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Kid reporter who interviewed Obama at White House dies at 23
The student reporter who gained national acclaim when he interviewed President Barack Obama at the White House in 2009 has died of natural causes, his family says.
Damon Weaver was 23 when he died May 1, his sister, Candace Hardy, told the Palm Beach Post. Further details were not released. He had been studying communications at Albany State University in Georgia.
Weaver was 11 when he interviewed Obama for 10 minutes in the Diplomatic Room on Aug. 13, 2009, asking questions that focused primarily on education. He covered school lunches, bullying, conflict resolution and how to succeed.
Weaver then asked Obama to be his “homeboy,” saying then-Vice President Joe Biden had already accepted.
“Absolutely,” a smiling Obama said, shaking the boy’s hand.
Read:Biden opens 'Obamacare' window for uninsured as Covid-19 rages
He used that meeting to later interview Oprah Winfrey and athletes like Dwyane Wade.
“He was just a nice person, genuine, very intelligent,” Hardy said. “Very outspoken, outgoing. He never said no to anybody.”
Weaver got his start in fifth grade when he volunteered for the school newscast at K.E. Cunningham/Canal Point Elementary in a farm community on the shores of Lake Okeechobee.
“Damon was the kid who ran after me in the hall to tell me he was interested,” his teacher, Brian Zimmerman, told the Post in 2016. “And right away, I just saw the potential for the way he was on camera. You could see his personality come through. He wasn’t nervous being on camera.”
Biden, GOP senators upbeat, plan more infrastructure talks
After meeting at the White House, President Joe Biden and a group of Republican senators agreed to talk again early next week as negotiations intensified over a potentially bipartisan infrastructure package that could become one piece of the administration’s ambitious $4 trillion public investment plan.
The GOP senators exited the more than 90-minute meeting Thursday “encouraged” about their discussions with the president and prepared to build on the $568 billion proposal they had put forward last month as an alternative to his sweeping American jobs and families plans.
“The president asked us to come back and rework an offer so that he could then react to that,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who is leading the group.
“We’re very encouraged,” she told reporters outside the White House. “The attitude the president had in the Oval Office with us was very supportive and desirous of striking a deal.”
Also read: Biden aims to vaccinate 70% of American adults by July 4
Biden also emerged upbeat. “I am very optimistic that we can reach a reasonable agreement — and even if we don’t, it’s been a good faith effort,” Biden said in the Rose Garden.
Biden is intent on at least trying to strike a deal with Republicans rather than simply going it alone with a Democrats-only bill, which might in some ways be a more politically viable route in a Congress held by the president’s party with only the slimmest of majorities.
One strategy that appears to be coming into focus would be for Biden to negotiate a more limited, traditional infrastructure bill of roads, highways, bridges and broadband as a bipartisan effort. Then, Democrats could try to muscle through the remainder of Biden’s priorities on climate investments and the so-called human infrastructure of child care, education and hospitals on their own.
“I’m willing to negotiate,” Biden said earlier at the White House. But the president has indicated that he’s not about to wait indefinitely for a compromise that may or may not come, and reiterated his view Thursday that “doing nothing is not an option.”
The White House said the president stressed that inaction was a “red line for him.” He set a Memorial Day deadline for progress on a bipartisan deal.
Those gathered included some of the top ranking Republicans — Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Roger Wicker of Mississippi. Joining Biden were Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
Thursday’s meeting followed a lengthy session at the White House with the congressional leadership the day before. Republican leader Mitch McConnell has said his side will accept spending as much as $800 billion, but Republicans made it clear they would refuse to embrace Biden’s broad proposals or his idea of raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for the plans.
Also read: More perilous phase ahead for Biden after his 1st 100 days
The White House outreach is part political strategy and part practical legislating. Striking a deal with Republicans would give all sides a political win — a rare bipartisan accomplishment — without fully forfeiting the president’s broader goals, which are largely shared by Democrats.
It also acknowledges the “red line” that McConnell has drawn against GOP votes for undoing the 2017 tax law by raising taxes on corporations or those earning more than $400,000.
“I want to get a bipartisan deal on as much as we can get a bipartisan deal on — and that means roads, bridges, broadband, all infrastructure,” Biden said Wednesday on MSNBC. “And then fight over what’s left and see if I can get it done without Republicans, if need be.”
Capito has taken the lead for Senate Republicans, keeping in close contact with both the president’s team and McConnell, she said, as she shuttles between the White House and Capitol Hill.
The West Virginia senator is no stranger to the legislative process, serving more than a decade in the House and now as the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee. She ushered a $35 billion bipartisan water resources bill to passage in the Senate and is hard at work with the panel’s Democratic chairman, Tom Carper of Delaware, a Biden ally, on a big surface transportation bill.
