| A timeline of Trump's missed opportunities on coronavirus Posted: 08 Apr 2020 12:32 PM PDT  As the deadly coronavirus outbreak rapidly spread across America in February and March, President Trump repeatedly asserted that "nobody could have predicted something like this." But a review of government records shows that repeated warnings were issued to the White House and went unheeded.
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| Coronavirus is ushering in a new wave of racially motivated attacks, warns intelligence bulletin Posted: 08 Apr 2020 07:46 AM PDT  Federal agencies are concerned that domestic extremists could use the coronavirus pandemic to attack Asians and Jews, according to a joint intelligence bulletin obtained by Yahoo News. That bulletin mirrors what organizations that monitor online hate content are also finding.
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| Doctors rethinking coronavirus: Are we using ventilators the wrong way? Posted: 08 Apr 2020 05:37 AM PDT  As hospitals and health care workers grapple with a shortage of supplies, some doctors are raising questions about how ventilators are currently being used on coronavirus patients — and whether they may actually be doing more harm than good.
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| Coronavirus: California woman arrested for licking $1,800 worth of groceries Posted: 08 Apr 2020 06:47 PM PDT  A California woman has been arrested after licking $1,800 worth of groceries and other items at a supermarket in the northern part of the state, police said Wednesday. Chris Fiore, spokesman for the South Lake Tahoe police department, near the border with Nevada, told AFP that officers were called to the Safeway store on Tuesday following reports of "a customer licking groceries" at a time of heightened fears over the spread of the highly contagious novel coronavirus. "When officers arrived on the scene, a Safeway employee informed them that the suspect put numerous pieces of jewelry from the store on her hands," he said.
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| Coronavirus: WHO chief and Taiwan in row over 'racist' comments Posted: 09 Apr 2020 07:39 AM PDT  Taiwan rejects accusations by the UN health body's head that racist slurs against him originated there.
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| A super-spreader believed to be at the center of Chicago's coronavirus outbreak shows the importance of social distancing Posted: 08 Apr 2020 07:29 PM PDT  A case study traced the cases from one infected individual after they attended a funeral and birthday party, infecting 16 people and killing three.
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| Cases of novel coronavirus in Russia surge past 10,000 after record daily rise Posted: 09 Apr 2020 12:55 AM PDT  Russia on Thursday reported a record one-day rise in cases of novel coronavirus, pushing the official tally to more than 10,000, a day after President Vladimir Putin said the coming weeks would prove decisive in the fight against the virus. The number of cases jumped by 1,459 and 13 more people died, the national coronavirus crisis response centre said on its website. Moscow, the worst-affected region, and many other regions are in their second week of a partial lockdown.
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| President says 'we are praying for' Boris Johnson as coronavirus cases in New York overtake any other country Posted: 09 Apr 2020 02:27 PM PDT  The number of coronavirus cases in New York state has now passed 151,600, meaning it has more confirmed infections than any country barring the US itself, as the number of Americans claiming unemployment benefits surges to almost 17m.Despite those grim figures, Donald Trump's mind appeared to be on other matters, including blasting the Wall Street Journal for not praising him on his ratings during Monday night's White House press briefing. The president tweeted out against the newspaper and called it "fake news" for not saying his ratings were "through the roof".
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| Linda Tripp, whose tapes exposed Clinton scandal, dies at 70 Posted: 08 Apr 2020 05:32 PM PDT  Linda Tripp, whose secretly recorded conversations with Monica Lewinsky led to the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton, died at age 70.
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| This is what I want my friends to do if they have COVID-19 symptoms and are asked to go to the ER Posted: 08 Apr 2020 06:20 AM PDT  As a frontline infectious diseases doctor, this is what I want my friends and neighbors to do if they have COVID-19 symptoms and are asked to go to the emergency room.
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| Pope hails priests, health workers as 'the saints next door' Posted: 09 Apr 2020 11:23 AM PDT  Pope Francis on Holy Thursday hailed priests and medical staff who tend to the needs of COVID-19 patients as "the saints next door." Francis celebrated the Holy Week evening Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, which was kept off-limits to the public because of restrictions aimed at containing the spread of the new coronavirus. The pope began his off-the-cuff homily by honoring the memory of priests who gave their lives in service to others, singling out those who died after tending to sick people in Italy's hospitals.
