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Debris from Ethiopian Airlines flight 302

Officials probing the crash in Ethiopia of a Boeing 737 Max have preliminarily concluded that a flight-control feature automatically activated before it crashed, the Wall Street Journal says.

The newspaper, citing unnamed sources, says the findings were relayed on Thursday at a briefing at the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The flight-control feature is meant to help prevent the plane from stalling.

Boeing said it could not comment as the investigation was still under way.

It said all inquiries should be referred to the investigating authorities. The BBC has approached the FAA for a response.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Transport said: “We have seen the WSJ report. We’ll comment shortly.”

Thursday also saw what is thought to be the first lawsuit filed on the crash.

Black box findings

The Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) flight-control feature was also implicated in a fatal crash by Lion Air flight in Indonesia last year.

Together, the two crashes have claimed 346 lives.

MCAS is software designed to help prevent the 737 Max 8 from stalling.

It reacts when sensors in the nose of the aircraft show the jet is climbing at too steep an angle, which can cause planes to stall.

But an investigation of the Lion Air flight last year suggested the system malfunctioned, and forced the plane’s nose down more than 20 times before it crashed into the sea, killing all 189 passengers and crew.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says there are similarities between that crash and the Ethiopian accident on 10 March.

Boeing has redesigned the software so that it will disable MCAS if it receives conflicting data from its sensors.

As part of the upgrade, Boeing will install an extra warning system on all 737 Max aircraft, which was previously an optional safety feature.

Neither of the planes, operated by Lion Air in Indonesia and Ethiopian Airlines, that were involved in the fatal crashes carried the alert systems, which are designed to warn pilots when sensors produce contradictory readings.

Earlier this week, Boeing said that the upgrades were not an admission that the system had caused the crashes.

Investigators have not yet determined the cause of the accidents.

A preliminary report from Ethiopian authorities is expected within days.

Lawsuit looms

The report comes a day after a lawsuit was filed in a Chicago federal court by the family of one of the victims of the Ethiopian crash, Jackson Musoni, a citizen of Rwanda.

It alleges that Boeing had defectively designed the automated flight control system

All Boeing 737 Max are currently grounded. It is still not certain when the planes will be allowed to fly.

Source Article from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47745191

U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration policies came under renewed scrutiny in March 2019, when photographs emerged that appeared to show relatively large numbers of undocumented immigrants being housed behind wire fencing under a bridge in El Paso, Texas.

On 27 March, the website Grit Post published an article with the headline “Trump Administration Cages Immigrants Under Bridge Because Detention Center Is Full,” which went on to report that:

Several photos that have emerged show what appear to be hundreds of immigrant families caged under the Paso Del Norte Bridge in El Paso, Texas.

The photos were initially tweeted by Washington Post immigration reporters Nick Miroff and Bob Moore, who said the immigrants are being held there because the border patrol station in El Paso — just beyond Ciudad Juarez in Mexico — is full.

That report prompted multiple inquiries from Snopes readers about the authenticity of the photographs in question and the facts surrounding them.

On 27 March, Miroff and Moore did indeed post photographs showing the scene under the bridge. Miroff gave the following description of one of the photographs: “This is El Paso right now, where hundreds of migrant families are being held in the parking lot of a Border Patrol station because there is no room for them inside, or anywhere else.”

 

For his part, Moore tweeted: “Hundreds of migrants are being held under the Paso Del Norte Bridge in El Paso, near the site of [Customs and Border Protection agency] Commissioner [Kevin] McAleenan’s press conference.”

 

Setting aside the somewhat colored language used by Grit Post, which stated that the Trump administration had “caged” the immigrants, we find the substantive claim — that crowds of undocumented immigrants had been detained under a bridge in El Paso in March 2019 due to a backlog at the nearest official immigration center — was true.

On 27 March, U.S. Border Patrol spokesperson Ramiro Cordero largely confirmed the facts as presented by the Post‘s Nick Miroff and Bob Moore, as well as in the Grit Post article, in an interview with the Texas Tribune. But Cordero indicated that the typical time spent by immigrants at the improvised facility was relatively short.

The following are excerpts from the edited interview with Cordero that the Texas Tribune published on 27 March:

Cordero: When illegal immigrants are apprehended, they are [usually] taken to the [processing center]. As people are being processed inside the facility and sent out to Immigration and Customs Enforcement or wherever else they go, then more people are being brought in [from the camp] It’s just a transitional facility. Weeks ago, the community had issues that the [undocumented immigrants] were camping out outside on the levee road [south of the border fence]. They said we were leaving them there overnight. So we built the tent to keep people from the elements.

Texas Tribune [TT]: How long are the people there?

Cordero: It could be a couple of hours, it could be 12 hours. During that time, they get blankets, food, bathroom facilities, water, snacks — they have it all there …

TT: There were some tweets and reports that said some people under the bridge said they have been there for two or three days. Is that possible because you said 12 hours or longer? What’s the maximum?

Cordero: So for example, let’s say you get picked up at 6 p.m. and you end up at the river’s edge waiting to be transported for a few hours. Then you end up at that [camp] the next morning maybe at 9 a.m. Then you don’t get processed because there is a bottleneck until the following day. Did you stay there overnight? Yes, you sure did. So a lot is just perspective. The sun went down, it came back up. So for them that’s two days.

TT: You said that as of 6 a.m. Wednesday that about 3,500 people were in Border Patrol custody in the El Paso Sector. Has that figure remained steady?

Cordero: This morning in custody, we had 3,369. The vast majority were at the El Paso station.

On 28 March, the Associated Press published the following footage of the makeshift facility under the bridge:

At a press conference held close to the Paso Del Norte bridge on 27 March, Border Commissioner McAleenan said the U.S. immigration system’s “breaking point has arrived,” adding that the agency was facing “an unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis” along the southwestern border, especially at El Paso.

Source Article from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/el-paso-bridge-immigrants/

BEIJING (Reuters) – The United States and China said they made progress in trade talks that concluded on Friday in Beijing that Washington called “candid and constructive” as the world’s two largest economies try to resolve a bitter, nearly nine-month trade war.

“The two parties continued to make progress during candid and constructive discussions on the negotiations and important next steps,” the White House said in a statement, adding that it looked forward to the visit to Washington next week by a Chinese delegation led by Vice Premier Liu He.

The statement gave no other details on the nature of the progress.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer were in the Chinese capital for the first face-to-face meetings between the two sides since President Donald Trump delayed a scheduled March 2 hike in tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, citing progress in negotiations.

China’s state news agency Xinhua said the two sides discussed “relevant agreement documents” and made new progress in their talks, but did not elaborate in a brief report.

“@USTradeRep and I concluded constructive trade talks in Beijing,” Mnuchin said on social media network Twitter.

Earlier, Mnuchin told reporters that U.S. officials had a “very productive working dinner” on Thursday. He did not elaborate and it was not immediately clear with whom he had dined.

Trump imposed tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese imports beginning last July in a move to force China to change the way it does business with the rest of the world and to pry open more of its economy to U.S. companies.

Though his blunt-force use of tariffs has angered many, his push to change what are widely viewed as China’s market-distorting trade and subsidy practices has drawn broad support.

Lobbyists, company executives and U.S. lawmakers from both parties have urged Trump not to settle simply for Beijing’s offers to make big-ticket purchases from the United States to help reduce a record trade gap.

LOST IN TRANSLATION?

Details of where the two sides made progress were not immediately clear. Going into the talks, people familiar with the negotiations had said there were still significant differences on an enforcement mechanism and the sequence of when and how U.S. tariffs on Chinese products would be lifted.

