Job Openings Unexpectedly Plunge In August To Lowest Level Since June 2021
Job Openings Unexpectedly Plunge In August To Lowest Level Since June 2021 https://digitalarizonanews.com/job-openings-unexpectedly-plunge-in-august-to-lowest-level-since-june-2021/
U.S. job openings unexpectedly dropped in August to the lowest level in over a year as the Federal Reserve tries to bring down near-record high inflation and cool the labor market.
The Labor Department said Tuesday that there were 10.1 million job openings in August – a major decline from the previous month’s revised reading of 11.17 million.
Still, the number of available jobs has topped 10 million for 15 consecutive months; before the pandemic began in February 2020, the highest on record was 7.7 million.
“The broad-based decline in job openings across sectors in the US shows a slight loosening in the labor market,” said Jeffrey Roach, chief economist for the Charlotte-based LPL Financial. “But overall, still tight.”
THE FED’S WAR ON INFLATION COULD COST 1M JOBS
A hiring sign is posted at a Target store on August 05, 2022 in San Rafael, California. ((Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) / Getty Images)
The Federal Reserve closely watches these figures as it tries to gauge labor market tightness; the lower-than-expected number of openings could provide some relief for policymakers as they try to slow the economy and cool painfully high inflation.
Despite the loosening in the labor market, Roach said he does not anticipate “a change in the Fed’s likely actions at the next meeting. In our view, the labor market moved from ‘extremely tight’ to just ‘very tight,’ and the Fed will likely respond by another 0.75% increase in the Fed funds rate next month.”
SEVERE RECESSION NEEDED TO COOL INFLATION, BANK OF AMERICA ANALYSTS SAY
Meanwhile, the number of Americans quitting their jobs rose to 4.2 million, or about 2.7% of the workforce – below the high of 4.5 million recorded earlier this year, but well above the pre-pandemic level of about 3.6 million. Hiring was also mostly unchanged at 6.3 million.
Switching jobs has been a windfall for many workers over the past year, with employees seeing an average 6.7% annual wage growth rate – a marked increase from the 4.9% of workers who do not switch jobs, according to the Atlanta Fed.
Jerome Powell, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, arrives to speak during a news conference following a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in Washington, D.C., on Sept 21, 2022. (Photographer: Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
The Fed has responded to the inflation crisis and the extremely tight labor market by raising interest rates at the fastest pace in decades. Officials approved three consecutive 75-basis-point rate hikes in June, July and September, and have signaled that another of that magnitude is on the table in November.
Chairman Jerome Powell has conceded that higher rates could “give rise to increases in unemployment.”
“We think we need to have softer labor market conditions,” Powell said. “And if we want to set ourselves up really light the way to another period of a very strong labor market, we have got to get inflation behind us. I wish there were a painless way to do that. There isn’t.”
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The data precedes the release of the September jobs report on Friday morning, which is expected to show that employers hired 250,000 workers following a gain of 315,000 in July. The unemployment rate is expected to hold steady at 3.7%.
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Russian Journalist Who Protested On Live Television Escapes House Arrest | CNN Business
Russian Journalist Who Protested On Live Television Escapes House Arrest | CNN Business https://digitalarizonanews.com/russian-journalist-who-protested-on-live-television-escapes-house-arrest-cnn-business/
CNN —
Marina Ovsyannikova, a Russian journalist who staged a daring protest live on state-run television, has been declared a fugitive after going on the run, Russian media reported.
Ovsyannikova was placed under house arrest in August. She had been charged with disseminating false information about the Russian military after participating in a protest in July, according to Russian state-run news agency TASS. Her detention was supposed to last until Sunday.
Ovsyannikova’s ex-husband said that she had escaped house arrest with her daughter on Saturday, TASS reported. Her lawyer, Dmitry Zakhvatov, said he could not confirm those allegations.
“All I know is that she’s gone,” Zakhvatov told CNN.
Ovsyannikova has been added to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs’ “wanted list,” TASS reported on Monday.
The 44-year-old journalist shot to international fame in March when, as an editor at Russia’s state-controlled Channel One television station, she stood behind an anchor and held up a sign that read “No War” during a live broadcast.
The Kremlin described her actions as “hooliganism,” a criminal offense in Russia. Following her protest, Ovsyannikova was arrested, interrogated for more than 14 hours, released and fined 30,000 rubles (around $500).
A Moscow court found her guilty of organizing an “unauthorized public event” and she fled Russia, but returned in July, according to her official Facebook page.
Ovsyannikova was later fined 50,000 rubles (around $820) over a video recorded on July 13 in which she spoke out against the conflict.
She also shared content of herself holding a one-woman anti-war demonstration on an embankment opposite the Kremlin in Moscow on July 15.
The on-air protest was particularly risky for Ovsyannikova, as it came during an increased crackdown on both political dissent and freedom of the press, forcing local Russian media to curtail their coverage of the invasion or shut down altogether. International news networks including CNN temporarily suspended broadcasting from Russia in the days that followed the invasion.
Ovsyannikova said she felt “ashamed” of her work at Channel One, which she said was effectively peddling Kremlin propaganda. But after the invasion, she said she felt it was “impossible to stay silent” and wanted the world to know that many disagreed with the war.
“The decision was brewing for quite a long time,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour shortly after the initial protest. “The war was the point of no return, when it was simply impossible to stay silent.”
Speaking to CNN from Germany in May, where she was working as a correspondent for the newspaper Die Welt, Ovsyannikova said she was subject to online harassment, bullying and attempts to discredit her — including from Ukrainians who disapproved of a former Russian propagandist covering the conflict.
— David Goldman and Joshua Berlinger contributed to this report.
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Mississippi State Coach Mike Leach: Consistently Good Trumps Occasionally Great The Dispatch
Mississippi State Coach Mike Leach: Consistently Good Trumps Occasionally Great – The Dispatch https://digitalarizonanews.com/mississippi-state-coach-mike-leach-consistently-good-trumps-occasionally-great-the-dispatch/
STARKVILLE — Winning big in the Southeastern Conference is about more than being at the top of your game.
It’s playing at the top of your game almost every time you compete.
Mississippi State coach Mike Leach has called for that type of consistency from his players, well, consistently.
On Saturday, the Bulldogs delivered their best game of the season in a 42-24 not-that-close win over then-No. 17 Texas A&M.
It was the newly ranked Bulldogs’ sixth win over a ranked team in 2 1/2 seasons under Leach. No. 23 Mississippi State is at home at 11 a.m. Saturday against Arkansas.
Preseason polls for various reasons aren’t often a good barometer for the Bulldogs. Those who peeled back the layers on this team in August saw an experienced group on both sides with a strong defense and an accomplished quarterback.
Expectations were created, and the Bulldogs didn’t deliver their best version, not even close, at LSU.
They were not perfect against A&M, but they were better.
Twice in the second quarter they stopped A&M drives deep in MSU territory by forcing turnovers.
That allowed the offense to create separation. When the Aggies gained their footing and began to score, the Bulldogs answered each time.
State scored on offense, defense and special teams, and as all three phases contributed, a patchwork offensive line did not allow a sack as the offense finished just shy of 500 yards.
“That’s what you want: You want to have complementary football where all phases are holding up their end,” Leach said at his Monday press conference.
It was a great beginning to the most challenging month on the schedule.
The question now is whether the Bulldogs can produce Saturday’s play on a more regular basis.
Leach has called this unit a good practice team. That’s important, obviously, but midweek preparation and game-day execution are different things. Both ends have to connect to see the product State delivered against Texas A&M.
The Bulldogs won’t always catch an opponent in its first game without a talented playmaker as the Aggies were without receiver Ainias Smith.
Ironically, that could happen again this week as Arkansas quarterback KJ Jefferson’s status is unclear after getting hit in the head against Alabama.
It’s a long way to Saturday.
“An awful lot of times it looks like somebody’s out, and he comes in there, and there isn’t anything wrong with him,” Leach said.
The gap between MSU and A&M was bigger than Smith’s presence would have covered.
The Bulldogs sacked and harassed A&M quarterbacks and took the Aggies’ offense out of rhythm.
The Bulldogs, with a level of play missing in Week 3, scratched the SEC itch after the disappointing loss at LSU. They got a reminder of what’s required to win SEC games, and maybe that makes it easier for Leach to coax more consistency from them.
The Arkansas team that visits Saturday lost to A&M in Arlington, Texas.
Unfortunately, the transitive property that applies in mathematics doesn’t always make sense in college football.
The Bulldogs are 1-0 in October and in their last game looked like a team that can do some good things in this season-defining month.
“Sometimes players need to understand the difference between being consistently good and occasionally great,” Leach said. “The most valuable guy is the guy that’s consistently good, the guy you can count on every play.”
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How To Get Away With Insurrection: The Techniques Of Denial And Distraction That Politicians Use To Managescandal
How To Get Away With Insurrection: The Techniques Of Denial And Distraction That Politicians Use To Manage scandal https://digitalarizonanews.com/how-to-get-away-with-insurrection-the-techniques-of-denial-and-distraction-that-politicians-use-to-manage-scandal/
The U.S. House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection intends to hold another public hearing, likely the last before it releases its official report. The hearing had been scheduled for Sept. 28, 2022 but was postponed because of Hurricane Ian.
Through earlier hearings this past summer, the committee has shown how former President Donald Trump and close associates spread the “big lie” of a stolen election. The hearings have also shown how Trump stoked the rage of protesters who marched to the U.S. Capitol and then refused to act when they breached the building.
The hearings have aired in prime time and dominated news cycles. Still, polling conducted in August by Monmouth University found that around 3 in 10 Americans still believe that Trump “did nothing wrong regarding January 6.”
As a sociologist who studies denial, I analyze how people ignore clear truths and use rhetoric to convince others to deny them, too. Politicians and their media allies have long used this rhetoric to manage scandals. Trump and his supporters’ responses to the Jan. 6 investigation are no exception.
Stages of denial
Commonly, people think of denial as a state of being: Someone is “in denial” when they reject obvious truths. However, denial also consists of linguistic strategies that people use to downplay their misconduct and avoid responsibility for it.
These strategies are remarkably adaptable. They’ve been used by both political parties to manage wildly different scandals. Even so, the strategies tend to be used in fairly predictable ways. Because of this, we can often see scandals unfold through clear stages of denial.
In my previous research on denial and U.S. torture, I analyzed how the George W. Bush administration and supporters in Congress adjusted the forms of denial they used as new allegations and evidence of abuses in the global “war on terror” became public.
For instance, after photographs of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were released in the spring of 2004, Abu Ghraib was described as a deplorable but isolated incident. At the time, there wasn’t serious public evidence of detainee abuse at other U.S. facilities.
Later revelations about the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay and secret CIA black sites changed things. The Bush administration could no longer claim that torture was an isolated incident. Officials also faced allegations that they had directly and knowingly authorized torture.
An exhibit on torture includes a section on waterboarding in the International Spy Museum in Washington in 2019. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Facing these allegations, Bush and his supporters began justifying and downplaying torture. To many Americans, torture, once deplorable, was rebranded as an acceptable national security tool: “enhanced interrogation.”
As the debate about torture shows, political responses to scandal often begin with outright denials. But rarely do they end there. When politicians face credible evidence of political misconduct, they often try other forms of denial. Instead of saying allegations are untrue, they may downplay the seriousness of allegations, justify their behavior or try to distract from it.
It’s not just Republican administrations that use denial in this way. When the Obama administration could no longer outright deny civilian casualties caused by drone strikes, it downplayed them. In a 2013 national security speech, President Barack Obama contrasted drone strikes with the use of “conventional air power or missiles,” which he described as “far less precise.” He also justified drone strikes, arguing that “to do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties.”
Scandal strategies in play
Americans watched the Jan. 6 insurrection on TV and social media as it happened. Given the vividness of the day, outright denials of the insurrection are particularly far-fetched and marginal – though they do exist. For example, some Trump supporters have claimed that left-wing “antifa” groups breached the Capitol – a claim many rioters themselves have rejected.
Some of Trump’s supporters in Congress and the media have repeated the claim that the insurrection was staged to discredit Trump. But given Trump’s own vocal support for the insurrectionists, supporters usually deploy more nuanced denials to downplay the day’s events.
So what happens when outright denial fails? From ordinary citizens to political elites, people often respond to allegations by “condemning the condemners,” accusing their accusers of exaggerating – or of doing worse things themselves, a strategy called “advantageous comparisons.”
Together, these two strategies paint those making accusations as untrustworthy or hypocritical. As I show in my new book on denial , these are standard denials of those managing scandals.
“Condemning the condemners” and “advantageous comparisons” have been central to efforts to minimize the Jan. 6 insurrection, as well. Some critics of the committee downplay the insurrection by likening it to the Black Lives Matter protests, despite the fact that the vast majority were peaceful.
“For months, our cities burned, police stations burned, our businesses were shattered. And they said nothing. Or they cheer-led for it. And they fund-raised for it. And they allowed it to happen in the greatest country in the world,” Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz said during Trump’s second impeachment. “Now, some have cited the metaphor that the president lit the flames. Well, they lit actual flames, actual fires!”
Similar comparisons reappeared amid the House select committee’s hearings. One NFL coach called Jan. 6 a “dust-up” by comparison to the Black Lives Matter protests.
These forms of denial do several things at once. They direct attention away from the original focus of the scandal. They minimize Trump’s role in inciting the violence of Jan. 6 by making the claim that Democrats incite even more destructive forms of violence. And they discredit the investigation by suggesting that those leading it are hypocrites, more interested in scoring political points than in curtailing political violence.
Trump supporters and members of the far-right group Proud Boys gather during a ‘Justice for January 6th Vigil’ in New York on Jan. 6, 2022. AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura
Trickle-down denial
These denials may not sway a majority of Americans. Still, they’re consequential. Denial trickles down by providing ordinary citizens with scripts for talking about political scandals. Denials also reaffirm beliefs, allowing people to filter out information that contradicts what they hold to be true. Indeed, ordinary Americans have adapted “advantageous comparisons” to justify the insurrection.
This has happened before. For example, in a study of politically active Americans, sociologists Barbara Sutton and Kari Marie Norgaard found that some Americans adopted pro-torture politicians’ rhetoric – such as supporting “enhanced interrogation” and defending practices like waterboarding as a way to gather intelligence, even as they condemned “torture.”
For this reason, it’s important to recognize when politicians and the media draw from the denial’s playbook. By doing so, observers can better distinguish between genuine political disagreements and the predictable denials, which protect the most powerful by excusing their misconduct.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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FAA Mandates More Rest For Flight Attendants To Combat Fatigue
FAA Mandates More Rest For Flight Attendants To Combat Fatigue https://digitalarizonanews.com/faa-mandates-more-rest-for-flight-attendants-to-combat-fatigue%ef%bf%bc/
An aircraft flies past the control tower as it prepares to land at New York’s John F Kennedy Airport, May 25, 2015. (TREVOR COLLENS/AFP/Getty Images)
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Tuesday announced a new rule increasing the amount of rest time airlines must give flight attendants between shifts.
The new rule, which the FAA proposed late last year, boosts the required rest time from nine consecutive hours to 10 hours for flight attendants between their shifts, which can reach as long as 14 hours.
Officials touted the new rule as helping mitigate fatigue among flight attendants.