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| Oil producers intend to cut 10-15 mn barrels: Kuwait Posted: 08 Apr 2020 09:31 PM PDT  Top oil producers meeting later Thursday intend to cut production by between 10 and 15 million barrels per day, Kuwait's Oil Minister Khaled al-Fadhel reportedly said. The talks between OPEC and other major producers come as oil languishes at near-two decade lows, with Russia and Saudi Arabia's price war compounding slack demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic. "Through our continuous consultations in the past weeks, I confirm that the intention is to conclude an agreement to cut production by a large amount ranging between 10 million bpd and 15 million bpd," Fadhel said in an interview with Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai published Thursday.
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| Coronavirus: World Bank predicts sub-Saharan Africa recession Posted: 09 Apr 2020 05:59 AM PDT  The region's economy will shrink for the first time in 25 years because of the coronavirus, the bank predicts.
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| New York City will bury unclaimed bodies on a remote island after 14 days because coronavirus deaths are overwhelming morgues Posted: 09 Apr 2020 12:19 PM PDT  The city typically waits 30 days before interring bodies in mass graves on Hart Island, but the coronavirus' death toll is overwhelming the system.
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| Taiwan rebuffs accusations it racially attacked WHO chief Posted: 08 Apr 2020 06:22 PM PDT  Taiwan on Thursday angrily condemned accusations from the World Health Organization's (WHO) boss that racist slurs against him had come from the island, saying racism did not exist in Taiwan. Taiwan's exclusion from the WHO, due to objections from China which claims the island as its own, has infuriated the Taipei government during the coronavirus outbreak. Taiwan says it has been unable to get timely information and that Taiwanese lives have become political pawns.
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| Bernie Sanders, Sellout Posted: 09 Apr 2020 10:46 AM PDT  Yesterday, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders officially dropped out of the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Despite early successes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Sanders failed to put up much of a fight against Joe Biden after the latter convincingly won South Carolina. And so, for the second campaign in a row, he has come up short against a weak but well-known presumptive front-runner.In the not-too-distant past, this would have depressed me. When Sanders announced his 2016 presidential campaign, I had never heard of him, but he didn't take too long to figure out. On economic questions, he was among the left-most political figures ever to achieve prominence in America, and was clearly proud of it. On other issues, he strayed from left-wing orthodoxy in some interesting ways. He evinced a skepticism of open borders and increased immigration that occasionally made him sound downright Trumpy. He had a surprisingly decent record on gun rights. And above all, he actually seemed to believe what he said, which I found a breath of fresh air when juxtaposed with the obfuscation and opportunism of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.Four years later, my view of the Sanders phenomenon has changed completely. I do not now mourn the end of Sanders's candidacy, because in his second run for the White House he proved himself to be just another politician: He deemphasized or outright jettisoned his politically inconvenient stances in pursuit of power, while remaining true to a core far-left agenda that, in the absence of that aura of integrity, seems far scarier than it did four years ago.It was always one of the more striking aspects of Sanders's rhetoric that he could sound like an immigration hawk. In a 2015 interview with Vox, he famously called open borders a "Koch brothers proposal":> It would make everybody in America poorer — you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation-state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.To be fair, Sanders wasn't necessarily getting immigration-policy advice from Mark Krikorian. He represented an older strain of left-wing thought that argued against immigration from the perspective of labor unions concerned about multinational corporations and undercut wages. But nevertheless, when he spoke of the issue, he could sound surprisingly like Donald Trump, then rampaging his way through the Republican primaries.That Bernie Sanders is gone now. His 2020 platform called for "breaking up ICE and CBP and redistributing their functions to their proper authorities," unilaterally reinstating President Obama's DACA and DAPA programs, and decriminalizing illegal immigration, among other things. For the most part, he became difficult to distinguish from his Democratic opponents on immigration, except insofar as some of them chased after him as he moved left in the hope of capturing more votes. Thus did this unconventional aspect of his public persona recede.The story on gun rights is much the same. Vermont is caricatured as a semi-socialist state, and maybe the caricature is accurate. But it also has relatively loose gun laws, and a high rate of per capita firearm ownership. As a representative of the state in various capacities, Sanders has compiled a record that reflects this. The National Rifle Association helped him first win election to the House in 1990, where he would vote against the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. As a senator, he has supported bills that would allow firearms in checked bags on Amtrak trains. And after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Sanders said, "If you passed the strongest gun-control legislation tomorrow, I don't think it will have a profound effect on the tragedies we have seen." Though this record was a source of consternation for an otherwise adoring left in 2016, and was fodder