Elon Musk and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had an awkward Twitter interaction on Friday.
She slammed a "billionaire with an ego problem" who "controls a massive communication platform."
Musk responded, but Ocasio-Cortez said she was talking about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
In a cringe-worthy social media exchange Friday, billionaire Elon Musk told Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to "stop flirting" with him after the lawmaker slammed an unnamed "billionaire with an ego problem."
"Tired of having to collectively stress about what explosion of hate crimes is happening bc some billionaire with an ego problem unilaterally controls a massive communication platform and skews it because Tucker Carlson or Peter Thiel took him to dinner and made him feel special," the New York progressive wrote in a tweet on Friday.
Musk, whose buyout offer was accepted by Twitter earlier this week, then responded: "Stop hitting on me, I'm really shy."
Ocasio-Cortez quipped back in a now-deleted tweet that she was referring to a different billionaire, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
"I was talking about Zuckerberg but ok," the New York lawmaker replied.
Musk, nor Zukerberg, replied to the now-deleted tweet.
Ocasio-Cortez's initial tweet namedropping Fox News host Carlson and venture capitalist Thiel may have been referring to a 2019 Politico report, which claimed that Zuckerberg hosted a confidential dinner with Carlson. Thiel, Zuckerberg's longtime mentor, was one of Facebook's early investors.
Meanwhile, Theil and Musk's trajectories have run parallel since the founding of Paypal in 2000, though they appear to have a love-hate relationship. And this week, Carlson said he would be returning to Twitter after Musk's takeover.
Both social media companies have been wrapped up in an ongoing culture war over free speech. Twitter, for example, has faced criticism for allowing accounts that amplify misinformation. Many believe Musk, a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist," may reinstate accounts previously banned for violating the platform's hate speech or misinformation policy. Facebook has faced criticism in the past for allowing the spread of far-right misinformation.
Trump, Barr said, has surrounded himself with “sycophants” and “whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories”.
How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable April 30, 2022 at 1:17 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 95 Comments
New York Times: “...Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful.
Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — ‘We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,’ Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear.
“Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain.”
IN THAT WAY, HE PLAYS THE TRUMP GAME OF TRYING TO MAKE US HATE "ENEMIES" --WHILE HIDING THE FACT THAT OUR REAL ENEMIES ARE THE RICH AMERICAN AUTOCRATS WHO FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT ARE EVERY DAY ROBBING US OF A BETTER AMERICA FOR ALL OF US.
IT FRIGHTENS REPUBLICANS THAT IT IS NOW BECOMING CLEAR THAT OUR REAL ENEMIES ARE THE AMERICAN AUTOCRATS WHO, LIKE THE RUSSIAN AUTOCRATS WHO HAVE HELPED PUTIN TAKE OVER RUSSIA, WANT TO HELP DONALD TRUMP TAKE OVER AMERICA AND MAKE IT INTO A SIMILAR DICTATORIAL OLIGARCHY WHICH WOULD BE RUN AND RULED ONLY BY THE SUPER WEALTHY IN A GOVERNMENT OF, BY, AND FOR THE RICH, --NOT OF, BY, AND FOR THE PEOPLE.
OUR REAL ENEMIES ARE THE AMERICAN AUTOCRATS WHO, LIKE THE RUSSIAN AUTOCRATS WHO HAVE HELPED PUTIN TAKE OVER RUSSIA, WANT TO HELP DONALD TRUMP OR SOMEONE LIKE HIM TAKE OVER AMERICA AND MAKE IT INTO A SIMILAR DICTATORIAL OLIGARCHY WHICH WOULD BE RUN AND RULED ONLY BY THE SUPER WEALTHY IN A GOVERNMENT OF, BY, AND FOR THE RICH, --NOT OF, BY, AND FOR THE PEOPLE.
The status of key investigations involving Donald Trump
Probes of the ex-president’s business and political conduct ARE STILL UNDERWAY IN MULTIPLE PLACES
By Matt Zapotosky
Trump business practices, Manhattan DA’s criminal probe Trump business practices, New York AG’s civil probe Georgia election results investigation The Jan. 6 select committee’s investigation Criminal probes of Jan. 6 The Mar-a-Lago boxes investigation Westchester, N.Y., golf club
Donald Trump is facing historic legal and legislative scrutiny for a former president, under investigation by U.S. lawmakers, local district attorneys, a state attorney general and the FBI.
