President Trump’s executive order issued earlier this month would make it easier for the federal government to fire career civil servants.
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President Trump’s executive order issued earlier this month would make it easier for the federal government to fire career civil servants.
Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Trump administration has issued an executive order that would fundamentally restructure the federal workforce, making it easier for the government to fire thousands of federal workers, while also allowing political and other considerations to affect hiring.
The executive order, issued last week, would affect the professional employees in policymaking positions at the very top of the civil service — people like lawyers and scientists who are are not political appointees and serve from administration to administration regardless of which party controls the White House.
The president’s order changes that, creating a new category for them — “Schedule F” — and taking away their civil service protections. In a statement that accompanied the order, the White House took aim at those protections, saying they make it too difficult for agency heads to remove “poor performers.” Without the protections, the employees can be more easily replaced.
Rachel Greszler, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which supports the order, says it’s “a common-sense change” to address a lack of accountability in the federal government.
“I’ve talked to managers in the past who say that they want to do the right thing and they want to hold workers accountable,” says Greszler. “They want to get rid of the bad apples who are weighing others down and preventing the agency from carrying out its mission. But ultimately, the managers said, they often gave up because they had to spend so much time and so much effort that … it just wasn’t worth it. They determined it was better to just keep these people on the payrolls and shift their job responsibilities to others. And that’s a big problem.”
But public employee unions say it’s Trump’s order that’s the problem. They’ve said it could have a chilling effect on the more than 2 million people who make up the federal workforce — most of whom are not political appointees.
“It’s a huge attack on the apolitical civil service” says Jacqueline Simon, the policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees union. She says the order could mean these top positions would no longer be filled by people who have been hired through a competitive process.
“If it’s implemented broadly, it could create absolute chaos in the agencies. It could be an absolute fiasco,” says Simon. “Everyone’s seen what happens if this administration tries to politicize scientific work. We’ve seen it in CDC, and we’ve seen it in the weather service. We’ve seen it in EPA, we’ve seen it all across the agencies. Imagine every single agency undermined by political hacks.”
Trump has railed against federal workers since taking office, baselessly claiming there is a deep state within the bureaucracy working to thwart his policies.
Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University, says most recent presidents have tried to reform the federal workforce, but Trump has taken it to a new level.
“We started with a hiring freeze,” he says. “We segued into a shutdown. I think the net effect is really on undermining commitment within the federal workforce and just giving feds a good Halloween scare that is likely to be overturned, but they won’t forget.”
Light says the order could make a career in the federal government less appealing, at a time when many government employees are nearing retirement age.
The executive order has already led to one departure: It prompted the resignation of Ron Sanders, the chairman of the Federal Salary Council.
Sanders, a lifelong Republican, says he believes the U.S. civil service is the best in the world. He warns the order could strip the government of sorely needed expertise.
“It’s absolutely critical because of the complexity of that world — the laws, the rules, the regulations, the scientific theories, all of the things that go into public policy. Somebody has to understand that. You can’t look at the CliffsNotes and get it. You need people with deep technical expertise who are there regardless of party who provide neutral competence to whoever is in power.”
The executive order calls on federal agencies to make a list of positions that would be affected by the new classification by Jan. 19, the day before Inauguration Day.
What happens next depends on who is sworn in on Jan. 20. It’s likely that Democrat Joe Biden would overturn the order if elected. Democrats in Congress say they’ll work to nullify the order, and the National Treasury Employees Union has filed a lawsuit to overturn it in court.
Estados Unidos incluyó un nueva nueva casilla en su planilla de solicitud de visas en la que solicita detalles sobre los perfiles en redes sociales durante los últimos cinco años, así como información biográfica de los 15 años anteriores a la petición, confirmó una vocera del Departamento de Estado a Univision Noticias.
La Oficina de Administración y Presupuestos ya había aprobado la medida el pasado 23 de mayo y el Departamento de Estado comenzó a implementarla dos días después.
La medida es parte de un “exhaustivo” control de seguridad al que podría ser sometido cualquiera en cualquier parte del mundo, sin excepciones, explicó Lydia Barraza, vocera del Departamento de Estado. Y además de las redes sociales, si los funcionarios consulares lo consideran, se pedirán los números de pasaportes anteriores del solicitante y sus familiares, información sobre viajes y empleos previos, así como personas de contacto.