Mnuchin and Lighthizer greeted a waiting Liu at the Diaoyutai State Guest House just before 9 a.m. (0100 GMT), and in two brief appearances before journalists, the three mingled and joked with members of the opposite teams.

Observers had anticipated the scope of this round of talks, which wrapped up about 24 hours after the U.S. delegation arrived, to be quite narrow, but that both countries hoped to signal they were working hard toward a resolution.

Reuters reported previously that the two sides were negotiating written pacts in six areas: forced technology transfer and cyber theft, intellectual property rights, services, currency, agriculture and non-tariff barriers to trade.

A U.S. administration official told Reuters earlier this week that Lighthizer and Mnuchin were “literally sitting there going through the texts”, a task typically delegated to lower-level deputies.

One person with knowledge of the talks said “translation is definitely an issue”, referring to discrepancies between the Chinese and English-language versions.

On Thursday, Premier Li Keqiang said Beijing would sharply expand market access for foreign banks and securities and insurance companies, fuelling speculation that China may soon announce new rules allowing foreign financial firms to increase their presence.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the United States may drop some tariffs if a trade deal is reached, while keeping others in place to ensure Beijing’s compliance.

“We’re not going to give up our leverage,” he told reporters in Washington on Thursday.

‘THERE ARE GOING TO BE PROBLEMS’

Many have expressed scepticism that any deal can permanently resolve U.S.-China trade tensions.

“Whatever implementation mechanism China agrees to, whether it is monthly or quarterly meetings or other check-ins, there are going to be problems,” James Green, a senior advisor at McLarty Associates who until August was the top USTR official at the embassy in Beijing, told Reuters.

“Either the purchases are going to be off, or the market access is not going to be there. And then the question is, ‘When do you consider putting tariffs back on?’” he added. “The trade issue is not going to be put to bed.”

Trump’s demands include an end to Beijing’s practices that Washington says result in the systematic theft of U.S. intellectual property and the forced transfer of American technology to Chinese companies.

U.S. companies say they are often pressured into handing over technological know-how to Chinese joint venture partners, local officials or regulators as a condition for doing business in China.

Slideshow (4 Images)

The U.S. government says technology is often subsequently transferred to, and used by, Chinese competitors.

The issue has proved tough for negotiators as U.S. officials say China has previously refused to acknowledge the problem exists to the extent alleged by the United States, making it hard to discuss resolution.

China says its laws enshrine no requirements on technology transfers that are a result of legitimate transactions.

Reporting by Michael Martina and Philip Wen in Beijing; Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, Tim Ahmann and David Lawder in Washington; Writing by Ben Blanchard, Tony Munroe and David Lawder; Editing by Shri Navaratnam, Clarence Fernandez and Dan Grebler

Source Article from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china/us-china-hold-candid-and-constructive-trade-talks-in-beijing-idUSKCN1RA02V

CARACAS, Venezuela — Each morning, when Angela Carlucci wakes up, she must make difficult decisions.

Does she go to work at the children’s clothing store she owns in central Caracas, or does she keep her store closed to care for her daughter, whose preschool is shuttered?

Does she spend the day transporting water to her apartment, or does she burn several hours scouring the city for fresh meat and ice because their refrigerator doesn’t work without power?

“This is your life,” Carlucci, 42, said.

Venezuelans like Carlucci are struggling amid massive blackouts, as well as medical and food shortages as the power struggles continue between President Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader who declared himself interim president.

Amid the economic and political crisis, Carlucci’s life took a turn several weeks ago. Her father who had cancer, and was low on medicine, died in the home they share during one of the country’s massive blackouts.

Now, Carlucci is debating whether to leave the country.

“Right now, I don’t know if I have to go or if it’s better if I wait a little bit more,” she said. “I really don’t know what to do.”

Battling the blackouts

For the second time in a month, much of the country endured power outages that began around midday Monday and continue to affect all 23 states in the country.

Venezuela’s minister of communications, Jorge Rodriguez, said the outage was a “brutal” attack on the country’s hydroelectric plant. Maduro has called the outages acts of “sabotage” and has blamed the opposition and the United States.

Since Monday, lights in some neighborhoods have flickered on but many Venezuelans remain without cell service, water or lights in their homes — paralyzing the country.

Carlucci doesn’t know whether to leave Venezuela or wait for things to get better.Annie Rose Ramos

Rodriguez announced on Twitter that all work and school activities would be suspended Thursday. On Friday, schools were set to close again.

“I deserve better,” Carlucci said. “I have worked really hard to have what I have. My daughter is years old — I had felt like I could provide a good life for her.”

Not anymore, she said.

Opposition keeps pressure but Maduro enjoys support

Guaidó rallied supporters Wednesday in central Caracas, urging them to oust Maduro.

“Today, Venezuelans woke up in the dark once again because of an inefficient, corrupt and thieving regime,” Guaidó said to a cheering crowd. “What we are fighting for every single day, is to live normally.”

The crowd included only about 200 people, a far cry from the thousands that had swamped his rallies two months ago, when he first declared himself the interim president and was recognized as the nation’s leader by 50 countries.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s state-owned oil company and threw its support behind Guaidó. Earlier this week at the White House, Guaidó’s wife, Fabiana Rosales, met with President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. They pledged their support to the opposition and criticized Russia’s recent deployment of military planes to the country.

Yet, Maduro enjoys support among many devotees of his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013 and spent extensively on social programs. Maduro’s opponents argue that that spending — along with corruption and falling oil prices — obliterated the country’s economy.

His critics, however, claim Maduro is holding onto power through fear. Intelligence agents arrested one of Guaido’s top aides, Roberto Marrero, and on Thursday, Maduro’s government barred Guaidó from holding public office for at least 15 years, citing alleged irregularities in his financial records.

But in a Caracas public housing complex built several years ago with help from China, Maduro has strong support. Jenny Castro said she would have never owned her small apartment if it weren’t for the government. She called Guiadó a traitor — and wants to see him arrested.

“This is a sovereign country,” she said, adding this message for Trump: “Remove the economic sanctions.”

Desperate for water

Still, for many others, the desperation is mounting after years of a spiraling economic crisis.

That desperation brought Gabriela Jiménez to the side of a busy highway where firefighters were giving out water to the public Wednesday afternoon.

Firefighters here said they’ve always provided water to people living in the nearby mountains who don’t have access to water. But lately, more and more people from the city come to collect water — and the lines are getting longer.

“I’m going to use one of these bottles of water to bathe tonight,” Jimenez, who lives in Caracas, said. She said she’s had just six hours of electricity inside her home since Monday.

On the outskirts of the capital city, people stood in a long line Wednesday evening, waiting to collect water from a local river named Quebrada de Chacaíto.

Hundreds poured into a public park in Caracas where the Quebrada de Chaca?to river offers people access to water. Many, who have been living without electricity or water for the past week if not longer, come here to collect water to bathe and cook with in their homes.Annie Rose Ramos

Beside the line was the entrance to a public park where others followed a hiking path up a hill to other parts of the river with more privacy. There, many bathed themselves and washed their clothes along the banks of the river.

For Eloy Araujo, it was his first time doing that in the river. Araujo and his family said his house, in central Caracas, usually has water and electricity. This week, however, he said they were caught off guard with the latest power outage and didn’t have enough water stored.

On Wednesday, electricity returned to most of Caracas for roughly three hours but then went out again in multiple neighborhoods.

It’s only a matter of time, Angela Carlucci said, before everything goes out again.

“The government is broken, but sometimes people are broken too,” she said.

