Migrants, pictured in September 2019, apply for asylum in the United States in a tent courtroom in Laredo, Texas. On Jan. 2, the U.S. government began sending asylum-seekers back to Nogales, Mexico, to await court hearings that will be scheduled roughly 350 miles away in Juarez, Mexico.
Eric Gay/AP
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Eric Gay/AP
Migrants, pictured in September 2019, apply for asylum in the United States in a tent courtroom in Laredo, Texas. On Jan. 2, the U.S. government began sending asylum-seekers back to Nogales, Mexico, to await court hearings that will be scheduled roughly 350 miles away in Juarez, Mexico.
Eric Gay/AP
Updated at 6:15 p.m. ET
A federal appeals court in California has blocked the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program, dealing a blow to the president’s controversial policy requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their day in U.S. immigration court.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2 to 1 on Friday to uphold a lower-court’s injunction on the program, also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP. Judges said the policy “is invalid in its entirety due to its inconsistency with” federal asylum law.
“It should be enjoined entirety,” the judges added.
About 60,000 migrants, mostly from Central America, have been forced to wait in Mexican border towns, often in dangerous and squalid conditions, as applications are slowly processed.
Trump administration officials considered the program a “game changer” in their effort to end to what they call “catch and release.” They said that practice allowed migrants to enter the U.S. and stay illegally by avoiding authorities.
The lawsuit, Innovation Law Lab v. Wolf, was filed by Innovation Law Lab, the Central American Resource Center of Northern California, and four other organizations on behalf of 11 asylum seekers who were sent to Mexico to wait.
A separate ruling by the court in East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Trumpalso upheld a block on the Trump administration’s attempt to restrict asylum applications to ports of entry.
ACLU attorney Judy Rabinovitz, who argued the appeal against MPP said: “The court forcefully rejected the Trump administration’s assertion that it could strand asylum seekers in Mexico and subject them to grave danger. It’s time for the administration to follow the law and stop putting asylum seekers in harm’s way.”
Immigration rights advocates argue that forcing vulnerable asylum seekers to wait in temporary, often makeshift, shelters exposes them to even more violence than that which they are trying to escape. Human Rights First has documented more than 600 violent crimes and at least one murder against migrants in the program.
The argument swayed two of the three judges on the panel who determined that the effects of the MPP “is staggering,” adding that the program “runs afoul” of existing asylum laws, which state that “an undocumented migrant may apply for asylum when she is ‘physically present in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival).'”
A May ruling by the Ninth Circuit allowed the MPP to restart after an initial ruling by a federal judge had halted the program.
Meanwhile, as asylum-seekers are processed in temporary tent courts along the border, judges are granting far fewer asylum claims than other courts. As of November 2019, just 117 migrants had been granted protection out of tens of thousands of applicants, according to data released by the TRAC immigration project at Syracuse University. That’s a success rate of less than 1%.
Michael Bloomberg on Thursday defended his covert surveillance of New York City Muslims as mayor in the wake of 9/11 as he faces mounting criticism for the policy.
Under Bloomberg’s backing, the NYPD spent at least six years cataloging information on Muslim communities, surveilling Muslim-owned businesses, mosques and other schools and organizations linked to the faith — which advocates have described as racist and baseless religious profiling.
But Bloomberg said it was what authorities were “supposed to do” following the terror attacks during an appearance on PBS Newshour.
“We had every intention of going every place we could legally to get as much information to protect this country,” said Bloomberg. “We had just lost 3,000 people at 9/11. Of course, we’re supposed to do that.”
The program, which ended in 2014, had police coordinating with authorities in far off cities like Buffalo and went as far as to send an undercover agent along with Muslim college students on a whitewater rafting trip. The surveillance was subjected to several lawsuits, which resulted in a settlement deal with a court never ruling it to be legal.
Bloomberg stressed that he doesn’t believe “all Muslims are terrorists, or all terrorists are Muslim” and that he supported the Ground Zero mosque as a matter of freedom of religion.
“But all of the [9/11 terrorists] came from the same place — and all that came were from a place that happened to be one religion,” Bloomberg added. “And if they’d been another religion, we would have done the same thing.”
The billionaire appeared to downplay the extent of the surveilling, describing the NYPD as sending “some officers into some mosques “ to listen to sermons from imams.
The program never resulted in an arrest or a lead to a potential terror plot.
Mayor de Blasio on Thursday night called the surveillance “racist” and “counterproductive.” Hizzoner attacked the candidate in one of his late-night anti-Bloomberg tweets while being kept awake by the medication he’s taking for his knee surgery
“As the person who ended [Bloomberg’s racist + counterproductive Muslim surveillance program,” de Blasio tweeted, “I will tell you what he won’t: it actually made us LESS SAFE It bred resentment and distrust, just when we most needed to bring our police and our Muslim community together. Failure.”
Mr. Mulvaney also criticized the news media for generally not wanting to portray Mr. Trump in a positive light. But he chose a bizarre example, claiming it refuses to cover what he described as Mr. Trump’s loving relationship with his 13-year-old son, Barron.