for Hillary Clinton's campaign, he didn't run away from it then.Four years later, the story was very different. A watershed moment came during a February Democratic primary debate, when he was asked about his past vote to protect gun manufacturers from lawsuits pertaining to the use of guns in shootings. "I've cast thousands of votes, including bad votes," Sanders said. "That was a bad vote." His 2020 platform proposed a buyback program for guns and a ban on assault weapons. In a fitting bookend to his elective career, it also demanded that Democrats "take on the NRA and its corrupting effect on Washington." Once again, Sanders had tacked left under pressure in search of votes, willingly abandoning a unique part of his persona to the political needs of the moment.Shorn of the ideological heterodoxies that made him appealing, Sanders was reduced to his essence as a crusader for hard-left economics. When, in 2015, he argued that, "You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm-spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country," I still regarded his economic platform as a quirk that might inspire him to join with fiscally conservative Republicans to, say, cut corporate welfare. But it wasn't a quirk at all: He recently expressed disgust at the idea that someone might make money developing drugs to fight the novel coronavirus.Meanwhile, in his second campaign certain aspects of Sanders's record that were always there for those who wanted to see them became impossible to ignore. We knew in 2016 that, as mayor of Burlington, the just-married Sanders had visited the Soviet Union on a mission to procure a Soviet sister city that doubled as his honeymoon. Those facts would be more forgivable if he had not offered unqualified praise for Cuban "literacy programs" and the economic progress of Communist China in 2020.In 2016, smitten with the heterodox left-populist gadfly I thought I'd found, I either did not realize the currency that Sanders's economic views had in the Democratic Party or did not anticipate the extent of the foothold they would gain in it. This is due mostly to young voters, who in a 2019 Gallup survey thought almost equally well of capitalism and socialism (51 percent to 49 percent). Sanders consistently garnered more support than Clinton from this group in 2016. In 2020, he maintained that support to a certain extent, though it didn't translate into actual votes as easily as it had before. Both times around, the center of the Democratic Party, such as it is, held. But the young democratic socialists uncovered by his campaigns continue to maintain that they are the future of the party's politics, and of the country's.If they are right, we can be sure that they won't remember the Bernie Sanders whom I, as an outside conservative observer, once found somewhat compelling. For that Sanders held certain views they would abhor, views that he changed or abandoned when it became politically expedient. And that may be the most disappointing thing about Sanders: In the end, he stands revealed as just another guy all too happy to tell people what they wanted to hear.
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| New Yahoo News/YouGov coronavirus poll shows Americans turning against Trump Posted: 08 Apr 2020 01:13 PM PDT  The new survey found that Americans increasingly blame Trump for the vast scale of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak.
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| Adam Schiff says Intelligence Committee may conduct 'Zoom hearings' during current pandemic Posted: 08 Apr 2020 03:17 PM PDT  House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., says he is considering using the teleconferencing software Zoom to hold hearings into foreign election interference and other key issues, including the firing of intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson, while social distancing restrictions remain in place due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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| 'A silent explosion': Coronavirus deaths in U.S. climb past 16,000 Posted: 09 Apr 2020 11:13 AM PDT  COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. surpass 16,000. In New York, new hospitalizations slow, affirming signs that stay-at-home orders are slowing coronavirus spread.
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| U.K. truck driver pleads guilty in deaths of Vietnamese migrants found in container Posted: 08 Apr 2020 09:50 AM PDT  Victims died of a combination of a lack of oxygen and overheating in an enclosed space, police said.
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| Pakistan shoots down Indian drone as Kashmir tensions rise Posted: 09 Apr 2020 12:19 AM PDT  Pakistan's army said Thursday it had shot down a small Indian surveillance drone in Kashmir, as tensions rose over continued cross-border shelling in the disputed territory. "This blatant act was aggressively responded to by Pakistan Army troops shooting down Indian quadcopter," the statement read. An Indian army spokesman said the drone "is not ours".
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| Smithfield temporarily shuts pork plant due to coronavirus Posted: 09 Apr 2020 09:24 AM PDT  A Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in South Dakota will temporarily close for cleaning after more than 80 employees were confirmed to have the coronavirus, the company announced Thursday. Smithfield Foods plans to suspend operations in a large section of the Sioux Falls plant on Saturday, then completely close on Sunday and Monday. Smithfield Foods CEO Kenneth Sullivan said in a statement that the plant dishes out nearly 18 million servings of meat per day.
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| The coronavirus probably started spreading in Wuhan far earlier than Chinese authorities reported — here's the more likely timeline Posted: 09 Apr 2020 08:55 AM PDT  The first cases of COVID-19 in China popped up weeks before December 31, the date health authorities reported the first cluster of cases.