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Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/venezuela-crisis/venezuelans-struggle-amid-massive-blackouts-while-maduro-holds-n988836

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(CNN)When people can’t see things, conspiracy theories fester. That goes double for President Donald Trump’s tax returns, which he’s made clear he’ll be keeping from public view, making many people wonder what he could be hiding.

    Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/29/politics/mueller-report-secrecy/index.html

    British lawmakers voted on eight different possible Brexit options, but none received enough votes. May is adamant to see Brexit through. (March 28)
    AP

    Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/03/29/brexit-theresa-mays-eu-exit-deal-faces-third-vote-parliament/3308170002/

    Boeing executives are offering a simple explanation for why the company’s best-selling plane in the world, the 737 MAX 8, crashed twice in the past several months, leaving Jakarta, Indonesia, in October and then Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in March. Executives claimed Wednesday, March 27, that the cause was a software problem — and that a new software upgrade fixes it.

    But this open-and-shut version of events conflicts with what diligent reporters in the aviation press have uncovered in the weeks since Asia, Europe, Canada, and then the United States grounded the planes.

    The story begins nine years ago when Boeing was faced with a major threat to its bottom line, spurring the airline to rush a series of kludges through the certification process — with an under-resourced Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) seemingly all too eager to help an American company threatened by a foreign competitor, rather than to ask tough questions about the project.

    The specifics of what happened in the regulatory system are still emerging (and despite executives’ assurances we don’t even really know what happened on the flights yet). But the big picture is coming into view: A major employer faced a major financial threat, and short-term politics and greed won out over the integrity of the regulatory system. It’s a scandal.

    The 737 versus 320 rivalry, explained

    There are lots of different passenger airplanes on the market, but just two very similar narrow-body planes dominate domestic (or intra-European) travel. One is the European company Airbus’s 320 family, with models called A318, A319, A320, or A321 depending on how long the plane is. These four variants, by design, have identical flight decks so pilots can be trained to fly them interchangeably.

    The 320 family competes with a group of planes that Boeing calls the 737 — there’s a 737-600, a 737-700, a 737-800, and a 737-900 — with higher numbers indicating larger planes. Some of them are also extended-range models that have an ER appended to the name and, as you would probably guess, they have longer ranges.

    Importantly, even though there are many different flavors of 737, they are all in some sense the same plane, just as all the different 320 family planes are the same plane. Southwest Airlines, for example, simplifies its overall operations by exclusively flying different 737 variants.

    Both the 737 and the 320 come in lots of different flavors, so airlines have plenty of options in terms of what kind of aircraft should fly exactly which route. But because there are only two players in this market, and because their offerings are so fundamentally similar, the competition for this slice of the plane market is both intense and weirdly limited. If one company were to gain a clear technical advantage over the other, it would be a minor catastrophe for the losing company.

    And that’s what Boeing thought it was facing.

    The A320neo was trouble for Boeing

    Jet fuel is a major cost for airlines. With labor costs largely driven by collective bargaining agreements and regulations that require minimum ratios of flight attendants per passenger, fuel is the cost center airlines have the most capacity to do something about. Consequently, improving fuel efficiency has emerged as one of the major bases of competition between airline manufacturers.

    If you roll back to 2010, it began to look like Boeing had a real problem in this regard.

    Airbus was coming out with an updated version of the A320 family that it called the A320neo, with “neo” meaning “new engine option.” The new engines were going to be a more fuel-efficient design, with a larger diameter than previous A320 engines, that could nonetheless be mounted on what was basically the same airframe. This was a nontrivial engineering undertaking both in designing the new engines and in figuring out how to make them work with the old airframe, but even though it cost a bunch of money, it basically worked. And it raised the question of whether Boeing would respond.

    Initial word was that it wouldn’t. As CBS Moneywatch’s Brett Snyder wrote back in December 2010, the basic problem was that you couldn’t slap the new generation of more efficient, larger-diameter engines onto the 737:

    One of the issues for Boeing is that it takes more work to put new engines on the 737 than on the A320. The 737 is lower to the ground than the A320, and the new engines have a larger diameter. So while both manufacturers would have to do work, the Boeing guys would have more work to do to jack the airplane up. That will cost more while reducing commonality with the current fleet. As we know from last week, reduced commonality means higher costs for the airlines as well.

    Under the circumstances, Boeing’s best option was to just take the hit for a few years and accept that it was going to have to start selling 737s at a discount price while it took the time to design a whole new airplane. That would, of course, be time-consuming and expensive, and during the interim they’d probably lose a bunch of narrow-body sales to Airbus.

    The original version of the 737 first flew in 1967, and a decades-old decision about how much height to leave between the wing and the runway left them boxed-out of 21st century engine technology — and there was simply nothing to be done about it.

    Unless there was.

    Boeing decided to put the too-big engines on anyway

    As late as February 2011, Boeing chair and CEO James McNerney was sticking to the plan to design a totally new aircraft.

    “We’re not done evaluating this whole situation yet,” he said on an analyst call, “but our current bias is to move to a newer airplane, an all-new airplane, at the end of the decade, beginning of the next decade. It’s our judgment that our customers will wait for us.”

    But then in August 2011, Boeing announced that it had lined up orders for 496 re-engined Boeing 737 aircraft from five different airlines.

    It’s not entirely clear what happened, but, reading between the lines, it seems that in talking to its customers Boeing reached the conclusion that airlines would not wait for them. Some critical mass of carriers (American Airlines seems to have been particularly influential) was credible enough in its threat to switch to Airbus equipment that Boeing decided it needed to offer 737 buyers a Boeing solution sooner rather than later.

    Committing to putting a new engine that didn’t fit on the plane was the corporate version of the Fyre Festival’s “let’s just do it and be legends, man” moment, and it not surprisingly wound up leading to a slew of engineering and regulatory problems.

    New engines on an old plane

    As the industry trade publication Leeham News and Analysis explained earlier in March, Boeing engineers had been working on the concept that became their 737 MAX even back when the company’s plan was still not to build it.

    In a March 2011 interview with Aircraft Technology, Mike Bair, then the head of 737 product development, said that reengineeing was possible.

    “There’s been fairly extensive engineering work on it,” he said. “We figured out a way to get a big enough engine under the wing.”

    The problem is that an airplane is a big, complicated network of interconnected parts. To get the engine under the 737 wing, engineers had to mount the landing gears higher and more forward on the plane. But moving the landing gears changed the aerodynamics of the plane, such that the plane did not handle properly at a high angle of attack. That, in turn, led to the creation of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). It fixed the angle-of-attack problem in most situations, but it created new problems in other situations when it made it difficult for pilots to directly control the plane without being overridden by the MCAS.

    On Wednesday, Boeing rolled out a software patch that it says corrects the problem, and it hopes to persuade the FAA to agree.

    But note that the underlying problem isn’t really software, it’s with the effort to use software to get around a whole host of other problems.

    Recall, after all, that the whole point of the 737 MAX project was to be able to say that the new plane was the same as the old plane. From an engineering perspective, the preferred solution was to actually build a new plane. But for business reasons, Boeing didn’t want a “new plane” that would require a lengthy certification process and extensive (and expensive) new pilot training for its customers. The demand was for a plane that was simultaneously new and not new.

    But because the new engines wouldn’t fit under the old wings, the new plane wound up having different aerodynamic properties than the old plane. And because the aerodynamics were different, the flight control systems were also different. But treating the whole thing as a fundamentally different plane would have undermined the whole point. So the FAA and Boeing agreed to sort of fudge it.

    The new planes are pretty different

    As far as we can tell, the 737 MAX is a perfectly airworthy plane in the sense that error-free piloting allows it to be operated safely.