Quienes hayan estado en zonas bajo control de organizaciones terroristas tendrán que entregar, además, “detalles precisos” de su estancia en esos países, explica Barraza. “Permite evaluar si los solicitantes no reúnen las condiciones para obtener una visa en Estados Unidos”, dice, al precisar que ni la raza ni la religión serán consideradas en esas evaluaciones.
En total, calculan que se verá afectado 1% de los 13 millones de solicitantes de visas en el mundo.
En un comunicado de prensa del 4 de mayo, el Departamento de Estado había explicado que el no consignar alguno de los datos enumerados anteriormente no resultaría en una negación inmediata de la visa, siempre que el funcionario consular a cargo del caso considere que el solicitante tiene razones de peso para no presentarlos.
Barraza reiteró que no serán exigidas las contraseñas de cuentas de correo electrónico o de redes sociales de los aplicantes.
Los críticos de esta medida, sostienen que las nuevas preguntas podrían aumentar los retrasos en el proceso y desalentarían a estudiantes y científicos extranjeros que planeen visitar Estados Unidos, refiere la agencia Reuters.
El anuncio responde a un memorando del presidente Donald Trump emitido el 6 de marzo, en el que pedía la implementación de nuevos protocolos para evaluar con mayor rigurosidad a quienes parecieran no ser elegibles para una visa estadounidense.
Uno de los deportados, Antonio Martínez-Arreguín, muestra su “constancia de recepción de mexicanos repatriados” cerca de El Chaparral, antes de emprender la caminata de horas para intentar llegar a casa de un primo. La constancia le sirve, hasta que pueda tramitar sus documentos, para identificarse como ciudadano de México. No tiene dinero, teléfono ni documentos. Almudena Toral/Univision Digital
Iran warned world powers they will not be able to negotiate a better deal than the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement, as the United States vowed the Islamic Republic will never acquire an atomic weapon.
Tehran threatened on Monday to restart deactivated centrifuges and ramp up its enrichment of uranium to 20 percent purity as its next potential big moves away from the agreement that Washington abandoned last year.
The latest war of words came the same day that Iran began enriching uranium to 4.5 percent, breaking the limit set in the 2015 agreement sealed under former president Barack Obama.
#B_Team sold @realDonaldTrump on the folly that killing #JCPOA thru #EconomicTerrorism can get him a better deal. As it becomes increasingly clear that there won’t be a better deal, they’re bizarrely urging Iran’s full compliance. There’s a way out, but not with #B_Team in charge
US Vice President Mike Pence said the international accord simply delayed Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon by “roughly a decade”, and gave away billions in economic relief that Iran could then use to wage “terrorist” attacks.
The US “will never allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon”, Pence told a pro-Israel Christian organisation on Monday.
“Iran must choose between caring for its people and continuing to fund its proxies who spread violence and terrorism throughout the region and breathe out murderous hatred against Israel,” he said.
Pence added US sanctions have succeeded in “cutting off” Iran’s ability to support armed groups in the Middle East, but he also alleged the Islamic Republic had increased its “malign activity and violence in the region” over the past several months.
Tensions in the region have risen in recent weeks after oil tankers were attacked near the Strait of Hormuz and Iran downed an unmanned US military surveillance drone.
The drone shootdown nearly led to a US military attack against Iran. It was called off at the last minute by US President Donald Trump.
The US has sent thousands of troops, an aircraft carrier, nuclear-capable B-52 bombers, and advanced fighter jets to the Middle East.
“Let me be clear,” Pence said. “Iran should not confuse American restraint with a lack of American resolve.”
A dying deal
Iran’s threats to restart their nuclear programme – made by Tehran’s nuclear agency spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi – would go far beyond the small steps Iran has taken in the past week to nudge stocks of fissile material just beyond limits in the pact.
That could raise serious questions about whether the nuclear deal, intended to block Iran from making a nuclear weapon, is still viable.