“It’s been a long road, and it’s about time,” FAA Acting Administrator Billy Nolen said at a press conference. “I can tell you it’s been a priority for me and for this administration, and that’s why we are here today. I’m a pilot and as any pilot can tell you, we cannot fly the plane without this safety expertise and support of flight attendants.”
The change was first reported by CNN.
Sarah Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, said congressionally mandated studies found flight attendants had increased risk for cancer, cardiac issues and respiratory issues in part because of the lack of rest, calling the nine-hour requirement a “safety loophole.”
“We continue to make this one standard of safety and continue to press forward to ensure that this minimum rest is applied for cargo pilots,” she said.
Congress passed the rule in 2018 but was never implemented by the Trump administration. Nelson at the press conference repeatedly applauded the Transportation Department and FAA’s work to implement the rule, tying its success to the “consequences of elections.”
“We are so happy, this was time to happen, and especially on the heels of coronavirus and all that flight attendants have had to deal with,” Nelson said.
“Longer days, shorter nights with the reduction of schedules throughout this pandemic and also all of the combative passengers that they have had to face on not enough rest,” she continued. “Today, that is getting corrected, and we are going to see by the new year this implemented across the industry.”
Unruly passenger investigations soared during the pandemic, hitting an all-time annual record of 1,099 in 2021, as flight attendants enforced a federal mask mandate in mass transit.
The number of initiated investigations has fallen since the mandate ended, but the rate remains more than double that of any time before the pandemic, according to FAA data.
The airline industry has also struggled to grow their operation to meet resurging demand after downsizing during the pandemic. The problems have led many airline labor groups to protest for better pay or improved conditions.
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Trump's Chief Of Staff Claimed No President Had Ever Done The Presidential Daily Briefing 'daily': New Book
Trump's Chief Of Staff Claimed No President Had Ever Done The Presidential Daily Briefing 'daily': New Book https://digitalarizonanews.com/trumps-chief-of-staff-claimed-no-president-had-ever-done-the-presidential-daily-briefing-daily-new-book/
Mark Meadows speaking with attendees at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Former Donald Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows had little experience in executive government when he took over at the White House. While aides continued to contend that it was Jared Kushner who was the real chief, Meadows was certainly involved in the transition efforts as the final days of the Trump administration arrived.
In Maggie Haberman’s new book, “Confidence Man,” she talks about the catastrophe in the transition between the Trump and Joe Biden administrations. At one point, Meadows refused to allow the policy team access to a specialized computer that helped them craft the budget.
“You just can’t expect us to endorse your spending plans,” Meadows told Biden chief Ron Klain.
But it was the presidential daily briefing that resulted in the strangest of conversations. While in office, Trump didn’t take the PDB seriously. Briefers were forced to devise tactics to keep the president’s attention. Photos were crucial along with charts and graphs. They were desperately trying to find ways to get the president to listen and be engaged. Another problem, however, is that if Trump was too engaged he would think something was “cool” and want to take the top secret information to show it off.
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The CIA revealed that Trump was very different in his briefing customs.
“For the Intelligence Community, the Trump transition was far and away the most difficult in its historical experience with briefing new presidents. The only (and imperfect) analogy was the Nixon transition, when the president-elect effectively declined to work with the IC, electing, instead, to receive intelligence information through an intermediary, National Security Advisor-designate Henry Kissinger,” the CIA report explained. “Trump was like Nixon, suspicious and insecure about the intelligence process, but unlike Nixon in the way he reacted. Rather than shut the IC out, Trump engaged with it, but attacked it publicly.”
As of 2018, stories began to surface that Trump’s refusal to read the daily briefing resulted in serious international issues that were being ignored.
Trump told Axios in 2017, “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.”
READ MORE: Jared Kushner compared himself to a priest at the death bed of Donald Trump’ presidency: new book
By 2020, when it was revealed that there was a Russian plot to put a bounty on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan. Trump claimed he’d never heard of it. It turns out it was part of a presidential daily briefing. In fact, they were able to pinpoint the exact day that Trump was briefed on the issue. At the time, on Feb. 27, 2020, Trump was claiming that the COVID-19 pandemic was “going down.”
Haberman wrote that Mark Meadows couldn’t understand why Biden wanted the presidential daily briefing to be “daily.” Meadows was in Congress for just eight years before he took the job at the White House for Trump, so his experience wasn’t exactly top-level.
“How many days a week is Vice President Biden gonna want this daily brief?” Meadows asked Klain, who’d called in mid-November 2020.
Klain was “dumbstruck by the question, said that Biden would want to be briefed every day,” Haberman wrote. “It was how he did it as vice president, he said.”
“No president ever does that. That’s never happened,” Meadows said.
“It seemed so beyond Meadows’s own experience that he could not comprehend it,” the book described.
In fact, it was Trump who was the exception, refusing to read much and instead requiring a kind of performance by briefers. Former President George W. Bush did his briefing six days a week, as did Vice President Mike Pence.
Haberman’s new book “Confidence Man” is on sale as of Tuesday.
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WATCH: Trump Bugs Pelosi As She Makes Bold Midterm Prediction On The Late Show
WATCH: Trump Bugs Pelosi As She Makes Bold Midterm Prediction On The Late Show https://digitalarizonanews.com/watch-trump-bugs-pelosi-as-she-makes-bold-midterm-prediction-on-the-late-show/
October 04, 2022 09:26 AM
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Monday, making a bold prediction about November’s midterm elections while throwing shade on former President Donald Trump.
“I believe that we will hold the House,” Pelosi said. “We will hold the House by winning more seats. We won the 40 seats, then we lost some when Trump was on the ballot, we lost some on the Trump districts, but we held enough seats to hold the House with him on the ballot. He’s not on the ballot now.”
“Oh! Did I say his name? I didn’t mean to. Perhaps you could bleep that out,” the speaker said, to which Colbert jokingly affirmed that “it is a family show.”
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Colbert asked the speaker how she could be so confident amid polling that suggests the Republicans have the advantage. Pelosi noted the Democrats’ strategy has been to “own the ground,” bring inspiration through messaging, and raise money.
“We always believed we could win because we knew we had to, because our democracy was on the ballot, our planet was on the ballot. Everything was on the ballot in this election,” Pelosi said.
Colbert pointed out that the speaker was “talking in the past tense,” as if the election was already decided. Pelosi replied that she was referring to the needs of Democratic candidates who decided to run for office.
The speaker praised President Joe Biden for his leadership concerning legislation passed, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act. She noted that it is “beginning to have some appreciation in the public.”
Pelosi also said she desires “the truth” as the ideal outcome of the Jan. 6 hearings, praising the bipartisan committee’s investigation into Trump’s influence before dismissing more conversation about the former president.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“But enough of him. About the future,” Pelosi chuckled as she went on to praise Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) for his leadership and Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) courage on the panel.
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Why The Visa Process Could Be https://digitalarizonanews.com/why-the-visa-process-could-be/
Tourist visas can be expensive and confusing to apply for.
The process may discourage some travelers from visiting the U.S.
Visa policies try to balance economic and national security priorities.
It can be hard for international visitors to get permission to come to the U.S.
Onyi Apakama knows this firsthand. She’s a first-generation American born to two Nigerian immigrants, and much of her family is still living overseas.
A convoluted and expensive tourist visa application process means her relatives have missed major milestones with family here in the U.S.
“It was definitely a sad thing because it was (my cousin’s) younger sister,” Apakama said. “She wasn’t able to attend her sister’s wedding.”
For Americans, it can be easy to forget how complicated international travel can be depending on your passport.
U.S. passport holders can access 186 international destinations without applying for visas in advance according to the Henley Passport Index, meaning we almost never need to go through the hassle and expense of filling out extra paperwork or turning up at a country’s embassy to prove ourselves before a trip.
But many visitors coming to the U.S. face a process that’s much more arduous.
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According to Esra Calvert, around 40% of international visitors to the U.S. need to apply for a visa to enter. Calvert is the principal at Esra Calvert Consulting, which focuses on data in the tourism industry.
“There is paperwork you have to do online, and you wait for your appointment time,” she told USA TODAY. “When your appointment time comes, you go to the embassy for an interview. You have to show proof of finances, what your plans are, very basic pieces of information just for proof that you’re going on vacation or a business meeting.”
In Nigeria, Apakama said, it can also be harder to get a visa appointment if your family isn’t politically well-connected.
Those extra barriers sometimes discourage people from applying for visas at all – to say nothing of those whose applications are rejected. That means the U.S. is potentially missing out on a lot of tourist dollars that would otherwise be generated every year.
According to the Department of Commerce, tourism accounted for $1.9 trillion in economic output in 2019.
“There’s so many choices for travelers,” Calvert said. “If a traveler has to wait for a year,” just to get their visa interview, they’re going to go somewhere else for vacation.
Raoul Bianchi, a reader in political economy at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Department of Economics Policy and International Business said that tourist visa applications disproportionately make it harder for people to travel from the developing world.
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“The global north/global south division is very stark,” he said in an interview. “There is an enormous disparity between wealthy Westernized countries and sub-Saharan Africa, South and Central America and South Asia.”
The process can be so opaque that experts suggest many visa applicants fear that talking about their experiences to the press could hinder their ability to get approved.
What does a tourist visa cost to visit the US?
According to the State Department, it costs $160 per person to apply for a tourist visa. They can be valid for up to 10 years, depending on the applicant’s nationality.
The fees are becoming more prohibitive for some travelers as inflation rises.
“The cost has gone up. And right now with inflation (and) the exchange rate, the Nigerian naira has gotten a lot weaker in the last year or six months,” Apakama said.
When she visited Nigeria in 2019 or 2020, it was around 350 naira to the dollar. Now it’s closer to 430 nairas to the dollar, meaning her relatives could wind up paying tens of thousands of naira just in visa fees for a whole family unit to visit.
In a statement, the State Department said those fees are nonrefundable and nontransferable, even if the application is rejected.
“The department’s consular operations are largely funded by fees for services. Visa fees charged are generally based on the cost to the department of providing visa services, and are determined through periodic studies of the cost of consular services, including visa services,” a spokesperson said. “This means that there is no profit to the U.S. government from the collection of fees. Rather the fee is in place to recover the cost to the U.S. government of providing the service.”
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Who is required to get a tourist visa to come to the US?
Visa requirements can change over time, and especially for visitors to the U.S., have gotten more stringent in recent decades.
“An average of two-thirds of the people around the world have to obtain a visa prior to departure. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and more recent terrorist attacks worldwide, have changed the discourse of immigration and international tourism within Europe and North America,” Pooneh Torabian, a lecturer in the Department of Tourism at the University of Otago’s business school in New Zealand said in a statement. “Since Sept. 11, international travel has become more regulated in the name of safety and security, and international movement for ethnic minority citizens, specifically Arab and Muslim travelers, has been hindered.”
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Bianchi agreed and pointed out that visa policies often reflect a country’s broader geopolitical stances.
For example, soon after President Donald Trump took office, his administration enacted a ban on visitors from many Muslim-majority countries, a reflection of the president’s immigration priorities. Even since President Joe Biden reversed that policy, however, advocates say little has changed in practical terms.
“Quite often visa policies can be a reflection of bilateral diplomatic relations or a proxy for something else that’s going on,” Bianchi said.
Story continues below.
For visa applicants, Apakama said, the restrictions can feel like discrimination at a high level.
“Who are the folks that we as a country believe are going to contribute to the society and those who are not,” she said.
Many applicants feel there’s a human arbitrariness to the process too.
“My family members believe it’s whoever’s interviewing you that day and it’s just their mood,” Apakama said. When the visa interviewer seemed grumpy, her family felt their applications faced more scrutiny and were more likely to be denied.
The U.S. has visa waiver agreements with 40 countries including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and many European nations. Canadian citizens also usually do not need to apply for tourist visas to visit the U.S. Travelers using passports from countries not on the waiver list generally do need to apply for tourist visas before coming here.
Even when a visitor has a visa, border guards have the discretion to turn them away at passport control. Apakama said she’s had relatives who were denied entry after landing in the U.S. and put on flights back to Nigeria.
How long does it take to get a tourist visa for the US?
Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. embassies and consulates have been struggling to keep up with visa applications, and in some places, the wait time for an appointment is now longer than a year.
“It’s discouraging visitors,” Calvert said. “All the hassle that travelers have to go through with the visa application process in this day and age, there could be some opportunities to bring the visa backlog numbers down.”
The State Department’s wait time calculator estimates that the consulate in Mumbai is now scheduling tourist visa appointments 848 days out, though the department says that extreme wait is an outlier.
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“We are reducing appointment wait times in all visa classes as quickly as possible, worldwide. In fact, visa processing is rebounding faster than projected, after a near-complete shutdown and freezing of resources during the pandemic,” a spokesperson said. “The wait time for a routine visa appointment at half of our overseas posts is less than four months, and at some posts is far shorter than that. Applicants who have urgent travel needs and can apply away from their own home country should seek to do so.”
Will US visas ever be easier to get?
Bianchi, from Manchester Metropolitan University, said visa policies are constantly in flux.
“There are tensions and conflicts within governments. They don’t work as a monolith,” he said. “You’ll get the tourism industry in alliance with the tourism ministries, but the ministries of the interior, or in your case the Department of Homeland Security, will be very much in favor of tightening visas because their concern is security.”
Are airplane seats too small?: FAA soliciting public comments on minimum dimensions
That push and pull means making visas more accessible is usually a slow and contested process. In the meantime Calvert said, the U.S. will keep missing out on potential tourist dollars.
“I’m concerned about price as a barrier and these visa regulations,” she said. “Travel shouldn’t be that difficult. How do we keep the world open?”
If you’d like to share your story of applying for a visa, please use this form.
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Jack Thurston Honored As A Top Veteran In The Workplace
Jack Thurston Honored As A Top Veteran In The Workplace https://digitalarizonanews.com/jack-thurston-honored-as-a-top-veteran-in-the-workplace/
ST. LOUIS, Oct. 04, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) —
Saint Louis, MO, October 2022 – ButcherJoseph & Co. (“ButcherJoseph” or “the Firm”) celebrates Jack Thurston, Vice President, Marketing, at ButcherJoseph on being recognized by Small Business Monthly as one of St. Louis’ Top Veterans in the Workplace.
The October edition of Small Business Monthly presents the Top Veterans in the Workplace within St. Louis companies. ButcherJoseph’s Jack Thurston is one of the top five veterans featured.
“These veterans not only served their country with pride and dedication, but they are also now serving local businesses. Their experiences and talents are helping build some of the region’s fastest growing firms. These are not your average Vets, they are the best in the region,” stated Small Business Monthly.
As Vice President, Marketing, Jack leads all aspects of marketing and communications for ButcherJoseph, from go-to-market strategy and driving brand awareness to lead generation and sales enablement efforts to support the Firm’s business development process.
“We are so thrilled for Jack to receive this recognition, and we’re extremely grateful for his service to our Country and our Firm. Jack’s discipline and commitment are second to none, making him a tremendous asset and colleague to all of us at ButcherJoseph. There are not many professionals in our industry with the skillset that Jack has developed throughout his military and civilian careers, and he is instrumental in the continued growth of our Firm,” said Rose Thompson, Chief Operating Officer at ButcherJoseph.
About ButcherJoseph. & Co.