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| Italy declares own ports 'unsafe' to stop migrants arriving Posted: 08 Apr 2020 05:19 AM PDT  Decree citing coronavirus claims Italy cannot guarantee security of migrants' lives * Coronavirus – latest updates * See all our coronavirus coverageIn an unprecedented move, the Italian government has declared its seaports "unsafe" due to the coronavirus pandemic, and will not authorise the landing of migrant rescue boats until the end of the emergency.In a decree issued late on Tuesday, the government wrote that "for the entire duration of the health emergency, due to the outbreak of coronavirus, Italian ports cannot be classified as 'safe places' for the landing of people rescued from boats flying a foreign flag".The measure – the first of its kind in Italian history – appeared designed to prevent rescue boats from disembarking migrants in the upcoming weeks, as departures from Libya have increased in recent days with the arrival of good weather.The decree, signed by the interior minister, Luciana Lamorgese, the health minister, Roberto Speranza, the foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, and the infrastructure minister, Paola De Micheli, also suggests that rescued migrants might include people who have contracted Covid-19.It adds that "rescued people must be guaranteed an absence of any threat to their lives", and concludes that at this time the government cannot guarantee the security of migrants' lives in Italy.The government decree comes after the rescue boat Alan Kurdi, operated by the German NGO Sea-Eye, rescued about 150 people and is now located a few miles from the Italian island of Lampedusa.InteractiveAlan Kurdi, named after the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned in 2015, is currently the only NGO rescue boat operating in the central Mediterranean. The coronavirus outbreak has forced many charities to concentrate their aid efforts elsewhere.Despite fears of the virus, migrants are still risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean: almost 800 people left Libya in March, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.In March, Di Maio said during a conference call to the EU's foreign affairs council that the country was unable to open its ports to migrants. "It's not about wanting to be good or bad," said Di Maio. "Italy can't just do it now."In 2018 the far-right former interior minister Matteo Salvini declared Italy's ports "closed" to migrant rescue ships, arguing that migrants represented a threat to national security. Italy has been one of Europe's worst-hit countries in the pandemic so far, with 135,586 coronavirus cases and 17,127 deaths."We respect the national fate of all European countries fighting against this pandemic and especially the situation facing Italy," said Sea-Eye's mission manager, Jan Ribbeck."No state in the Mediterranean should be left alone on the question of reception of refugees in the coronavirus crisis. We will address our flag state if it should become necessary."On Tuesday, Italy's public broadcaster RAI reported a claim that the NGO has ''already asked the German government to intervene by sending a plane to evacuate the 150 people on board".According to the NGO, at least 150 German cities are ready to welcome rescued migrants.In the meantime, while Italian ministers were sending the decree to local authorities in order to inform them of the new government measures, two unescorted migrant boats with 124 people onboard arrived on the island of Lampedusa from Libya on Tuesday night.The risk, according to charitable organisations, is that the Italian decree will send the migrant situation back years, when boats from Libya would set off on their own, risking people's lives in the attempt to reach Italian shores.Alarm Phone, a hotline service for migrants in distress at sea, told the Guardian, "We are very concerned about the effects of the Italian decree and how European authorities are using the Covid-19 pandemic to increase restrictive measures. With Malta also decreasing rescue efforts, we are witnessing a deadly rescue gap off the Libyan coast.''Alarm Phone fears that people fleeing from war and torture will be forced to navigate their boats over longer distances in order to reach European search and rescue. "This means that those trying to escape are at risk of drowning while at sea for days," Alarm Phone added. "These restrictive measures will lead to mass fatalities at sea as people will continue to migrate. They have no other option."The migrants who arrived alone in the night were placed in quarantine in an area near the port of Lampedusa, inciting citizens who on Wednesday morning gathered in front of the mayor's office to protest against the decision to take in asylum seekers.