The two threats would reverse major achievements of the agreement, although Iran omitted important details about how far it might go to returning to the status quo before the pact.
Enriching uranium up to 20 percent purity would be a dramatic move, since that was the level Iran achieved before the 2015 deal, although back then it had a far larger stockpile.
It is considered an important intermediate stage on the path to obtaining the 90 percent pure fissile uranium needed for a bomb.
One of the main achievements of the deal was Iran’s agreement to dismantle its advanced IR-2M centrifuges, used to purify uranium. Iran had 1,000 of them installed at its large Natanz enrichment site before the deal. Under the deal, it is allowed to operate only up to two for testing.
Still, the threatened measures also appear intended to be sufficiently ambiguous to hold back from fully repudiating the deal.
Kamalvandi did not specify how much uranium Iran might purify to the higher level, nor how many centrifuges it would consider restarting.
Iran has said all the steps it is contemplating are reversible.
Emergency diplomacy
Trump on Monday spoke to French President Emmanuel Macron about Iran’s threat to ramp up enrichment of uranium.
“They discussed ongoing efforts to ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon and to end Iran’s destabilising behaviour in the Middle East,” a White House spokesman said in a statement.
Macron’s top diplomatic adviser will travel to Iran on Tuesday and Wednesday to try to de-escalate tensions between Tehran and the US, a presidential official said.
The French official said both Iran and the US had an interest in increasing the pressure at this stage, but both sides would want to start talks eventually.
“The important thing in a crisis situation such as this one is to find the middle points that take us from extreme tension to negotiation, that’s what we’re trying to do,” the official said.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Palestinians grabbed their children and belongings and fled neighborhoods on the outskirts of Gaza City on Friday as Israel unleashed a heavy barrage of tank fire and airstrikes. Israel said it was clearing a network of militant tunnels.
Separately, in the West Bank, Palestinian health officials said seven Palestinians were killed by Israeli army fire in several locations.
Israel has massed troops along the border and called up 9,000 reservists as fighting intensifies with the Islamic militant group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. Palestinian militants have fired some 1,800 rockets, and the Israeli military has launched more than 600 airstrikes, toppling at least three high-rise apartment buildings, and has shelled some areas with tanks stationed near the frontier.
As Israel and Hamas plunged closer to all-out war despite international efforts at a cease-fire, communal violence in Israel erupted for a fourth night. Jewish and Arab mobs clashed in the flashpoint town of Lod, even after Israel dispatched additional security forces.
The Gaza Health Ministry says the toll from the fighting has risen to 119 killed, including 31 children and 19 women, with 830 wounded. The Hamas and Islamic Jihad militant groups have confirmed 20 deaths in their ranks, though Israel says that number is much higher. Seven people have been killed in Israel, including a 6-year-old boy and a soldier.
Of the seven Palestinians killed in the West Bank, most were killed in stone-throwing clashes in several locations, although one was killed while trying to stab an Israeli soldier, the health officials said. About 100 were injured, most by live fire, they said.
The protests took place in several locations across the West Bank, signaling a new wave of unrest there as part of the escalation of fighting between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers.
Before dawn Friday, Israeli tanks and warplanes carried out an intense barrage on the northern end of the Gaza Strip.
In the darkness, Houda Ouda and her extended family ran frantically inside their home in the town of Beit Hanoun, trying to find shelter as the earth shook for two and half hours, Ouda recalled.
“We even did not dare to look from the window to know what is being hit,” she said. When daylight came, she saw the swath of destruction outside: streets cratered, buildings crushed, their facades torn off, an olive tree burned bare, dust and powered concrete covering everything.
Among the dead was a family of six. Rafat Tanani, his pregnant wife and four children, aged 7 and under, were killed after an Israeli warplane reduced their four-story apartment building to rubble in the neighboring town of Beit Lahia, residents said.
Four strikes hit the building at 11 p.m., just before the family was going to sleep, Rafat’s brother Fadi said. The building’s owner and his wife were also killed.
“It was a massacre,” said Sadallah Tanani, another relative. “My feelings are indescribable.”
Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said the operation involved tank fire and airstrikes, aimed at destroying a network of tunnels beneath Gaza City that the military refers to as “the Metro,” used by militants to evade surveillance and airstrikes.