He said Mr. Trump is in frequent contact with his youngest son, calling to check in on him and let him know of his whereabouts. But, Mr. Mulvaney said, “the press would never show you that because it doesn’t fit that image of him, the press wants him to be this terrible monster.”
Mr. Mulvaney’s decision to discuss Barron Trump was curious, especially when Melania Trump, the first lady, and senior White House officials have gone to great lengths to make sure he enjoys the privacy afforded to other children of presidents growing up in the uncomfortable spotlight of the White House. The White House press corps has generally agreed to grant Barron Trump the same privacy.
“He’s huge, but he’s still very young,” Mr. Mulvaney said of Barron, who is sometimes seen boarding Air Force One with his parents, but who often departs the plane after his father to avoid being photographed. “He was 10 or something like that when the president was elected.”
Mr. Mulvaney, who was interviewed onstage by Stephen Moore, whose expected nomination by the president to the Federal Reserve Board was withdrawn over concerns about his treatment of women, also asserted that Mr. Trump did not sleep on the overnight plane trip home from India or during the day before his news conference on coronavirus Wednesday night.
“He said, ‘I’ve only got eight years, I’m going to get as much out of it as I can,’” Mr. Mulvaney said.
The House judiciary committee is launching a wide-ranging inquiry into the attorney general, William Barr, and the justice department, demanding briefings, documents and interviews with 15 officials as it tries to determine whether there has been improper political interference in federal law enforcement.
The committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, on Friday sent Barr a letter listing a series of matters that the committee finds “deeply troubling”, including Barr’s involvement in the case of Donald Trump’s longtime confidant Roger Stone.
Stone was convicted in November of lying to Congress and other charges. Barr overruled prosecutors who had recommended that Stone be sentenced to seven to nine years in prison, leading the four top prosecutors on the case to step down from it.
Nadler is also questioning Barr about his involvement in other cases related to friends and associates of Trump and about internal investigations into department employees who investigated Trump after the 2016 election.
“Although you serve at the president’s pleasure, you are also charged with the impartial administration of our laws,” Nadler wrote to Barr. “In turn, the House judiciary committee is charged with holding you to that responsibility.”
The committee is asking for briefings on the issues listed and interviews with 15 justice department officials involved in those matters, including the four prosecutors who resigned from the Stone case.
It is unclear whether the department will cooperate with any part of the investigation. Trump has vowed to block “all” subpoenas from Democrats and refused to cooperate with their impeachment inquiry last year. Still, despite his declarations, many administration officials came forward during the impeachment investigation once faced with subpoenas.
Barr has already agreed to testify before the committee on 31 March. It will be the first time he has appeared before the panel since he became attorney general a year ago, and the meeting is sure to be contentious. Since Barr was sworn in, House Democrats have questioned whether he was too close to Trump, criticized his handling of the former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report and impeached Trump for his pressure on Ukraine to investigate Democrats. The Senate acquitted Trump this month.
In the letter, Nadler asked for a broad swath of documents related to the committee’s concerns, including communications between Trump and the justice department. The committee is unlikely to get any of those documents, as a president’s personal conversations are generally considered privileged by the courts.
The sharpened look at Barr’s activities comes as many Democrats have been wary of prolonging the Ukraine inquiry that led to Trump’s impeachment. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the House intelligence committee chairman, Adam Schiff, have put off – but not ruled out – a subpoena for the former national security adviser John Bolton, who refused to participate in the House impeachment inquiry but later said he would testify in the Senate trial. The Senate voted not to call witnesses, but Bolton has written an as yet unpublished book that could detail his involvement in the Ukraine matter.
Just after the Senate voted to acquit Trump, Barr faced blowback over his decision to overrule the prosecutors in the Stone case. Trump congratulated Barr shortly afterward.
Stone was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election. He was sentenced last week to more than three years in prison.
Barr appeared to try to deflect some of the rising criticism over Stone, saying in an interview with ABC News that Trump’s tweets about justice department prosecutors and cases “make it impossible for me to do my job”.
But Barr also said the decision to undo the sentencing recommendation was made before Trump tweeted about it, and he said Trump had not asked him to intervene in any cases.
A dog in Hong Kong has tested positive for the COVID-19 virus that’s killed at least 2,859 humans across the world over the last two months, World Health Organization officials said Friday.
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the technical lead of WHO’s emergencies program, said the canine tested “weakly positive,” meaning low levels of the virus were found.
Hong Kong scientists aren’t sure if the dog is actually infected or if it picked up the virus from a contaminated surface, she said.
“We’re working with them to understand the results, to understand what further testing they are doing and to understand how they are going to care for these animals,” Kerkhove said during a press conference at WHO’s headquarters in Geneva.
The dog reportedly belongs to a 60-year-old woman who developed symptoms on Feb. 12 and later tested positive, according to The Wall Street Journal.