Authorities are looking into Trump and his family business for a medley of possible wrongdoing, including his actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol and how he valued his various assets for loan and tax purposes.
Though one probe — by the district attorney in Manhattan — appears to be winding down, others remain active, threatening Trump with criminal or financial penalties, or plain old public embarrassment, as he weighs a 2024 bid to return to the White House. Here’s a list of the many key investigations and where they stand.
AND THEN TOO--- Special Grand Jury Considers TRUMP Election Interference
April 30, 2022 at 7:25 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 83 Comments
“Fulton County prosecutors will begin selecting participants Monday for a special grand jury to consider whether former president Donald Trump should be charged for his attempts to pressure Georgia officials to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost,” CBS News reports.
“Special grand juries are unusual. They focus on just one investigation, and can be impaneled for far longer than typical grand juries, which often consider charging recommendations for a variety of investigations.”
Georgia special grand jury to convene Monday to investigate Trump’s effort to overturn the election
Bob Brigham
April 30, 2022
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Monday will begin selecting a special grand jury to investigate Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
The move comes 482 days after The Washington Post published a damning recording of Trump pressuring GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" to make up the margin he lost to Joe Biden.
"The jury selection process will kick off amid recent reports that a separate grand jury in New York has fizzled after six months without bringing any charges against the former president," Mother Jones reported Saturday. "The investigation is likely to proceed along a drawn-out timeframe. Willis previously told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she will wait to issue subpoenas until after Georgia’s primaries in late May to avoid the appearance that she’s attempting to influence the election for politically motivated reasons."
Raffensperger released the audio recording to The Post after Trump tweeted about the call and said the secretary of state "had no clue."
In February, Willis told Rachel Maddow the investigation would go beyond the call.
Effective immediately, employees and customers may choose whether they’d like to wear a mask,” a Southwest Airlines pilot announced jubilantly, mid-air.
Passengers on the flight from Nashville to Charlotte, in the United States, responded by applauding, cheering, and eagerly removing their masks, as if after years of solitary confinement, the pilot had just opened the cell door. It was a scene replicated across the US as airports, airlines, transit authorities and private hire companies like Uber informed their staff and customers that masking was no longer necessary. One airport even blared the song “We Are the Champions” on repeat as unmasked customers milled around, enjoying their “freedom”.
KEEP READINGlist of 4 itemslist 1 of 4‘Like Wuhan all over again’: As Shanghai protests, China censorslist 2 of 4South Africa says it may be on brink of fifth COVID wavelist 3 of 4China pledges more economic support as lockdowns stymie growthlist 4 of 4Beijing closes more venues as anger at Shanghai lockdown growsend of list
The sudden announcements came in response to Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s decision that the US government could not require people to mask while on public transportation. In her 59-page decision, Mizelle – who was appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump – waxed lyrical on the minutiae of dictionary entries from the 1940s. She held that a law that enabled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to enforce “sanitation” and “other measures” in order to “prevent the … spread of communicable diseases”, did not allow the CDC to mandate mask use on public transportation to limit the spread of COVID-19.
While Judge Mizelle was indulging in an exercise of extreme legal pedantry, nearly one million people had already died from COVID in the US alone – fiddling while Rome burned would have been a more productive pastime.
But Mizelle’s decision is just the latest episode in a series of catastrophic pandemic blunders by the world’s most powerful country.
Through a combination of ideology, political self-interest, racism, structural inequalities and next-level idiocy, the US has had one of the worst COVID outcomes in the world. President Trump made fun of evidence-based measures to control the pandemic – such as mask-wearing – and touted quack advice like using hydroxychloroquine or injecting disinfectant. He publicly contradicted his own government’s public health experts, encouraged protests against other elected officials’ public health measures, and he did effectively nothing to support essential workers on the front lines of the crisis. After he, himself, was hospitalised and provided a treatment for COVID which was unavailable to nearly everyone else, his advice to his compatriots was to not let COVID “dominate [their] lives”.
After President Joe Biden, a Democrat, took office, the federal government dramatically improved its communications on the pandemic and public health and pushed robust economic measures, however many of the new president’s policies have been stymied by Republican-appointed judges.
For example, the CDC’s moratorium on landlord evictions of tenants in areas of the country with high COVID rates was blocked by the country’s Supreme Court, where six of the nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents.
The Supreme Court also blocked a rule that compelled large employers to require workers to either get vaccinated or test weekly and wear masks at work. The essence of the court’s reasoning in that case – that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) couldn’t regulate COVID as a workplace issue because it’s also a non-workplace issue – strained judicial credibility to the extreme.