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| Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’ Posted: 09 Apr 2020 09:00 AM PDT  (Bloomberg Opinion) -- California this week declared its independence from the federal government's feeble efforts to fight Covid-19 — and perhaps from a bit more. The consequences for the fight against the pandemic are almost certainly positive. The implications for the brewing civil war between Trumpism and America's budding 21st-century majority, embodied by California's multiracial liberal electorate, are less clear. Speaking on MSNBC, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California "as a nation-state" to acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide. If all goes according to plan, Newsom said, California might even "export some of those supplies to states in need.""Nation-state." "Export."Newsom is accomplishing a few things here, with what can only be a deliberate lack of subtlety. First and foremost, he is trying to relieve the shortage of personal protective equipment — a crisis the White House has proved incapable of remedying. Details are a little fuzzy, but Newsom, according to news reports, has organized multiple suppliers to deliver roughly 200 million masks monthly.Second, Newsom is kicking sand in the face of President Donald Trump after Newsom's previous flattery — the coin of the White House realm — failed to produce results. If Trump can't manage to deliver supplies, there's no point in Newsom continuing the charade.Third, and this may be the most enduring effect, Newsom is sending a powerful message to both political parties. So far, the Republican Party's war on democratic values, institutions and laws has been a largely one-sided affair, with the GOP assaulting and the Democratic Party defending. The lethal ruling this week by the U.S. Supreme Court's Republican bloc, which required Wisconsin residents to vote in person during a pandemic that shut down polling stations, is a preview of the fall campaign. The GOP intends to restrict vote-by-mail and other legitimate enfranchisement to suppress turnout amid fear, uncertainty and disease.At some point this civil war by other means, with the goal of enshrining GOP minority rule, will provoke a Democratic counteroffensive. Newsom, leader of the nation's largest state, is perhaps accelerating that response, shaking Democrats out of denial and putting Republicans on notice. California, an economic behemoth whose taxpayers account for 15% of individual contributions to the U.S. Treasury, is now toning up at muscle beach.What that means, of course, is left to the imagination. But not much is required to envision what might evolve.Newsom, a former lieutenant governor who won the top job in 2018, has used the "nation-state" phrase before. It's a very odd thing to say. California, like its 49 smaller siblings, qualifies only as the second half. But it's obviously no slip of the tongue. Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, a leader in California's cumbersome efforts to produce more housing, said soon after Newsom took office in 2019 that reorienting the state's relationship to Washington is a necessity, not a choice."The federal government is no longer a reliable partner in delivering health care, in supporting immigrants, supporting LGBT people, in protecting the environment, so we need to forge our own path," Wiener said. "We can do everything in our power to protect our state, but we need a reliable federal partner. And right now we don't have that."The statement appears prescient in light of the Trump administration's failure to protect against a pandemic. Newsom was the first governor to issue a stay-at-home order, on March 19. Though his state is chock-full of cosmopolitan centers, and rural threats loom as well, California is weathering the virus in far better shape than New York, which has many fewer people and many more deaths.Federalism has always had rough spots, but conflict is rising and resolutions are not. California is a sanctuary state while the Trump administration is fond of immigration dragnets. Marijuana is grown, marketed and used in abundance in the state while the White House conjures more restrictions. The Trump administration endorses extreme gun rights; California has other ideas. Most of all, Trump's failure to act, or even take responsibility for acting, in the face of pandemic has required California, like other states, to look out for itself.One conflict, however, encompasses all others, and could galvanize Californians into new ways of thinking about their state and its relationship to Washington. The GOP war on democracy is inspired by a drive for racial and cultural supremacy that jeopardizes the democratic aspirations and human rights of California's multiracial citizenry. From Fort Sumter to Little Rock to Montgomery, the blueprint for states opposing federal control has a recurring theme. But there is no reason that states can't adopt a racist playbook for other ends. If California and other 21st-century polities withhold revenue, or otherwise distance themselves from Washington's control, legal and political battles will escalate. Republicans will have a legitimate constitutional argument — but it will be a morally tainted and politically illegitimate one so long as they continue to subvert majority rule.The experience of states battling Covid-19 while the White House devotes its energy to winning the news cycle may be instructive. What is the difference, conceptually, between a state deploying its power to protect its population's health and a state using it to protect its population's democratic rights?John C. Calhoun, who used the theory of states' rights to defend the institution of slavery, is not generally a philosophical lodestar for liberal Democrats such as Newsom. But if Republicans (or foreign friends) succeed in sabotaging democracy in November, Calhoun's theory of nullification, which posited that states have the power to defy federal law, could be ripe for a comeback on the left coast. With the heirs of the Confederacy now reigning in Washington, turnabout might be very fair play.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Italian cemeteries can't keep up with deaths from pandemic Posted: 09 Apr 2020 11:52 AM PDT  In Bergamo, a city in Northern Italy, bodies are being kept in a makeshift morgue, unrefrigerated.
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| Two suspects arrested after Wisconsin doctor and husband were 'targeted' and killed, police say Posted: 08 Apr 2020 07:23 AM PDT  Two suspects were arrested Friday after the double-homicide of Beth Potter, 52, and Robin Carre, 57.
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| India's poor hit hardest by virus lockdown Posted: 08 Apr 2020 11:52 PM PDT  With his rickshaw sitting idle outside his one-room shack, Sailesh Kumar is one of the hundreds of millions of poor Indians hit the hardest by the world's biggest coronavirus lockdown. Like an estimated 100 million others, Kumar is a migrant worker. Before India's 21-day lockdown began on March 25, the 38-year-old earned -- on a good day -- the equivalent of $4 a day cycling his rickshaw, while his wife cooked and cleaned as a domestic worker.