As a precaution, the Hong Kong government declared cats, dogs and other domesticated mammals whose owners test positive and are quarantined for COVID-19 would be collected and delivered to a “designated animal keeping” facility for quarantine and veterinary surveillance. Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department said the dog doesn’t have any symptoms. Swabs of its nasal and oral cavities revealed tested “weak positive,” it said in a statement Friday.
The dog is under quarantine at a facility at a port in Hong Kong and will be returned to the owner once it tests negative for the virus, according to the agency.
Although the virus seems to have emerged from an animal — scientists have said a bat — there is currently no evidence that suggests pets like dogs or cats can be infected with the coronavirus, the department said. However, the situation is still evolving, scientists say.
On Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said six animal drug firms that source ingredients or make finished products in China have indicated they’re seeing disruptions in the supply chain that could soon lead to shortages.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests pet owners restrict contact with pets and other animals if the owner is infected with COVID-19. That includes “petting, snuggling, being kissed or licked, and sharing food.”
Billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg said Thursday he will stay in the presidential race “right to the bitter end” as long as he’s got a chance at winning the nomination.
In an interview with NBC News’ Kasie Hunt, Bloomberg said “as long as you have a chance of winning,” he would “absolutely” stay in the race.
“Why would I spend all of this money, all of this time out of my life, and wear and tear, you know, which I love — incidentally, (it) reminds me of my three campaigns in New York for mayor, which I did like,” he told Hunt, the host of “KasieDC.” “The difference here is I’ve got to fly from event to event where there I used to drive from event to event. But yeah sure, I love it, I am going to stay right to the bitter end, as long as I have a chance.”
Bloomberg said that if Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., hit the delegate threshold to secure a majority ahead of the Democratic National Convention this summer, then he would not continue his presidential bid. If Sanders had amassed only a plurality, however, Bloomberg says he will keep pressing forward.
“I mean, if it was one vote away from a majority, then you’d have to start thinking about (getting out),” Bloomberg said. “But yeah, if it’s just a plurality, you got to be in it to win it. Anybody that goes in, yeah, I’m running a race, and I’m behind with one lap to go. What, am I going to quit? No, you run harder.”
Bloomberg bypassed the first four voting states and is first appearing on the ballot in the Super Tuesday elections. The media mogul is polling third nationally in the Democratic primary, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.
Bloomberg’s comments come after, during last week’s debate, Sanders was the only candidate who said whoever has the most delegates entering the convention, even if it is not a majority, should be the nominee. It was a reversal of Sanders’ position in 2016 when he ran against that year’s eventual nominee Hillary Clinton.
Speaking at a CNN town hall on Wednesday, Bloomberg said he would support the Democratic nominee regardless of who it is “because the alternative is Donald Trump — and that, we don’t want.”
He added that he is committed to keeping his campaign offices across the country open through the election, and that whoever the nominee is will be able to use them. After Tuesday’s debate, a top Sanders adviser said he would reject an offer of Bloomberg’s financial help should the Vermont independent become the nominee.
Earlier this month, GOP senators were riding high after Trump’s acquittal on impeachment charges in the Senate. Now they’re wrestling with predictions of an economic slowdown that could upend the political calculus for 2020.
“I think we’re in a position to do a good job of combating it. We just don’t know really what to expect as far as the full impact,” he added. “What I believe is we should be ready for the worst and essentially whatever money it takes, spend that to protect the American public.”
Republican lawmakers say the strength of the economy along with national security are the biggest factors determining whether an incumbent president wins reelection.
GOP senators worry the strength of the U.S. economy, which a couple weeks ago had pointed in favor of Trump winning a second term, is now in doubt as the coronavirus cripples supply chains in China and sends economic tremors throughout the European Union.
Forecast firm Oxford Economics projects global growth will slow to 1.9 percent in the first quarter of 2020 as a result of the coronavirus. The firm has already lowered its forecast for the year from 2.5 percent to 2.3 percent.
Republican concerns are fueled by uncertainty over how quickly the virus may spread across the United States and how a vaccine is not expected before November.
China, where the coronavirus outbreak originated, has imposed quarantines and urged its citizens to avoid crowded places, resulting in eerie images of empty sidewalks, roads and subway cars in cities like Beijing and Shanghai.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced Thursday that his government would ask all schools to close for March in an effort to contain the virus.
South Korean officials on Thursday reported to their American counterparts more than 503 new infections in the past 24 hours, according to a lawmaker briefed on the situation.
“When will it end? How much worse will it get? How will it disrupt supply chains, workforce? In a global economy, an issue like this is pretty dramatic,” said Cramer, while also striking a note of optimism.
“It’s not like the world hasn’t dealt with similar issues in the past and will no doubt deal with this one,” he said.
“I think it’s obvious if you’re seeing a downturn in supplies and products — in American companies that have facilities in China and who knows where else in the world — it could be a big detriment, I think, to any kind of growth,” she said.
“As we go into summer, you’re looking at things like tourism. That’s another thing I think could have a broad economic impact,” she added.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 plunged 4.4 percent each over the past few days, wiping out their gains for 2020.