Another court similarly blocked a vaccine requirement for workers who contract with the federal government. In response to the difficulties it has faced – and the changing mood in the country – the Biden administration appears, increasingly, to be giving up. The CDC recently overhauled how it measures COVID risk, with the effect that previously risky areas of the country are now deemed not risky, providing a false sense of security. And Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, has claimed the US is now “out of the pandemic phase”. Specific measures to protect healthcare workers from COVID have been allowed to lapse. Biden’s government, for example, did not try to replace the test-or-vax mandate with other rules to protect workers from the risks of contagion at work.
Sign up for Al Jazeera
Coronavirus Newsletter
Medical developments, troubling variants, the human impact—it’s all here.
The administration spent a couple of days dithering before deciding they would appeal Judge Mizelle’s decision, and – at the time of writing – they still have not sought a stay of the decision so that masks could remain mandatory while the appeal is pending.
Regardless of any legal decision, the CDC and Biden have seemed to prevaricate on whether masks on public transport were even necessary; the CDC’s latest renewal of the mandate was for a period of only two weeks, and when Biden was recently asked whether people should still mask he responded it was “up to them”.
The proposition that – through a combination of vaccines, therapeutics, built-up community immunity and the predominance of the milder Omicron subvariants – the pandemic is no longer a cause for concern in the US, is indeed seductive. Although the currently available vaccines are no longer great at preventing infection, they are still effective for most people at preventing severe disease, hospitalisation and death. Some of the available therapeutics – especially if administered early on – are also quite effective. And the milder variants and our increasing immunity – through past infections and vaccination – clearly provide more protection than we had at the beginning of the pandemic. However, complacency is still dangerous. And – as has been the theme throughout this global pandemic – the danger is greater for some than for others.
First, not everyone who gets vaccinated will be adequately protected, in particular the immunocompromised, such as some cancer survivors. And in the US, it is not easy for everyone to get access to therapeutics if they do get a bad case of COVID. Also, people of colour not only disproportionately use public transportation in the US but – due to longstanding health and economic inequities and structural racism – have borne the disproportionate brunt of the pandemic in the US.
This phenomenon has been well publicised since the earliest days of the outbreak in 2020. And rather than act as a clarion call to action, one University of Georgia Athens study suggested that white people in the US who were more aware of these racial disparities were less likely to take COVID safety precautions or support public health measures.
Further, low-paid and essential workers – who are less likely to have the option of remote work – are often performing the highest risk jobs, even if their wages do not reflect this.
KYIV, Ukraine—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a delegation of U.S. lawmakers met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Saturday night, as Russia’s military advance stalled in Ukraine’s east.
“Our delegation traveled to Kyiv to send an unmistakable and resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine,” Mrs. Pelosi and the members of Congress who traveled with her said in a statement released after their trip. They added that Mr. Zelensky had conveyed a clear need for continued U.S. security, economic and humanitarian assistance in Ukraine’s fight to repel the Russian advance.
“I am thankful to you for this signal of strong support for Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video from their meeting posted to his official Telegram channel on Sunday.
“We believe we are visiting you to say thank you for your fight for freedom,” Mrs. Pelosi told him in video footage of the meeting. “Your fight is a fight for everyone, and our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is done.”
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky greeted U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Saturday before their meeting in Kyiv.PHOTO: UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SER/VIA REUTERS
Other members of the delegation included congressional representatives Gregory Meeks, Adam Schiff, Barbara Lee, Bill Keating, Jason Crow and Jim McGovern.
The show of support, days after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with Mr. Zelensky in the Ukrainian capital, comes amid an intensified Russian push to capture swaths of Ukraine’s east.
20 comments:
Elon Musk and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had an awkward Twitter interaction on Friday.
She slammed a "billionaire with an ego problem" who "controls a massive communication platform."
Musk responded, but Ocasio-Cortez said she was talking about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
In a cringe-worthy social media exchange Friday, billionaire Elon Musk told Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to "stop flirting" with him after the lawmaker slammed an unnamed "billionaire with an ego problem."
"Tired of having to collectively stress about what explosion of hate crimes is happening bc some billionaire with an ego problem unilaterally controls a massive communication platform and skews it because Tucker Carlson or Peter Thiel took him to dinner and made him feel special," the New York progressive wrote in a tweet on Friday.
