According to a Vanity Fair report, White House senior adviser, Jared Kushner, was working on a secret national testing plan in the spring to help bring the spread of Covid-19 under control.
On Trump’s handling of the coronavirus response, Al Franken says “This is the American carnage he was talking about,” a reference to the president’s inauguration speech.
Academy award winning actor Louis Gossett Junior and former Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill join MSNBC’S Ari Melber for the latest edition of Fallback Friday. Gossett criticizes the media for its oftentimes simplistic representation of Black lives in
dailymail.co.uk – To arrive in the pretty Somerset village of Witham Friary on a perfect English summer day is to feel instantly envious of its residents. Who wouldn’t want to live in an Area of Outstanding Natural Be…
A warning was issued for portions of Florida’s east coast by The National Hurricane Center on Friday, as Hurricane Isaias approaches the United States.
President Trump seems determined to sow confusion and chaos ahead of the 2020 election. Laurence Tribe says the president is trying to make the election ‘look chaotic’ and mentions a ‘fail safe’: President Nancy Pelosi.
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) – Argentine President Alberto Fernandez pulled the plug on a planned government takeover of cash-strapped soymeal giant Vicentin, according to a tweet sent by the Peronist leader on Friday, after a local judge partially blocked the move.
In early June Fernandez said his government would “rescue” Vicentin, once Argentina’s top soymeal exporter, after the family-owned company went broke last year. The move was criticized by farmers and industry leaders who characterized it as meddling in the private sector.
Past Peronist governments, including the one led by Argentina’s current Vice President Cristina Fernandez, had vastly increased the government’s role in the economy.
“We have repealed the decree that ordered the intervention of Vicentin,” Fernandez wrote on Twitter.
A source at Vicentin said the company welcomed the announcement. “The intervention never should have happened in the first place,” said the source, who asked not to be named.
Fernandez originally planned for the government to appoint managers to Vicentin. But a judge later stopped the government-appointed managers from acting as more than observers, a ruling that left Vicentin’s original management team in place.
“The national government will not commit public resources while the current board of directors remains in the company, nor will it form a trust sharing its management,” Fernandez wrote on Twitter.
Argentina is the top international supplier of soymeal livestock feed used to fatten hogs, poultry and cattle from Europe to Southeast Asia. It is a relatively healthy part of an economy mired in recession while battling COVID-19.
Fernandez’s intervention plan involved seeking congressional approval for a full takeover of the company. Vicentin went broke after going on a credit-fueled expansion in 2019, leaving farmers and banks holding more than a billion dollars in bad debts.
“Our intention has always been to rescue the company, preserve its assets, collaborate with the affected producers and maintain the employment of its workers,” Fernandez said.
Industry leaders applauded the canceling of the government’s intervention.
“This was the right decision,” said Gustavo Idigoras, head of Argentina’s CIARA-CEC export companies’ chamber.
“The solution to Vicentin should come from the court system,” he added, noting the company was in bankruptcy proceedings.
(Reporting by Hugh Bronstein and Maximilian Heath; Editing by Leslie Adler, Daniel Wallis and Tom Brown)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci on Friday resisted efforts by a staunch ally of President Donald Trump to turn his testimony about controlling the coronavirus pandemic into criticism of protests against racial injustice.
Fauci clashed with Representative Jim Jordan at a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Coronavirus, after the Ohio Republican demanded Fauci’s opinion about whether protests should be curbed or eliminated to control the pandemic.
“Should we limit the protesting?” Jordan asked. When Fauci said he was not in a position to make such a recommendation, the lawmaker retorted: “You make all kinds of recommendations. You make comments on dating, on baseball and everything you could imagine.”
“I’m not favoring anybody over anybody,” Fauci replied. “I’m not going to opine on limiting anything … I’m telling you what is the danger, and you can make your own conclusion about that. You should stay away from crowds, no matter where the crowds are.”
Fauci’s testimony comes at the end of a month in which U.S. coronavirus deaths rose by almost 25,000 and cases doubled in at least 18 states, according to a Reuters tally, dealing a crushing blow to hopes of quickly reopening the economy.
The United States has recorded nearly 1.8 million new COVID-19 cases in July out of its total 4.5 million known infections, an increase of 66% with many states yet to report on Friday. Deaths in July rose at least 19% to a total of more than 152,000.
Fauci, who made headlines in March by describing U.S. testing efforts as a failing, repeatedly handed off questions about the current state of testing from Democrats critical of Trump to get him to characterize the current situation to witnesses more directly involved with that effort.
Trump, who appeared to be watching the proceedings, weighed against his Democratic critics on Twitter: “Our massive testing capability, rather than being praised, is used by the Lamestream Media and their partner, the Do Nothing Radical Left Democrats, as a point of scorn. This testing, and what we have so quickly done, is used as a Fake News weapon. Sad!”
At the start of the hearing, congressional Republicans and Democrats clashed about whether the Trump administration had a national strategy to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
“The administration’s approach of deferring to states, sidelining experts and rushing to reopen has prolonged this virus and led to thousands of preventable deaths,” said panel Chairman James Clyburn, who denounced Trump’s coronavirus response as “among the worst of any country in the world.”
But Steve Scalise, the subcommittee’s top Republican, dismissed Clyburn’s criticism as political posturing, saying the Trump administration has provided effective plans for schools, employers, nursing homes and vaccine development.
“You wouldn’t even be here today if there wasn’t a plan,” he told the witness panel, which also included U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield and Admiral Brett Giroir, assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services.
A veteran of six Republican and Democratic administrations, Fauci has become the most familiar face of the administration’s coronavirus task force but a target of many conservatives who want to see the economies fully reopened.
(Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Scott Malone, Jonathan Oatis and Bill Berkrot)
Egypt Receives Advanced Russian Fighter Jets Over US Lingering Sanctions Threat Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/31/2020 – 19:45
Ignoring the lingering threat of Washington sanctions, Egypt is moving forward with a purchase of large batch of Russian Su-35 “Flanker” jet fighters.
The first batch of Su-35’s are now said to en route to Cairo this week, after in 2019 Egypt signed an agreement to purchase more than 20 Su-35 fighter jets from the Kremlin in a $2 billion deal.
The whole arrangement is awkward for the US defense establishment, given that it works so closely with the Egyptian military, and has done so for years going back to the Camp David Accords.
Via The Drive
Last last year, soon after the controversial deal was inked, a US official announced that the “United States could impose sanctions on Egypt and block it from future military sales if it goes ahead with a purchase of Russian warplanes” — but now that the planes have reportedly already been shipped, it’ll be interesting to see if the threat is followed through upon.
The news and analysis source Middle East Monitor previously offered the central rationale to Washington’s objections to its ally Egypt acquiring the aircraft: in addition to the obvious problem of the Kremlin’s growing influence in the region, the US has for decades honored its unofficial policy of ensuring that Israel keeps a “qualitative edge” over all potential rivals when it comes to defense technology.
The US has previously threatened other countries with sanctions under its Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) for purchases of Russian military equipment (Serbia being a recent example, related to rumors that it’s mulling S-400 anti-air acquirement).
Cairo eyeing the advanced Russian fighter might be viewed as an especially insulting affront by the Trump administration especially given that as the second largest recipient of foreign aid historically (after Israel), Washington has provided billions in economic and military aid to Egypt over the past years, including its F-16 fighters.
Val Demings has pressed through many obstacles in her career of public service, and with America bitterly divided over social justice issues, Demings has appeared as a prime candidate for Joe Biden’s VP. MSNBC’s Ari Melber reports on Rep. Val Demings in
Reaction from Yolo County assistant chief deputy district attorney Melinda Aiello.