Goldman Sachs sent a note to clients Thursday morning warning that the coronavirus could also wipe out corporate earnings growth for the year. Later that day, officials in California announced they were monitoring more than 8,400 people for infection.
Financial markets had clawed back some of their losses, but the news from California sent stocks into an afternoon tailspin.
Republicans say that if the situation gets worse, it could certainly have an impact on the economy and likely on the election as well, depending on how long it lasts.
“I wish the politics of it would disappear and people would really focus on what we’re doing,” Capito said, while acknowledging that “anything that impacts the economy is going to have an impact on the election because the president has really rebuilt our economy.”
During his first three years in office, Trump often boasted about the performance of the stock market. On Wednesday, Trump tried to blame the recent market decline on what he said were fears over the agendas put forth by Democratic presidential candidates instead of growing concern over the coronavirus.
“I think the financial markets are very upset when they look at the Democrat candidates standing on that stage making fools out of themselves, and they say, ‘If we ever have a president like this,’ and it’s always a possibility,” Trump said at a press conference at the White House.
The president warned that concern over liberal proposals such as “Medicare for All” and tuition-free college have “a huge effect.”
The Washington Post reported Wednesday morning that Trump had privately expressed his fury over the stock market’s slide and blamed CDC officials for spooking investors with their warnings about the likelihood of the virus spreading to the United States.
The White House moved Thursday to impose more message discipline over the administration by requiring health officials to coordinate public statements about the virus with Vice President Pence, whom Trump tapped to lead the federal response, The New York Times reported.
Democratic leaders have pounced on the situation, arguing the administration was not adequately prepared.
“Despite months of public warnings about the danger of this disease, the president was caught completely flat-footed by the coronavirus,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the floor Thursday.
“And now, instead of quickly marshaling the resources of the federal government to respond to this health crisis, President Trump is intent on blaming everyone and everything instead of solving the problem,” he added.
Republican lawmakers on Thursday condemned Democrats, arguing they are trying to score political points from the crisis.
“Democratic leaders in this town seem to be cheering for a disaster,” said Cramer.
At the same time, though, Republicans acknowledged the very real threat to the economy and their own electoral prospects in November as a result of the coronavirus.
“The Do Nothing Democrats were busy wasting time on the Immigration Hoax, & anything else they could do to make the Republican Party look bad, while I was busy calling early BORDER & FLIGHT closings, putting us way ahead in our battle with Coronavirus. Dems called it VERY wrong!” Trump wrote.
That post mirrored a similar tweet the president issued Thursday evening but later deleted, in which he charged that Democrats were “wasting their time on the Impeachment Hoax” as he sought to implement preventative measures to combat the coronavirus.
Of course, the Senate earlier this month acquitted Trump of two articles of impeachment. It was only less than a week earlier that the administration in late January had declared the coronavirus a public health emergency — announcing it would close the border to foreign nationals who had recently been in China and instituting a mandatory two-week quarantine for U.S. citizens returning from the epicenter of the outbreak.
Trump also railed against the “fake news” during a White House event Thursday for allegedly negatively characterizing his administration’s response to the coronavirus, and claimed he was accused of being a “racist” for restricting travel from Asia while leaving U.S. borders open to affected countries elsewhere.
The president’s various complaints regarding Democratic criticism and media coverage of his management of the coronaviruscome as he has broadened his administration’s response to the crisis in recent days, even while continuing to downplay the risk it poses to the U.S. amid dire warnings from health officials.
Trump on Wednesday revealed that Vice President Mike Pence would oversee the government’s response to the outbreak — taking over the supervisory role from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who insisted he would still chair the White House coronavirus task force.
Pence on Thursday then named a global health official, Ambassador Debbie Birx, as the “White House coronavirus response coordinator,” who will report to the vice president but serve on the task force that Azar leads.
The shuffling of responsibilities follows bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill against the administration’s emergency funding request to fight the coronavirus, which both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have slammed as insufficient to stave off the threat.
Meanwhile, the first patient likely to have contracted the coronavirus within an American community was diagnosed Wednesday in California, and Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday the state was monitoring 8,400 for possible infections. Only 40 of more than 100 public health labs in the U.S. are currently able to diagnose the coronavirus due to a faulty test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The coronavirus outbreak that first exploded in Wuhan, China, has now infected more than 83,000 people and killed nearly 3,000 people globally as of Friday morning.
China, though hardest hit, has seen lower numbers of new infections, with 327 additional cases reported Friday, bringing the country’s total to 78,824. South Korea has recorded 2,337 cases, the most outside of China.
Emerging clusters in Italy and in Iran, which has had 34 deaths and 388 cases, have in turn led to infections of people in other countries. France and Germany were also seeing increases, with dozens of infections.
The spread of the virus and the illness it causes, officially named by the World Health Organization as COVID-19, triggered a global response as health officials scrambled to quarantine evacuees, identify cases and treat patients. As more countries are hit with the health emergency, they face an economic crisis with the outbreak sapping financial markets, emptying shops and businesses, and putting major sites and events off limits.