Musk, whose buyout offer was accepted by Twitter earlier this week, then responded: "Stop hitting on me, I'm really shy."
Ocasio-Cortez quipped back in a now-deleted tweet that she was referring to a different billionaire, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
"I was talking about Zuckerberg but ok," the New York lawmaker replied.
Musk, nor Zukerberg, replied to the now-deleted tweet.
Ocasio-Cortez's initial tweet namedropping Fox News host Carlson and venture capitalist Thiel may have been referring to a 2019 Politico report, which claimed that Zuckerberg hosted a confidential dinner with Carlson. Thiel, Zuckerberg's longtime mentor, was one of Facebook's early investors.
Meanwhile, Theil and Musk's trajectories have run parallel since the founding of Paypal in 2000, though they appear to have a love-hate relationship. And this week, Carlson said he would be returning to Twitter after Musk's takeover.
Both social media companies have been wrapped up in an ongoing culture war over free speech. Twitter, for example, has faced criticism for allowing accounts that amplify misinformation. Many believe Musk, a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist," may reinstate accounts previously banned for violating the platform's hate speech or misinformation policy. Facebook has faced criticism in the past for allowing the spread of far-right misinformation.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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Lmao 🤣
Trump, Barr said, has surrounded himself with “sycophants” and “whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories”.
Just like you
Seriously this is the best Biden has.
Nina Jankowicz Called Herself the ‘Mary Poppins of Disinformation’ on Tik-Tok"
I read she deleted her Zuckerberg "comeback" within a minute but it was already captured
she's not too bright
It doesn't matter.
WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT TUCKER CARLSON?
How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable
April 30, 2022 at 1:17 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 95 Comments
New York Times:
“...Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful.
Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice —
‘We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,’ Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer
a few weeks before
accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty —
his show teaches loathing and fear.
“Night after night,
hour by hour,
Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege
— by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities,
by diseased migrants from south of the border,
by refugees importing alien cultures,
and by tech companies
and cultural elites who will silence them,
or label them racist, if they complain.”
IN THAT WAY, HE PLAYS THE TRUMP GAME OF TRYING TO MAKE US HATE "ENEMIES"
--WHILE HIDING THE FACT THAT OUR REAL ENEMIES ARE THE RICH AMERICAN AUTOCRATS WHO FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT ARE EVERY DAY ROBBING US OF A BETTER AMERICA FOR ALL OF US.
IT FRIGHTENS REPUBLICANS THAT IT IS NOW BECOMING CLEAR THAT OUR REAL ENEMIES ARE THE AMERICAN AUTOCRATS WHO, LIKE THE RUSSIAN AUTOCRATS WHO HAVE HELPED PUTIN TAKE OVER RUSSIA, WANT TO HELP DONALD TRUMP TAKE OVER AMERICA AND MAKE IT INTO A SIMILAR DICTATORIAL OLIGARCHY WHICH WOULD BE RUN AND RULED ONLY BY THE SUPER WEALTHY IN A GOVERNMENT OF, BY, AND FOR THE RICH,
--NOT OF, BY, AND FOR THE PEOPLE.
Little miss white privilege Sandy Cortez, just got clowned.
James, how often do you watch Tucker Carlson show?
==SLIGHTLY revised:
OUR REAL ENEMIES ARE THE AMERICAN AUTOCRATS WHO, LIKE THE RUSSIAN AUTOCRATS WHO HAVE HELPED PUTIN TAKE OVER RUSSIA, WANT TO HELP DONALD TRUMP OR SOMEONE LIKE HIM TAKE OVER AMERICA AND MAKE IT INTO A SIMILAR DICTATORIAL OLIGARCHY WHICH WOULD BE RUN AND RULED ONLY BY THE SUPER WEALTHY IN A GOVERNMENT OF, BY, AND FOR THE RICH,
--NOT OF, BY, AND FOR THE PEOPLE.
Trump grand jury ending in N.Y. with no charges against ex-president.
🤣The Three Socialist Stooges of CHT should be Suicidial.
WASHINTON POST
Democracy Dies in Darkness
The status of key investigations involving Donald Trump
Probes of the ex-president’s business and political conduct ARE STILL UNDERWAY IN MULTIPLE PLACES
By Matt Zapotosky
Trump business practices, Manhattan DA’s criminal probe
Trump business practices, New York AG’s civil probe
Georgia election results investigation
The Jan. 6 select committee’s investigation
Criminal probes of Jan. 6
The Mar-a-Lago boxes investigation
Westchester, N.Y., golf club
Donald Trump is facing historic legal and legislative scrutiny
for a former president, under investigation
by U.S. lawmakers,
local district attorneys,
a state attorney general
and the FBI.