“As always, the aim is to strike military targets and to minimize collateral damage and civilian casualties,” he said. “Unlike our very elaborate efforts to clear civilian areas before we strike high-rise or large buildings inside Gaza, that wasn’t feasible this time.”
When the sun rose, residents streamed out of the area in pickup trucks, on donkeys and on foot, taking pillows, blankets, pots and pans and bread. “We were terrified for our children, who were screaming and shaking,” said Hedaia Maarouf, who fled with her extended family of 19 people, including 13 children.
Thousands crowded into 16 U.N.-run schools for shelter, said Adnan Abu Hasna, a spokesman for UNRWA, the U.N. relief agency for Palestinians.
Mohammed Ghabayen, who took shelter in one school with his family, said his children had eaten nothing since the day before, and they had no mattresses to sleep on. “And this is in the shadow of the coronavirus crisis,” he said. “We don’t know whether to take precautions for the coronavirus or the rockets or what to do exactly.
The strikes came after Egyptian mediators rushed to Israel for cease-fire talks that showed no signs of progress. Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations were leading the truce efforts.
An Egyptian intelligence official with knowledge of the talks said Israel rejected an Egyptian proposal for a yearlong truce with Hamas and other Gaza militants, which would have started at midnight Thursday had Israel agreed. He said Hamas had accepted the proposal.
The official said Israel wants to delay a cease-fire to give time to destroy more of Hamas’ and Islamic Jihad’s military capabilities. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.
Since then, Israel has attacked hundreds of targets in Gaza, causing earth-shaking explosions in densely populated areas. Of the 1,800 rockets Gaza militants have fired, more than 400 fell short or misfired, and most of the rest have been intercepted by missile defense systems, according to the military.
Still the rockets have brought life in parts of southern Israel to a standstill, and several barrages have targeted the seaside metropolis of Tel Aviv, some 70 kilometers (45 miles) from Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue the operation, saying in a video statement that Israel would “extract a very heavy price from Hamas.”
In Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden said he spoke with Netanyahu about calming the fighting but also backed the Israeli leader by saying “there has not been a significant overreaction.”
He said the goal now is to “get to a point where there is a significant reduction in attacks, particularly rocket attacks.” He called the effort “a work in progress.”
The fighting has, for the moment, disrupted efforts by Netanyahu’s political opponents to form a new government coalition, prolonging his effort to stay in office after inconclusive parliamentary elections. His rivals have three weeks to agree on a coalition but need the support of an Arab party, whose leader has said he cannot negotiate while Israel is fighting in Gaza.
Israel has come under heavy international criticism for civilian casualties during three previous wars in Gaza, which is home to more than 2 million Palestinians. It says Hamas is responsible for endangering civilians by placing military infrastructure in civilian areas and launching rockets from them.
Hamas showed no signs of backing down. It fired its most powerful rocket, the Ayyash, nearly 200 kilometers (120 miles) into southern Israel on Thursday. The rocket landed in the open desert but briefly disrupted flight traffic at the southern Ramon airport. Hamas has also launched two drones that Israel said it quickly shot down.
A spokesman for Hamas’ military wing said the group was not afraid of a ground invasion, which would be a chance “to increase our catch” of Israeli soldiers.
The current eruption of violence began a month ago in Jerusalem. A focal point of clashes was Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, on a hilltop compound revered by Jews and Muslims. Israel regards all of Jerusalem as its capital, while the Palestinians want east Jerusalem, which includes sites sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims, to be the capital of their future state.
The violent clashes between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem and other mixed cities across Israel has added a new layer of volatility to the conflict not seen in more than two decades.
The violence continued overnight into Friday. A Jewish man was shot and seriously wounded in Lod, the epicenter of the troubles, and Israeli media said a second Jewish man was shot. In the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Jaffa, an Israeli soldier was attacked by a group of Arabs and hospitalized in serious condition.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said some 750 suspects have been arrested since the communal violence began earlier this week.
___
Krauss reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Samy Magdy in Cairo contributed.