    But pilots of planes that didn’t crash kept noticing the same basic pattern of behavior that is suspected to have been behind the two crashes, according to a Dallas Morning News review of voluntary aircraft incident reports to a NASA database.

    The disclosures found by the News reference problems with an autopilot system, and they all occurred during the ascent after takeoff. Many mentioned the plane suddenly nosing down. While records show these flights occurred in October and November, the airlines the pilots were flying for is redacted from the database.

    These pilots all safely disabled the MCAS and kept their planes in the air. But one of the pilots reported to the database that it was “unconscionable that a manufacturer, the FAA, and the airlines would have pilots flying an airplane without adequately training, or even providing available resources and sufficient documentation to understand the highly complex systems that differentiate this aircraft from prior models.”

    The training piece is important because a key selling feature of the 737 MAX was the idea that since it wasn’t really a new plane, pilots didn’t really need to be retrained for the new equipment. As the New York Times reported, “For many new airplane models, pilots train for hours on giant, multimillion-dollar machines, on-the-ground versions of cockpits that mimic the flying experience and teach them new features” while the experienced 737 MAX pilots were allowed light refresher courses that you could do on an iPad.

    That let Boeing get the planes into customers’ hands quickly and cheaply, but evidently at the cost of increasing the possibility of pilots not really knowing how to handle the planes, with dire consequences for everyone involved.

    The FAA put a lot of faith in Boeing

    In a blockbuster March 17 report for the Seattle Times, the newspaper’s aerospace reporter Dominic Gates details the extent to which the FAA delegated crucial evaluations of the 737’s safety to Boeing itself. The delegation, Gates explains, is in part a story of a years-long process during which the FAA “citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes.”

    But there are indications of failures that were specific to the 737 MAX timeline. In particular, Gates reports that “as certification proceeded, managers prodded them to speed the process” and that “when time was too short for FAA technical staff to complete a review, sometimes managers either signed off on the documents themselves or delegated their review back to Boeing.”

    Most of all, decisions about what could and could not be delegated were being made by managers concerned about the timeline, rather than by the agency’s technical experts.

    It’s not entirely clear at this point why the FAA was so determined to get the 737 cleared quickly (there will be more investigations), but if you recall the political circumstances of this period in Barack Obama’s presidency, you can quickly get a general sense of the issue.

    Boeing is not just a big company with a significant lobbying presence in Washington, it’s a major manufacturing company with a strong global export presence and a source of many good-paying union jobs. In short, it was exactly the kind of company that the powers that be were eager to promote — with the Obama White House, for example, proudly going to bat for the Export-Import Bank as a key way to sustain America’s aerospace industry.

    A story about overweening regulators delaying an iconic American company’s product launch and costing us good jobs compared to the European competition would have looked very bad. And the fact that the whole purpose of the plane was to be more fuel-efficient only made getting it off the ground a bigger priority. But the incentives really were reasonably aligned, and Boeing has only caused problems for itself by cutting corners.

    Boeing is now in a bad situation

    One emblem of the whole situation is that as the 737 MAX engineering team piled kludge on top of kludge, one thing they came up with was a cockpit warning light that would alert the pilots if the plane’s two angle-of-attack sensors disagreed.

    But then, as Jon Ostrower reported for the Air Current, Boeing’s team decided to make the warning light an optional add-on, like how car companies will uncharge you for a moon roof.

    The light cost $80,000 extra per plane and neither Lion Air nor Ethiopian chose to buy it, perhaps figuring that Boeing would not sell a plane (nor would the FAA allow it to) that was not basically safe to fly. In the wake of the crashes, Boeing has decided to revisit this decision and make the light standard on all aircraft.

    Now to be clear, Boeing has lost about $40 billion in stock market valuation since the crash, so it’s not like cheating out on the warning light turned out to have been a brilliant business decision or anything.

    This, fundamentally, is one reason the FAA has become comfortable working so closely with Boeing on safety regulations: The nature of the airline industry is such that there’s no real money to be made selling airplanes that have a poor safety track record. One could even imagine sketching out a utopian libertarian argument to the effect that there’s no real need for a government role in certifying new airplanes at all, precisely because there’s no reason to think it’s profitable to make unsafe ones.

    The real world, of course, is quite a bit different from that, and different individuals and institutions face particular pressures that can lead them to take actions that don’t collectively make sense. Looking back, Boeing probably wishes it had just stuck with the “build a new plane” plan and stuck it out for a few years of rough sales, rather than ending up in the current situation. Right now they are, in effect, trying to patch things up piecemeal — a software update here, a new warning light there, etc. — in hopes of persuading global regulatory agencies to let their planes fly again.

    But even once that’s done, they face the task of convincing airlines to actually go buy their planes. An informative David Ljunggren article for Reuters reminds us that a somewhat comparable situation arose in 1965 when three then-new Boeing 727 jetliners crashed.

    There wasn’t really anything unsound about the 727 planes, but many pilots didn’t fully understand how to operate the new flaps — arguably a parallel to the MCAS situation with the 737 MAX — which spurred some additional training and changes to the operation manual. Passengers avoided the planes for months, but eventually came back as there were no more crashes, and the 727 went on to fly safely for decades. Boeing hopes to have a similar happy ending to this saga, but so far they seem to be a long way from that point. And their immediate future likely involves more tough questions.

    A political scandal on slow-burn

    The 737 MAX was briefly a topic of political controversy in the United States as foreign regulators grounded the planes, but President Donald Trump — after speaking personally to Boeing’s CEO — declined to follow. Many members of Congress (from both parties) called on him to reconsider, which he rather quickly did, pushing the whole topic off Washington’s front burner.

    But Trump is generally friendly to Boeing (he even has a Boeing executive serving as acting defense secretary, despite an ongoing ethics inquiry into charges that he unfairly favors his former employer) and Republicans are generally averse to harsh regulatory crackdowns. The most important decisions in the mix appear to have been made back during the Obama administration, so it’s also difficult for Democrats to go after this issue. Meanwhile, Washington has been embroiled in wrangling over special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and a new health care battlefield opened up as well.

    That said, on March 27, FAA officials faced the Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Aviation and Space at a hearing called by subcommittee Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cruz says he expects to call a second hearing featuring Boeing executives, as well as pilots and other industry players. Cruz was a leader on the anti-Boeing side of the Export-Import Bank fight years ago, so perhaps is more comfortable than others in Congress to take this on.

    When the political system does begin to engage on the issue, however, it’s unlikely to stop with just one congressional subcommittee. Billions of dollars are at stake for Boeing, the airlines who fly 737s, and the workers who build the planes. And since a central element of this story is the credibility of the FAA’s own process — both in the eyes of the American people and also in the eyes of foreign regulatory agencies — it almost certainly isn’t going to get sorted out without more involvement from the actual decision-makers in the US government.

    Source Article from https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2019/3/29/18281270/737-max-faa-scandal-explained

    <!– –>

    U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a tweet on Friday that he and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer had concluded “constructive” trade talks in Beijing.

    “I look forward to welcoming China’s Vice Premier Liu He to continue these important discussions in Washington next week,” he said in the tweet.

    Mnuchin and Lighthizer were in the Chinese capital for the first face-to-face meetings between the two sides in weeks after missing an initial end-of-March goal for a summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to sign a pact.

    Trump imposed tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese imports last year in a move to force China to change the way it does business with the rest of the world and to pry open more of China’s economy to U.S. companies.

    On Thursday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Beijing will sharply expand market access for foreign banks and securities and insurance companies, adding to speculation that China may soon announce new rules to allow foreign financial firms to increase their presence at home.