Biden personally reached out to Capito late last week after the water bill cleared the Senate.
“The president he expressed on the phone with me, and has with others, that you know he’s anxious to move forward,” she said.
“His desire is to define where we have common ground and I think we’ll probably spend the bulk of the time talking about that.”
Also read: Harris, Pelosi make history seated behind Biden at speech
Biden has insisted he doesn’t want working-class Americans to bear the “burden” of paying for all the new infrastructure investments alone, resisting GOP plans for taxes and user fees, like tolls, to fund the projects.
One potential new funding source could be the more than $1 trillion in unpaid taxes each year.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has mentioned tapping that potential funding source and she said Biden discussed it at their meeting Wednesday. Republicans have not resisted it.
“That’s a big chunk that would go a long way,” she said Thursday.
McConnell and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy have insisted they want the infrastructure bills to go through the committee process, where lawmakers can hammer out the details and take ownership of the proposals, rather than have the package negotiated in their leadership suites.
Across faiths, US volunteers mobilize for India crisis
Volunteers at Hindu temples, Muslim groups and Sikh relief organizations across the United States are mobilizing to support India as the world’s second most populous country struggles to handle a devastating surge of the coronavirus.
From coast to coast, faith groups tied to the Indian diaspora have collected hundreds of oxygen concentrators and electrical transformers to ship to overwhelmed hospitals, raised millions for everything from food to firewood for funeral pyres and gathered in prayer for spiritual support for the Asian nation.
Read:11 die in India hospital due to disruption in oxygen supply
“This is a human tragedy, said Manzoor Ghori, executive director of the California-based Indian Muslim Relief and Charities, which has donated more than $1 million for purposes including supporting teachers and providing families with thousands of medical kits and more than 300,000 meals.
Ghori said he has had five loved ones, including two nephews, die in India from COVID-19 — “so, it is a personal tragedy” as well.
He’s one of many in the U.S. diaspora to have lost relatives to the virus in India, where total confirmed infections and deaths have surpassed 22.6 million and 246,000, respectively, though the true numbers are believed to be much higher.
Kashyap Patel, an Atlanta-based physician, said the pandemic has been “catastrophic” for him, with about a dozen members of his extended family in India contracting the virus, from teenagers to octogenarians, and his 73-year-old uncle dying from it.
He volunteers for the North America branch of the BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha Hindu organization, which has provided 250 oxygen concentrators and several hundred thousand dollars in COVID-19 relief to help with India’s overwhelmed health system.
“It is challenging to find hospital beds,” Patel said. “It is challenging to find oxygen, to find contemporary medicine.”
India’s Supreme Court recently said it would set up a national task force consisting of top experts and doctors to conduct an “oxygen audit” to determine whether supplies from the government were reaching states in the country of nearly 1.4 billion people amid widespread complaints of shortages.
The U.S. branch of Khalsa Aid, a U.K.-based Sikh humanitarian organization, is sending another 500 concentrators and 500 electrical transformers this week to New Delhi, where the group’s team is already helping COVID-19 patients, hospitals and NGOS with essential supplies as well as wood for cremations.
At a warehouse on New York’s Long Island, workers busily packed, sorted and labeled dozens of boxes containing transformers on a recent day ahead of their shipment.
Read:In India’s northeast there’s fear of a virus surge to come
“In these last two weeks, many of us haven’t slept. We’ve been running our day jobs at the same time,” one of the group’s directors, Manpreet Kaur said.
“It’s been an intense period of time, but for us, it’s about giving back to the community,” Kaur continued. “And the people in India definitely need that support.”
Khalsa Aid’s India relief effort has gotten grassroots support from individuals all over the country, such as Tahil Sharma, a Los Angeles-based interfaith activist born to a Hindu father and a Sikh mother. He raised nearly $3,000 on Facebook for the initiative.
“It’s a small amount for a really big crisis,” Sharma said. “But it helps mitigate the costs that Khalsa Aid needs to take upon itself sometimes in being able to get oxygen concentrators, to be able to secure beds at gurdwaras (Sikh houses of worship) on the ground in New Delhi, to help them get the resources that they need so people don’t get hit by more waves of deaths.”
Seeing individual pledges like that on social media platforms motivated members of Shri Shirdi Saibaba, a Hindu Temple in South Brunswick Township, New Jersey, to organize as a religious organization for their own effort, temple founder and chairman Rajesh Anand said. So far the temple has raised about $3,000 to buy concentrators for two hospitals in New Delhi.
“We are one among many to help the cause,” Anand said.
In the New York City borough of Queens, the Hindu Temple Society of North America has also been fundraising online and has so far donated more than $50,000 to the India Development and Relief Fund in Washington, D.C., for concentrators and other medical needs.
