principle, this shows that insulin-producing cells (beta cells), which have been destroyed in Type 1 diabetes, can be replaced with new insulin-generating cells, the university said.
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Way forward
The scientists admit that their approach requires further work before a therapy reaches patients. But they say that the research has the potential to help develop new ways to treat Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, especially for insulin-dependent diabetes.
“More work is required to define the properties of these cells and establish protocols to isolate and expand them…I would think therapy is pretty far away, however, this represents an important step along the way to devising a lasting treatment that might be applicable for all types of diabetes,” Dr Al Hashmi was quoted as saying in a Monash University release.
At present, the only way to treat insulin-dependent diabetes is through daily insulin injections or through pancreas/pancreatic islet transplantation that relies on donors and therefore has a limited widespread use.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-health/treating-diabetes-without-insulin-injections-study-holds-out-hope-8062263/
| 2022-07-31T12:41:31
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| 0.954241
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With Sunday (July 31) being the last day for filing income tax returns for AY 2022-23 (FY 2021-22) for salaried individuals and the deadline unlikely to be extended, the Income Tax Department has issued a set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on issues pertaining to filing of the ITRs.
Salaried individuals are required to file their income tax returns by July 31, while corporates or those who are required to audit their books of accounts can file their returns by October 31 of the assessment year.
19,53,581 tax returns had been filed up to 1 pm today, the income tax department said. It also put out its email address orm@cpc.incometax.gov.in or helpdesk numbers 1800 103 0025 or 1800 419 0025 for resolution of queries and issues in filing of the returns.
What will happen if you don’t comply with the deadline for filing ITR?
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If the return of income is not filed by the due date — July 31 for FY 2021-22 — there will be a levy of penalty under Section 234F. The penalty amount for filing returns last deadline would be Rs 5000 if ITR is reported before December 31 of the Assessment Year and Rs 10,000 if ITR is reported after December 31 but before March 31 of the Assessment Year.
Also, if a person fails to file ITR by the due date and has an outstanding unpaid tax, then under Section 234A, an interest on the outstanding tax amount at 1 per cent per month will be levied since the prescribed due date. If a person with taxable income fails to file his ITR or is found to under-report his income in the returns, then he/she has to pay 50 per cent of the total tax payable on the income for which no return was furnished.
What has the tax department stated in FAQs?
The FAQs have been released for issues including self-assessment tax paid but not reflected in prefilled detail, pre-validation of bank account for refund, absence of drop down facility while filing ITR-7 claiming exemptions under various provisions, difference in income reflected in Annual Information Statement and 26AS, password-reset without efiling/Aadhar OTP and opting for Section 115 BAC tax regime, the provision for the new concessional income tax regime.
The tax department said that taxpayers who do not have Aadhaar registered mobile number but want to reset the password on their income tax efiling portal can do so using DSC or logging into internet banking.
For self-assessment tax paid but not reflecting in prefilled details, the I-T department said it takes 3 to 4 days for different banks to provide information to the department. Post that, it gets prefilled in the Tax-returns/Pre-filled JSON.
“Taxpayers may opt to wait for the required time-period for auto reflecting details of the Taxes paid in ITR. Alternatively, in such cases where the taxpayer has already filled in additional details over and above the pre-filled details, such payment details can be entered manually after clicking on ‘Add Details’ link for Advance Tax and Self- Assessment Tax Payment details under Schedule “Taxes Paid”,” the I-T department said.
On resetting password without e-filing OTP (in cases where registered mobile has changed)/Aadhaar OTP (where mobile is not linked to Aadhaar or if Aadhaar is not linked to PAN), user can reset password using a valid digital signature certificate (DSC) or can login in directly through Internet Banking into E-filing account.
For any difference between income as shown in AIS and 26AS, the I-T department clarified that income reflected in AIS and 26AS are based on information received from different sources and tax compliance made by different stakeholders.