Whistleblower says workers weren’t prepared for evacuees
Federal workers did not have the necessary protective gear or training when they were sent to help quarantined Americans who were evacuated from China during the coronavirus outbreak, according to a government whistleblower complaint.
The complaint alleges employees with the Department of Health and Human Services were sent to Travis and March Air Force bases in California without full protective gear and training on how to protect themselves in a viral hot zone.
While helping the evacuees, team members noticed that workers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were in full gear to protect them from getting sick whereas they had no respirator masks, only gloves and masks at times.
The team consisted of about 14 employees who had been deployed to help connect the evacuees with government assistance from mid-January until early February.
The complaint was first reported by the Washington Post, which was told by the whistleblower’s lawyers that workers didn’t show any symptoms of infection and weren’t tested for the virus.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., who said the whistleblower contacted his office, said the whistleblower also alleged retaliation by superiors for having filed the complaint.
“My concern from the moment I heard it is that individuals at HHS are not taking the complaints of HHS employees seriously,” Gomez said in an interview. “Their superiors are not supposed to brush them off. By retaliating against people if they do call out a problem, that only discourages other people from ever reporting violations.”
Gomez’s office said the complaint was filed by a high-ranking official at the Administration for Children and Families, a social service agency with HHS. According to the Post, the whistleblower is seeking federal protection alleging improper reassignment after raising concerns. If the official doesn’t accept the post by March 5, the Post reported that she would be terminated.
The Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog agency that investigates personnel issues, confirmed Thursday that it had received the complaint and opened a case. HHS said it was “evaluating the complaint.”
“We take all whistleblower complaints very seriously and are providing the complainant all appropriate protections under the Whistleblower Protection Act,” HHS spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley said in a statement.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar denied the accusation in a hearing Thursday when asked by Gomez if it was possible that protocols were broken given the urgency surrounding the virus, according to CBS News.
“Urgency does not compensate for violating isolation and quarantine protocols for personal protection,” he said. “I’m not aware of any violation of quarantine or isolation protocols.”
Lawyer Ari Wilkenfeld, representing the unidentified whistleblower, said in a statement: “This matter concerns HHS’ response to the coronavirus, and its failure to protect its employees and potentially the public. The retaliatory efforts to intimidate and silence our client must be opposed.”
A fifth Diamond Princess cruise passenger has died, according to Japanese news source Kyodo News and the latest Johns Hopkins death count from the ship. The man is from the U.K., according to Kyodo and the BBC.
The British passenger is the fifth person to die from the outbreak aboard the Diamond Princess and is the first person from his country to succumb to the virus.
“We regret to announce that the BTS MAP OF THE SOUL TOUR … has been cancelled,” the K-pop group’s agency Big Hit Entertainment said in a statement.
Green Day, which was scheduled to perform in Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan starting in March as part of its Hella Mega Tour, followed suit. On Friday, the group announced it’s nixing tour dates in Asia.
The National Symphony Orchestra, meanwhile, canceled the five remaining performances in Japan, citing a recommendation from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that major cultural events be canceled for the next two weeks.
– Anika Reed
California monitoring 8,400 people for coronavirus
Across California, more than 8,400 people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus after traveling to Asia are being monitored, Gov. Gavin Newsomsaid Thursday during a press conference.
State and federal health officials are also moving quickly to locate everyone who came in contact with a Northern California woman believed to be the first in the U.S. to contract the coronavirus with no known connection to travel abroad or other known cases.
The woman lived in Solano County, home to the Travis Air Force Base, where dozens of people infected in China or on cruise ships have been treated. There was no evidence the woman had any connection to the base, said California Department of Public Health Director Sonia Angels during a press conference with Newsom Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, officials in San Francisco and in Santa Clara and San Diego counties have issued emergency declarations aimed at preparing the areas for an outbreak.
Does the Pope have the coronavirus?
Pope Francis has apparently come down with a cold. While the Vatican hasn’t confirmed what the 83-year-old pontiff has, he was seen coughing and blowing his nose during Ash Wednesday Mass this week.
He also canceled a planned trip across town to celebrate Mass with Rome priests and his official audiences on Friday.
His illness comes amid an outbreak of the virus in Italy that has sickened more than 650 people, almost all of them in the north. Rome had three cases, but all three recovered.
Japan travel warning: Tokyo Disneyland to close
Tokyo Disneyland said Friday that it would close for two weeks as a precaution against the spread of coronavirus in Japan, one day after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe asked schools nationwide to close for most of March.
The park will be closed beginning Saturday with plans to reopen March 15. In a statement on its website, the park cited the elevated risk of infection in crowded venues.
“The coming week or two is an extremely important time,” Abe said Thursday as he asked elementary, middle and high schools to shut down. “This is to prioritize the health and safety of the children and take precautions to avoid the risk of possible large-scale infections.”
– Jayme Deerwester
Contributing: Marco della Cava, USA TODAY; Ricardo Alonso-Zalvidar, Associated Press. Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
Bernie Sanders has overtaken Joe Biden and opened up a seven-point lead over President Donald Trump, according to a new Fox News poll. The survey published by Fox News on Thursday night found that Sen. Sanders (I-Vt.) jumped eight points since the same poll was conducted in January, with 31 percent of Democratic primary voters backing him for the 2020 nomination.