The temple also organized special group prayers for those who have died of COVID-19 and a virtual vigil featuring music, prayer and speeches by interfaith leaders and elected officials.
“When we learned more about the difficulties the country was facing,” said Ravi Vaidyanaat, the temple’s director of religious affairs, “we immediately thought we had to do something.”
Support for India has come, too, from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which sent ventilators to hospitals in Mumbai and Ahmedabad and personal protective equipment to rural communities. It is also recruiting U.S. and Israeli intensive-care doctors and nurses for a telemedicine training program.
Read:India reports 366,161 new COVID-19 cases
“In the efforts that we’re making in India ... what we keep in mind is that with each action that we engage in, we can save one life,” said Michael Geller, the group’s director of communications and media relations. “And that one life represents an entire world of people who can be impacted.”
Nepal, India’s much-smaller neighbor, is seeing its own pandemic spike, with doctors there warning recently of a major crisis as hospitals run out of beds and oxygen. That has prompted similar aid efforts by Nepalese in the United States.
“It’s a landlocked country, and there’s a lack of resources there. ... The situation in Nepal is very bad,” said Urgen Sherpa, a former president and current adviser of New York City’s United Sherpa Association, which has raised about $5,000 for Nepal.
Pfizer COVID-19 shot expanded to US children as young as 12
U.S. regulators on Monday expanded the use of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to children as young as 12, offering a way to protect the nation’s adolescents before they head back to school in the fall and paving the way for them to return to more normal activities.
Shots could begin as soon as Thursday, after a federal vaccine advisory committee issues recommendations for using the two-dose vaccine in 12- to 15-year-olds. An announcement is expected Wednesday.
Most COVID-19 vaccines worldwide have been authorized for adults. Pfizer’s vaccine is being used in multiple countries for teens as young as 16, and Canada recently became the first to expand use to 12 and up. Parents, school administrators and public health officials elsewhere have eagerly awaited approval for the shot to be made available to more kids.
Read:Vaccine deserts: Some countries have no COVID-19 jabs at all
“This is a watershed moment in our ability to fight back the COVID-19 pandemic,” Dr. Bill Gruber, a Pfizer senior vice president who’s also a pediatrician, told The Associated Press.
The Food and Drug Administration declared that the Pfizer vaccine is safe and offers strong protection for younger teens based on testing of more than 2,000 U.S. volunteers ages 12 to 15. The agency noted there were no cases of COVID-19 among fully vaccinated adolescents compared with 16 among kids given dummy shots. More intriguing, researchers found the kids developed higher levels of virus-fighting antibodies than earlier studies measured in young adults.
The younger teens received the same vaccine dosage as adults and had the same side effects, mostly sore arms and flu-like fever, chills or aches that signal a revved-up immune system, especially after the second dose.
Pfizer’s testing in adolescents “met our rigorous standards,” FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks said. “Having a vaccine authorized for a younger population is a critical step in continuing to lessen the immense public health burden caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech recently requested similar authorization in the European Union, with other countries to follow.
The latest news is welcome for U.S. families struggling to decide what activities are safe to resume when the youngest family members remain unvaccinated.
“I can’t feel totally comfortable because my boys aren’t vaccinated,” said Carrie Vittitoe, a substitute teacher and freelance writer in Louisville, Kentucky, who is fully vaccinated, as are her husband and 17-year-old daughter.
The FDA decision means her 13-year-old son soon could be eligible, leaving only her 11-year-old son unvaccinated. The family has not yet resumed going to church, and summer vacation will be a road trip so they do not have to get on a plane.
Read: Vexed over vaccines
“We can’t really go back to normal because two-fifths of our family don’t have protection,” Vittitoe said.
President Joe Biden said Monday’s decision marked another important step in the nation’s march back to regular life.
“The light at the end of the tunnel is growing, and today it got a little brighter,” Biden said in a statement.
Pfizer is not the only company seeking to lower the age limit for its vaccine. Moderna recently said preliminary results from its study in 12- to 17-year-olds show strong protection and no serious side effects. Another U.S. company, Novavax, has a COVID-19 vaccine in late-stage development and just began a study in 12- to 17-year-olds.
Next up is testing whether the vaccine works for even younger children. Both Pfizer and Moderna have begun U.S. studies in children ages 6 months to 11 years. Those studies explore whether babies, preschoolers and elementary-age kids will need different doses than teens and adults. Gruber said Pfizer expects its first results in the fall.
Outside of the U.S., AstraZeneca is studying its vaccine among 6- to 17-year-olds in Britain. And in China, Sinovac recently announced that it has submitted preliminary data to Chinese regulators showing its vaccine is safe in children as young as 3.