“If there is variation between the TDS/TCS or tax payments as provided in Form 26AS and the TDS/TCS or tax payments provided in AIS, the Taxpayer may rely on the TDS/Tax payment information provided in 26AS for the purpose of filing of tax return and for computing Prepaid Taxes,” it said.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-itr-filing-deadline-this-need-to-know-if-you-havent-filed-your-return-8062373/
| 2022-07-31T12:41:37
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| 0.95614
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The Opposition is likely to demand a discussion on the Agnipath defence recruitment scheme in Parliament next week after the debate on price rise is taken up in both the Houses, sources said Sunday.
A discussion on price rise has been listed in the Lok Sabha for Monday and in the Rajya Sabha the next day.
Opposition leaders said while there is a consensus among them about the need for a discussion on Agnipath, which had sparked widespread violence across the country, they have varied stands on the subject.
With barely 10 working days remaining before the Monsoon Session gets over on August 12, it is unlikely the parties would be abe to extract a debate on the new armed forces recruitment scheme in either House.
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“We will definitely raise the issue in Parliament, however there is very little time to force a discussion on it as the session is ending on August 12 and in between there is a weekend, the vice presidential election as well as the farewell for (outgoing vice president) Venkaiah Naidu,” said an opposition leader.
Also, some leaders said the parties have also different stands on the issue with those based in northern region demanding a complete withdrawal of the scheme, while some like the TMC asking that state governments be freed of the liability to provide jobs for the Agniveers.
Congress leaders such as Rajya Sabha MP from Haryana Deepender Singh Hooda has demanded a complete rollback.
Sources said the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Samajwadi Party and the Congress have already filed notices demanding a discussion on Agnipath in both Houses. Three three notices are likely to be filed on Monday.
Opposition leaders have indicated the government has conveyed to them informally they have no plans of accommodating their request on Agnipath as the matter is sub-judice.
The government has also listed two bills — The Central Universities(Amendment) Bill, 2022 to be introduced and the The Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Bill, 2021 to be passed in the Lok Sabha.
In the Rajya Sabha too two Bills will come up for consideration and passing on Monday — the Weapons of Mass Destruction and their Delivery Systems (Prohibition of Unlawful Activities) Act, 2005; and a Bill to provide for the national measures for protecting the Antarctic environment and dependent and associated ecosystems and to give effect to the Antarctic Treaty, the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources and to the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty.
Both these Bills have been passed by the Lok Sabha.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/india/oppn-to-push-for-discussion-on-agnipath-in-parliament-next-week-8062452/
| 2022-07-31T12:41:43
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| 0.968763
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Fitness is all about turning up the next day. This requires the will to undertake the fitness journey and build consistency. Giving us the much needed inspiration is Marathi actor Priya Bapat who was spotted sweating it out at a gym recently.
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Take a look.
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The 35-year-old who likes to work out has been particular about not missing her “early morning workouts”.
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“Pain of discipline or pain of regret. Your choice! I am addicted to this and I never want to give up,” she said in a post on Instagram.
In it, she can be seen doing a variety of bodyweight exercises, deadlifts, and ab workouts.
The Mayanagari- City Of Dreams actor has been a major fitness enthusiast. These videos are proof.
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She captioned a post, “You may not be there yet, but you are closer than you were yesterday. Consistency is the key. My favourite time of the day.”
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If you, too, are looking to stay on course and consistent with your fitness journey, here’s what you should be doing.
According to Sohrab Khushrushahi, the founder of SOHFIT, “One session will not make or break your body. Consistent work over a long period of time is what will give you the results you desire. Also, you can only be consistent if you’re being good to your body.”
He also suggested in an earlier interaction with indianexpress.com that the simpler one keeps the workout, the more chance they have for a better performance. “The end result is never in our hands, the process is. And if we focus all our energy in just staying the course, we will get to where we want to be,” Khushrushahi added.
He also stressed on the need to adopt a clean and balanced eating strategy for a smarter and long-lasting choice. “Consuming lots of protein shakes every day is not the answer; try and get your protein from natural foods,” he said.
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- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
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https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/fitness/marathi-actor-priya-bapat-fitness-journey-8012632/
| 2022-07-31T12:41:49
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| 0.961927
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