By comparison, former Vice President Biden slumped by eight points into second place as just 18 percent of Democrats favored him, according to the poll’s finding.
His plunge in the national primary rankings has put Sen. Sanders two points above former New York City Mayor and late primary entrant Mike Bloomberg.
When asked which candidate they would like to see become the Democratic nominee, 16 percent of polled party voters said they backed Bloomberg, putting the billionaire six points up on his January rating.
The former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) were close behind, winning 12 and 10 percent support among Democrats, respectively.
No other candidate in the primary field polled at double-digits, with the once-insurgent Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) seeing herself backed by 5 percent of party voters, despite a surprisingly strong performance in the New Hampshire primary.
Fox News reported that its latest poll of the 2020 Democratic primary field was the first not to show Biden as the frontrunner, and the only one to show five candidates with double-digit support. A plurality (45 percent) also said they would support whichever candidate was chosen to face President Trump in the November presidential election.
But just less than a fifth of polled primary voters (18 percent) said they would refuse to support Sen. Sanders or Bloomberg in 2020, while 13 percent said the same of Biden and Warren.
When asked who they believed could beat President Trump later this year, Democrats put the most faith in Sen. Sanders.
Almost two-thirds (65 percent) said they fancied the Vermont senator’s chances of winning, while 57 and 56 percent said the same of Bloomberg and Biden respectively.
But only a little more than a third of party voters said they believed either Sen. Warren or Buttigieg could beat Trump.
In hypothetical head-to-heads between primary candidates and President Trump, a cross-party sample of registered voters told Fox News they preferred much of the Democratic field to the commander-in-chief.
Biden and Bloomberg had the joint-greatest leads over the president among Democrats, with both being separated from Trump by eight points.
Sen. Sanders was found to come seven points ahead of the president, with 49 percent opting for him and 42 percent supporting the commander-in-chief.
Both the former Mayor Buttigieg and Sen. Warren were found to be three points ahead of the Republican incumbent, putting them within the margin of error.
A total of 1,000 registered voters were surveyed nationwide between February 23 and February 26 for the Fox News poll, which has a 3 percentage point margin of error.
In the summer of 2013, as he sought to cement his legacy as a three-term mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg faced a pair of threats to his signature — and highly divisive — crime-fighting policy, known as stop-and-frisk.
One challenge was in the courts, where a mostly black group of New Yorkers who’d been subjected to the pat-downs accused the city of systematic racial profiling. The other was in the New York City Council, where lawmakers wanted to hold police accountable for complaints of abuse.
The dual challenges to stop-and-frisk marked an escalation in public resentment over the tactic, which focused aggressive policing in largely minority neighborhoods with high crime rates but fueled claims that it did more harm than good in those communities.
Bloomberg scorned the critics.
“I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” Bloomberg told a radio interviewer early that summer, arguing that stop-and-frisk targeted the people who were committing most of the city’s gun violence.
When a federal judge ruled that the police department’s use of stop-and-frisk violated minorities’ rights and ordered oversight by a court-appointed monitor, Bloomberg — a lifelong Democrat who became a Republican to run for mayor and switched to independent while in office — vowed to keep stop-and-frisk going through his final days in office. When the council voted to enact the reform measures, he vetoed them, called them “dangerous to the city” and tried to sink attempts to override the veto.
The Rev. Al Sharpton leads the way as protesters call for an end to the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy in 2012.Andrew Savulich / New York Daily News via Getty Images
“He fought us every single step of the way,” recalled Jumaane Williams, a Democrat who at the time was a City Council member pushing the reforms. He is now the city’s public advocate. “Everywhere we turned, the mayor and people who supported him kept telling everyone that we were going to handicap the police department and destroy the city.”
More than six years later, as Bloomberg campaigns for president as a Democrat, that response is noteworthy again. As a candidate, he says that he now regrets defending the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk for so long and that he did not understand the pain it caused minority New Yorkers at the time. But the policy remains a consistent focus of criticism as he seeks the party’s nomination, cited by his Democratic opponents, President Donald Trump, civil rights activists and people who were subjected to the policing tactic.
“We let it get out of control,” Bloomberg said when challenged on the issue again Tuesday at the Democratic debate in South Carolina, where several of his opponents called his deployment of stop-and-frisk racist. Bloomberg is not on the ballot for the state’s primary Saturday, but he is on it in more than a dozen states holding primaries Tuesday. “And when I realized that, I cut it back by 95 percent. And I’ve apologized and asked for forgiveness.”
The apology came only recently, just before Bloomberg entered the race. For years before, he championed stop-and-frisk as a proven method to prevent shootings and other crimes. His recent campaign comments also gloss over the fact that the decline in the use of stop-and-frisk came only after it ballooned to historic levels under his watch and opposition reached a tipping point, according to half a dozen people who were involved in the fight at the time.