Children are far less likely than adults to get seriously ill from COVID-19, yet they represent nearly 14% of the nation’s coronavirus cases. At least 296 have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. alone, and more than 15,000 have been hospitalized, according to a tally by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
That’s not counting the toll of family members becoming ill or dying -- or the disruption to school, sports and other activities so crucial to children’s overall well-being.
The AAP welcomed the FDA’s decision.
Read:Russian Vaccine Sputnik V: Things we should know to fight COVID-19
“Our youngest generations have shouldered heavy burdens over the past year, and the vaccine is a hopeful sign that they will be able to begin to experience all the activities that are so important for their health and development,” said AAP President Dr. Lee Savio Beers in a statement.
Experts say children must get the shots if the country is to vaccinate the 70% to 85% of the population necessary to reach what’s called herd immunity.
In the meantime, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says unvaccinated people — including children — should continue taking precautions such as wearing masks indoors and keeping their distance from other unvaccinated people outside of their households.
Man kills 6, then self, at Colorado birthday party shooting
A gunman opened fire at a birthday party in Colorado, slaying six adults before killing himself Sunday, police said.
The shooting happened just after midnight in a mobile home park on the east side of Colorado Springs, police said.
Officers arrived at a trailer to find six dead adults and a man with serious injuries who died later at a hospital, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported.
Also Read:Police: 3 hurt in Florida mall shooting as shoppers scatter
The suspected shooter was the boyfriend of a female victim at the party attended by friends, family and children. He walked inside and opened fire before shooting himself, police said.
The birthday party was for one of the people killed, police said.
Neighbor Yenifer Reyes told The Denver Post she woke to the sound of many gunshots.
“I thought it was a thunderstorm,” Reyes said. “Then I started hearing sirens.”
Police brought children out of the trailer and put them into at least one patrol car, she said, adding that the children were “crying hysterically.”
Authorities say the children, who weren’t hurt in the attack, have been placed with relatives.
Police on Sunday hadn’t released the identities of the shooter or victims. Authorities say a motive wasn’t immediately known.
“My heart breaks for the families who have lost someone they love and for the children who have lost their parents,” Colorado Springs Police Chief Vince Niski said in a statement.
Also Read: Sheriff: Girl shoots 3 at Idaho school; teacher disarms her
It was Colorado’s worst mass shooting since a gunman killed 10 people at a Boulder supermarket March 22.
“The tragic shooting in Colorado Springs is devastating,” Gov. Jared Polis said Sunday, “especially as many of us are spending the day celebrating the women in our lives who have made us the people we are today.”
Colorado Springs, population 465,000, is Colorado’s second-biggest city after Denver.
In 2015, a man shot three people to death at random before dying in a shootout with police in Colorado Springs on Halloween. Less than a month later, a man killed three people, including a police officer, and injured eight others in a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in the city.
Police: 3 hurt in Florida mall shooting as shoppers scatter
A shooting at a South Florida shopping mall that was sparked by a fight between two groups of people sent panicked shoppers fleeing and left three persons injured Saturday afternoon, police and witnesses said.
Live aerial television news footage showed people scattering outside the Aventura Mall after the initial reports of gunfire. Law enforcement vehicles could be seen converging at the complex and blocking roads.
Aventura Police said two groups of people had begun fighting before it escalated to gunfire.
One individual in one of the groups produced a gun, and an individual in the other group also drew a gun and fired that weapon, said an Aventura police spokesman, Michael Bentolila, in briefing reporters on live television.
Also Read:Sheriff: Girl shoots 3 at Idaho school; teacher disarms her
Police said the three wounded were taken to hospitals but their injuries were not life-threatening.
Aventura Police later tweeted that authorities had “several suspects” in custody who were being questioned by detectives. Police had no immediate report on what touched off the incident and did not immediately release the identities of those in custody or injured.
After the shooting, mall patrons and employees were led out of the shopping complex and officials announced the mall would not reopen until Sunday.
Oscar Alvarado, a worker at the mall, said the complex was bustling with a strong Mother’s Day weekend crowd when the chaos erupted. He said it wasn’t the first shooting at the mall that he’s experienced.
“This time I do have to say I could hear the screams from so far away. I could clearly hear the people were really, really worried and concerned,” he said. “They were yelling `shooter, shooter.′ ”
Alvarado recorded video of two police officers moving down the mall walkway after the shooting with their guns drawn. And he described waiting for about an hour with coworkers before they could evacuate.
“There was a lot of commotion outside, a lot of people crying and stressed,” he said of the scene outdoors.
Videos shared on social media community forums show officers who appeared to be taking a man in custody outside the mall. Other footage showed shoppers running out of stores or seeking cover.
Luke Lockart, 22, said he was in Armani Exchange, checking out, when he heard screaming and things falling over because people were running into the store and knocking over mannequins.