ButcherJoseph & Co. is a boutique investment banking firm specializing in ESOPs, mergers and acquisitions, private capital sourcing and valuation advisory services for middle market companies. Our industry recognized team of professionals has executed 200+ transactions exceeding $15 billion in total value. ButcherJoseph is headquartered in St. Louis with a presence Chicago, IL; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia, PA; Miami, FL; Palm Beach, FL; Charlotte, NC; Scottsdale, AZ; and Nashville, TN.
About Small Business Monthly
The St. Louis Small Business Monthly is a trade magazine serving small- and mid-sized firms in the St. Louis region. The monthly publication has expanded from a once-tiny newsletter into a thriving publication read by more than 50,000 entrepreneurs and small-business owners each month. Informative “how to” articles in every issue help educate business owners, regardless of size, industry or length of time in business. The company hosts the St. Louis Business Expo twice each year. The Expo is the largest business-to-business trade show in the state of Missouri.
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Micron Pledges Up To $100 Billion For Semiconductor Factory In New York
Micron Pledges Up To $100 Billion For Semiconductor Factory In New York https://digitalarizonanews.com/micron-pledges-up-to-100-billion-for-semiconductor-factory-in-new-york/
The company is planning a giant complex in Clay, N.Y., a sign that the government’s investments in semiconductors are steering firms’ decisions.
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Micron said high-volume production would start after 2025. Credit…Steve Helber/Associated Press
Oct. 4, 2022Updated 8:50 a.m. ET
Micron announced on Tuesday that it planned to spend as much as $100 billion over the next 20 years or more to build a huge computer chip factory complex in upstate New York, the latest move by a major semiconductor maker to invest in the United States.
The commitment by Micron is a sign that the federal government’s prodding and package of generous incentives is helping to steer investment decisions. Legislation that passed in August, the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, provides $52 billion in grants and subsidies for companies to build and expand computer chip factories in the country.
“There is no doubt that without the CHIPS act, we would not be here today,” said Sanjay Mehrotra, chief executive of Micron.
The legislation along with favorable tax treatment and partnerships with state governments like New York are key ingredients needed to match the subsidies offered by Asian nations and “bring chip-making back to America,” Mr. Mehrotra said
Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, has championed the chip legislation and his state as a site for semiconductor investment. Gov. Kathy Hochul worked on the state’s behalf to persuade Micron.
The Micron decision, Mr. Schumer said, is a byproduct of the chips legislation he worked on for three years. “Had America not done that, I think our economy would have slipped,” he said. “We’ve led in semiconductor research, but over the years we let the manufacturing slip away. But we’re reversing that now.”
The investment is a long-term bet by the company and by the federal and state governments. Micron estimated that it would spend $20 billion through the end of the decade and described that plan as a first phase. The company said it planned to invest as much as $100 billion in New York over the next two decades or more.
The giant factory will be built in Clay, N.Y., about 15 miles north of Syracuse. Micron said site preparation would begin next year, construction in 2024 and production in volume after 2025.
Over the next 20 years, Micron says, the project will generate nearly 50,000 jobs — about 9,000 Micron employees and more than 40,000 jobs for suppliers, contractors and others. The plan also calls for Micron and the state to spend $500 million on community and work force training.
The New York incentive package is put at $5.5 billion, one of the largest ever by a state. New York officials noted that the financial support would come in steps as milestones for job creation and private investment are met.
How much federal support will flow to the project is uncertain. Since the legislation passed only a couple of months ago, companies cannot apply for federal backing until next year.
Both Mr. Schumer and Ms. Hochul met and spoke frequently with Mr. Mehrotra of Micron. “This is personal for me,” said Ms. Hochul, who grew up in Buffalo. “I lived through the decline of manufacturing upstate.”
The Micron investment, she said, is an opportunity to revive the region as an advanced manufacturing hub.
Upstate New York does have a legacy of chip-making. GlobalFoundries has a plant outside Albany. IBM also had semiconductor manufacturing operations, which it sold to GlobalFoundries. And the State University of New York at Albany has a semiconductor research center.
The semiconductor industry is both highly capital-intensive and cyclical. The Micron plan looks well beyond the current cycle.
Concerns that the United States was becoming too dependent on Asia to make computer chips — a vital technology for the economy and national security — had been growing for years. Those worries intensified when pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions and chip shortages hampered the production of cars and other goods just as China’s technological capabilities improved. China has also ramped up its rhetoric and its military threats to Taiwan, a vital chip supplier.
Those industry and geopolitical forces increased support for the federal chip legislation. To chip makers, it has been clear since the Trump administration that manufacturing in the United States would be encouraged and imports would be threatened with trade curbs. The final bill attracted both a rare measure of bipartisan backing in Congress and a rare endorsement of industrial policy.
In recent months, the chip market cycle has swung down. Covid-related lockdowns in China, the war in Ukraine and inflation have affected consumer spending, as many economies struggle or head for recession.
Personal computer shipments, for example, are expected to decline nearly 13 percent this year, according to IDC, a research firm. Smartphone sales are also soft.
Micron is a leading producer of memory and data storage chips used in personal computers, smartphones, data centers, cars and an array of other electronic products. The company, based in Boise, Idaho, reported a 20 percent falloff in sales in its most recent quarter, to $6.64 billion, and a 45 percent decline in profit, to $1.49 billion.
But beyond the current cycle, the demand for memory chips is expected to grow, doubling by the end of the decade, according to industry estimates.
The company joins other major chip makers in expanding operations in the United States. Intel, banking on investment incentives, announced in January its plan to invest $20 billion to build two chip plants in Ohio.
In late 2021, Samsung said it would build a $17 billion plant in Texas. It later raised the possibility of adding several more in the state with a total long-term investment of nearly $200 billion. In 2020, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced it would construct a $12 billion factory in Arizona.
This year, Mark Liu, chairman of T.S.M.C., told shareholders that the price tag was likely to go higher in part because the United States lacked the rich ecosystem of suppliers and large pool of skilled workers that had developed around T.S.M.C., the world’s largest chip maker, in Taiwan.
But Mr. Liu added that his company would proceed with its plans in the United States “no matter what.”
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Here Is What We Know So Far About The Victims Of The Possible Serial Killer In Stockton California
Here Is What We Know So Far About The Victims Of The Possible Serial Killer In Stockton, California https://digitalarizonanews.com/here-is-what-we-know-so-far-about-the-victims-of-the-possible-serial-killer-in-stockton-california/
Police on Monday continued to search for a person of interest in a series of five fatal shootings in Stockton, California, that are believed to be interconnected.
“By definition, you could probably very well call this serial killings,” Stockton Police Chief Stanley McFadden said Friday.
An unidentified person recorded on grainy security video could be a suspect or a witness, police said, and other people may be involved in the five attacks, which have happened since July.
Two other shootings from 2021, including one in which the victim survived, have also been linked to the killings, Stockton police said Monday evening.
McFadden said all of the slayings have happened after dark and in areas with few security cameras. Each of the attacks has involved a single victim.
“It wasn’t a robbery,” he said. “Items aren’t being stolen. They’re not talking about any gang activity in the area or anything. It’s just element of surprise.”
The city is offering a $75,000 reward for information leading to an arrest, and Stockton Crime Stoppers put up an additional $10,000.
The San Joaquin County medical examiner’s office released the names of the victims Monday: Paul Alexander Yaw, 35, of Stockton, who died July 8; Salvador Debudey, Jr., 43, of Stockton, who died Aug. 11; Jonathan Hernandez Rodriguez, 21, of Stockton, who died Aug. 30; Juan Cruz, 52, of Stockton, who died Sept. 21; and Lawrence Lopez Sr., 54, of Stockton, who died Sept. 27.
Authorities have not released the name of a 40-year-old Latino man who was fatally shot just before 4:20 a.m. on April 10, 2021, in Oakland.
Stockton police spokesperson Joe Silva said Monday investigators need the community’s help.
“We do have grieving family members that are asking a lot of questions, and they want closure,” he said. “We are just hoping that someone will do the right thing and report that information to our detectives.”
Paul Alexander Yaw
Paul Alexander Yaw.via Facebook
Greta Bogrow, 60, of Texas, said Monday her son Paul Alexander Yaw was killed July 8 in the Northern California city. Yaw’s death and four subsequent fatal shootings appear “interconnected,” police said.
Bogrow said she has been estranged from her son, who was homeless for about five years.
“I have always hoped in my heart that at some point we would get reunited and have a relationship,” she said. “It’s always a mom’s dream that their children turn out to be good people. He was a good person. I just wish I had the opportunity to speak to him again in this life.”
Bogrow said she has been in touch with detectives about her son’s death. She can’t fathom how someone could commit such senseless slayings. She said her son was at a park when he was attacked.
“They are a really sick person. And they are preying on the weak,” she said. “My son had a big heart. He didn’t want to ever hurt anybody. … I don’t understand what kind of mind this person might have.”
She said whoever is responsible must be arrested quickly.
“I hope that all of this publicity brings this person in to get some kind of justice for what he has done to my son and all the other victims and their families,” Bogrow said. “I just hope it gets him off the street and stops him from doing this to anybody else.”
Lawrence Lopez Sr.
Lawrence “Lorenzo” Lopez Sr. Courtesy of Jerry Lopez.
Jerry Lopez, 53, said his brother, Lawrence, went by the nickname “Lorenzo.”
Lorenzo Lopez was a father of six children ages 16 to 38, his brother said.
Jerry Lopez said his older brother worked as an independent contractor and had fallen into homelessness. He said that many people offered for his brother to stay with them but that he didn’t want to “burden” people.
“He’d rather be taking care of himself than have other people take care of him,” Jerry Lopez said.
He said they had lived in Stockton since they were in elementary school.
“No city should have to deal with this,” Jerry Lopez said. “This thing needs to end. It’s scary for our city.”
He added: “It’s just hard to think why a person would even get this way. But there are people out there having hard times and troubled minds.”
Salvador Debudey Jr.
NBC affiliate KCRA of Sacramento reported that Analydia Lopez, Debudey’s wife, said his slaying has devastated her.
“To be honest with you, a part of me died with him that day,” Lopez said. “It’s been hard. It’s been really, really hard.”
The station reported that Debudey was a father and that he and Lopez met 28 years ago when they were in high school. The pair reconnected later in life and had been married 12 years when he was slain in August.
Relatives of the remaining two dead men could not immediately be reached Monday.
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Florida Sheriff Warns Looters; 3 Win Nobel Prize In Physics; Trump Files Lawsuit Against CNN | Hot Off The Wire Podcast
Florida Sheriff Warns Looters; 3 Win Nobel Prize In Physics; Trump Files Lawsuit Against CNN | Hot Off The Wire Podcast https://digitalarizonanews.com/florida-sheriff-warns-looters-3-win-nobel-prize-in-physics-trump-files-lawsuit-against-cnn-hot-off-the-wire-podcast/
Nearly a week after Hurricane Ian smashed into Florida and carved a path of destruction that reached into the Carolinas, 78 deaths have been blamed on Ian, with 71 of them reported in Florida. A Florida sheriff issued a blunt warning to potential looters.
President Joe Biden promises to “rebuild it all” after visiting Puerto Rico on Monday to survey damage from Hurricane Fiona, as tens of thousands of people remain without power two weeks after the storm hit. Biden says he’s “committed to this island,” and acknowledges that Fiona was only the latest in a string of disasters that have battered the U.S. territory in recent years. Biden will visit Florida on Wednesday.
Three scientists have jointly won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for their work on quantum information science that has significant applications, for example in the field of encryption. Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger were cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for discovering the way that particles known as photons can be linked, or “entangled,” with each other even when they are separated by large distances.
The city council of Kyiv says it is providing evacuation centers with potassium iodine pills in preparation for a possible nuclear strike on the capital, Ukraine’s largest city. Potassium iodine pills can help block the absorption of harmful radiation by the thyroid gland if taken just before or immediately after exposure to nuclear radiation.
North Korea has conducted its longest-ever weapons test, a nuclear-capable ballistic missile that flew over Japan and could reach the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam and beyond. The launch early Tuesday forced the Japanese government to issue evacuation alerts and halt trains.
Former President Donald Trump has gone to court against CNN, a familiar target when he was president. He’s seeking $475 million in damages, saying the network’s reports are trying to short-circuit any future political campaign. Trump’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Florida, focuses primarily on use of the term “The Big Lie” about Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud that he says cost him the 2020 presidential election.
Last month, new auto prices averaged $45,622, the fourth-highest monthly price on record, according to J.D. Power. In addition, average auto loan interest rates hit 5.7% between July and September, up from 4.3% a year ago, with terms stretched to average over 70 months, Edmunds said.
In sports, one National League team clinched a wild card spot while another tried to clinch a division crown, Albert Pujols passed another milestone, the 49ers continued to dominate the Rams and Tua Tagovailoa will get next Sunday off.
Wall Street rallied to its best day since July as falling bond yields eased some of the pressure that’s battered markets. The S&P 500 rose 2.6% Monday, the latest swing for a scattershot market that’s been mostly falling this year on worries about a possible global recession.
Ukrainian forces have scored more gains in their counteroffensive across a broad front. The troops advanced Monday in the very areas Russia is trying to absorb.
Prosecutors are saying at the opening of the most serious case to reach trial in the attack on the U.S. Capitol that the founder of the Oath Keepers extremist group and four associates planned for an “armed rebellion” to stop the transfer of presidential power.
Apple Music is about to reach a huge milestone, offering its eye-and-ear-popping 100 millionth song on the streaming service. The music giant tells The Associated Press that internal data indicates Apple Music will reach the heady mark on Monday. Every day, 20,000 singers and songwriters release music on the service.
Bono’s next tour will be without U2 or a new album to support. He will, instead, be promoting his memoir “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” which comes out Nov. 1.
The Supreme Court began its new term Monday with a new justice on the bench, the public back in the courtroom and a spirited debate in a case that pits environmental protections against property rights. The new member of the court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, wasted no time joining the lively give-and-take, asking questions throughout nearly two hours of arguments in the dispute over the nation’s main anti-water pollution law, the Clean Water Act.
The long list of celebrities promoting cryptocurrencies just got shorter. Kim Kardashian is being barred from doing so for three years — and will pay a $1 million fine — to settle federal charges that she recommended a crypto security to her 330 million Instagram followers without making clear that she was paid to do so.
Andrew Lloyd Webber is saying goodbye to his last remaining show on Broadway and welcoming another. The musical theater icon announced Monday that his retooled version of “Cinderella” will land in New York at the Imperial Theatre in February with new songs, a new leading lady and a new title: “Bad Cinderella.”
The actor and activist who declined Marlon Brando’s 1973 Academy Award for “The Godfather” on his behalf in an indelible protest of how Native Americans had been portrayed on screen has died. Sacheen Littlefeather was 75.
In this week’s religion roundup, Jewish pilgrims gathered in Ukraine despite the war, Brazil’s president exhorted evangelicals to help keep him in office, and the Vatican imposed disciplinary sanctions on a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Bishop.
Hurricane Ian sent severe flooding into the Naples Fire-Rescue building on Sept. 28, forcing firefighters to save what they could.
An enormous 23-foot pregnant python was caught and killed by farmers in a jungle in Indonesia, fearing it would prey on humans in the nearby v…
Woman footage of a woman stuck in a ‘floaty pool’ as Hurricane Ian batters her home has gone viral on TikTok.