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| Walmart Says It Will Invest $425 Million to Expand Presence in Wuhan over the Next Five Years Posted: 09 Apr 2020 08:53 AM PDT  Walmart's China branch announced at an investment conference hosted by the Wuhan city government on Wednesday that it was committing 3 billion yuan ($425 million) to expand its presence in the origin point of the coronavirus pandemic over the next five years.According to Walmart China, the company will be putting up at least four new Sam's Club stores, 15 additional shopping malls, and more community stores in the capital of China's Hubei province. The U.S.-based retailer already has 34 stores and two distribution centers in the city, where the global coronavirus pandemic first emerged in December.Wern-Yuen Tan, President and CEO of Walmart China, announced the decision in collaboration with Wuhan's municipal government, saying "the framework marks a new milestone between the two parties and a new beginning for a win-win situation."Wuhan ended its city-wide lockdown on Wednesday, after 76 days of mandatory shutdown, despite fears that the city was still hosting many asymptomatic cases. City residents have dismissed the official death toll of approximately 2,500, while U.S. intelligence concluded last week that the city has been lying about its number of cases.The corporate response to China's handling of the coronavirus has been mixed. The American Chamber of Commerce polled 119 companies last month on their China outlook, with 40 percent saying they would maintain their planned levels of investment in China this year, while 24 percent said they plan to cut investment. A third said it was too early to determine coronavirus's impact.U.S. lawmakers have grown increasingly critical of the U.S.'s over reliance on China in recent months, especially relating to medical supplies — with experts suggesting that "thousands" of basic pharmaceuticals are sourced in China.Last month, Representative Jim Banks (R., Ind.) warned that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's proposed stimulus package did not address U.S. dependence on Chinese supply chains, despite bipartisan concerns about the issue.Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) also proposed a phase-four relief package last week that promoted bringing "critical supply chains back to this country from China and elsewhere and to encourage domestic production."
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| Thousands of scientists in Sweden are criticizing the government for not implementing a lockdown to stop the coronavirus Posted: 08 Apr 2020 09:37 AM PDT  Sweden is resisting international trends by not implementing a lockdown or strict social distancing measures to fight the coronavirus.
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| Head of Global Strike Command Wants to Make Air Force Bombers Even More Lethal Posted: 09 Apr 2020 01:07 PM PDT  The Air Force plans to have 165 to 175 bombers in its inventory once the B-21 Long Range Strike Bomber comes online.
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| Exclusive: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, in solitary confinement Posted: 09 Apr 2020 12:23 PM PDT  Cohen, 53, was transferred on Wednesday to a Special Housing Unit at Otisville Federal Correctional Institution, a disciplinary section of the prison, the sources said. Until now, Cohen had been housed in a minimum-security camp at Otisville, which is about 70 miles (110 km) northwest of New York City.
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| Woman gives birth standing with trousers on while detained at US-Mexico border Posted: 09 Apr 2020 02:20 PM PDT  A woman suffering flu-like symptoms gave birth standing and fully clothed while detained near the Mexican-US border, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.The Guatemalan woman, 27, was being processed at the Chula Vista Border Patrol Station near San Diego when her complaints of pain and pleas for help were allegedly ignored by agents, according to a complaint filed on Wednesday by the ACLU and Jewish Family Service of San Diego with the US Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General.