“They were trying to hide anywhere they could because no one knew what was going on,” said Lockart, who works in real estate.
The staff at the store eventually locked the doors and asked people to go into a back room, he said. Police and first responders were running through a nearby hallway within minutes. “They were on top of it,” Lockart said.
He followed updates on social media, saying “it was a very uneasy feeling” as he spent more than an hour in the store before police escorted everyone out.
Also read:2 killed in shooting at Wisconsin casino; gunman slain
Aventura City Manager Ron Wasson told The Miami Herald that authorities were sweeping the complex afterward in case someone dropped a firearm.
“They just want to make sure if someone might have dumped a weapon, we don’t miss it,” he told the newspaper.
Aventura Mall bills itself on its online site as a premier shopping destination in the Miami area and South Florida.
In May 2020, two people were wounded and taken to a hospital after an argument led to a shooting inside the same mall. Police said that shooting also followed an argument.
Major US pipeline halts operations after ransomware attack
The operator of a major pipeline system that transports fuel across the East Coast said Saturday that it had been victimized by a ransomware attack and that it had halted all pipeline operations to deal with the threat. The attack is unlikely to affect gasoline supply and prices unless it leads to a prolonged shutdown of the pipeline, experts said.
Colonial Pipeline did not say what was demanded or by whom, but ransomware attacks are typically carried out by criminal hackers who seize data and demand a large payment in order to release it.
The attack on a pipeline operator, which says it delivers roughly 45% of all fuel consumed on the East Coast, underscored again the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure to cyberattacks both by criminal hackers and U.S. adversaries. It presents a new challenge for an administration still grappling with its response to major hacks from months ago, including a massive breach of government agencies and corporations for which the U.S. sanctioned Russia last month.
In this case, Colonial Pipeline said the ransomware attack Friday affected some of its information technology systems and that the company moved “proactively” to take certain systems online, halting pipeline operations.
The Alpharetta, Georgia-based company transports gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and home heating oil from refineries primarily located on the Gulf Coast through pipelines running from Texas to New Jersey.
The company said it hired a cybersecurity firm to investigate the nature and scope of the attack and has also contacted law enforcement and federal agencies.
In a statement late Friday, Colonial Pipeline said it was “taking steps to understand and resolve this issue,” focused primarily on ”the safe and efficient restoration of our service and our efforts to return to normal operation.” It said it was “working diligently to address this matter and to minimize disruption to our customers and those who rely on Colonial Pipeline.”
While there have long been fears about U.S. adversaries disrupting American energy suppliers, ransomware attacks by criminal syndicates are much more common and have been soaring lately.
Oil analyst Andy Lipow said the impact of the attack on fuel supplies and prices depends on how long the pipeline is down. An outage of one or two days would be minimal, he said, but an outage of five or six days could cause shortages and price hikes, particularly in an area stretching from central Alabama to the Washington, D.C., area.
Lipow said a key concern about a lengthy delay would be the supply of jet fuel needed to keep major airports operating, like those in Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina.
A leading expert in industrial control systems, Dragos CEO Robert Lee, said systems such as those that directly manage the pipeline’s operation have been increasingly connected to computer networks in the past decade.
But critical infrastructure companies in the energy and electricity industries also tend to have invested more in cybersecurity than other sectors. If Colonial’s shutdown was mostly precautionary — and it detected the ransomware attack early and was well-prepared — the impact may not be great, Lee said.
Ransomware scrambles a victim organization’s data with encryption. The criminals leave instructions on infected computers for how to negotiate ransom payments and, once paid, provide software decryption keys.
Mike Chapple, teaching professor of IT, analytics and operations at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business and a former computer scientist with the National Security Agency, said systems that control pipelines should not be connected to the internet and vulnerable to cyber intrusions.
“The attacks were extremely sophisticated and they were able to defeat some pretty sophisticated security controls, or the right degree of security controls weren’t in place,” Chapple said.
Brian Bethune, a professor of applied economics at Boston College, also said the impact on consumer prices should be short-lived as long as the shutdown does not last for more than a week or two. “But it is an indication of how vulnerable our infrastructure is to these kinds of cyberattacks,” he said.
Bethune noted the shutdown is occurring at a time when energy prices have already been rising as the economy reopens further as pandemic restrictions are lifted. According to the AAA auto club, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline has increased by four cents since Monday to $2.94.
Colonial Pipeline said it transports more than 100 million gallons of fuel daily, through a pipeline system spanning more than 5,500 miles.
The FBI and the White House’s National Security Council did not immediately return messages seeking comment. The federal Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency referred questions about the incident to the company.