This is the adorable moment a playful elephant slid down a muddy hill on its knees after heavy rain in Thailand. The male jumbo named Somsak w…
Storm chaser Mike Scantlin shared this drone video of widespread flooding submerging the streets and neighborhoods of McGregor, Florida, on Se…
People who experienced the worst storm surge and destructive winds from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida share their experience with AccuWeather.
Never park a car, especially a police cruiser with a suspect in the back, on the tracks. Veuer’s Tony Spitz has the details.
This deer looks like he’s been training. Buzz60’s Tony Spitz has the details.
A view from the International Space Station shows Hurricane Ian nearly covering the entire state of Florida as it slammed into Fort Myers with…
Veuer’s Elizabeth Keatinge shows us some people who want to capture their experience with Hurricane Ian in a photo.
In a first for humanity, NASA smashed a vending machine-sized spacecraft into the football stadium-sized asteroid Dimorphos on Sept. 26.
From anthropomorphic figurines to 1,500-year-old Indigenous necklaces, Colombia has recently repatriated 274 ancient objects from the United States.
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Post Politics Now: Biden To Mark 100 Days Since Supreme Court Overturned Roe V. Wade
Post Politics Now: Biden To Mark 100 Days Since Supreme Court Overturned Roe V. Wade https://digitalarizonanews.com/post-politics-now-biden-to-mark-100-days-since-supreme-court-overturned-roe-v-wade/
Today, President Biden is convening a meeting at the White House to mark 100 days since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and assess the impact that has had on the country. Administration officials plan to discuss a White House report noting that abortion bans have taken effect in more than a dozen states and close to 30 million women of reproductive age now live in a state with a ban.
The event comes as Democrats seek to galvanize voters on the issue of abortion ahead of the November midterm elections. The report pointedly says that Republicans have blocked efforts to write reproductive protections into federal law and that “Republican elected officials at the state and national level have taken extreme steps to block women’s access to health care.”
Your daily dashboard
10 a.m. Eastern time: The Supreme Court hears oral arguments. Listen live here.
1 p.m. Eastern: White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre briefs reporters. Watch live here.
3:30 p.m. Eastern: Biden convenes at meeting of the Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access at the White House.
Got a question about politics? Submit it here. After 3 p.m. weekdays, return to this space and we’ll address what’s on the mind of readers.
On our radar: Second day of testimony planned in Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy trial
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An FBI agent who began investigating the Oath Keepers days after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot will continue testifying Tuesday morning as five people associated with the far-right paramilitary group stand trial on accusations of conspiring to keep President Donald Trump in office by force.
The Post’s Rachel Weiner and Spencer S. Hsu report that Michael Palian said he had not heard of the Oath Keepers before Jan. 6, 2021, and that he specialized in health-care fraud, not domestic terrorism. But after shepherding U.S. senators to safety that evening, he began investigating the people responsible.
Analysis: K Street prepares for a House Republican takeover
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The midterm elections are five weeks away, but K Street is already preparing for the possibility of a Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) if Republicans retake the House in November.
Writing in The Early 202, The Post’s Theodoric Meyer and Leigh Ann Caldwell note that to prepare for divided government, Washington lobbying firms have been hiring aides to McCarthy, now the House minority leader, and other top House Republicans. Per our colleagues:
They’ve held briefings and drafted memos for clients on what a Republican House would mean for them. And they’ve been shepherding clients to meet with Republican lawmakers and staffers who are likely to be in positions of power.
Republicans are bullish on retaking the House, which requires them to flip only on a handful of seats. They face tougher odds in the Senate — and it may not be clear until December which party controls that chamber if neither Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) nor his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, secures 50 percent of the vote next month, forcing a runoff election.
You can read the full analysis here.
On our radar: Supreme Court examining Alabama’s congressional districts
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On the second day of its new term, the Supreme Court will hear more oral arguments, including in a case concerning the Voting Rights Act that civil rights groups say could undercut Black voting strength across the country.
The Post’s Robert Barnes reports that the court will consider whether the Voting Rights Act requires Alabama to create a second congressional district favorable to a Black candidate, a decision that could affect redistricting nationwide. Per Bob:
A lower court threw out the state’s map drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature, which gave Black voters a significant chance to elect a candidate in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts, even though African Americans make up more than a quarter of the state’s population.
But the Supreme Court stepped in, ordering that this fall’s elections will take place under the legislature’s map, and then later accepted the case for full briefing and argument.
Civil rights leaders fear the court will weaken federal protections about redistricting decisions that disadvantage minority communities. But Alabama, joined by other Republican-led states, says the Constitution forbids an extended consideration of race in drawing voting districts.
You can read previews of this case and others being heard by the Supreme Court this term here.
On our radar: White House officials to assess impact of court ruling on abortion
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President Biden is convening a meeting Tuesday at the White House to mark 100 days since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and assess the impact that has had on the country.
Administration officials plan to discuss a White House report noting that abortion bans have taken effect in more than a dozen states and close to 30 million women of reproductive age now live in a state with a ban.
“As the President has repeatedly said, the only way to fully protect women’s access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care, including abortion, is for Congress to pass a law codifying the protections of Roe v. Wade,” says the report, written by Jennifer Klein, director of the White House Gender Policy Council.
Noted: Trump sues CNN claiming defamation, seeks $475 million in damages
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Former president Donald Trump sued CNN on Monday, alleging defamation and seeking $475 million in punitive damages, a move that escalates his conflict with U.S. news organizations that have critically reported on his career.
The Post’s Kelly Kasulis Cho reports that the 29-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleges that CNN took part in a “campaign of dissuasion in the form of libel and slander” that “escalated in recent months” because the network feared Trump would again run for president. Per Kelly:
Take a look: Democrats will hold the House, Pelosi tells Stephen Colbert
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), during an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” predicted Monday that Democrats will hold the House in the midterms, pointing to her party’s performance in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.
“We will hold the House by winning more seats,” Pelosi said. “We won the 40 seats, then we lost some when Trump was on the ballot, we lost some in the Trump districts, but we held enough seats to hold the House. He’s not on the ballot now.”
Pelosi, who doesn’t like to mention former president Donald Trump by name, quickly realized she had.
The latest: Herschel Walker denies report that he paid for girlfriend’s abortion
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Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia, on Monday denied a claim that he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, saying in a televised interview on the Fox News Channel that the account published in the Daily Beast is a “flat-out lie.”
The Post’s Annie Linskey and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. report that Walker’s denial came after the Daily Beast published a detailed description from an unnamed former girlfriend who said that Walker encouraged her to have an abortion after she became pregnant while they were dating, wrote her a $700 check to pay for the procedure and then sent her a subsequent “get well” card.
The latest: White House condemns North Korean ballistic missile test
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The White House on Monday night condemned a “dangerous and reckless” decision by North Korea to launch a suspected intermediate-range missile over Japan.
“This action is destabilizing and shows [North Korea’s] blatant disregard for United Nations Security Council resolutions and international safety norms,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement.
She added that White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke with officials in Japan and South Korea and reinforced the United States’ “ironclad commitments” to their defense.
The latest: Trump’s lawyer refused his request in February to say all documents returned
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Former president Donald Trump asked one of his lawyers to tell the National Archives and Records Administration in early 2022 that Trump had returned all materials requested by the agency, but the lawyer declined because he was not sure the statement was true, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Post’s Josh Dawsey and Jacqueline Alemany report that, as it turned out, thousands more government documents — including some highly classified secrets — remained at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club. Per our colleagues:
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Both GOP Candidates Courting Veterans In Nevada Senate Race
Both GOP Candidates Courting Veterans In Nevada Senate Race https://digitalarizonanews.com/both-gop-candidates-courting-veterans-in-nevada-senate-race/
RENO, Nev. — (AP) — Common sense more than any campaign strategy dictated that Adam Laxalt not trumpet his own military service in Nevada’s sometimes-heated Republican Senate primary.
After all, the ex-attorney general, who served as a Navy judge advocate general in Iraq, was running against retired Army Capt. Sam Brown, a war hero who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan and whose badly scarred face serves as a more powerful reminder of his sacrifice than his Purple Heart.
But with his former foe now turned patriotic ally, Laxalt, the son of a U.S. senator and grandson of another, is trying to make the most of his own military career.
He is relying on familiar GOP buzzwords in appealing to veterans to help save the country from “the left” and calling Democrats the party of the “megarich” as he tries to unseat Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.
In some cases he is also capitalizing further on his military experience — and Cortez Masto’s lack of it — with links to conservative issues from U.S. border safety to government overreach on things like COVID-19.
He warns about the dangers of Afghan terrorists, prematurely released from captivity, sneaking into the U.S. and pledges to reinstate military members who were discharged for refusing to get coronavirus vaccinations.
They’re the kind of campaign issues that strike a chord with many rallying around candidates like Laxalt, backed by former President Trump in a Western battleground that Republicans view as one of their best chances to turn a blue Senate seat red.
“First and foremost, there is no substitute for service. And we all know that,” Laxalt said recently at the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, where he and Brown served up free hot dogs. “Obviously, Sen. Masto hasn’t served.”
It’s a line he couldn’t use in debates with Brown, who denounced Laxalt during the primary as part of the “elite” Washington establishment.
Laxalt — the grandson of former U.S. Sen. and Nevada Gov. Paul Laxalt, and son of former Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. — spent much of his early life in the D.C. area.
He graduated from Georgetown law school, was an assistant law professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and served with the JAG Corps in Iraq but didn’t engage in the sort of field combat Brown saw with the 1st Infantry in 2008.
At the VFW, Laxalt was introduced by an ex-commander of a B-2 test squad who created a potentially awkward moment when referencing Laxalt’s role in the military before the room eventually erupted into laughter.
“I’ll forgive him for being a JAG,” Air Force Col. Tony Grady said. “But then, not really, because when I was a commander, the JAG was in my hip pocket, to keep me out of trouble.”
Brown never claimed his military record outranked Laxalt’s, but he did make veiled references during the primary to the way each got where they are.
“I wasn’t born into power,” Brown said in his first ad, describing the Taliban bomb that “nearly killed me,” the soldiers who dragged his burning body to safety under mortar fire and his subsequent 30 surgeries.
Each pitch ended with the same tag line: “Career politicians can’t fix Washington; they broke it.”
Initially, the quote was juxtaposed with images of Cortez Masto and President Joe Biden but later was accompanied by photos of Cortez Masto and Laxalt.
Now, Brown is singing Laxalt’s praises and pleading with vets of all political stripes to rally behind him.
“What we do in primaries as Republicans is identify who can lay down the most effective fire, and they become the main effort,” Brown said. “Our duty is to go out there and be those foot soldiers for Adam Laxalt.”
At the VFW, Laxalt linked Cortez Masto to Democratic policies he says have weakened the U.S. military, disrespected its soldiers and made young Americans less likely to enlist. His biggest applause came when he ridiculed those who “wonder why” military recruiting is down.
“Well, how about because they kicked out service members for refusing to take the COVID shots?” Laxalt said. “We have Navy SEALS after 12-year investments and 15 tours of duty to terrible places. I’m a guaranteed vote to reinstate those people.”
Laxalt said he’d heard Cortez Masto hadn’t held a town hall meeting with veterans for at least a year.
Not true, her campaign said.
Cortez Masto, whose father and grandfather served in the U.S. Army, hosted at least a dozen events with Nevada veterans in the past year “to make sure she’s hearing their concerns and is able to deliver the federal support they need,” her campaign said in an email.
Her accomplishments include approval of the construction of a national veterans cemetery in Elko that locals had sought for nearly a decade.
She helped pass a bill guaranteeing health and compensation benefits for veterans exposed to Agent Orange. Her legislation to protect VA benefits for student veterans was signed into law, as was a measure she backed to improve veterans’ access to mental health services.
As he did during the primary, Laxalt reminds vets he founded the nation’s first state office of military legal services as Nevada’s attorney general — a creation the Pentagon eventually embraced and several states later adopted.
He touts his JAG work in Iraq — where his legal team oversaw more than 20,000 detainees — when blasting the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, “leaving billions of dollars of weapons behind” for potential terrorists.
He said the “Afghan debacle” marked the first time Americans “took the measure of this commander in chief and knew he was not up to the job.”
“Sen. Masto is not holding him accountable,” Laxalt said. “A terrorist that was released in Afghanistan could actually be in this country today. This is a huge issue, and it’s an absolute shame that Sen. Masto is dead silent on this.”
Cortez Masto insists she has pushed back on Biden’s method of withdrawal from Afghanistan after criticizing Trump’s proposal to withdraw without a plan in place.
She gets high marks from Ross Bryant, a retired Army veteran who is the executive director of UNLV’s Military & Veteran Services Center in Las Vegas.
Bryant describes himself as a moderate Republican who has voted for candidates in both parties. He’s glad when veterans are elected to Congress and acknowledges the veteran community “is sometimes very harsh: ‘If you are not a vet, you don’t know what it’s like.’”
He said that Laxalt “did great for us” as attorney general, and that Brown’s backing should carry weight with some: “He’s been wounded, he’s one of us.’”
But, he said, it’s wrong to portray Cortez Masto as anything but a staunch, effective advocate for veterans. He ticks off a list that includes expanding Agent Orange coverage to toxic burn-pit exposures, pressuring federal agencies to set up booths at UNLV’s veteran job fairs, and reversing benefit formulas during the COVID pandemic that would have drastically reduced $9 million worth of vet benefits for remote-students at UNLV alone.
“At the end of the day, she has delivered. She’s been a rock star for us,” Bryant said.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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Nobel Prize In Physics Is Awarded To 3 Scientists For Work In Quantum Technology
Nobel Prize In Physics Is Awarded To 3 Scientists For Work In Quantum Technology https://digitalarizonanews.com/nobel-prize-in-physics-is-awarded-to-3-scientists-for-work-in-quantum-technology/
Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger were recognized for their experiments in an area that has broad implications for secure information transfer and quantum computing.
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Awarding the prize on Tuesday, the committee said that the scientists’ work had “opened doors to another world.”Credit…Jonas Ekstromer/TT News Agency, via Associated Press
Oct. 4, 2022Updated 7:28 a.m. ET
The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger on Tuesday for work that has “laid the foundation for a new era of quantum technology,” the Nobel Committee for Physics said.
The scientists have each conducted “groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated,” the committee said in a briefing. Their results, it said, cleared the way for “new technology based upon quantum information.”
The laureates’ research builds on the work of John Stewart Bell, a physicist who strove in the 1960s to understand whether particles, having flown too far apart for there to be normal communication between them, can still function in concert, also known as quantum entanglement.
According to quantum mechanics, particles can exist simultaneously in two or more places. They do not take on formal properties until they are measured or observed in some way. By taking measurements of one particle, like its position or “spin,” a change is observed in its partner, no matter how far away it has traveled from its pair.
Working independently, the three laureates did experiments that helped clarify a fundamental claim about quantum entanglement, which concerns the behavior of tiny particles, like electrons, that interacted in the past and then moved apart.
What to Know About the Nobel Prizes
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What are the prizes? Six Nobel Prizes are awarded every year, each recognizing an individual’s or organization’s groundbreaking contribution to a specific field. Prizes are given for physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry, economic science, literature and peace work.