Pete Hegseth hosts highly-decorated veterans on Fox Nation’s ‘Modern Warriors: Reflections,’ who share their war stories, combat moments, thoughts on military morale today, and why they served.
This Memorial Day, Fox Nation treats subscribers to fresh, new, exclusive content inspired by America’s heroes — and an even sweeter surprise for them: a one-year free membership to the streaming service.
Fox Nation is thrilled to thank soldiers currently serving in active duty – as well as our nation’s veterans – for their service to our country with its new ‘Grateful Nation’ promotion. For one whole year, military personnel will get to enjoy a wide variety of Memorial Day-inspired content free of charge — like Pete Hegseth’s ‘Modern Warriors,’ Johnny Joey Jones’ ‘USA Ink,’ Shannon Bream’s ‘Hero Dogs,’ and ‘America’s Top Ranger,’ a look at the 2021 “Best Ranger” competition in Fort Benning, Georgia.
From decorated dogs to the history of war-time tattoos, Fox Nation has no shortage of patriotic content this holiday.
“Here in America, we conflate what Veterans Day is with what Memorial Day is,” said former U.S. Army Pilot Wesley Hunt, who joined host Pete Hegseth alongside other veterans for the series, ‘Modern Warriors: Reflections.’
“Memorial Day is for those that paid the ultimate sacrifice for us to wake up in the morning and put our feet on free sovereign American soil, and breathe free sovereign American air.”
“And people died for it,” Hunt continued. “They died for all Americans.”
Former U.S. Marine Richard Casper, who is also featured in ‘Reflections,’ further explained why it’s necessary for Americans to recognize Memorial Day.
“They always say you die twice — the moment you pass, and the moment that someone speaks your name for the last time,” noted Casper. “And so to memorialize them [veterans who’ve died in battle] is so important… because we have to keep saying their name.”
While Memorial Day serves to honor the many men and women who’ve sacrificed their lives for our American freedoms, Fox Nation explores how a man and woman’s best friend often exemplifies a similar sense of bravery.
From the battlefield to the home front, Season 3 of Fox Nation’s ‘Hero Dogs’ features first-hand accounts of courageous canines saving lives. The series, hosted by Fox News’ Shannon Bream, profiles three news dogs whose brave efforts have ranged from their work during drug raids, to protecting American soldiers in Afghanistan.
Though tattoos have become a widely accepted form of memorialization and self-expression, tattooing in American history dates back to markings on soldiers during the Civil War. Many who fought in early-on battles were branded in order to be identified, in the event they were injured or killed in the line of duty.
Fox Nation’s new series ‘USA Ink,’ illustrates the history and significance of tattooing’s pervasive spread throughout culture in America, and how it’s progressed over time alongside it.
Host and combat veteran Johnny Joey Jones explores its inky origins — true experts and enthusiasts track the first known tattoo back to an iceman — and takes a deeper look at how tattoos have been used to celebrate our patriots and U.S. soldiers, who marked themselves during our most impactful wars.
The series also sees Jones getting new ink by fellow Army vet, Will XX of the Blaque Salt Studio. His piece, inspired by the United States Second Amendment, debuts on Fox Nation.
The three-part documentary series records the three-day-long physical battle between soldiers. Two-man teams compete for 62 hours straight while carrying 75 pounds on their backs and maneuvering 70 miles of obstacles with 38 total events.
Regardless of your tastes, Fox Nation has something for everyone this Memorial Day. Enjoy everything ‘Grateful Nation’ has to offer by signing up today.
Military members and veterans get one free year of Fox Nation if they sign up today.
Fox Nation programs are viewable on-demand and from your mobile device app, but only for Fox Nation subscribers. Go to Fox Nation to start a free trial and watch the extensive library from your favorite Fox News personalities.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and her top lieutenants are considering several options that would refuse the president’s $5 billion demand for a border wall and send thousands of furloughed federal employees back to work. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Democratic leaders think the president is playing a losing hand and will be under pressure to relent.
House Democrats — increasingly convinced they’re winning the shutdown fight with President Donald Trump — are plotting ways to reopen the government while denying the president even a penny more for his border wall when they take power Jan. 3.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her top lieutenants are considering several options that would refuse Trump the $5 billion he’s demanded for the wall and send hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal employees back to work, according to senior Democratic sources.