A hacker’s botched attempt to poison the water supply of a small Florida city raised alarms about how vulnerable the nation’s critical infrastructure may be to attacks by more sophisticated intruders.
Anne Neuberger, the Biden administration’s deputy national security adviser for cybersecurity and emerging technology, said in an interview with The Associated Press in April that the government was undertaking a new effort to help electric utilities, water districts and other critical industries protect against potentially damaging cyberattacks. She said the goal was to ensure that control systems serving 50,000 or more Americans have the core technology to detect and block malicious cyber activity.
Since then, the White House has announced a 100-day initiative aimed at protecting the country’s electricity system from cyberattacks by encouraging owners and operators of power plants and electric utilities to improve their capabilities for identifying cyber threats to their networks. It includes concrete milestones for them to put technologies into use so they can spot and respond to intrusions in real time. The Justice Department has also announced a new task force dedicated to countering ransomware attacks.
Weak jobs report spurs new arguments over big fed spending
President Joe Biden insists an unexpected slowdown in companies’ hiring is clear new proof the U.S. needs the multitrillion-dollar federal boost he’s pushing. But his sales effort is challenged by critics who say Friday’s jobless figures show his earlier aid legislation — successfully rushed through Congress — is actually doing more harm than good.
Biden’s promised economic comeback hardly stalled on Friday. But it seemed to sputter a bit with a report that found merely modest April job gains of 266,000 and complicated his new $4 trillion push for infrastructure, education and children.
The employment report failed to show that the U.S. economy was accelerating so much as stutter-stepping along as the unemployment rate ticked up to 6.1%. Economists had projected roughly one million added jobs last month, and the modest hiring indicated that the earlier $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package has provided an uneven boost so far.
The figures present Biden with a fresh challenge at a critical moment in his presidency. He is betting that an open embrace of massive government spending will help resolve the nation’s public health and financial turmoil — and lift the political prospects for Democrats heading into next year’s elections. But the disappointing jobs numbers could also embolden his critics and stiffen the Republican resistance to the infrastructure package Biden is trying to push through Congress.
Also read: Biden aims to vaccinate 70% of American adults by July 4
Addressing the report, Biden sought to ease concerns.
“We knew this wouldn’t be a sprint—it’d be a marathon,” he said. The pandemic relief package “was designed to help us over the course of a year, not 60 days. A year. We never thought that after the first 50 or 60 days everything would be fine. Today, there’s more evidence our economy is moving in the right direction. But it’s clear we have a long way to go.”
Biden’s opponents say the legislation actually worsened problems in at least one way, with expanded unemployment benefits that gave the jobless a reason to stay at home instead of seeking work.
The president said the jobs data don’t show that. And advocates for his plans argue that the report shows more spending is needed to sustain the economy.
There are also issues of supply shortages — for computer chips, lumber and more — that are holding back growth, a reminder that the world’s largest economy seldom bends perfectly to the wishes of lawmakers.
The fate of the president’s agenda may depend on how the public processes and understands the April jobs report in the coming weeks, said Jon Lieber, a managing director at the Eurasia Group, a political risk advisory and consulting firm.
“Are the Republicans able to seize on this as, ‘This is what happens when the government gets involved in the economy and screws things up?’ Or, does the public see this as the need for more government support?” Lieber said. “That’s the argument for the next month.”
One clear takeaway across partisan lines was a need for caution in interpretation. A single monthly report can be volatile. The three-month average of job gains is still a healthy 524,000.
Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, noted that many businesses have said they cannot find workers to hire despite increases in hourly pay. Strain said he plans to monitor upcoming reports to see if that pattern holds in what could be a troubling sign for Biden’s vision of how to generate growth through government spending.
“If we continue to hear a growing chorus of businesses complaining about worker shortages and if wages continue to rise, then it will be tempting to conclude that a lot of the 8 million jobs we are currently missing aren’t coming back,” Strain said.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents businesses, put the blame squarely on the relatively generous unemployment benefits that Biden extended as part of his relief package. The group said the checks prevent people from accepting jobs.
“One step policymakers should take now is ending the $300 weekly supplemental unemployment benefit,” said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the Chamber. “Based on the Chamber’s analysis, the $300 benefit results in approximately one in four recipients taking home more in unemployment than they earned working.”
Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said he has heard companies say they’re struggling to find workers, but he didn’t see those concerns reflected in the jobs report. For example, restaurants and bars added 187,000 jobs last month even though workers in that relatively low-wage sector would, in theory, have an incentive to just collect unemployment.
The jobs report hinted at other factors that could strengthen Biden’s agenda. It showed losses for women, who were forced into caregiver roles for children and relatives because of the pandemic. The family demands stopped them from holding outside jobs.
There was a drop of 165,000 for women over the age of 20 last month who were holding or seeking jobs. By contrast, men saw gains of 355,000 in labor force participation.