Authorities are looking into Trump and his family business for a medley of possible wrongdoing,
including his actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol
and how he valued his various assets for loan and tax purposes.
Though one probe — by the district attorney in Manhattan — appears to be winding down,
others remain active,
threatening Trump with criminal
or financial penalties,
or plain old public embarrassment,
as he weighs a 2024 bid to return to the White House.
Here’s a list of the many key investigations and where they stand.
...the long, long article continues...
AND THEN TOO---
Special Grand Jury Considers
TRUMP Election Interference
April 30, 2022 at 7:25 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 83 Comments
“Fulton County prosecutors will begin selecting participants Monday for
a special grand jury to consider whether former president Donald Trump should be charged
for his attempts to pressure Georgia officials to overturn the results of the 2020 election,
which he lost,”
CBS News reports.
“Special grand juries are unusual. They focus on just one investigation, and can be impaneled for far longer than typical grand juries, which often consider charging recommendations for a variety of investigations.”
MY, MY!
How do you bring a Republican to their knees?
Paint your dick orange.
Georgia special grand jury to convene Monday to investigate Trump’s effort to overturn the election
Bob Brigham
April 30, 2022
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Monday will begin selecting a special grand jury to investigate Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
The move comes 482 days after The Washington Post published a damning recording of Trump pressuring GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" to make up the margin he lost to Joe Biden.
"The jury selection process will kick off amid recent reports that a separate grand jury in New York has fizzled after six months without bringing any charges against the former president," Mother Jones reported Saturday. "The investigation is likely to proceed along a drawn-out timeframe. Willis previously told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she will wait to issue subpoenas until after Georgia’s primaries in late May to avoid the appearance that she’s attempting to influence the election for politically motivated reasons."
Raffensperger released the audio recording to The Post after Trump tweeted about the call and said the secretary of state "had no clue."
In February, Willis told Rachel Maddow the investigation would go beyond the call.
Effective immediately, employees and customers may choose whether they’d like to wear a mask,” a Southwest Airlines pilot announced jubilantly, mid-air.
Passengers on the flight from Nashville to Charlotte, in the United States, responded by applauding, cheering, and eagerly removing their masks, as if after years of solitary confinement, the pilot had just opened the cell door. It was a scene replicated across the US as airports, airlines, transit authorities and private hire companies like Uber informed their staff and customers that masking was no longer necessary. One airport even blared the song “We Are the Champions” on repeat as unmasked customers milled around, enjoying their “freedom”.
KEEP READINGlist of 4 itemslist 1 of 4‘Like Wuhan all over again’: As Shanghai protests, China censorslist 2 of 4South Africa says it may be on brink of fifth COVID wavelist 3 of 4China pledges more economic support as lockdowns stymie growthlist 4 of 4Beijing closes more venues as anger at Shanghai lockdown growsend of list
The sudden announcements came in response to Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s decision that the US government could not require people to mask while on public transportation. In her 59-page decision, Mizelle – who was appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump – waxed lyrical on the minutiae of dictionary entries from the 1940s. She held that a law that enabled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to enforce “sanitation” and “other measures” in order to “prevent the … spread of communicable diseases”, did not allow the CDC to mandate mask use on public transportation to limit the spread of COVID-19.
While Judge Mizelle was indulging in an exercise of extreme legal pedantry, nearly one million people had already died from COVID in the US alone – fiddling while Rome burned would have been a more productive pastime.
But Mizelle’s decision is just the latest episode in a series of catastrophic pandemic blunders by the world’s most powerful country.
Through a combination of ideology, political self-interest, racism, structural inequalities and next-level idiocy, the US has had one of the worst COVID outcomes in the world. President Trump made fun of evidence-based measures to control the pandemic – such as mask-wearing – and touted quack advice like using hydroxychloroquine or injecting disinfectant. He publicly contradicted his own government’s public health experts, encouraged protests against other elected officials’ public health measures, and he did effectively nothing to support essential workers on the front lines of the crisis. After he, himself, was hospitalised and provided a treatment for COVID which was unavailable to nearly everyone else, his advice to his compatriots was to not let COVID “dominate [their] lives”.