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While the strategy is fluid, House Democrats hope to pass a funding bill shortly after members are sworn in. They believe that would put pressure on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to follow suit. And they’re confident that their political leverage will only increase the longer the shutdown lasts — a notion that some GOP leaders agree with privately.
Indeed, the specter of a lengthy shutdown could hurt Trump’s already damaged image more than it would Democrats — especially because he claimed ownership of the crisis two weeks ago. Democrats believe the shutdown battle — combined with the volatility in financial markets and special counsel Robert Mueller closing in on Trump — exacerbates the appearance of a cornered president acting out of his own political self-interest instead of the needs of the American public.
“We want … the government open and my hope is we can get it opened before Jan. 3,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the incoming Rules Committee chairman. “If not, one of the first things we’ll do will be to move to pass legislation to re-open the government. And the president can decide whether he wants to sign it or not.”
“I believe Democrats are going to move [to end the shutdown] on Jan. 3,” added Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat whose district includes thousands of federal employees. “It’s got to be the first item of business.”
On Thursday afternoon, when the House briefly went into a pro-forma session, McGovern tried to bring up a Senate-passed bill to re-open the government, the second attempt by House Democrats to do so in recent days. Republicans refused to recognize McGovern, stifling his effort — but not before he yelled to the empty chamber: “Mr. Speaker, 800,000 federal employees don’t know whether they will get paid! Mr. Speaker!”
With it increasingly unlikely that Republicans will do anything in the remainder of the 115th Congress to end the stalemate, House Democrats are considering a procedural tactic that would allow them to move quickly once they’re officially in the majority on Jan. 3.
They’re weighing including multiple funding options in a package of rules for the new Congress that they intend to approve that day, according to Democratic sources. That would give Trump and Senate Republicans several options to choose from.
The alternatives under discussion have all been floated to Trump already by Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). But one option they’re not considering, sources close to the Democratic leaders said, is offering the president more than the $1.3 billion they already put on the table to fund fencing at the southern border.
So far, Trump has refused the $1.3 billion as too little. But Democrats believe he’ll come under fire as stories of furloughed federal employees spread in January, and the chaos of a shutdown starts to affect everyday Americans.
“The American people know that this is a Trump shutdown,” McGovern said.
One option Democrats are considering is a short-term funding measure to open now-shuttered agencies until Feb. 8. A week ago, the Senate approved a continuing resolution with that timeline. Some House Democrats believe that if they quickly push the CR through their own chamber, McConnell — a former appropriator who despises shutdowns — will feel pressure to act.
A short-term bill would also allow newly empowered House Democratic appropriators to put their mark on the last remaining funding bills before they pass a larger package in February, two Democratic sources pointed out.
But with Trump still urging Hill Republicans to fight for his wall, McConnell is unlikely to take up a stop-gap funding bill. GOP leaders have made clear they will not act without the president’s public support for any funding bill to reopen the government.
Connolly also isn’t interested in a short-term funding solution. He wants an agreement that keeps the entire government funded through Sept. 30.
“I see a growing sentiment among Democrats to have a funding vehicle that carries us through the end of the fiscal year,” Connolly added. A “short-term CR gets us very little.”
Trump rejected a temporary fix just last week, instead blessing an attempt by House Republicans provide $5 billion for the wall, which led to the shutdown.
House Democrats are also considering a CR for the affected agencies that would last through the fiscal year. Such a proposal would mean no policy changes for the agencies that are currently closed; they would operate on the same budget they had in fiscal 2018.
A third option being considered includes passing full appropriations bills for all affected agencies except the Homeland Security Department, which is where Trump’s wall money would go. That department would operate under current levels through the rest of the fiscal year.
No matter what option they go with, House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and other Democrats from Virginia and Maryland intend to add a provision to any funding bill guaranteeing back pay for any federal employees hit by the shutdown.
At the center of the legal debate over the law is the mechanism that essentially deputizes private citizens, rather than the state’s executive branch, to enforce the new restrictions by suing anyone who performs an abortion or “aids and abets” a procedure. Plaintiffs who have no connection to the patient or the clinic may sue and recover legal fees, as well as $10,000 if they win.