When were the awards established? The Nobel Prizes were established after the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and other explosives, in 1896. In his will, Nobel bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to create five annual prizes honoring ingenuity.
What do the winners receive? Nobel Prize laureates receive a Nobel Prize diploma, a Nobel Prize medal and a monetary award, which for 2022 is 10 million Swedish krona, or about $900,000 according to current exchange rates, for a full prize.
How do the nominations work? Eligible nominators, which include university professors, scientists, members of national governments and previous Nobel Prize laureates, submit the names of potential candidates each year. Nominations for 2022 had to be submitted by Jan. 31.
Who selects the winners? Four separate institutions are responsible for picking the winners: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry, the Karolinska Institute for the Nobel Prize in Medicine, the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and a committee of five people elected by the Norwegian Parliament for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Isn’t there a prize for economics? Yes, but it is technically not a Nobel Prize. The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was not among the awards originally stipulated in Nobel’s will. The economics prize was established by the Bank of Sweden in 1968; the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has been selecting the winners since 1969.
Dr. Clauser, an American, was the first in 1972. Using duct tape and spare parts at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., he endeavored to measure quantum entanglement by firing thousands of photons in opposite directions to investigate a property known as polarization. When he measured the polarizations of photon pairs, they showed a correlation, proving that a principle called Bell’s inequality had been violated and that the photon pairs were entangled, or acting in concert.
The research was taken up 10 years later by Dr. Aspect, a French scientist, and his team at the University of Paris. And in 1998, Dr. Zeilinger, an Austrian physicist, led another experiment that considered entanglement among three or more particles.
Eva Olsson, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, noted that quantum information science had broad implications in areas like secure information transfer and quantum computing.
Quantum information science is a “vibrant and rapidly developing field,” she said. “Its predictions have opened doors to another world, and it has also shaken the very foundation of how we interpret measurements.”
The Nobel committee said the three scientists were being honored for their experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.
“Being able to manipulate and manage quantum states and all their layers of properties gives us access to tools with unexpected potential,” the committee said in a statement on Twitter.
Dr. Zeilinger described the award as “an encouragement to young people.”
“The prize would not be possible without more than 100 young people who worked with me over the years and made all this possible,” he said.
Though he acknowledged that the award was recognizing the future applications of his work, he said, “My advice would be: Do what you find interesting, and don’t care too much about possible applications.”
It was the second of several such prizes to be awarded over the coming week. The Nobels, among the highest honors in science, recognize groundbreaking contributions in a variety of fields.
“I’m still kind of shocked, but it’s a very positive shock,” Dr. Zeilinger said of receiving the phone call informing him of the news.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021?
The prize was awarded to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi for their work detailing humanity’s role in climate change.
Who else has won a Nobel Prize in the sciences this year?
The Physiology or Medicine prize was awarded on Monday to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish scientist who peered back into human history by retrieving genetic material from 40,000-year-old bones, producing a complete Neanderthal genome and initiating the field of ancient DNA studies.
When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded on Wednesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan won for their development of a new tool that spurred research into new drugs and reduced the chemistry’s effect on the environment.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah won for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. Last year, Maria Ressa and Dmitri A. Muratov, both journalists, won for their efforts in the struggle to protect press freedoms.
Next week, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be awarded on Monday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, the prize went to David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.
All of the prize announcements will also be streamed live by the Nobel Prize organization. Prize winners will receive their awards at a ceremony in Stockholm in December.
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520K Floridians Wait For Power As Rebuilding Begins After Hurricane Ian
520K Floridians Wait For Power As Rebuilding Begins After Hurricane Ian https://digitalarizonanews.com/520k-floridians-wait-for-power-as-rebuilding-begins-after-hurricane-ian/
Video above: The latest on the impacts of IanNearly a week after Hurricane Ian smashed into Florida and carved a path of destruction that reached into the Carolinas, more than half a million statewide residents faced another day without electricity Tuesday as rescuers continued their search for those trapped inside homes inundated with lingering floodwaters.U.S. officials vowed Sunday to unleash a massive amount of federal disaster aid as crews scrambled to rescue people stranded by the storm. GALLERY: Hurricane Ian causes tornadoes, flooding across South Florida At least 99 people have been confirmed dead in Florida and four in North Carolina, according to ABC News. Search and rescue efforts were still ongoing in Florida, where more than 1,600 people have been rescued statewide.Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was in Arcadia on Sunday afternoon, about 30 miles inland from where Ian made landfall. The rural area didn’t get the storm surge experienced by coastal communities, but standing water from floods remained four days after the storm.“This is such a big storm, brought so much water, that you’re having basically what’s been a 500-year flood event,” DeSantis said. Video below: The last news conference from Florida officials on IanIan knocked out power to 2.6 million customers across Florida when it roared ashore with 150-mph (241-kph) winds and pushing a powerful storm surge. About 520,000 homes and businesses in Florida were still without electricity Monday evening, down from a peak of 2.6 million. But that is still nearly the same amount of customers in all of Rhode Island.Eric Silagy, Chairman and CEO of Florida Power & Light — the largest power provider in the state — said he understands the frustrations and said crews are working as hard as they can to restore power as soon as possible. The utility expects to have power restored to 95% of its service areas by the end of the day Friday, he said.A utility spokesperson said the remaining 5% comprises mostly cases where there’s a special situation making it difficult to restore power, such as the home being so damaged it can’t receive power or the area still being flooded. Those outages do not include customers whose homes or businesses were destroyed.Another major electricity provider in the hard-hit coastal region — Lee County Electric Cooperative — said Monday it expects to hit the 95% mark by the end of Saturday. That figure does not include barrier islands like Sanibel that are in its service area.Video below: WPBF 25 drone video shows the devastation in Fort MyersPower restoration is always a key challenge after major hurricanes when high winds and flying debris can topple power lines that distribute electricity to homes or in more severe storms, damage major parts of the electric infrastructure such as transmission lines or power generation.Silagy said the utility has invested $4 billion over the last 10 years to harden its infrastructure by doing things such as burying more power lines, noting that 40% of its distribution system is now underground. The utility is also using more technology like drones that can stay aloft for hours to get a better picture of the damage to the system, and sensors at substations that can alert them to flooding so they can shut off parts of the system before the water hits.Silagy said he’s seen during Ian where those investments have paid off. On Fort Myers Beach, for example, where so many homes and businesses were wiped away, concrete utility poles remain standing, he said. Silagy said the company also didn’t lose a single transmission structure in the 8,000 miles (12,875 kilometers) they have across Florida. Deanne Criswell, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the federal government is focusing first on victims in Florida, which took the brunt of one of the strongest storms to make landfall in the United States. President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden plan to visit Florida on Wednesday. Informational: 2022 WPBF 25 First Warning Weather Hurricane Survival GuideMeanwhile, rescue and salvage efforts across Florida remained difficult. In DeSoto County, northeast of Fort Myers, the Peace River and tributaries reached record high levels, and boats were the only way to get supplies to many of the county’s 37,000 residents.Video below: Central Florida family saved during water rescueIan washed away bridges and roads to several barrier islands. About 130 Florida Department of Transportation trucks started work on building a temporary bridge to Pine Island and, by the end of the week, should be finished on a structure drivers can carefully traverse at slow speeds, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news conference Monday.The governor said a similar temporary bridge is planned for nearby Sanibel, but will take more time. Fort Myers Mayor Kevin Anderson on Sunday defended Lee County officials from accusations that they were slow in ordering evacuations Tuesday ahead of the storm, a day later than some other counties in the area.“Warnings for hurricane season start in June. So there’s a degree of personal responsibility here. I think the county acted appropriately. The thing is, a certain percentage of people will not heed the warnings regardless,” Anderson said on the CBS show “Face the Nation.” Video below: EF2 tornado damage in Delray Beach, which was one of the three tornadoes in Palm Beach County during Hurricane Ian
Video above: The latest on the impacts of Ian
Nearly a week after Hurricane Ian smashed into Florida and carved a path of destruction that reached into the Carolinas, more than half a million statewide residents faced another day without electricity Tuesday as rescuers continued their search for those trapped inside homes inundated with lingering floodwaters.
U.S. officials vowed Sunday to unleash a massive amount of federal disaster aid as crews scrambled to rescue people stranded by the storm.
GALLERY: Hurricane Ian causes tornadoes, flooding across South Florida
At least 99 people have been confirmed dead in Florida and four in North Carolina, according to ABC News. Search and rescue efforts were still ongoing in Florida, where more than 1,600 people have been rescued statewide.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was in Arcadia on Sunday afternoon, about 30 miles inland from where Ian made landfall. The rural area didn’t get the storm surge experienced by coastal communities, but standing water from floods remained four days after the storm.
“This is such a big storm, brought so much water, that you’re having basically what’s been a 500-year flood event,” DeSantis said.
Video below: The last news conference from Florida officials on Ian
Ian knocked out power to 2.6 million customers across Florida when it roared ashore with 150-mph (241-kph) winds and pushing a powerful storm surge.
About 520,000 homes and businesses in Florida were still without electricity Monday evening, down from a peak of 2.6 million. But that is still nearly the same amount of customers in all of Rhode Island.
Eric Silagy, Chairman and CEO of Florida Power & Light — the largest power provider in the state — said he understands the frustrations and said crews are working as hard as they can to restore power as soon as possible. The utility expects to have power restored to 95% of its service areas by the end of the day Friday, he said.
A utility spokesperson said the remaining 5% comprises mostly cases where there’s a special situation making it difficult to restore power, such as the home being so damaged it can’t receive power or the area still being flooded. Those outages do not include customers whose homes or businesses were destroyed.
Another major electricity provider in the hard-hit coastal region — Lee County Electric Cooperative — said Monday it expects to hit the 95% mark by the end of Saturday. That figure does not include barrier islands like Sanibel that are in its service area.
Video below: WPBF 25 drone video shows the devastation in Fort Myers
Power restoration is always a key challenge after major hurricanes when high winds and flying debris can topple power lines that distribute electricity to homes or in more severe storms, damage major parts of the electric infrastructure such as transmission lines or power generation.
Silagy said the utility has invested $4 billion over the last 10 years to harden its infrastructure by doing things such as burying more power lines, noting that 40% of its distribution system is now underground. The utility is also using more technology like drones that can stay aloft for hours to get a better picture of the damage to the system, and sensors at substations that can alert them to flooding so they can shut off parts of the system before the water hits.
Silagy said he’s seen during Ian where those investments have paid off. On Fort Myers Beach, for example, where so many homes and businesses were wiped away, concrete utility poles remain standing, he said. Silagy said the company also didn’t lose a single transmission structure in the 8,000 miles (12,875 kilometers) they have across Florida.
Deanne Criswell, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the federal government is focusing first on victims in Florida, which took the brunt of one of the strongest storms to make landfall in the United States. President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden plan to visit Florida on Wednesday.
Informational: 2022 WPBF 25 First Warning Weather Hurricane Survival Guide
Meanwhile, rescue and salvage efforts across Florida remained difficult. In DeSoto County, northeast of Fort Myers, the Peace River and tributaries reached record high levels, and boats were the only way to get supplies to many of the county’s 37,000 residents.
Video below: Central Flori...
Trump Rallies Drift To Fringe Ahead Of Potential 2024 Bid
Trump Rallies Drift To Fringe Ahead Of Potential 2024 Bid https://digitalarizonanews.com/trump-rallies-drift-to-fringe-ahead-of-potential-2024-bid-4/
WARREN, Mich. (AP) — Paige Cole is one of the “Anons.” The mother of three from Eastpointe, Michigan, says Joe Biden is a sham president and believes Donald Trump will soon be reinstated to the White House to finish the remainder of Biden’s term.
“His whole inauguration was fake. He didn’t have real military people. He had, like, fake badges, fake people. And Trump is actually our president,” she said while waiting in line for his latest rally on Saturday at Macomb Community College. Wearing a pink “Trump 2024” hat and draped in a large “TRUMP WON” flag, Cole — a former Democrat who says she voted twice for Barack Obama — began to cry as she described the significance of Trump’s return and the 1,000 years of peace she believes will be ushered in with it.
“It’s gonna change everything,” she says, “like we have never in humanity seen before.”
Trump’s rallies have always attracted a broad swath of supporters, from first timers taking advantage of their chance to see a president in person, to devotees who camp out for days and follow him around the country like rock band groupies. But after spending much of the last two years obsessively peddling false claims of a stolen election, Trump is increasingly attracting those who have broken with reality, including adherents of the baseless QAnon conspiracy, which began in the dark corners of the internet and is premised on the belief that the country is run by a ring of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and cannibals that only Trump can defeat.
As he eyes another White House bid, Trump is increasingly flirting with the conspiracy. He’s reposted Q memes on his social media platform and amplified users who have promoted the movement’s slogans, videos and imagery. And in recent weeks, he has been closing out his rally speeches with an instrumental song that QAnon adherents have claimed as their anthem and renamed “WWG1WGA” after the group’s “Where we go one, we go all” slogan.
Trump and his allies often dismiss suggestions that he advances conspiracy theories or condones violence. “The continued attempts by the media to invent and amplify conspiracies, while also fanning the flames of division, is truly sick,” his spokesperson, Taylor Budowich, said in a statement. “America is a nation in decline and our people are suffering, President Trump and his America First movement will not be distracted by the media’s nonsense, and he will instead continue fighting to Make America Great Again.”
But interviews with more than a dozen Michigan rallygoers Saturday underscore his influence and serve as a reminder that many cling to his every word and see his actions as validation.
Several of those interviewed said they only began attending Trump’s rallies after the 2020 election, when they said they had become more politically engaged. Several, like Virginia Greenlee, of Holland, Michigan, said they had been in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, trying to halt the peaceful transition of power by disrupting the certification of Biden’s win.
“President Trump really woke people up because I didn’t even know there was a deep state or fake media, fake news, until he started bringing light,” said Greenlee, who said she did not go inside the building but watched from outside. She blamed the violence on leftist protesters masquerading as Trump supporters, though there is no evidence to support that claim.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to elevate those who peddle conspiracies. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow salesman who has spent millions trying (and failing) to prove the election was stolen, spoke twice Saturday — once outside to attendees waiting in line to enter and again during the rally program. Also in attendance was Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman who told the crowd that “Democrats want Republicans dead. And they’ve already started the killings.”
Trump has long used angry and violent rhetoric to rile up his supporters, even after Jan. 6 made clear that some may act on that anger. As he inches closer to a possible announcement, Trump has leaned into the kind of racist and violent language that helped him clinch victory in 2016, when his ever-more-shocking statements — and the inevitable backlash — helped him dominate the news.
On Friday, he again attacked Mitch McConnell, this time in a racist post on his social media site that accused the Senate Republican leader of having a “death wish” and derided McConnell’s wife, who was born in Taiwan and served in Trump’s administration as a Cabinet secretary.
On Saturday, the crowd cheered enthusiastically as Trump touted plans to use the death penalty to kill drug dealers and traffickers if he returns to the White House, emulating the strongman leaders he’s often admired. And again, he empathized with the Jan. 6 defendants who have been jailed for their role in the insurrection, casting the rioters — whom he has already pledged to pardon if he runs and wins — as “political prisoners” and accusing authorities of “persecuting people who just happened to be there, many of them didn’t even go in.”