One way to bring women back could be Biden’s plans to fund child care, create a national family leave program and expand the child tax credit through 2025 — the idea being that government action is needed to unlock the job market.
“When you start squinting at this data to figure out what is going on, it looks like you need more government to get past a labor shortage,” said Michael Madowitz, an economist at the liberal Center for American Progress.
Also read: More perilous phase ahead for Biden after his 1st 100 days
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi cited the “disappointing” jobs report as proof that Biden’s $4 trillion agenda must be approved quickly.
“The evidence is clear that the economy demands urgent action, and Congress will not be deterred or delayed from delivering transformational investments for the people,” the Democratic congressional leader said.
Prospects dim for passage of LGBTQ rights bill in Senate
Controlling Congress and the White House for the first time in a decade, Democrats were hopeful that this would be the year they finally secured civil rights protections for LGBTQ Americans.
Then came a new debate over women’s and girls sports.
Legislation that would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is running aground in the Senate, partly knocked off course by the nationwide conservative push against transgender participation in girls and women’s athletics that has swept state legislatures and now spilled into the halls of Congress.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said the House-passed legislation would “in effect repeal Title IX” by making it easier for transgender women to play on girls teams. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., said that allowing “male-bodied athletes” to compete against females would “totally undermine” girls basketball. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., said the bill would “decimate” female athletic competition.
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Democrats are frustrated by the shift in the debate, saying there’s ample evidence that the Republican claims are false and overblown.
The International Olympic Committee has allowed transgender athletes to compete for years under specific parameters, and, to date, there have been no known transgender women compete in the Olympics. Only one known transgender woman has competed at the Division I level in the NCAA. And though legislators in around 30 states have introduced legislation to ban or limit transgender athletes from competing on teams that align with their gender identity, few lawmakers have been able to cite specific cases in their home states where it became an issue.
“We are waiting for this avalanche of problems,” said the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, characterizing the Republicans’ argument. “They haven’t really surfaced.”
But Republicans are unyielding in their opposition to the legislation, spurred on by conservative groups who are pushing anti-transgender laws nationwide. With no Republicans signed on, for now, Democrats are unlikely to win the 60 votes needed to pass the Equality Act, potentially putting the issue in limbo indefinitely.
“It’s very discouraging, but in many ways not surprising, that Republicans are so focused on the trans community to build up opposition,” said Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I. He called the GOP arguments over sports a solution in search of a problem.
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Sports are just the latest front in the decadeslong GOP culture war over LGBTQ rights that has focused increasingly on transgender Americans since 2015, when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. Conservative groups including The Heritage Foundation, Family Policy Alliance and the Christian legal network Alliance Defending Freedom have been engaged for much of the past two decades in advocacy against the LGBTQ rights movement. An earlier push by those groups to enact laws requiring transgender people to use public bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate sputtered amid backlash.
Republicans contend the Equality Act would open the floodgates for transgender girls and women to play on female sports teams and hurt others’ chances to compete. While the bill does not explicitly mention sports or touch Title IX protections against sex-based discrimination, they say extending the protections to gender identity would eliminate “private spaces” for cisgender women, including sports teams.
They have repeatedly pointed to one example in Connecticut, where two transgender high school runners in Connecticut won several championships. A lawsuit filed by the runners’ teammates was recently thrown out.
“I have to say, as the father of two young girls, that girls sports has had a profound impact in their lives,” Cruz said at a hearing on the bill.
“The discipline, the teamwork, the camaraderie, the competitiveness, that girls sports teaches, is effectively destroyed from this bill.”
Christiana Holcomb, a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, contends that the Equality Act would supersede Title IX “and force vulnerable girls to share intimate spaces with men who identify as female.”
GOP opposition to the bill goes beyond sports, however. Republicans have stalled earlier iterations of the legislation while making different arguments, including that it would infringe on religious freedom.
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Democrats say that none of those objections hold weight and that it’s long past time to make clear that the nation’s civil rights laws explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identification. Passage of the law would outlaw discrimination in employment, housing, loan applications, education, public accommodations and other areas, as it did for women and racial minorities in an earlier era.
President Joe Biden pushed for the bill in his address to Congress last month, speaking directly to transgender Americans “watching at home, especially young people, who are so brave. I want you to know, your president has your back.”
The lead sponsors of the bill, Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Cicilline, say they know they have work to do. Merkley says he is working with Republicans and civil rights organizations “to find a path forward that will bring senators together behind a vision of full equality for LGBTQ Americans.”
The legislation has support from the Women’s Sports Foundation, a group that has advocated for women’s and girls sports for more than 40 years. The group says the GOP narrative on transgender athletes is a distraction from more important issues, including pay inequity and the harassment and abuse of female athletes.