Stop-and-frisk was not Bloomberg’s idea. The tactic — in which officers stop and pat down any person “reasonably” suspected of being involved in a crime — has been used by New York police since the 1960s, when it was first permitted under city law and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Bloomberg’s predecessor as mayor, Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, embraced it in the 1990s, and it was divisive even then. A 1999 report commissioned by state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer found that the NYPD stopped and frisked minorities disproportionately and often failed to meet the legal threshold of reasonable suspicion.
After taking office in 2002, Bloomberg greatly expanded the program.
An analysis of police data by the New York Civil Liberties Union — which joined the federal lawsuit that claimed the NYPD was stopping and frisking people without reasonable suspicion — found that its use increased by more than 600 percent, from 97,296 stops in 2002 to a peak of 685,724 stops in 2011, just before the lawsuit was filed. The vast majority of people targeted in the searches weren’t charged with crimes.
In 2012, the NYPD made a series of changes to its stop-and-frisk policy, including a reminder to officers to avoid racial profiling, and Bloomberg announced his intention to continue the stops but with “civility.” Stops began to decline, and the next year, when a federal judge ruled the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional, the number tumbled to 191,851.
New York police arrest a man in a subway in 2012.Orlando Camargo / Third Eye Corporation/Flickr Vision/Getty Images file
Since then, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, who won office on a promise to curtail stop-and-frisk, the stops have trended downward, but they rose last year by more than 20 percent, from 11,008 in 2018 to 13,459 in 2019, according to the NYPD.
While in office and in the years afterward, Bloomberg tied stop-and-frisk to historic drops in crime, even though the downturn persisted with the decline of stop-and-frisk.
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There is no clear data proving the effect of stop-and-frisk on crime; the causes of New York’s decadeslong drop in crime remain debatable. Some researchers have found that stops based on clear suspicion of criminal activity contributed, but that wasn’t the case with stops in which officers couldn’t articulate specific reasons to search someone.
“They twisted the law in order to essentially carpet-bomb neighborhoods,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia Law School criminologist who conducted twostudies of the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk in New York and analyzed data for the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit. “But when they were much more careful and judicious and rigorous, they were actually good at deterring crime.”
Bloomberg continued to justify the use of stop-and-frisk as recently as October, when he told The Washington Post that the tactic made the city safer.
“I came into a situation where an awful lot of people were killing an awful lot of other people. And it was all pretty much one community,” Bloomberg was quoted as saying. “And I just said, ‘We are going to do anything we can to stop the carnage.’ The first thing was stop the murders. And we brought down the incarceration rate in jails by a third, mostly minority kids. We brought down the murder rate by 50 percent, from 600 to 300 murders, and you know who would have been killed.”
“I now see that we could and should have acted sooner and acted faster to cut the stops,” Bloomberg said. “I wish we had — and I’m sorry that we didn’t. But I can’t change history. However, today, I want you to know that I realize back then I was wrong — and I am sorry.”
With Bloomberg newly contrite, many of those who challenged him over stop-and-frisk say voters now considering whether to support him for president should know how aggressively he resisted.
“He didn’t just keep going ─ he dug in, tried to stop reforms, appealed the judge’s ruling and fought the bills,” said Monifa Bandele, who sits on the board of the Communities United for Police Reform Action Fund, a coalition of New York advocacy organizations. “He could have been like ‘I’m going to just leave,’ but he dug in and fought us all the way to his last day in office.”
The new scrutiny has also revived feelings of anxiety and anger in many neighborhoods that were targeted during the height of the policy, Bandele said.
“Living through stop-and-frisk, it was horrible,” she said. “If your loved one didn’t come home or you didn’t know where they were for a while, your first thought was: They must have been stopped by police. People lost jobs if they got caught up over the weekend in Rikers. They lost custody of their kids. It was horrible.”
A police officer trains in stop-and-frisk procedure at an New York police training facility in the Bronx in 2012.Mark Bonifacio / New York Daily News via Getty Images
In the spring of 2013, as the federal lawsuit was approaching a final ruling, the City Council debated a package of bills aimed at fighting stop-and-frisk: one that would create an inspector general’s office to monitor the police department and another that would make it easier for people to sue the agency for discriminatory policing. Bloomberg vowed to veto them, so supporters worked to find 34 members willing to vote yes ─ the number needed to override a veto. Some recalled council members’ telling them they feared retaliation from Bloomberg or his administration, including the possibility that the billionaire mayor would finance an opponent.
But the bills passed ─ and, as promised, Bloomberg vetoed them. He warned that the measures “could reverse the striking, dramatic and wonderful reduction in crime this city has experienced over the last 10 years or 20 years.”
With that began a second battle over the 34 votes needed for an override.
“There was a coordinated campaign with mailers and phone banks trying to get council members to switch sides,” said council member Brad Lander, a Democrat who helped shepherd the bills to passage. He has endorsed a Bloomberg rival, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
That fight was underway when U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled on Aug. 12, 2013, that the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional and blamed Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, for officers’ feeling pressure to increase stops.