After President Joe Biden, a Democrat, took office, the federal government dramatically improved its communications on the pandemic and public health and pushed robust economic measures, however many of the new president’s policies have been stymied by Republican-appointed judges.
For example, the CDC’s moratorium on landlord evictions of tenants in areas of the country with high COVID rates was blocked by the country’s Supreme Court, where six of the nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents.
The Supreme Court also blocked a rule that compelled large employers to require workers to either get vaccinated or test weekly and wear masks at work. The essence of the court’s reasoning in that case – that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) couldn’t regulate COVID as a workplace issue because it’s also a non-workplace issue – strained judicial credibility to the extreme.
Another court similarly blocked a vaccine requirement for workers who contract with the federal government. In response to the difficulties it has faced – and the changing mood in the country – the Biden administration appears, increasingly, to be giving up. The CDC recently overhauled how it measures COVID risk, with the effect that previously risky areas of the country are now deemed not risky, providing a false sense of security. And Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, has claimed the US is now “out of the pandemic phase”. Specific measures to protect healthcare workers from COVID have been allowed to lapse. Biden’s government, for example, did not try to replace the test-or-vax mandate with other rules to protect workers from the risks of contagion at work.
Sign up for Al Jazeera
Coronavirus Newsletter
Medical developments, troubling variants, the human impact—it’s all here.
The administration spent a couple of days dithering before deciding they would appeal Judge Mizelle’s decision, and – at the time of writing – they still have not sought a stay of the decision so that masks could remain mandatory while the appeal is pending.
Regardless of any legal decision, the CDC and Biden have seemed to prevaricate on whether masks on public transport were even necessary; the CDC’s latest renewal of the mandate was for a period of only two weeks, and when Biden was recently asked whether people should still mask he responded it was “up to them”.
The proposition that – through a combination of vaccines, therapeutics, built-up community immunity and the predominance of the milder Omicron subvariants – the pandemic is no longer a cause for concern in the US, is indeed seductive. Although the currently available vaccines are no longer great at preventing infection, they are still effective for most people at preventing severe disease, hospitalisation and death. Some of the available therapeutics – especially if administered early on – are also quite effective. And the milder variants and our increasing immunity – through past infections and vaccination – clearly provide more protection than we had at the beginning of the pandemic. However, complacency is still dangerous. And – as has been the theme throughout this global pandemic – the danger is greater for some than for others.
First, not everyone who gets vaccinated will be adequately protected, in particular the immunocompromised, such as some cancer survivors. And in the US, it is not easy for everyone to get access to therapeutics if they do get a bad case of COVID. Also, people of colour not only disproportionately use public transportation in the US but – due to longstanding health and economic inequities and structural racism – have borne the disproportionate brunt of the pandemic in the US.
This phenomenon has been well publicised since the earliest days of the outbreak in 2020. And rather than act as a clarion call to action, one University of Georgia Athens study suggested that white people in the US who were more aware of these racial disparities were less likely to take COVID safety precautions or support public health measures.
Further, low-paid and essential workers – who are less likely to have the option of remote work – are often performing the highest risk jobs, even if their wages do not reflect this.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/4/29/america-going-maskless-is-nothing-to-celebrate
KYIV, Ukraine—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a delegation of U.S. lawmakers met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Saturday night, as Russia’s military advance stalled in Ukraine’s east.
“Our delegation traveled to Kyiv to send an unmistakable and resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine,” Mrs. Pelosi and the members of Congress who traveled with her said in a statement released after their trip. They added that Mr. Zelensky had conveyed a clear need for continued U.S. security, economic and humanitarian assistance in Ukraine’s fight to repel the Russian advance.
“I am thankful to you for this signal of strong support for Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video from their meeting posted to his official Telegram channel on Sunday.
“We believe we are visiting you to say thank you for your fight for freedom,” Mrs. Pelosi told him in video footage of the meeting. “Your fight is a fight for everyone, and our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is done.”
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky greeted U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Saturday before their meeting in Kyiv.PHOTO: UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SER/VIA REUTERS
Other members of the delegation included congressional representatives Gregory Meeks, Adam Schiff, Barbara Lee, Bill Keating, Jason Crow and Jim McGovern.
The show of support, days after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with Mr. Zelensky in the Ukrainian capital, comes amid an intensified Russian push to capture swaths of Ukraine’s east.
Clearly Roger has nothing else to do while the rest of us live our busy lives
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