“Let us be clear, there are many real threats to girls’ and women’s access and opportunity in sports,” the group said. “However, transgender inclusion is not one of them.”
Many of the state legislators who have pushed the bills to ban transgender girls from competing on girls sports teams couldn’t cite any local examples, according to a review by The Associated Press in March. The AP reached out to two dozen state lawmakers sponsoring such measures as well as the conservative groups supporting them and found only a few times it’s been an issue among the hundreds of thousands of American teenagers who play high school sports.
Stella Keating, a 16-year-old transgender girl from Washington state, testified to the Senate that she wanted to join her school’s bowling team because her friends were on it.
“I can tell you that the majority of transgender people who join sports just want to hang out with their friends,” Keating said. “And that’s basically it.”
Online speech shield under fire as Trump Facebook ban stays
Lurking beneath Facebook’s decision on whether to continue Donald Trump’s suspension from its platform is a far more complex and consequential question: Do the protections carved out for companies when the internet was in its infancy 25 years ago make sense when some of them have become global powerhouses with almost unlimited reach?
The companies have provided a powerful megaphone for Trump, other world leaders and billions of users to air their grievances, even ones that are false or damaging to someone’s reputation, knowing that the platforms themselves were shielded from liability for content posted by users.
Now that shield is getting a critical look in the current climate of hostility toward Big Tech and the social environment of political polarization, hate speech and violence against minorities.
The debate is starting to take root in Congress, and the action this week by Facebook’s quasi-independent oversight board upholding the company’s suspension of Trump’s accounts could add momentum to that legislative effort.
Under the 1996 Communications Decency Act, digital platform companies have legal protection both for content they carry and for removing postings they deem offensive. The shelter from lawsuits and prosecution applies to social media posts, uploaded videos, user reviews of restaurants or doctors, classified ads — or the doxing underworld of thousands of websites that profit from false and defamatory information on individuals.
Section 230 of the law, which outlines the shield, was enacted when many of the most powerful social media companies didn’t even exist. It allowed companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google to grow into the behemoths they are today.
Republicans accuse the social media platforms of suppressing conservative voices and giving a stage to foreign leaders branded as dictators, while Trump is barred. Democrats and civil rights groups decry the digital presence of far-right extremists and pin blame on the platforms for disseminating hate speech and stoking extremist violence.
“For too long, social media platforms have hidden behind Section 230 protections to censor content that deviates from their beliefs,” Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the senior Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, has said.
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On this, Trump and President Joe Biden apparently agree. Trump, while president, called for the repeal of Section 230, branding it “a serious threat to our national security and election integrity.” Biden said during his campaign that it “immediately should be revoked,” though he hasn’t spoken about the issue at length as president.
Facebook, with a strong lobbying presence in Washington and a desire to have an input into any changes, has stepped out in favor of revisions to Section 230. Congress should update the 1996 law “to make sure it’s working as intended,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said. And he’s offered a specific suggestion: Congress could require internet platforms to gain legal protection only by proving that their systems for identifying illegal content are up to snuff.
Some critics see a clever gambit in that, a requirement that could make it more difficult for smaller tech companies and startups to comply and would ultimately advantage Facebook over smaller competitors.
Spokespeople for Twitter and Google declined to comment on the prospects for legislative action on Section 230 following the Facebook board ruling; a spokesperson for Menlo Park, California-based Facebook had no immediate comment.
The decision announced by the Facebook oversight board upheld the suspension of Trump, an extremely rare move that was based on the company’s conclusion that he incited violence leading to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But the overseers told Facebook to specify how long the suspension would last, saying its “indefinite” ban on the former president was unreasonable. The ruling, which gives Facebook six months to comply, effectively postpones any possible Trump reinstatement and puts the onus for that decision squarely back on the company.
Trump was permanently banned after the riot from Twitter, his favored bullhorn. But it was Facebook that played an integral role in both of Trump’s campaigns, not just as a way to speak to his more than 32 million followers but also as a fundraising juggernaut driving small-dollar contributions through highly targeted ads.
Critics of Facebook generally saw the oversight board’s ruling as positive. But some view the board as a distraction by Facebook to skirt its responsibility and to stave off action by Congress or the Biden administration. What must be addressed, critics insist, are the broader problems for society from the fearsome power, market dominance and underlying business model of Facebook and the other tech giants — harvesting data from platform users and making it available to online advertisers so they can pinpoint consumers to target.
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That’s where the debate over changes to Section 230 comes in, as a key area for new regulation of social media.
Gautam Hans, a technology law and free-speech expert and professor at Vanderbilt University, said he finds the board to be “a bit of a sideshow from the larger policy and social questions that we have about these companies.”