Bloomberg, outraged, accused Scheindlin of anti-police bias. In a column in The Washington Post, he said she had showed “disdain for our police officers and the dangerous work they do.” And he vowed to appeal so stop-and-frisk could continue.
A few days after the ruling, the council overrode Bloomberg’s veto. He vowed to sue the council to block the measures “before innocent people are harmed.”
The lawsuit did not succeed, but Bloomberg’s appeal of the court ruling allowed the city to pause the reforms ordered by Scheindlin. That ended in 2014, when de Blasio, his successor, withdrew the appeal.
Before he knew who the next mayor would be, Bloomberg told The New Yorker that he hoped that person wouldn’t back down on stop-and-frisk.
“Stop-and-frisk has been shown to be — not the only, but the most effective, tool in getting guns out of the hands of kids,” he said.
Williams, the City Council member, said the battle over stop-and-frisk revealed the problem of having a wealthy mayor who, while immune to outside influences, didn’t feel the need to listen to critics, including his most vulnerable constituents.
“There was nothing to show this man that he was wrong,” said Williams, who has endorsed one of Bloomberg’s rivals, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. “He bought into it in a way that was remarkable. And it had a lasting effect.”
Iran’s health ministry confirmed that 34 people have died because of coronavirus infections, Reuters reported Friday, citing an announcement on state television. The total number of infections in the country has climbed to 388, the ministry added. Iran is at the epicenter of the outbreak in the Middle East, having recorded the highest number of coronavirus fatalities outside China. —Meredith
Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, said there were “significant numbers” of people making their way to the northern land border with Turkey but warned that his country’s doors were closed.
“Significant numbers of migrants and refugees have gathered in large groups at the Greek-Turkish land border and have attempted to enter the country illegally,” he wrote on Twitter. “I want to be clear: no illegal entries into Greece will be tolerated.”
“Greece does not bear any responsibility for the tragic events in Syria and will not suffer the consequences of decisions taken by others,” he added.
Turkey has shown no sign of opening its southern border with Syria, where several hundred thousand Syrians are sheltering from attacks by the Assad government. Nor has it rescinded visa restrictions for Syrians living in Lebanon and Jordan.
A large proportion of the refugee influx to Europe in 2015 were Syrians who had come directly from Syria — or who had traveled by plane into Turkey from Jordan and Lebanon.
After the mass movement of asylum seekers in 2015, the European Union had struck a deal with Ankara, which saw it funding international and local organizations to help refugees in Turkey with 6.6 billion euros ($7.2 billion). The deal also foresaw that Syrians could be returned to Turkey from Greek islands, but in practice, the Greek government has not made much use of this provision.
“There is no official announcement from the Turkish side about any change to their asylum-seeker, refugee or migrant policy,” said Peter Stano, a spokesman from the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union.
“There’s a New York Times report today that is talking about the party leadership actively working against Bernie Sanders and willing to break up the party as a result of that, how do you feel about that?” Jones asked Sanders supporters.
“I mean, unfortunately, it’s really kind of what we could see coming to a head since 2016,” One supporter said. Adding that he hoped members of the Democratic Party would rally behind Sanders.
One supporter told Jones she thinks “the Democratic Party is isolating their base.”
Another supporter called the idea that Democrats would do that “trash.”
“I don’t know what else to say,” she added. “It’s harmful to us as a country and to everybody to want to do something like that.”
In the latest Fox News poll, Sanders pushes Joe Biden out of the frontrunner spot for the Democratic nomination, capturing a record 31 percent support among primary voters. This is the first 2020 Fox national poll that finds Biden not leading the Democratic race.
Sanders has gained 8 percentage points since January in the nomination race, while Biden drops into second with 18 percent, down 8 points. Close behind is Mike Bloomberg at 16 percent, up 6 points since last month and triple his 5 percent in December. Pete Buttigieg comes in at 12 percent (up 5), Elizabeth Warren at 10 percent (down 4), and Amy Klobuchar at 5 percent (up 2).
In Daegu, health officials’ most urgent job has been to test nearly 1,300 members of the Shincheonji Church, who have reported potential symptoms of the virus, as well as those people with whom they have been in contact.
In the past few days, workers have tested up to 1,000 people a day, accounting for the sharp rise in the daily tally of patients.
“We have not finished our testing of Shincheonji worshipers in Daegu yet and as the statistics from there reach us, you will see daily increases in the number of patients,” said Jung Eun-kyeong, head of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In a sign of the epidemic’s toll on business activity, including the entertainment industry, the K-pop supergroup BTS canceled a series of upcoming concerts on Friday.
The coronavirus “outbreak has made it impossible at this time to predict the scale of the outbreak during the dates of the concert in April,” the boy band said in a statement.
The Lancet withdraws essay purportedly written by front-line nurses in China.
The medical journal The Lancet has retracted an appeal for international help for Chinese medical workers after the article’s two authors said it was not a first-hand account.
The letter published earlier this week on the journal’s website claimed to speak on behalf of a group of professional nurses who traveled to Wuhan to work in hospitals treating patients with the coronavirus.
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