In its court filing, the Justice Department called this mechanism “an unprecedented scheme that seeks to deny women and providers the ability to challenge S.B. 8 in federal court.”
Understand the Texas Abortion Law
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The most restrictive in the country. The Texas abortion law, known as Senate Bill 8, amounts to a nearly complete ban on abortion in the state. It prohibits most abortions after about six weeks of preganancy and makes no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from incest or rape.
It said that in other cases where states had enacted laws that abridged reproductive rights to the extent that the Texas law does, courts had stopped those measures from taking effect.
Texas’ “attempt to shield a plainly unconstitutional law from review cannot stand,” the department said in its motion.
The Supreme Court did not rule on whether Senate Bill 8 was constitutional when it refused to block the law. The Justice Department has placed its constitutionality at the heart of the lawsuit, which could force the court to consider new factors and possibly come to a different decision if it hears the case.
Opponents and supporters of the Texas law recognize that it is an enormous shift in the nation’s battle over abortion, which has long rested on whether the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that granted women the constitutional right to the procedure.
The Texas law essentially allows a state to all but ban abortions before a legal test of that watershed case. If the law is not stopped by the courts, other Republican-led state legislatures could use it as a blueprint for their own restrictions.
Rusia atacó Siria con misiles lanzados por primera vez desde un submarino que se hallaba en el mar Mediterráneo, anunció el ministro ruso de Defensa, Sergei Shoigu.
“Utilizamos misiles crucero Calibre desde el submarino ‘Rostov-on-Don’ en el mar Mediterráneo”, contra “dos bastiones terroristas” cerca de Raqa, capital de hecho del grupo yihadista Estado Islámico, informó Shoigu al presidente Vladimir Putin, según las agencias de noticias rusas. Las Fuerzas Aéreas rusas han ejecutado 300 misiones y han destruido más de 600 objetivos en Siria en los últimos tres días.
Top government leaders told NPR that federal agencies are years behind where they could have been if Chinese cybertheft had been openly addressed earlier.
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Top government leaders told NPR that federal agencies are years behind where they could have been if Chinese cybertheft had been openly addressed earlier.
Bill Hinton Photography/Getty Images
Technology theft and other unfair business practices originating from China are costing the American economy more than $57 billion a year, White House officials believe, and they expect that figure to grow.
Yet an investigation by NPR and the PBS television show Frontline into why three successive administrations failed to stop cyberhacking from China found an unlikely obstacle for the government — the victims themselves.
About This Story
This story is part of a joint investigation with the PBS series Frontline, which includes an upcoming documentary, Trump’s Trade War, scheduled to air May 7, 2019, on PBS.
In dozens of interviews with U.S. government and business representatives, officials involved in commerce with China said hacking and theft were an open secret for almost two decades, allowed to quietly continue because U.S. companies had too much money at stake to make waves.
Wendy Cutler, who was a veteran negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, says it wasn’t just that U.S. businesses were hesitant to come forward in specific cases. She says businesses didn’t want the trade office to take “any strong action.”
“We are not as effective if we don’t have the U.S. business community supporting us,” she says. “Looking back on it, in retrospect, I think we probably should have been more active and more responsive. We kind of lost the big picture of what was really happening.”
None of the dozens of companies or organizations that NPR reached out to that have been victims of theft or corporate espionage originating from China would go on the record.
And for its part, the Chinese government officially denied to NPR and Frontline that it has been involved in such practices.
Wendy Cutler, a former diplomat and negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, delivers a 2015 speech at the Asia Society in Hong Kong. Cutler told NPR that U.S. businesses wouldn’t let the trade office take direct action on their behalf in Chinese cybertheft cases.
Bruce Yan/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
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Bruce Yan/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
Wendy Cutler, a former diplomat and negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, delivers a 2015 speech at the Asia Society in Hong Kong. Cutler told NPR that U.S. businesses wouldn’t let the trade office take direct action on their behalf in Chinese cybertheft cases.