    White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the United States may drop some tariffs if a trade deal is reached while keeping others in place to ensure Beijing’s compliance.

    “We’re not going to give up our leverage,” he told reporters in Washington on Thursday.

    Mnuchin and Lighthizer greeted a waiting Liu at the Diaoyutai State Guest House just before 9 a.m. (0100) on Friday for what China’s Commerce Ministry has said would be a full day of talks.

    Among Trump’s demands are for Beijing to end practices that Washington alleges result in the systematic theft of U.S. intellectual property and the forced transfer of American technology to Chinese companies.

    U.S. companies say they are often pressured into handing over technological know-how to Chinese joint venture partners, local officials or regulators as a condition for doing business in China.

    The U.S. government says that technology is often subsequently transferred to and used by Chinese competitors.

    The issue has proved a tough one for negotiators as U.S. officials say China has previously refused to acknowledge the problem exists to the extent alleged by the United States, making discussing a resolution difficult.

    China says it has no technology transfer requirements enshrined in its laws and any such transfers are a result of legitimate transactions.

    Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/us-china-resume-trade-talks-after-productive-working-dinner.html

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    (CNN)Demetrius Anderson walked out of a Connecticut state prison in 2006 thinking he was ready to leave behind his criminal past and build a new life as an upstanding citizen.

    Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/29/us/connecticut-man-fighting-prison-return/index.html

    Judge Bates said that the final rule issued by Mr. Trump and Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta “creates absurd results under the Affordable Care Act.” For example, he said, two business owners who have no employees would be treated as both employers and employees.

    Likewise, he said, a group of 51 individuals, none of whom employ anyone, would be treated as 52 employers (counting the association as an employer) and 51 employees and would be free from many requirements of the Affordable Care Act that apply to health insurance in the individual and small-group markets.

    The Trump administration’s attempt to squeeze self-employed individuals into the definition of employer is “a magic trick,” and the rationale offered by the Labor Department is a sleight of hand, Judge Bates said.

    Moreover, he said, in issuing its rule for small business health plans, the Trump administration ignored the language and purpose of both the Affordable Care Act and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, known as Erisa.

    The final rule, he said, illegally “expands the definition of ‘employers’ to include groups without any real commonality of interest and to bring working owners without employees within Erisa’s scope.”

    “Because the final rule stretches the definitions of ‘employer’ beyond what the statute can bear, the final rule is unlawful” under the Administrative Procedure Act, which sets the standards for federal rule-making, the judge said.

    Republicans in Congress have been trying for two decades to promote association health plans through legislation. Using his regulatory authority, Mr. Trump tried to do what Congress could not accomplish.

    Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/us/politics/trump-judge-health-care.html

    Special counsel Robert Mueller after attending church on March 24, 2019, in Washington, D.C.

    Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images


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    Special counsel Robert Mueller after attending church on March 24, 2019, in Washington, D.C.

    Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

    Days after Attorney General William Barr released his four-page summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation report, overwhelming majorities of Americans want the full report made public and believe Barr and Mueller should testify before Congress, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

    Only about a third of Americans believe, from what they’ve seen or heard about the Mueller investigation so far, that President Trump is clear of any wrongdoing. But they are split on how far Democrats should go in investigating him going forward.

    “People clearly want to see more about the report,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll. “They want it released publicly, are eager to see the principals — Mueller and Barr — testify, because they want to see how the sausage was made. They want to see how we got to this point.”

    At the same time, 56 percent said Mueller conducted a fair investigation, and 51 percent said they were satisfied with it. That included 52 percent of independents who said they were satisfied with the investigation. It’s one of the rare questions in the first two years of the Trump presidency in which a majority of independents sided with Republicans instead of Democrats on a subject.

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    The other prominent area where independents have sided with Republicans is on impeachment. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll last year found that pushing impeachment would not be a winning issue for Democrats.

    The summary “could be somewhat of a blessing in disguise for Democrats,” Miringoff said, “because there’s no massive pressure saying, ‘Look at this report, look at this summary — we have to move forward with impeachment.’ “

    Americans: The Barr letter is not enough

    Overall, three-quarters said the full Mueller report should be made public. That included a majority of Republicans (54 percent). Just 18 percent overall said Barr’s summary is enough.

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    Two-thirds (66 percent) also said they want Mueller to testify before Congress, and 64 percent said the same for Barr.

    Trump not in the clear with the public

    President Trump speaks to supporters during a rally Thursday in Grand Rapids, Mich.

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    President Trump speaks to supporters during a rally Thursday in Grand Rapids, Mich.

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    Almost six in 10 (56 percent) said that questions still exist, with just 36 percent saying Trump is clear of any wrongdoing. That latter figure is close to where Trump’s approval rating has been throughout his presidency.

    In this poll, Trump’s approval rating is 42 percent. That’s up slightly (but within the margin of error) from January, when it was 39 percent and unchanged from December.

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    But that doesn’t mean the public wants Democrats to go far down the collusion or obstruction-of-justice rabbit hole of investigations.

    On the issue of obstruction, the Mueller report, as summarized by the Barr letter, noted that Mueller did not come to a conclusion on whether charges should be brought against the president. But Mueller said his report did not “exonerate” the president either. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided against charging the president.

    The country was split 48 to 46 percent on whether Barr’s decision not to charge the president should stand or if Congress should continue to investigate obstruction of justice by the president.

    What’s more, the country was similarly split, 48 to 45 percent, on whether Democrats should hold hearings to further investigate the Mueller report or end their investigations.

    “I think they’re on safe footing to want the full report released” and to bring in Barr and Mueller, Miringoff said, adding, “But don’t start saying there’s still collusion, don’t go for obstruction of justice, because then they’re barking up the wrong tree.”

    Views of Mueller spike with Republicans

    Mueller enjoys an overall positive rating among Americans, with 38 percent favorable, 25 percent unfavorable and roughly a third (37 percent) unsure or never heard of him.

    That’s a big change from December, when Mueller was viewed more negatively (33 percent) than positively (29 percent).

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    That change is largely due to Republicans viewing him far more favorably now, after Barr’s letter was released. In December, just 8 percent of Republicans viewed him favorably, while 58 percent viewed him negatively. After the Barr letter, the proportion of Republicans viewing Mueller positively jumped to 32 percent.

    Overall, views of Trump are generally where they have been. In addition to the consistency of his approval rating, about the same percentage of people compared to last July think he did something either illegal or unethical in his dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin — 57 percent now compared to 53 percent then.

    What’s more, 54 percent of registered voters said they are definitely voting against him in 2020. That is about where it was in January, when 57 percent of registered said so. And, remember, in the 2016 election, 54 percent of people voted for someone other than Trump.

    Of Trump’s standing and the political climate, Miringoff put it this way: “Despite the two years of attention, focused on Russia and the convictions and all that, it pretty much is exactly where it was.”

    The NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll was conducted March 25 through March 27, surveyed 938 adults and has a margin of error of +/- 3.9 percentage points. There were 834 registered voters surveyed. Where they are referenced, there is a margin of error of +/- 4.1 percentage points.

    Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2019/03/29/707713994/poll-after-barr-letter-overwhelming-majority-wants-full-mueller-report-released

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      LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Theresa May scrambled on Thursday for a way to secure a new delay to Brexit in the face of parliamentary deadlock by setting out plans for a watered-down vote on her EU divorce deal to be held on Friday.

      Lawmakers will vote on May’s withdrawal agreement at a special sitting but not on the framework for future relations with the EU she negotiated at the same time, a maneuver which sparked confusion among lawmakers.