The crowd in turn, broke into numerous “Lock her up!” chants directed at Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well as the state’s Democratic governor, secretary of state and attorney general, whom his endorsed candidates are trying to unseat.
Still, Trump aides seem to want to have it both ways. As he began to wrap up his speech, some in the crowd raised their index fingers in what has been described as a QAnon salute. But for the second week in a row, burly event staff with tattoos carefully scanned the crowd, quickly asking those who raised their fingers to put them down.
“They said they didn’t want hands in the air,” one of them explained he’d been told.
Still, Trump’s nods to QAnon are encouraging to people like Cole, who said Trump had opened her eyes “to everything, to the evil in the world.”
A 55-year-old semi-retired certified nursing assistant who relies on a bevy of fringe podcasts for information since eschewing cable news, Cole believes “our money’s no good because it was controlled by the Rothschilds,” an anti-Semitic trope, and that the Supreme Court has “already overturned” the 2020 election, but “they’re just sitting on it and they’re waiting for things to come about.”
“We have to listen to underground news to get the truth of what’s going on, really,” she said.
Trump’s decision to play the song, she said after the rally, shows the American people “and all those affiliated and committed in with the WWG1WGA bond and mission, that President Trump, too, is doing his best to help all involved to eradicate worldwide evil and helping to make the world better for all. It brings me strength in my mind to hold onto the hope and promises for a better life for all.”
But some in the crowd voiced discomfort.
Christina Whipkey, 50, who lives in Warren, Michigan, said she found Trump’s flirtations with QAnon “kind of weird” and “odd” and worried their presence at his rallies was playing into negative stereotypes.
“I didn’t like that,” she said. “It’s telling people what they said about us all along, that we’re all just a bunch of QAnon supporters.”
“You don’t want people to think just because you support him that you’re that far into it, that you’re one of those people,” she went on. “You don’t want people to think that about you.”
A longtime Trump supporter who remembers talking about him running for president while playing his board game in high school, Whipkey also said she thinks it’s time for Trump to move on from the 2020 election, even if she has concerns about the vote.
“I just wish he’d let that go now. Focus more on the future than on the past,” she said, worried he was turning off potential voters. “They’re tired of hearing it … You get to a point where it’s like, ‘All right, buddy. We heard it enough. We got it. We know.’”
Laurie Letzgus, 51, a machine operator from Port Huron, Michigan, and another longtime supporter, agreed.
“It is time to move on, I think,” she said. “Let’s look forward. And let’s look to 2024.”
But Sharon Anderson, a member of the “Front Row Joes” group that travels the country to see Trump and who was attending her 29th rally Saturday, including the one held Jan. 6, disagreed. While she doesn’t “put a lot of faith in some of their beliefs,” she took no issue with QAnon’s growing presence at the rallies.
“There’s a lot of people, a big group that comes to his rallies. And they are for him, too. They’re for his policies. Now whether they are trying to push their beliefs, I don’t know,” said Anderson, who lives in East Tennessee. “But I do know that everybody here that I’ve encountered supports Donald J. Trump. That’s what matters.”
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A More Unequal Divided Violent United States Is Seeing Its Democracy Decay
A More Unequal, Divided, Violent United States Is Seeing Its Democracy Decay https://digitalarizonanews.com/a-more-unequal-divided-violent-united-states-is-seeing-its-democracy-decay/
* “Income and wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country, and it is rising,” said an April report.
* “Largely driven by the pandemic,” life expectancy at birth in the United States declined by nearly a year to 76.1 years from 2020 to 2021, reaching its lowest since 1996.
* Firearm-related deaths increased by 15 percent to 45,222 in 2020, the highest ever recorded.
BEIJING, Oct. 4 (Xinhua) — In a recent measurement of how countries have progressed towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, the United States ranked 41, after Cuba and before Bulgaria.
American experts consider it a dismal rating. Having dropped from its 2021 ranking of 32, the country has declined in indicators such as inequalities, labor rights protections and carbon emissions, according to the report by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network in June.
The rating is “the inevitable result of two problems,” namely racism and a devotion to “American exceptionalism,” political historian Kathleen Frydl wrote on Sept. 15, citing a February index that deemed the United States to be a “flawed democracy.”
More reports have revealed the ills of today’s America, where ordinary people have suffered too much from a system stuck in partisanship amid rising gun violence and an unprecedented pandemic.
People wearing face masks are seen at a COVID-19 vaccine clinic in Los Angeles, California, the United States, on Aug. 5, 2022. (Xinhua)
TOUGHER LIFE
“Let our voices be heard, knowing that enough is enough,” said Adrienne J. Gaymon, who sat through an eight-hour bus ride from Columbia, South Carolina, to join thousands of Americans in downtown Washington D.C. this June for a rally to call attention to the living conditions of low-income people.
She criticized what she called tax breaks for the rich and the rising cost of living, while “nothing’s being done to help those that are struggling.”
The rally took place near Capitol Hill, with protestors holding signs with messages such as “money for the poor, not for war,” “lift from the bottom everybody rises,” “stop racism now,” and “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“Income and wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country, and it is rising,” said an April report by the Council on Foreign Relations headquartered in New York, noting that between 1978 and 2018, CEO compensation and worker compensation increased by more than 900 percent and just 11.9 percent respectively.
In 1980, households in the top 10 percent in the United States had incomes about nine times that of households in the bottom 10 percent, while the ratio increased every decade since, reaching 12.6 in 2018, according to a report by the Pew Research Center in January 2020.
People attend a rally calling for attention to the living conditions of the low-income people and urging policymakers to do more to support those in the bottom, in Washington, D.C., the United States, June 18, 2022. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
Gloria Brandman, a retired school teacher from New York City, told Xinhua at the rally that “so many people are just struggling right now, and we’ve seen the pandemic has just made it even worse for everyone, especially people without the money to take the precautions that they need.”
“Largely driven by the pandemic,” life expectancy at birth in the United States declined by nearly a year to 76.1 years from 2020 to 2021, reaching its lowest since 1996, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in August.
“In this country, by systematically neglecting public health over the last 30 to 40 years, we’ve lost a lot of ground,” said Phil Landrigan, an epidemiologist at Boston College, the Boston Herald reported.
A breakdown of the data speaks more. In the first half of 2020, life expectancy at birth for African American populations dropped the most from 2019, by 2.7 years to 72 years, hitting a new low since 2001. Latinos experienced the second-biggest decline.
In January, the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer indicated that the level of trust among U.S. citizens in their government was merely 39 percent, down by 3 percentage points from 2021.
A yellow school bus convoy heads to pro-gun right U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s home and office in Houston, the United States, July 14, 2022. (Change the Ref/Handout via Xinhua)
RISING VIOLENCE
With less public confidence comes more violence.
On July 14, a mile-long convoy consisted of 52 yellow school buses headed to pro-gun right U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s home and office in Houston, the largest city of the gun-friendly state of Texas, to honor thousands of young victims of gun violence across the country and demand gun control reform.
The empty bus seats represented the 4,368 children killed by guns since 2020, according to the organizers, who said that Cruz was the leading recipient of gun lobbyist funding in Texas, with nearly 750,000 dollars in total.
Since 2020, firearms have overtaken car accidents to become the leading cause of death in children in the United States, said the CDC.
In 2020, firearm-related deaths increased by 15 percent to 45,222, the highest ever recorded by the CDC since it began tracking firearm deaths in 1968.
Twenty-one percent of U.S. adults say either themselves, a family member, or a close friend has had an experience with gun violence in the past five years, showed an August study from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
But still, gun control remains stagnant between parties, with a century-old New York state law restricting a citizen’s ability to carry a concealed handgun squashed by the Supreme Court in June.
Demonstrators march during a protest after U.S. Supreme Court made decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, in New York, the United States, June 24, 2022. (Photo by Michael Nagle/Xinhua)
DECAYING DEMOCRACY
The increasingly unequal, split and violent society has laid bare the malfunctions of American democracy. As the Sweden-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance said in November 2021, the United States was undergoing “democratic backsliding.”
The Jan. 6 Capitol riot last year, which a Le Monde columnist this May has called “a symbol of a sick democracy,” has shown how partisanship could undermine democracy, while 2022 has seen even more fierce antagonism between Democrats and Republicans, as well as between their supporters, in abortion, gun control and other issues concerning people’s fundamental rights and wellbeing.
Now, after the search of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate by federal agents in August, part of a probe launched by the U.S. Department of Justice into whether Trump had mishandled classified documents, violent threats and calls for “civil war” erupted on pro-Trump forums online, with some far-right figures publicly spreading violent rhetoric.
Supporters of Donald Trump gather near the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., the United States, Jan. 6, 2021. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said they have seen an increase in “violent threats” against law enforcement, judiciary and government personnel, including a particular threat to “place a so-called Dirty Bomb in front of FBI headquarters.”
In a speech on Sept. 1, U.S. President Joe Biden himself admitted that “equality and democracy are under assault,” lashing out at Trump and “MAGA Republicans” — those who support Trump.
“For the West, the growth of social cleavages should come as a warning … democratic institutions can provide cover for social divisions and allow them to be exploited for political gain, as has occurred in the United States and elsewhere in recent years,” Amitav Acharya, professor of international relations at American University, wrote for Foreign Affairs in its July/August edition.
Marc Fisher, senior editor of The Washington Post, lamented in August that “it’s easy and logical to conclude that the United States today stands as close to the edge of civil war as it has since 1861.”
“We already live in a ‘backsliding’ democracy …” Max Boot, a senior fellow for national security studies at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in July. “We seem to be sleepwalking to disaster.” (Video reporters: Zhang Mocheng, Hu Yousong, Zhao Xu; video editors: Zhu Cong, Yin Le, Zhao Yuchao, Hui Peipei)■
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Biden Administration Uses Only 20% Of Available Refugee Spots
Biden Administration Uses Only 20% Of Available Refugee Spots https://digitalarizonanews.com/biden-administration-uses-only-20-of-available-refugee-spots/
The Biden administration resettled 25,000 refugees in fiscal year 2022, falling 80% short of the 125,000 available refugee spots, according to a new report from CBS News.
This year’s tally is more than double the number of refugee admissions in 2021, which saw a record low of 11,411 refugees. It also does not include at least 130,000 Afghans and Ukrainians who entered the U.S. under humanitarian parole, a program that grants temporary legal status to foreigners.
President Biden signed an executive order last year to expand the U.S. refugee program, which was gutted by the Trump administration. In 2020, former President Trump reduced the refugee cap to 15,000.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) interviewed 44,000 refugees during FY 2022, a nearly 400% increase from 2021, when 9,100 refugees were interviewed, according to CBS News. The figure remains below the annual historic average of 65,000 interviews,
The Biden administration announced last week it would once again allow up to 125,000 refugees in fiscal year 2023.
“We are going to do everything in our power to welcome as many refugees as we can this year, recognizing that 125,000 remains a very ambitious target and it will take some time to get there,” Deputy Assistant State Department Secretary Sarah Cross told CBS News. “But we are very optimistic that we’re going to reach much higher levels than this year.”
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Elon Musk Says https://digitalarizonanews.com/elon-musk-says/
In a world where social systems often depend on the young supporting the old, forward thinkers are starting to wonder what happens as populations age.
At the Cannes Film Festival this summer, many attendees reveled at the “Top Gun” reboot, a throwback to the past. But on the sidelines a smaller crowd witnessed something more solemn: the possibility of a dark and tragic future.
“Plan 75,” a film by Japanese director Hayakawa Chie, explores the potential dangers of her country’s aging society, where nearly one-in-three people are currently 65 or older. Set in a near-future dystopia, the film depicts a nation whose healthcare and pensions systems have become so overburdened by the elderly that the government aggressively markets a policy to pay for final bucket list items and then euthanize anyone over 75.
While technically the stuff of science fiction, demographers say the film arrives at a time when humanity really is aging.
The global fertility rate has decreased by half since 1960. In countries responsible for 85% of the world’s gross domestic product – the United States, Germany, Japan, even China and India – births have fallen below the “replacement rate,” meaning that unless offset by immigration, population will begin to decline as older generations depart.
The United Nations calculates the world population will now peak in 2084, before starting to fall by the century’s end.
More: US, world population to shrink after midcentury, study suggests
In a world where economies are designed around growth and social systems depend on the young supporting the old, forward thinkers are beginning to wonder what comes next.
Consider Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and business magnate, now most prominent among their ranks.
“Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk wrote on Twitter this summer. “Mark these words.”
But is he right?
Population concerns are nothing new
For centuries, humans have pondered the ideal size of humanity.
But experts warn such efforts usually end in folly, and that our species has within its grasp solutions to prosper whether populations rise or fall.
“It’s up to us and how the world responds,” said Lauren Johnston, a professor at the University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre and economic demographer.
For much of the last few centuries, those fretting about overpopulation have had the spotlight. In 1798, English scholar Thomas Malthus published an influential essay that laid out an idea known as the “Malthusian trap,” which holds that population growth inevitably exceeds food and other resources, leading to famine and poverty. The work inspired anxiety in England and helped lead to the first national census of England, Scotland and Wales.
Such concerns echoed loudly in 1968, when Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich and wife Anne Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” a book that predicted global famine leading to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people within decades.
But most experts say such predictions have not come to pass. Particularly in the past 50 years, a “Green Revolution” in agriculture has used new farming methods to reap more calories per acre of land, leading world hunger to decrease even as the population doubled.
More: A new threat emerges for US lakes and rivers. Your lawn or toilet may be partly to blame.
Although studies show such practices have created additional problems – driving water pollution, contributing to climate change, and perhaps even decreasing the nutritional value of food – Johnston points out that many nations are now facing the opposite of starvation.
“In most countries there has been a sufficiently productive response to population growth that there hasn’t been a famine,” Johnston said. “Now there’s obesity.”
Underpopulation on the horizon?
As concern over having too many mouths to feed has waned, an opposing one has risen: too few people to work.
That’s an especially obvious worry in China, which infamously implemented a one-child policy in 1980 to address exponential population growth projections. Its current population of 1.4 billion remains the world’s largest.
But realizing the aging trajectory of its society, in 2016 China eliminated the policy and has also limited pensions and social programs for the elderly, Johnston said.
Many other nations are or soon will be facing similar challenges.
To maintain a steady population without immigration, a nation has to achieve a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman, experts say. But the fertility rate is just 1.7 in China and Brazil, 1.5 across the European Union, and 0.8 in South Korea, the lowest of any country, according to the World Bank. The rate is 1.6 in the United States, where the population is still rising only due to longer lifespans and immigration, which is projected to outpace natural births by 2030.
Globally, it’s primarily African nations like Nigeria, where the fertility rate is 5.2, that are contributing to population growth. But as those nations develop, some experts expect fertility rates to fall as well, contributing to the possibility of unprecedented global population decline.
“There’s never been anything close to a parallel,” Johnston said.
Some experts are ringing alarm bells on what that could mean for societies.
In their book “Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival,” economists Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan warn of mounting fiscal crises, “as medical, care, and pension expenditures all increase in our ageing societies.”