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| Horror in Spain Turns to Anger Against Prime Minister Posted: 09 Apr 2020 03:30 AM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- Every night at 8 p.m., Spaniards head to their balconies and windows to clap for the healthcare workers risking their lives to save others from the coronavirus pandemic. An hour later, there's a second wave of noise in some neighbourhoods as people come out with pots and pans.This time it's not in praise, but in protest at the government's handling of the deadliest emergency to hit Spain since the Franco dictatorship years.The public health crisis that's seen hospitals overwhelmed, medical staff dying on the front line and harrowing stories of the army finding corpses in nursing homes, risks morphing into a political one for Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.After a series of missteps, his administration is increasingly being blamed for failing to get a grip on the disease. Fatalities reached 15,238 on Thursday, the most in the world per capita, and infections climbed to more than 150,000. Parliament will vote Thursday on extending a national lockdown through April 25."This has been appalling from the start," said Javier Dueñas, 59, a builder who lives in the Retiro neighborhood of Madrid who just joined the protests against the government. "They should pay a price for all of this."Just 28% of Spaniards approve of the efforts by their government to deal with the outbreak, compared with 35% three weeks ago, according to a GAD3 poll published Monday by Spanish newspaper ABC.In contrast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte have more than 60% backing from voters in recent surveys. French President Emmanuel Macron's overall approval rating jumped to its highest level in nearly two years. In extreme, extraordinary situations, "most countries tend to have a 'rally behind the flag' moment" that boosts the country's leader, said Narciso Michavila, chairman of GAD3. But that hasn't happened in Spain, largely because of the fiery ideological divisions that have dominated its politics since the Civil War in the 1930s, he said.A month ago, when deaths were already mounting across the Mediterranean in Italy, Sanchez showed support for an International Women's Day on March 8. Less than a week later, he declared a state of emergency. Now citizens are confined to their homes, and Spain is gripped by Europe's most-extensive outbreak of Covid-19. The way Spain is run hasn't worked in Sanchez's favor. Keeping a country with different languages and administrations together has never been easy, and the crisis has exposed a weakness in the Spanish federal system.When it comes to healthcare and nursing homes, the central government normally has no direct oversight of the 17 regions. But under the state of emergency announced on March 14, Sanchez changed that, placing them all under the control of the health minister. The government then scrambled to run a sprawling system it had no control over for years.Sanchez has held periodic calls with the regional presidents, though failed to create a solid, united political front, and many regional governments have complained of shortages of medical equipment. The World Health Organization says they're more acute in Spain than in other countries."The WHO told Spain we needed to buy hospital material months ago, and they ignored it, then they allowed the March 8 rally," said Dueñas, the builder in Madrid. "In nursing homes, the elderly are dying because of ineptitude. They didn't ask for help from opposition parties early on."Indeed, in some of the worst cases residents of nursing homes were left to die alone in their beds because many centers had no protective gear so staff were not showing up for work. Many of the public facilities have been underfunded during years of financial austerity, and are also far more loosely regulated than other health care services.The situation got so desperate that two weeks ago the Defence Ministry deployed some 7,000 soldiers to help, in Spain's biggest military peacetime operation. They disinfected over 2,000 facilities across the country. Sometimes, they help move residents because of the staff shortages."Suddenly, they see a car from the army emergency unit, and they see that they haven't been abandoned – it's a boost," said an army captain leading a battalion in northern Spain. He declined to be identified by name."This is unlike anything I've ever faced," said the captain. "Missions in Iraq, in Afghanistan, you know when they start and when they end. We just have no idea when this finishes, or what they'll ask us to do next."Hospitals from Bilbao to Madrid are likewise overwhelmed. In the capital, two ice rinks have been converted to keep bodies refrigerated until mortuaries can catch up. But it's the drama unfolding in the nursing homes that has sparked the greatest anger.Read More: Spanish Doctors Are Forced to Choose Who to Let DieDisc jockey Juan Jose Paul, 42, a supporter of Sanchez's Socialist Party, lost his aunt to the virus, and then authorities misplaced the body for almost a day. "The nursing home catastrophe is where the government really fell down because they should have jumped in much earlier," said Paul. "This could lose them votes."The government says its containment measures are having an impact, reducing the daily increase in confirmed cases in percentage terms and the numbers of new entrants to intensive care wards. It points to an aid package for self-employed workers and companies worth as much as a 100 billion euros ($109 billion).Officials have also said they didn't flout any guidelines for International Women's Day. It was only the next day, March 9, when WHO recommended banning such public gatherings."If only we could have known two or three months ago what we know today," government spokeswoman Maria Jesus Montero said at a press conference this week. "We were one of the first countries to suffer this pandemic, so other countries are learning from us. This government is, as always, self-critical."Sanchez barely scraped into office after an election in November. He cobbled together a coalition with his main rivals to the left, Unidas Podemos, just three months ago and is relying on support from a mixed-bag of parties, including a group of Catalan separatists.It was Spain's fourth vote in as many years, and the third time Sanchez was named prime minister since he took power from conservative Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy, who was hit by a political funding scandal and ousted in a no-confidence vote in June 2018.In the weeks prior to declaring a state of emergency on March 14, the government was focused mainly on finding a way to appease demands by Catalan separatists and garner support for a budget in the splintered parliament. The coalition that governs Catalonia, which includes his erstwhile allies, is now openly critical of the prime minister along with the main opposition.QuicktakeHow Catalonia Remains a Thorn in Spanish PoliticsPeople's Party leader Pablo Casado told Telecinco TV that Sánchez's handling of the outbreak is "an explosive cocktail of arrogance, incompetence and lies." The far-right Vox, the third-largest party in parliament, is calling for Sanchez to resign and his administration to be replaced by government of national unity.El Pais newspaper, traditionally supportive of socialist governments, published a harsh op-ed by its former editor-in-chief this week. Other public figures have also expressed their discontentment."I hope that measures will be taken against the government of @sanchezcastejon and @PabloIglesias when all this is over," former Atletico Madrid soccer player Álvaro Domínguez lamented in a tweet this month. "You only show incompetence day after day."(Updates with new totals for deaths and cases in the fourth paragraph)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Fauci lowers U.S. coronavirus death forecast to 60,000, says social distancing is working Posted: 09 Apr 2020 05:43 PM PDT  Anthony Fauci said Thursday the death toll from the coronavirus could be closer to 60,000 Americans, smaller than previous projections.