      Britain agreed with the EU last week to delay Brexit from the originally planned March 29 until April 12, with a further delay until May 22 on offer if May could get her divorce package ratified by lawmakers this week after two failed attempts.

      “The European Union will only agree an extension until May 22 if the withdrawal agreement is approved this week,” House of Commons leader Andrea Leadsom told lawmakers. “Tomorrow’s motion gives parliament the opportunity to secure that extension.”

      May’s Brexit package, comprising the legally binding withdrawal agreement and a more general political declaration on the future relationship with the EU, has been overwhelmingly rejected by lawmakers on two previous occasions.

      It remains uncertain how, when or even whether the United Kingdom, the world’s fifth-biggest economy, will leave the EU. The risks that it could crash out as early as April 12 without a transition deal to soften the shock to its economy, or be forced into a long delay to the departure date to hold a general election, have increased as other options have faded.

      May’s struggles to pass her deal have thrown the process into chaos, resulting in Brexit being put off and even a pledge from the premier to quit if that is what it takes to win over eurosceptic opponents in her Conservative party to the plan.

      Although it cannot clinch approval of May’s deal in legal terms, Friday’s vote now dares Conservative eurosceptics to vote against the government on the very day that Britain was due to leave the bloc, a goal they have cherished for decades.

      Parliament’s speaker said he would allow the vote to go ahead as it would be on the withdrawal deal only and so did not break rules against bringing the same package back more than once in the same session of parliament.

      CONFUSION AT MAY’S NEW GAMBIT

      But angry and confused lawmakers from the opposition Labour Party demanded to know whether the government’s motion was legal. Lawmaker Stephen Doughty said: “This just looks to me like trickery of the highest order.”

      On Wednesday, May offered to resign if her Brexit package was passed, securing support from some high-profile critics in her party. But the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which props up her minority government, said it still opposed the deal, denying her votes she desperately needs to pass it.

      “Things change by the hour here but I’m not expecting any last minute rabbits out of the hat,” DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds told the BBC on Thursday.

      May’s deal means Britain would leave the EU single market and customs union as well as EU political bodies. But it requires some EU rules to apply unless ways can be found in the future to ensure no border posts need to be rebuilt between British-ruled Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland.

      Many Conservative rebels and the DUP object to this “Irish backstop”, saying it risks binding Britain to the EU for years.

      A bid on Wednesday by lawmakers to seize control of the Brexit process in the face of government disarray with a series of “indicative votes” on alternatives to May’s deal yielded no majority for any of them.

      However the option calling for a referendum on any departure deal, and another suggesting a UK-wide customs union with the EU, won more votes than May’s deal did two weeks ago. Lawmakers will have another go at the more popular options on Monday.

      Labour Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer said that May’s vow to resign if her deal was passed meant Britain was headed to a “blindfold Brexit”, which would be exacerbated by a vote which did not encompass the political declaration on future relations.

      “We would be leaving the EU, but with absolutely no idea where we are heading,” Starmer said. “That cannot be acceptable and Labour will not vote for it.”

      With May floundering in her effort to get her Brexit package approved, EU officials and diplomats said on Friday Britain was more likely than ever to tumble chaotically out of the EU.

      They said the bloc would push ahead with contingency preparations next week and was gearing up for an emergency Brexit summit the week after, probably on April 10.

      Reporting by Elizabeth Piper, William James Kylie MacLellan and Michael Holden; Writing by Alistair Smout; Editing by Mark Heinrich

      Source Article from https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu/may-plans-watered-down-brexit-vote-to-secure-departure-delay-idUSKCN1R92IT

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      (CNN)A federal district court judge Thursday blocked another Trump administration effort to undermine Obamacare.

        Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/28/politics/trump-obamacare-courts/index.html

        It’s amusing that every Democrat in the Senate was too scared to vote for the Green New Deal. They are, in Margaret Thatcher’s language, “frit.”

        The fright is ironic because nearly every candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination has lauded the Green New Deal as the next big thing, and some of those praising it are even in the Senate.

        This shows what a gulf there can be between what the party activists want and what the nation does, which is fortunate. There’s also that gaping gulf between what the party activists want and what we really should be doing. Yea, even on climate change, even the Green New Deal.

        The Green New Deal’s central conceit is that climate change is such an imminent and catastrophic problem that we’ve got to mobilize the entire resources of society to avert it. I happen to think that there is a problem here, one we should do something about, yet it’s neither looming nor a catastrophe. But then, that’s because I’m informed on the subject, having read the reports and the studies and even understood them. Green New Deal proponents then tell us that the way to mobilize the entirety of society is through government bureaucracy, though there isn’t anyone who can honestly say that committees are an effective way of getting something done.

        But then, that’s just being sensible and adult when there’s a deeper misunderstanding by the Green New Deal’s proponents. They seem to think that government beats markets, and that’s simply not true.

        Look at Turkey right now. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thinks the value of the lira is different from what the markets think. It’s the latter who will win, as it was George Soros and others who beat the Bank of England in 1992. And it was the markets that beat global governance in the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s. Markets work. Government, not so much.

        Governments can influence markets, most certainly, but they can’t abolish them, ignore them, or refute their messages. Looking east from the Brandenburg Gate in 1989 proved that for generations to come. And that’s the problem with the Green New Deal: It thinks the larger the problems, the more we must use governance. Instead, the greater the problems, the more we should influence markets as our tool. They are the only thing we’ve got strong or fast enough to work.

        An example of this is a report from the Manhattan Institute. We simply don’t yet have the technologies necessary to live without fossil fuels. We certainly can’t run a grid, for example, that relies on such intermittent supplies. We lack not the political will or the money, but the know-how. We face uncertainty, that is, as to how we should even try to achieve that goal.

        Uncertainty is something for which you can’t plan. We do know what our goal is: less or, if possible, no fossil fuel use. How we get from here to there is the problem. And if we do want to mobilize the entire society to work on the problem, then we need to do so. Changing prices in markets will help.

        As I pointed out before, there are possible new technologies such as space solar. We don’t know whether it’s going to be economic, but let’s experiment. Or maybe to reduce gasoline usage we should move houses, have a smaller car, or get a smaller engine. Why not all of those? That’s the very thing that changed prices do for us. Everyone faces those incentives; thus, everyone is influenced by them.

        Think on it. The Green New Deal is giving Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a $93 trillion checkbook and hoping she gets it right. That would not work out well.

        If you change prices with a carbon tax, however, all 320 million of us gnaw away at the bone of this problem. Many of the things we try won’t work, but some will. And we humans aren’t quite monkey see, monkey do. We’re a type of ape, but we do copy what works and drop what doesn’t.

        So, what actually works in mobilizing the entire society to solve a problem? Here, obviously, it’s the carbon tax. And the more urgent you think climate change is, the more you should support that, rather than bureaucrats writing environmental impact statements.

        You see, there is a reason why 78 percent of economists think prices, not regulations, are the way to beat climate change, and why more than 3,300 economists, including 27 Nobel laureates, signed up to endorse such a plan. You know, it’ll work. And guess what? They’re not also asking for control of that $93 trillion, either.

        Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’ s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.

        Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-green-new-deals-misguided-plan-to-combat-climate-change

        President Trump returned to a favorite campaign theme at his rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., Thursday night, mocking Democrats’ Green New Deal as “an extreme, $100 trillion government takeover” of the economy.

        “I’d rather not talk about it tonight, Trump told his audience, “because I don’t want to talk them out of it too soon. Because I love campaigning against the Green New Deal. I want them to make that a big part of their platform.”