Nations could wind up burning the candle at both ends: as a higher percentage of people become retirees they require more public resources, while at the same time the taxable working population shrinks. Problems could be exacerbated as rates of Alzheimer’s and other costly elder illnesses increase, while labor shortages create inflationary pressures. As countries face these challenges, their societies and politics could destabilize.
“Our view of the future is not encouraging, but it is coherent and plausible,” Goodhart and Pradhan write.
So Musk is right?
Not so fast, says Daniel Kammen, a professor of sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley and former Science Envoy to the U.S. State Department.
While aging societies do pose possible challenges in the future, Kammen says the world is facing a current full-blown crisis right now: climate change.
And adding more people to the Earth’s population will only further complicate humanity’s lagging efforts to fight global warming, experts say.
“There’s no ideal number, but certainly I would say there are too many people on our planet for our current lifestyle,” Kammen said.
Kammen believes the entire conversation about population is a red herring, a view commonly held among population experts.
Instead, he says the focus should be on whether or not countries are wisely using resources. That’s when the wealth of nations like the U.S., and not their population, come into focus.
A study in the journal Nature Sustainability this year found that the world’s wealthiest 10% of people produce 47% of its carbon emissions, compared to just 10% of emissions for the entire bottom half of the economic ladder.
To put it another way, World Bank data shows the average Nigerian’s carbon footprint is 0.6 metric tons each year. With the globe currently emitting about 34 billion metric tons of CO2 annually, that means it could currently support 58 billion people if they had a Nigerian carbon footprint.
On the other hand, the average American uses 14.7 metric tons of CO2 each year, meaning the world could support just 2.3 billion people if everyone had an American footprint.
The same effect can be seen within countries. While many Americans believe that population-dense cities hold the most blame for carbon emissions, work from Kammen and his colleagues show the carbon footprints of urban Americans are actually substantially less than rural residents, with suburban residents surpassing both. That’s true both on a per capita basis and in total: about half of U.S. carbon emissions come from suburban settings, while less than a third come from urban.
Ultimately, Kammen said, the question is how to reduce resource footprints, especially in wealthy nations. The smaller they get, the more people the planet can support.
“While it sure seems like there are a lot of people on our planet, our individual impact is much more measured by the ways in which we amplify or minimize our footprint,” Kammen said. “If you make it about population, you avoid how critical our patterns of consumption are.”
Experts also say the challenges of population decline are not insurmountable.
Johnston says it will come down to smart planning and cooperation. If populations do peak and fall, governments can mitigate the repercussions by sharing resources more equitably. That will likely include sacrifices among the older generations. Not with their lives as “Plan 75” depicts, but through higher retirement ages and adjustments to pensions and benefits.
Other experts note that it may be possible to maintain productivity levels with fewer people, through increased education or even possibly with the assistance of technologies like Artificial Intelligence and automation. In the end, people of working ages may also need to sacrifice in the form of higher taxes.
But such a future will inevitably look different than the world we live in now, and Goodhart and Pradhan warn a lot will be riding on whether or not societies accept such changes.
“We doubt that politicians, facing rising health and pension costs, will be prepared or able to raise taxes enough to equilibrate the economy via fiscal policy,” they wrote.
Population ‘cures’ can be worse than population collapse
While population decline comes with challenges, experts warn that attempts to...
Trump Who Was Furious Because Of The Accusations Against Him The Case Against The Big Challan Was Dismissed Pipa News
Trump, Who Was Furious Because Of The Accusations Against Him, The Case Against The Big Challan Was Dismissed Pipa News https://digitalarizonanews.com/trump-who-was-furious-because-of-the-accusations-against-him-the-case-against-the-big-challan-was-dismissed-pipa-news/
Trump, who was furious because of the accusations against him, the case against the big Challan was dismissed
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Lloyd Baker Injury Attorneys The Superior Injury Firm In Phoenix AZ Digital Journal
Lloyd Baker Injury Attorneys, The Superior Injury Firm In Phoenix AZ – Digital Journal https://digitalarizonanews.com/lloyd-baker-injury-attorneys-the-superior-injury-firm-in-phoenix-az-digital-journal/
Lloyd Baker Injury Attorneys is a reputable firm with a team of experienced and highly qualified injury attorneys with an unrivaled track record of helping victims recover compensation for the damages caused by the negligence of another entity. In an update, Lloyd Baker Injury Attorneys highlighted the top qualities of the best injury lawyer in Phoenix.
Phoenix, AZ – In a website post, Lloyd Baker Injury Attorneys outlined the qualities of the best injury lawyer in Phoenix. The team also noted the necessity to hire the best injury lawyer in the locality. The reputable firm also noted that clients don’t have to pay legal fees unless they help them win their cases.
The best thing about hiring the best personal injury lawyer Phoenix has from Lloyd Baker Injury Attorneys is that the firm specializes in different areas of injury cases. They cater to victims of truck accidents, car accidents, uber accidents, slips and fall cases, and animal attacks, among others, caused by negligence or intentional acts of the responsible party or entity. Therefore, clients don’t have to rely on different firms for various legal representation or counsel but Lloyd Baker Injury Attorneys only.
The injury lawyers further shared they use the firm’s resources to ensure they collect solid evidence against the responsible party for maximum compensation. The firm also has a highly qualified and experienced legal team with exceptional negotiation skills. They also offer free consultations to their clients. That’s why Lloyd Baker Injury Attorneys is the go-to firm when searching for the best Phoenix personal injury lawyer.
About Lloyd Baker Injury Attorneys
Lloyd Baker Injury Attorneys is a top-rated firm in Phoenix offering top-notch legal counsel and representation to victims of personal injury cases. The highly experienced lawyers are confident that their extensive level of experience, affordable legal fees, and commitment to helping clients in Phoenix make them the best injury firm in the locality.
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European Midday Briefing: Stocks Claw Back Losses -2-
European Midday Briefing: Stocks Claw Back Losses -2- https://digitalarizonanews.com/european-midday-briefing-stocks-claw-back-losses-2/
Russia’s Lower House Approves Absorbing Ukrainian Territories
MOSCOW-Russian lawmakers moved forward with formalizing the absorption into Russia of occupied Ukrainian territories on Monday despite mounting battlefield setbacks and a lack of control over the regions they voted to incorporate.
Deputies in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, unanimously approved bringing Russian-controlled Luhansk and areas of Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia under Moscow’s control, increasing to 89 the number of Russian constituent territories.
London Heathrow to Drop Daily Passenger Cap After Chaotic Summer
LONDON-London Heathrow Airport has told airlines it will lift a cap on passenger numbers at its terminals later this month, according to people familiar with the decision, ending one of the most extraordinary measures the aviation industry put in place this summer to deal with a surge in travel and a shortage of workers.
The cap, which limits daily departing passengers from its terminals to 100,000 a day, won’t continue beyond Oct. 29 when the official summer flying season ends, people briefed on the matter said.
GLOBAL NEWS
U.S. Seeks to Further Restrict Cutting-Edge Chip Exports to China
The Biden administration is preparing new export controls on semiconductors and the machines to make them, the latest push in its effort to deny China the ability to make the fastest, most cutting-edge circuitry possible, according to people familiar with the situation.
The administration in recent weeks has already placed new restrictions on some U.S. exports of chips used for artificial-intelligence calculations and manufacturing equipment used to make some of the most powerful number-crunching chips.
Crypto Could Threaten Financial System, Federal Risk Panel Warns
WASHINGTON-Risks tied to cryptocurrencies could grow rapidly and eventually threaten the broader financial system, a panel of senior U.S. officials warned Monday, calling for tougher oversight of digital assets.
The Financial Stability Oversight Council, chaired by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, said the crypto industry remains small compared with the overall financial system, but that could change quickly and exacerbate potential systemic risks.
RBA Slows Pace of Rate Increases as Household Budgets Tighten
SYDNEY-The Reserve Bank of Australia slowed the pace of recent interest-rate increases at a policy meeting Tuesday, citing a deterioration in the global economic outlook and growing concern about tightening household budgets.
The RBA raised the official cash rate by 25 basis points to 2.60%, surprising most economists who expected a further 50-basis-point increase.
Top Fed Official Warns of More Persistent Price Pressures
Despite some signs of easing inflation, underlying price pressures have too much momentum and will likely require a period of higher interest rates, a top Federal Reserve official said Monday.
The economy is already seeing some of the effects of the Fed’s efforts to slow demand, including higher borrowing costs and mortgage rates and falling stock prices, which “have become significantly less supportive of spending,” said New York Fed President John Williams in remarks prepared for delivery Monday.
U.N. Calls On Fed, Other Central Banks to Halt Interest-Rate Increases
The Federal Reserve and other central banks risk pushing the global economy into recession followed by prolonged stagnation if they keep raising interest rates, a United Nations agency said Monday.
The warning comes amid growing unease about the haste with which the Fed and its counterparts are raising borrowing costs to contain surging inflation. India’s central bank Friday said that the global economy was facing a third major shock after the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in the form of aggressive rate increases by central banks in rich countries.
North Korea Launches Missile Over Japan
SEOUL-North Korea flew a missile over Japan for the first time since 2017, Seoul and Tokyo officials said, a significant escalation that led to Japan issuing warnings for citizens to take shelter.
A single intermediate-range missile was launched at 7:23 a.m. local time from the North’s Chagang Province, bordering China, South Korea’s military said. The missile flew about 2,800 miles, hitting an altitude of roughly 603 miles, according to Japanese and South Korean assessments.
Trump Files Defamation Lawsuit Against CNN, Seeking $475 Million
Former President Donald Trump filed a defamation lawsuit Monday against CNN, accusing the network of engaging in a smear campaign against him in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential race.
Mr. Trump’s suit, filed in a federal court in southern Florida, alleged CNN has sought to use its influence with viewers to spread false claims about him for the purpose of defeating him politically. He accused CNN of associating him with Adolf Hitler and portraying him as a Russian lackey and a racist. The network, he alleged, has been escalating these efforts recently in the expectation that he may run for president again in 2024.
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October 04, 2022 05:31 ET (09:31 GMT)
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George Conway Envisions Nightmare Scenario Before Trumps Final Reckoning
George Conway Envisions Nightmare Scenario Before Trump’s Final Reckoning https://digitalarizonanews.com/george-conway-envisions-nightmare-scenario-before-trumps-final-reckoning/
George Conway predicted “the reckoning is finally coming” for Donald Trump.
The former president “is in a downward psychological, emotional and physical spiral” and “in all likelihood” will soon “be convicted of multiple felonies,” the conservative attorney said in a lengthy interview with Salon published Monday.
But the path to Trump’s final downfall won’t run smoothly for America, warned the husband of former Trump White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and fierce critic of his wife’s former boss.
Trump would rather “try to tear the country apart” by inciting violence among his followers than cop a plea deal in the multiple investigations he is facing, said Conway.
Essentially, Trump “is going to make things much worse in this country before things finally get better,” he added.
“In all likelihood, I believe that Trump gets the Republican nomination in 2024, unless he goes to prison before then,” said Conway. “If Trump is convicted or it looks like he is going to be, he will try to take down as many people as possible with him. That’s what malignant narcissists do.”
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Verra Mobility Stock: A Toll Troll (NASDAQ:VRRM) https://digitalarizonanews.com/verra-mobility-stock-a-toll-troll-nasdaqvrrm/
FroggyFrogg/iStock Editorial via Getty Images
“A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.“― Roman Payne
Today, we put Verra Mobility Corporation (NASDAQ:NASDAQ:VRRM) in the spotlight for the first time. The company has recovered nicely from the pandemic and has recently made a couple of small acquisitions to help bolster growth. The shares do seem to be topping out in recent months even as the company has drawn the interest of an activist investor. An analysis follows below.
Seeking Alpha
Company Overview:
Verra Mobility Corporation is located in Mesa, AZ, a city I spent my grade school years in. The company provides smart mobility technology solutions and services in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Europe both to government and private entities. Its Parking division provides an integrated suite of parking software and hardware solutions to universities, municipalities, parking operators, healthcare facilities, and transportation hubs. The company services municipalities by enabling photo enforcement through road safety camera programs, which detects and process traffic violations. Finally, its Commercial division provides automated toll and violations management as well as title and registration services to rental car companies, fleet management companies, and other large fleet owners. The stock currently trades just above $15.00 a share and sports an approximate market capitalization of $2.35 billion.
Second Quarter Results:
On August 3rd, the company reported second quarter numbers. The company had non-GAAP earnings of 29 cents a share. This was up substantially from the 10 cents a share of profit it made in 2Q2021 and four cents a share above expectations. Revenues rose just over 45% on a year-over-year basis to $187.5 million, which also was nicely above the consensus. Management provided full year 2022 sales guidance of $720 million to $740 million, a slight rise from previous guidance.
August Company Presentation
It is important to note that organic revenue growth for the quarter was 26%. Verra Mobility got $29 million to service revenue in the quarter from recently acquired Redflex and T2 Systems.
August Company Presentation
Here is breakdown of revenue growth from the company’s three divisions:
The Commercial Services segment generated total revenue of $84.9 million, a 28% increase compared to $66.5 million in 2Q201.
The Government Solutions segment garnered total revenue of $83.5 million, a 34% increase compared to $62.2 million in the same period a year ago.
The Parking Solutions segment generated total revenue of $19.1 million with no comparable amounts in the prior year. The was the result of the recent purchase of T2 Systems.
Analyst Commentary & Balance Sheet:
The analyst community is mixed on its view around the company at the moment. Since mid-July, William Blair, Credit Suisse ($20 price target) and BTIG ($21 price target) have reissued Buy ratings while Deutsche Bank ($19 price target), Morgan Stanley ($17 price target) and Robert W. Baird ($18 price target) have all maintained Hold ratings on the equity.
August Company Presentation
Approximately seven percent of the outstanding float is currently held short. Two insiders sold $670,000 worth of the shares in January and February but there has been no insider activity in the stock since then. The company ended the second quarter with just over $90 million in cash and marketable securities on its balance sheet versus just over $1.2 billion in long term debt. The company repurchased $50 million worth of shares in the second quarter, part of a new $125 million stock buyback program. The company produced $54 million of free cash flow during the quarter as well.
Verdict:
The current analyst firm consensus has Verra Mobility earning a buck a share in FY2022 as revenues rise by a third to $735 million. Sales growth is expected to slow in FY2023 to the mid-single digits while earnings are projected to come in just under $1.15 a share.
It should be noted that activist investor Scopia Capital took a just over five percent stake in the company in July. It is pushing for changes at the company as the stock trades near the same levels of three years and its fair value for Verra Mobility is $25.00 a share.
The stock has doubled off pandemic lows but seems to be topping out in recent months. The shares trade for just over 15-time forward earnings and just over three times this year’s projected sales. Reasonable valuation for a company likely to grow earnings in the low teens next year on a mid-single-digit rise in sales. Based on the second quarter results, the stock has free cash flow yield in the high single digits.
Personally, I do wish the company would use that cash flow to pay down debt versus buying back stock. I am going to pass on any investment recommendation on VRRM at this time, as the shares seem fairly valued. If the stock dropped to the $12 to $13 range in the next market pullback, however, I would be tempted to pick up a small ‘watch item‘ position in VRRM.