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| Japan to Pay Companies to Move Production Out of China Posted: 09 Apr 2020 01:06 PM PDT  Japan will devote more than $2.2 billion of its coronavirus economic stimulus package to incentivize its manufacturers to move their production out of China as relations fray between the neighboring countries in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.The record stimulus plan provides $2 billion for manufacturers to transfer production to Japan and over $216 million to help companies move production to other countries. Imports from China, Japan's biggest trading partner, were down by nearly 50 percent in February as facilities in China closed while the coronavirus ripped through the country.A state visit to Japan by Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this month — the first such visit in about a decade — was postponed indefinitely last month amid the coronavirus pandemic."We are doing our best to resume economic development," Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday of Japan's decision during a press conference in Beijing."In this process, we hope other countries will act like China and take proper measures to ensure the world economy will be impacted as little as possible and to ensure that supply chains are impacted as little as possible."Politicians in Japan and the U.S., among other countries, have placed blame on China for failing to respond strongly during the early days of the coronavirus outbreak and concealing the scale of the threat from other nations. Despite recent developments, Japan has donated masks and personal protective equipment to China."Since the outbreak of the epidemic, the Japanese government and people have expressed sympathy, understanding and support to us," Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying said in early February.As of Thursday, Japan had more than 4,700 confirmed cases of coronavirus and at least 85 deaths from the respiratory illness.
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| China investigates party member critical of government's handling of coronavirus outbreak Posted: 08 Apr 2020 04:09 AM PDT  China is investigating a prominent Communist Party member who criticized leader Xi Jinping's handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
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| It has been 3 months since the first coronavirus case was reported. These photos show the 10 moments that defined the crisis. Posted: 09 Apr 2020 06:05 AM PDT  The novel coronavirus, which originated in China in December 2019, has spread to more than 200 countries and infected nearly 1.5 million people.
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| India struggles to contain coronavirus, enforce lockdown in sprawling city slums Posted: 09 Apr 2020 08:09 AM PDT  India faces an uphill battle to contain coronavirus outbreaks in the slums of the vast financial capital Mumbai amid fears the virus is gathering pace in the dense, unsanitary alleyways where it is next to impossible to enforce a full lockdown. India, the world's second most populous country after China with 1.3 billion people, has reported more than 5,800 cases of the virus, including 169 deaths, a far cry from the high tolls in several European countries and the United States. Mumbai's seaside Worli Koliwada slum is in an area that had 184 reported cases on Wednesday, as per the latest data, up from 133 the previous day.
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| New single-day record for NY virus deaths but hospitalizations fall Posted: 09 Apr 2020 01:16 PM PDT  America's coronavirus epicenter of New York recorded a new single-day high of 799 COVID-19 deaths Thursday but Governor Andrew Cuomo said the rate of hospitalizations continued to fall. Cuomo said 799 people died in the last 24 hours, outdoing the previous high of 779 announced on Wednesday, but added that the curve was flattening because of social confinement measures. "We had a 200-net increase in hospitalizations, which you can see is the lowest number we've had since this nightmare started," Cuomo told reporters, adding that intensive care admissions were also at the lowest yet.
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| White Supremacist Groups Are Recruiting With Help From Coronavirus – and a Popular Messaging App Posted: 08 Apr 2020 01:42 PM PDT  As COVID-19 spreads around the world, white supremacist groups are seizing onto it to recruit and spread misinformation
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| NYPD releases video of moments before $1.3 million jewellery burglary Posted: 08 Apr 2020 10:56 AM PDT  New York Police Department has released footage of the moments before a $1.3 million jewellery burglary in the Bronx.Four individuals broke into 50 East Fordham Road on the 31 March at around 1am, police said.
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