        The plan, championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., calls for the U.S. to shift away from fossil fuels such as oil and coal and replace them with renewable sources such as wind and solar power. It also calls for virtual elimination by 2030 of greenhouse gas emissions that have been tied to climate change. Opponents of the plan have seized on background materials briefly published on Ocasio-Cortez’s website, which included a promise that the proposal would include guaranteed economic security even for those “unwilling to work” and a line that noted, “We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.”

        GREEN NEW DEAL FAILS SENATE TEST VOTE AS DOZENS OF DEMOCRATS VOTE ‘PRESENT’

        “No more airplanes, no more cows,” Trump said. “One car per family … You know, I don’t think one car per family in Michigan plays too well, do you agree? Not too well.

        “And it’s got to be, of course, an electric car,” the president went on as the crowd jeered the Green New Deal. “Even if it only goes, what? 160 miles? What do you do? It’s 160 miles. Darling, where do I get a charge? Where do I get a charge?”

        CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

        Trump’s jabs came days after 42 Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., voted “present” on a non-binding resolution that would have begun debate on the Green New Deal. Not a single senator voted to break the filibuster, while 57 senators — including three Democrats and Sen. Angus King, I-Maine — voted “no.” In addition to Sanders, five Democratic presidential candidates who have previously backed the Green New Deal voted “present”: Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

        Democrats described the vote, orchestrated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as a “sham vote” meant to avoid a genuine debate on the effects of climate change.

        The Associated Press contributed to this report.

        Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-mocks-green-new-deal-pokes-fun-at-electric-cars-during-michigan-rally

        <!– –>

        The U.S. and China have no choice but to conclude ongoing trade negotiations, most likely in the next month or so, former U.S. ambassador to China Max Baucus said Thursday.

        “The talks will conclude. They have to,” Baucus told CNBC’s Martin Soong at the Boao Forum for Asia in the Hainan province of China. “U.S, China, we’re so closely joined at the hip economically, we got to get this thing done.”

        “There’s some feeling here maybe — by the end of April, maybe a little longer — but we’ll get it done,” Baucus said, noting that otherwise, U.S. stock markets and China’s already slowing economy would be negatively impacted.

        President Donald Trump has often compared his political success with the U.S. stock market, which has pushed higher over the last 10 years in the longest bull market in history. Meanwhile, official figures showed China’s economy grew at its slowest pace last year since 1990, and authorities expect the rate to slow further this year.

        For those reasons, Baucus said there is greater impetus for the U.S. to make a deal with China.

        He also said the near-term fallout of nuclear talks between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in late February should not be used as an example for how trade negotiations between the world’s two largest economies might end.

        The question for Beijing is whether Trump will live up to his side of the deal, said Baucus, who was the U.S. ambassador to China from 2014 to 2017 under President Barack Obama.

        The Trump administration is also looking for ways to ensure enforcement on China’s side.

        A meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, originally expected for the end of this month, has been delayed.

        For now, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are set to hold trade talks in Beijing beginning Thursday. The Chinese delegation under Vice Premier Liu He is expected to lead a team to the U.S. next week.

        Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/28/us-china-trade-talks-must-conclude-former-ambassador-says.html

        In his first major rally since Special Counsel Robert Mueller cleared him of any collusion with Russia, President Trump took the stage before a boisterous full house at the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Thursday night — and proceeded to tear into Democrats and the FBI as unintelligent “frauds” who tried desperately to undermine the results of the 2016 election.

        “The Democrats have to now decide whether they will continue defrauding the public with ridiculous bullsh–,” Trump said to thunderous applause, “– partisan investigations, or whether they will apologize to the American people.”

        Trump continued to unload on his opponents: “I have a better education than them, I’m smarter than them, I went to the best schools; they didn’t. Much more beautiful house, much more beautiful apartment. Much more beautiful everything. And I’m president and they’re not.”

        Addressing counterprotesters outside the arena and progressives in general, Trump asked: “What do you think of their signs, ‘Resist?’ What the hell? Let’s get something done.”

        EXCLUSIVE: FBI TEXTS OBTAINED BY FOX NEWS SHOW DOJ WARNED OF ‘BIAS’ IN KEY SOURCE USED TO SPY ON TRUMP AIDE

        Later, Trump vowed to “close the damn border” unless Mexico halts two new caravans he said have been approaching the United States rapidly. Trump also hit at fraudulent asylum applicants, saying liberal lawyers often have coached them in a “big fat con job” to claim they’ve feared for their lives when they make it to the border.

        The economy, Trump said to sustained cheers, “is roaring, the ISIS caliphate is defeated 100 percent, and after three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax is finally dead. The collusion delusion is over. … The single greatest political hoax in the history of our country. And guess what? We won.”

        “I love campaigning against the Green New Deal,” Trump remarked at one point. “One car per family — you’re going to love that in Michigan.”

        Trump predicted that the former DOJ and FBI officials who pushed the collusion theory and authorized secret surveillance warrants against members of his campaign — whom he incidentally called “major losers” — would soon have “big problems.”

        Trump also characterized the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee as “little pencil-neck Adam Schiff, who has the smallest, thinnest neck I’ve ever seen,” and someone who is “not a long-ball hitter.”

        Schiff, D-Calif., who fiercely pushed collusion claims, has vowed to continue investigating Trump despite Mueller’s findings — even as Republicans have called for his resignation.

        Trump’s rally prompted thousands of supporters to line the streets hours beforehand in a festive atmosphere that included vendors selling “Make America Great Again” hats and holding supportive signs.

        People waiting for President Donald Trump to speak at the rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Thursday. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

        The evening was something of a homecoming: Trump became the first Republican in over two decades to win Michigan in the 2016 presidential election, edging out Hillary Clinton thanks, in part, to his decision to cap off his campaign with a final rally in Grand Rapids shortly after midnight on Election Day. “This is our Independence Day,” Trump told roaring attendees then.

        FOX NEWS EXCLUSIVE: TRUMP VOWS TO RELEASE FISA DOCS THAT KICKSTARTED RUSSIA PROBE

        Thursday night’s event, though, was a mixture of homecoming and all-out victory parade, in the wake of Mueller’s conclusions. Enthusiastic fans — including many who stood by Trump amid a torrent of unproven allegations that he conspired with Russia to sway the 2016 election — began to encircle the Van Andel Arena as early as 3:30 a.m.

        Trump relived the Election Day rally on Thursday, telling the crowd that he got home at 4 a.m. in the morning and told Melania Trump that he had an “incredible crowd” late into the evening and thought, “How the hell can I lose Michigan? And guess what: We didn’t lose Michigan.”

        President Donald Trump speaking at the rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

        Trump also dropped what he called “breaking news” for locals, promising, “I’m going to get full funding of $300 million for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which you’ve been trying to get for over 30 years. It’s time.”

        Trump noted that MSNBC and CNN’s ratings “dropped through the floor last night,” while Fox News’ ratings were “through the roof.”

        Retired cabinet maker Ron Smith, 51, was one of the supporters who arrived to Thursday’s rally early. He told the Detroit News outside the arena that although “Republicans in Congress are trying to put stumbling blocks in his path,” nevertheless, “Donald Trump comes in here and gets stuff done.”

        FOX NEWS DOMINATES CNN, MSNBC IN RATINGS AFTER FALSE RUSSIA COLLUSION NARRATIVE IS TOTALLY DISCREDITED

        Separately, Trump called the Jussie Smollet case an “embarrassment” both to Chicago and to the U.S. and vowed to continue border wall construction.

        Trump also decried Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat who seemingly endorsed the practice of killing some infants after birth earlier this year.