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Stocks Sterling Rally After UK's Tax Climbdown Injects Some Confidence
Stocks, Sterling Rally After UK's Tax Climbdown Injects Some Confidence https://digitalarizonanews.com/stocks-sterling-rally-after-uks-tax-climbdown-injects-some-confidence/
Britain scraps small part of tax plan; markets relieved
Reserve Bank of Australia surprises with a small hike
High VIX points to more volatility
LONDON/SYDNEY, Oct 4 (Reuters) – Global stocks climbed for a second day on Tuesday, after Britain’s decision to ditch part of a controversial tax-cut plan and slightly paler expectations for aggressive central bank action returned some confidence to investors.
UK Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng on Monday announced the government would back down on reversing a tax break for top earners that formed part of a package aimed at boosting growth.
This measure only makes up a small part of the 45 billion pounds in unfunded tax cuts that sent the pound crashing to record lows and wreaked havoc in the gilts market.
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But it was enough to soothe some of the recent angst in the market and, together with emergency bond buying from the Bank of England, sterling was set to make up most of the losses incurred since the mini budget was unveiled on Sept. 23.
Adding to the sense of relief among investors, who endured one of the most volatile quarters in recent history in the three months to September, was Australia’s central bank, which lifted interest rates by far less than expected. .
A weaker read of U.S. manufacturing activity helped temper expectations for more hefty rate rises by the Federal Reserve.
However, some analysts said this optimism may be misplaced.
“My firm view, however, is that this will not be the case. While, technically, having a dual mandate, the Fed have effectively become a single-issue central bank; that issue being bringing inflation back to the 2% target,” Michael Brown, chief strategist at CaxtonFX, said.
“Unless we see a few months of consecutive improvement in inflation data, it’s tough to envisage any sort of pivot, with another 75 bps hike remaining my base case for next month’s decision. It’s tough to be long risk with that on the radar.”
The MSCI All-World index (.MIWD00000PUS) was last up 0.8% on the day, while stocks in Europe enjoyed a decent bounce, with the Stoxx 600 (.STOXX) trading almost 2% higher and London’s FTSE (.FTSE) gaining over 1%.
The pound , meanwhile, gained 0.6% against the dollar to trade at $1.1390. Sterling has risen by more than 10% since the mini-budget.
The dollar slid against a basket of major currencies , as the euro and the pound made upward headway and Treasury yields slipped in light of a shift in investor expectations for the path of U.S. interest rates.
U.S. benchmark 10-year yields fell by nearly 20 basis points on Monday, having topped 4.0% just last week. They were last down 7 bps at 3.5795%.
“Noticeably, that move lower was entirely driven by a fall in real yields, with inflation breakevens moving higher on the day, which is again a sign that investors are pricing in a much less aggressive reaction from the Fed,” Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid said in a daily note.
In trade thinned by holidays in China and Hong Kong, MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan (.MIAPJ0000PUS) rose 1.7%, led by gains in Australia.
ENJOY IT WHILE IT LASTS
After September, when global bonds witnessed one of the biggest sell-offs in decades and any currency other than the dollar appeared to crumble, market watchers said a snap back, aided by better sentiment in the UK market, was not unusual, but would likely be short-lived.
“The about-face … will not have a huge impact on the overall UK fiscal situation in our view,” said NatWest Markets’ head of economics and markets strategy John Briggs.
“(But) investors took it as a signal that the UK government could and is at least partially willing to walk back from its intentions that so disrupted markets over the past week.”
S&P 500 futures rose 1%, following a 2.6% bounce for the index (.SPX) overnight, suggesting a second day of gains may be in the offing on Wall Street later.
Other indicators of market stress are still flashing red. The CBOE Volatility Index (.VIX) remains elevated and above 30. Shares (CSGN.S) and bonds of Credit Suisse hit record lows on Monday as worry about the bank’s restructuring plans swept markets, although some of these losses reversed on Tuesday.
Japan’s yen hit 145 to the dollar on Monday – a level that prompted official intervention last week – and was last at 144.65, while the euro was up 0.6% at $0.9878, about three cents above last week’s 20-year trough.
“More volatility is almost certainly assured as FX markets re-focus on U.S. recession risks, which continue to build,” said ANZ senior economist Miles Workman, with U.S. jobs data on Friday the next major data point on the horizon.
Oil held overnight gains on news of possible production cuts, and Brent futures were last up 43 cents to $89.29 a barrel.
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Editing by Sam Holmes and David Evans
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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Links: Runoff Vote In Brazil; Rewilding A River; Waffle House And Hurricane Ian
Links: Runoff Vote In Brazil; Rewilding A River; Waffle House And Hurricane Ian https://digitalarizonanews.com/links-runoff-vote-in-brazil-rewilding-a-river-waffle-house-and-hurricane-ian/
A reminder to readers in the Bay area. This Thursday evening, at 6:30 p.m., I will be giving a talk at St. Ignatius Church, located on the campus of the University of San Francisco. Mine is the first in a series of talks about the Second Vatican Council, and I will be sketching some of the history that led up to the council as well as starting to answer the “So what?” question of why it remains so important. More information can be found here.
Politico looks at the surprisingly close result in the first round of voting in Brazil’s presidential contest. Former president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva was just shy of the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff, garnering 48.1% to incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro’s 43.5%. In pre-election polling, Bolsonaro was in the low 30s. The two men will face off on Oct. 30 in what may be the most consequential election for the planet this decade. Bolsonaro is a climate change skeptic and refuses to take steps to save the Amazon rainforest.
CNN reports on the town of Babcock Ranch, Florida, which is about 12 miles northeast of Fort Myers, and which was designed in an environmentally conscious way, 100% reliant on solar power, and with streets designed to direct floodwaters away from homes. It came through Ian with only some roof shingles torn off and some trees uprooted. Are there lessons here for Puerto Rico and other hurricane-prone regions?
Relatedly, at The Guardian, a fascinating look at efforts in the Netherlands to “rewild” the Meuse river. The Meuse likely has seen more battles than any other over time, but usually it was humans fighting other humans. Here, it is contemporary humans aligning with nature to defeat the progressive changes of earlier times, all of which at that time made the river more technologically efficient, but robbed it of the biodiversity a river should generate.
In The New York Times, Washington correspondent Charlie Savage explains why former President Donald Trump’s decision to request a special master to look at the documents seized by the FBI during their search at Mar-a-Lago is turning into a “giant backfire.” An appeals court ruling allows the Department of Justice to continue its probe into the documents that were seized. And Trump has to pay for the special master’s work, a bill that could become sizeable when one of Judge Raymond Dearie’s assistants charges $500 an hour. Seeing as Trump proposed Dearie for the job, it is hard to complain about his work.
In The American Prospect, managing editor Ryan Cooper brings together a lot of recent studies that explain that the climate “dystopia” is already here, and why policies that worry about the cost of combating climate change are now conclusively proven to be ridiculous, given the costs associated with recovering from a storm like Ian.
FiveThirtyEight republished a 2016 story about how Waffle House, the iconic breakfast joint throughout the South, prepares for hurricanes. Turns out, even the federal government has studied the company’s approach to honoring its commitment to remaining open. Just a great piece of longform journalism. And if you haven’t had their home fries, you don’t know what you are missing.
At Architecture Daily, a look at how the concept of the “megalopolis,” in which distinct urban areas grow and eventually merge into a unit with shared communications and transportation infrastructure, does and does not fit in the context of emerging patterns of urbanization in the Global South. I had not known that the term was coined to describe the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington. I am blessed to live in the Northeast Corridor’s North Korea, that is, if you look at the corridor from space at night, the northeast corner of Connecticut is the only section that is dark.
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Book On Trump Reveals Casual Racism And Homophobia
Book On Trump Reveals Casual Racism And Homophobia https://digitalarizonanews.com/book-on-trump-reveals-casual-racism-and-homophobia/
A controversial new book on Donald Trump by a New York Times journalist reveals that an intriguing look into his life from businessman to United States President, from casual racism to homophobia, and fear of dying from Covid-19.
The book, Confidence Man, written by Maggie Haberman chronicles Trump’s time as a New York businessman and life during and after his term as US President.
Haberman said she interviewed Trump three times in the course of writing the book and conducted interviews with over 200 people.
Confidence Man might not offer any real surprises to the public given his often-crass statements and ill-advised comments but the leaked contents do offer some inviting titbits.
The book reveals that Trump thought he was dying of Covid-19, regularly flushed government documents down the toilet, and tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The 76 year old former president denies any of these allegations are true of course.
Trump got infected by coronavirus in October 2020 and he thought he was dying. He was so ill that his deputy chief of staff, Tony Ornato, instructed the president to set up procedures to ensure the continuity of government.
It appears to be ironic given he often played down the pandemic threat in public. He also told the then New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, to not talk about the pandemic on TV.
Trump allegedly said…
“Don’t make such a big deal out of this. You’re going to make it a problem.”
One of the book’s biggest revelations is that Trump called former New York City mayor and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to try and overturn the 2020 US election.
He allegedly said…
“Okay, Rudy, you’re in charge. Go wild, do anything you want. I don’t care.”
Giuliani, and his other lawyers, allegedly refused to overturn the election results, to which he said…
“My lawyers are terrible.”
Trump’s nonpayment of taxes is highlighted in the book, which became a problem when he was running for president in 2016.
His campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and press secretary Hope Hicks, told him to address his refusal to release his tax returns as they believed the issue could prevent him from becoming president.
Trump apparently replied…
“Well, you know my taxes are under audit, I always get audited. So, what I mean is, well I could just say, ‘I’ll release them when I’m no longer under audit. ‘Cause I’ll never not be under audit.”
Every US President since Richard Nixon has voluntarily released their tax returns. A 2020 New York Times investigation revealed that Trump paid US$750 in federal income taxes the year he became president.
One of the most astonishing claims in Haberman’s book is that Trump was flushing documents down a White House toilet.
Apparently, White House staff regularly found the toilet was clogged with flushed documents.
Tearing up documents contravenes the Presidential Records Act – a law that says documents created or received by a president are the property of the US government and are to be handled by the US National Archives once the presidency ends.
Trump is also facing a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice for keeping government records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving office.
The book also logs Trump’s alleged casual racism and homophobia.
Shortly after his 2017 inauguration, Trump allegedly thought a racially diverse group of Democratic staffers were waiters and he asked them to fetch him some canapes.
The book is released today.
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US Warns About Foreign Efforts To Sway American Voters
US Warns About Foreign Efforts To Sway American Voters https://digitalarizonanews.com/us-warns-about-foreign-efforts-to-sway-american-voters/
Tuesday, October 4th 2022, 3:38 am
By: Associated Press
Federal officials are warning ahead of the November midterms that Russia is working to amplify doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections while China is interested in undermining American politicians it sees as threats to Beijing’s interests.
An unclassified intelligence advisory, newly obtained by The Associated Press, says China is probably seeking to influence select races to “hinder candidates perceived to be particularly adversarial to Beijing.” In the advisory, sent to state and local officials in mid-September, intelligence officials said they believe Beijing sees a lower risk in meddling in the midterms versus a presidential election.
While officials said they’ve not identified any credible threats to election infrastructure in the U.S., the latest intelligence warning comes amid the peak of a midterm campaign in which a rising number of candidates and voters openly express a lack of confidence in the nation’s democratic processes.
Foreign countries have long sought to sway public opinion in America, perhaps most notably in a covert Russian campaign that used social media to sow discord on hot-button social issues ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The U.S. government has been on high alert since, warning about efforts by Russia, China and Iran to meddle in American politics and shape how voters think.
The U.S. faces foreign influence campaigns while still dealing with growing threats to election workers domestically and the systematic spread of falsehoods and disinformation about voter fraud. Former President Donald Trump and many of his supporters — including candidates running to oversee elections in several states — continue to lie about the 2020 presidential election even as no evidence has emerged of significant voter fraud.
“The current environment is pretty complex, arguably much more complex than it was in 2020,” Jen Easterly, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm, told reporters Monday.
Russia is amplifying divisive topics already circulating on the Internet — including doubts about the integrity of American elections — but not creating its own content, said a senior FBI official who briefed reporters Monday on the condition of anonymity under terms set by the bureau.
Overall, the official said, China’s efforts are focused more on shaping policy perspectives, including at the state and local level, rather than on electoral outcomes.
Still, China appears to have focused its attention on a “subset of candidates” in the U.S. it sees as opposed to its policy interests, the official explained. In one high-profile case, the Justice Department in March charged Chinese operatives in a plot to undermine the candidacy of a Chinese dissident and student leader of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 who was running for a congressional seat in New York.
The briefing Monday came weeks after DHS distributed an advisory that described China’s approach during this midterm as different from the 2020 election, when the intelligence community assessed that China considered but did not deploy efforts to influence the presidential election.
There were publicly revealed examples during the last presidential election of influence campaigns originating in China. Facebook in September 2020 took down pages that posted what it said was a “small amount of content” on the election; that effort focused primarily on the South China Sea.
The DHS advisory doesn’t list specific races or states where it thinks China-linked actors might operate, but cites the March indictment alleging efforts to undermine the New York congressional candidate. It also suggests China’s interest in politics extends beyond the U.S., saying Australian intelligence since 2017 has scrutinized Chinese government attempts to support legislators or candidates, including those who have amplified Beijing’s stances on select issues.
A DHS spokesperson said the department regularly shares threat information with federal, state and local officials.
Chinese and Russian officials and state media have historically rejected U.S. allegations of election meddling and pointed in turn to American influence efforts in other countries.
State and local governments are limited in what they can do against influence campaigns, given that “their job isn’t to police political conversation,” said Larry Norden, an election security expert with the Brennan Center for Justice.
“I do think there is a lot voters should be doing,” he added. “If they are seeing messages about candidates presented in an alarmist or emotionally charged way, their radar should be going up. They should be checking the accuracy of claims, and if they are seeing false claims, they should be letting the social media companies know.”
Scott Bates, the deputy secretary of state in Connecticut, noted that election officials in the state had responded to warnings about foreign influence dating back to 2016.
“Our best defense is to have an educated populace,” he said.
He drew a distinction between misinformation about election processes and misinformation about a candidate or campaign.
“The election process, we can protect that,” he said. “If you’re talking about talking trash about a candidate, we’re not in the business of patrolling that.”
Some signs of influence operations from Russia and China are already public.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said in late September that it disabled a sprawling disinformation network coming from Russia involving sham news websites and hundreds of fake social media accounts. Researchers also exposed a much smaller network originating in China that was intended to spread divisive political content in the U.S., but reached only a tiny audience.
Officials at the FBI and DHS said Monday they were not aware of any credible threat to election infrastructure. A senior FBI official said that though officials were not tracking any specific effort by a foreign government to hack election equipment, they were nonetheless concerned that an adversary could spread exaggerated or false claims of compromise to undermine confidence in the elections.
Besides concerns about cybersecurity and foreign influence campaigns, the FBI is increasingly focused on physical threats to election workers.
The FBI created a task force in the summer of 2021 to deal with an influx of threats to election security workers. Since then, it has received and reviewed more than 1,000 reports of harassing communication. Most of the harassment came from email, phone calls and social media, and the majority primarily originated in states where there were ongoing audits of election results.
Of those tips, about 11% met the threshold of a potential federal crime. The task force has made four arrests, the FBI said. Officials cited constitutional barriers in bringing more cases because of the First Amendment’s strong protection of an individual’s political speech.
___
Associated Press journalist Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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