        “In recent months, the Democrat Party has also been aggressively pushing extreme late-term abortion, allowing children to be ripped from their mother’s womb up until the moment of birth,” Trump said. “In Virginia, the governor stated he would even allow a newborn baby to be executed.”

        Senate Democrats blocked a GOP-led effort after Northam’s remarks that would have established the standard of care owed to infants who survive failed abortions.

        In remarks to reporters before he left the White House earlier in the day, Trump previewed a wide-ranging rally on everything from the economy to health care and border security. But there was little doubt the president would devote a good deal of time to a victory lap on Russia.

        Trump also promised to save the Special Olympics, after the Education Department proposed cuts to the program in its latest budget.

        “The Special Olympics will be funded. I just told my people, I want to fund the Special Olympics and I just authorized a funding of the Special Olympics,” Trump said. “I’ve been to the Special Olympics. I think it’s incredible and I just authorized a funding. I heard about it this morning. I have overridden my people. We’re funding the Special Olympics.”

        In a fiery, exclusive interview with Fox News’ “Hannity” Wednesday night, Trump vowed to release classified documents that could shed light on the Russia probe’s origins. He also accused FBI officials of committing “treason” — slamming former FBI Director James Comey as a “terrible guy,” former CIA Director John Brennan as potentially mentally ill, and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., as a criminal.

        President Donald Trump arriving at Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Mich., for his rally. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

        Redacted versions of FISA documents already released have revealed that the FBI extensively relied on documents produced by Christopher Steele, an anti-Trump British ex-spy working for a firm funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, to surveil Trump aide Carter Page. At least one senior DOJ official had apparent concerns Steele was unreliable, according to text messages exclusively obtained last week by Fox News.

        The leaked dossier, and related FBI surveillance, kickstarted a media frenzy on alleged Russia-Trump collusion that ended with a whimper on Sunday. Trump, on Thursday, told the crowd in Michigan that the dossier was “dirty.”

        Michigan Democrats, meanwhile, organized a counter-rally nearby, with the party saying it wanted to issue a “call for action and solutions on the fundamental issues facing us all, like health care, education, clean water, equality, immigrant rights, support for our military veterans, jobs, the economy and more.”

        A handful of protesters separately waved “socialist alternative” flags and yelled, “No Trump, no KKK, no fascists, USA,” according to local reports.

        Republicans have maintained that Trump has a good chance to win Michigan again in 2020, although changing demographics could present some headwinds. In November, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer defeated a Trump-backed candidate to claim the state’s governorship.

        CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

        “Democrats are in a pickle and they put themselves here” by trumpeting the investigation, said Brian “Boomer” Patrick, communications director for GOP Michigan Rep. Bill Huizenga. “All the eggs were in one basket on the Mueller report.”

        At the end of the rally, Trump remarked, “the Democrats took the people of Michigan for granted. With us, you will never be forgotten again.”

        Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-in-first-rally-since-mueller-vindication-draws-huge-crowds-on-streets-of-grand-rapids

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        (CNN)Tensions are escalating between President Donald Trump and Puerto Rico’s governor over disaster relief efforts that have been slow in coming for the still-battered island after Hurricane Maria.

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playerId, token, mode, id, duration, blockId, adType, instance, isAdPause) {if (mobilePinnedView) {CNN.VideoPlayer.handleMobilePinnedPlayerStates(containerId, isAdPause);}},onTrackingFullscreen: function (containerId, PlayerId, dataObj) {CNN.VideoPlayer.handleFullscreenChange(containerId, dataObj);if (mobilePinnedView &&typeof dataObj === ‘object’ &&FAVE.Utils.os === ‘iOS’ && !dataObj.fullscreen) {jQuery(document).scrollTop(mobilePinnedView.getScrollPosition());playerInstance.hideUI();}},onContentPlay: function (containerId, cvpId, event) {var playerInstance,prevVideoId;if (CNN.companion && typeof CNN.companion.updateCompanionLayout === ‘function’) {CNN.companion.updateCompanionLayout(‘restoreEpicAds’);}clearTimeout(moveToNextTimeout);CNN.VideoPlayer.hideSpinner(containerId);if (Modernizr && !Modernizr.phone && !Modernizr.mobile && !Modernizr.tablet) {if (typeof videoPinner !== ‘undefined’ && videoPinner !== null) {videoPinner.setIsPlaying(true);videoPinner.animateDown();}}},onContentReplayRequest: function (containerId, cvpId, contentId) {if (Modernizr && !Modernizr.phone && !Modernizr.mobile && !Modernizr.tablet) {if (typeof videoPinner !== ‘undefined’ && videoPinner !== null) {videoPinner.setIsPlaying(true);var $endSlate = jQuery(document.getElementById(containerId)).parent().find(‘.js-video__end-slate’).eq(0);if ($endSlate.length > 0) {$endSlate.removeClass(‘video__end-slate–active’).addClass(‘video__end-slate–inactive’);}}}},onContentBegin: function (containerId, cvpId, contentId) {if (mobilePinnedView) {mobilePinnedView.enable();}/* Dismissing the pinnedPlayer if another video players plays a video. */CNN.VideoPlayer.dismissMobilePinnedPlayer(containerId);CNN.VideoPlayer.mutePlayer(containerId);if (CNN.companion && typeof CNN.companion.updateCompanionLayout === ‘function’) {CNN.companion.updateCompanionLayout(‘removeEpicAds’);}CNN.VideoPlayer.hideSpinner(containerId);clearTimeout(moveToNextTimeout);CNN.VideoSourceUtils.clearSource(containerId);jQuery(document).triggerVideoContentStarted();},onContentComplete: function (containerId, cvpId, contentId) {if (CNN.companion && typeof CNN.companion.updateCompanionLayout === ‘function’) {CNN.companion.updateCompanionLayout(‘restoreFreewheel’);}navigateToNextVideo(contentId, containerId);},onContentEnd: function (containerId, cvpId, contentId) {if (Modernizr && !Modernizr.phone && !Modernizr.mobile && !Modernizr.tablet) {if (typeof videoPinner !== ‘undefined’ && videoPinner !== null) {videoPinner.setIsPlaying(false);}}},onCVPVisibilityChange: function (containerId, cvpId, visible) {CNN.VideoPlayer.handleAdOnCVPVisibilityChange(containerId, visible);}};if (typeof configObj.context !== ‘string’ || configObj.context.length 0) {configObj.adsection = window.ssid;}CNN.autoPlayVideoExist = (CNN.autoPlayVideoExist === true) ? true : false;CNN.VideoPlayer.getLibrary(configObj, callbackObj, isLivePlayer);});CNN.INJECTOR.scriptComplete(‘videodemanddust’);

          Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/28/politics/ricardo-rossell-donald-trump-puerto-rico-funding/index.html

          President Trump slammed the Jussie Smollett case in Chicago on Thursday, calling it an “embarrassment” to both the city and the country.

          “How about in Chicago?” Trump said. “He said he was attacked by MAGA country.”

          Trump did not name Smollett by name, but referenced Smollett’s January police report, in which the “Empire” actor said he had been attacked by two men who shouted, “This is MAGA country.”

          Smollett had been accused of staging a hate crime and filing a false police report, but this week the charges against him were dropped.

          The city of Chicago however, still wants $130,106.15 in the next seven days from Smollett, to cover the cost of the investigation into claims he was attacked.

          Trump added that this is “maybe the only time I ever agreed with the Mayor of Chicago.” (Rahm Emanuel has called the decision to drop charges an “abomination of justice.”)

          Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-rally-michigan-march-2019/index.html