Bruce Yan/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
But that’s not what former U.S. Attorney David Hickton found. When he took over in the Western District of Pennsylvania in 2010, he says, he was inundated with calls from companies saying they suspected China might be inside their computer systems.
“I literally received an avalanche of concern and complaints from companies and organizations who said, ‘We are losing our technology — drip, drip, drip,’ ” he says.
Hickton opened an investigation and quickly set his sights on a special unit of the Chinese military — a secretive group known as Unit 61398. Investigators were able to watch as the unit’s officers, sitting in an office building in Shanghai, broke into the computer systems of American companies at night, stopped for an hour break at China’s lunchtime and then continued in the Chinese afternoon.
“They were really using a large rake — think of a rake [like] you rake leaves in the fall,” he says. “They were taking everything … personal information, strategic plans, organizational charts. Then they just figured out later how they were going to use it.”
But when Hickton went to the companies, eager for them to become plaintiffs, he ran into a problem. None of the companies wanted any part of it. Hickton says they had too much money on the line in China.
“What we were tone-deaf to is [that] we seemed to think we could just walk in and wave the flag of the USA,” Hickton says, “and it just didn’t work.”
Even today, five years later, Hickton still won’t name most of the companies involved — and they have never come forward.
Eventually he was able to convince five largely local companies and the steelworkers union to come forward, mostly, he says, because he grew up in Pittsburgh and went to school with a lot of the managers.
David Hickton, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, speaks during a 2014 announcement of indictments against Chinese military hackers, with former Attorney General Eric Holder and former Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin.
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David Hickton, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, speaks during a 2014 announcement of indictments against Chinese military hackers, with former Attorney General Eric Holder and former Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
“I knew these people,” Hickton says. “They trusted me. … We couldn’t ask them to be patriotic at the expense of engendering a shareholder case.”
But, he says, he could have included hundreds — or even thousands — more.
“We’ve made a terrible mistake by being so secretive about our cyberwork,” he says. “We have not fairly told the people we represent what the threats are.”
Government and business leaders interviewed by NPR and Frontline said individual companies were making millions of dollars in China over the past decade and a half and didn’t want to hurt short-term profits by coming forward. They demanded secrecy, even in the face of outright theft.
But now the impact of that secrecy is coming to light, they say. Companies are facing hundreds of millions of dollars in future losses from the theft, and U.S. officials say they are years behind trying to tackle the problem.
Michael Wessel, commissioner on the U.S. government’s U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, says it wasn’t supposed to be this way. U.S. officials had high hopes when China officially joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
“There was a honeymoon period in the first six or seven years, a desire to try [to] make things work,” Wessel says.
But, he says, starting around 2006, businesses began coming to him saying that China had stolen their designs or ideas or had pressured them into partnerships and taken their technology.
Just like with Hickton, Wessel says, they wouldn’t come forward publicly.
“The business community wanted the administration to come in hard without anyone’s fingerprints being on the reasoning behind it,” he says. “They wanted the profits, but they also didn’t want the possible retribution.”
Wessel says that was never going to work. While nothing in the original trade agreements specifically mentions cybertheft, the U.S. could have brought criminal cases forward, enacted sanctions or opened investigations under rules set up by the World Trade Organization — if a company would let it.
Court cases and documents from recent years offer a clue into what experts believe has really been going on. The Chinese government has been accused of stealing everything from vacuum cleaner designs to solar panel technology to the blueprints of Boeing’s C-17 aircraft.
Hackers from China, often with ties to the government, have been accused of breaking into gas companies, steel companies and chemical companies. Not long ago, Chinese government companies were indicted for stealing the secret chemical makeup of the color white from DuPont. China developed its J-20 fighter plane, a plane similar to Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor, shortly after a Chinese national was indicted for stealing technical data from Lockheed Martin, including the plans for the Raptor.
Chinese hacking made occasional headlines, but none really grabbed Americans’ attention. There was one exception.
In 2010, Google went public in announcing that it had been hacked by the Chinese government. Thirty-four other American companies that were also part of the hack stayed silent. Most have kept it a secret to this day.
A man places flowers outside Google’s Chinese headquarters in Beijing, on Jan. 15, 2010. The tech giant’s accusation that year that it had been hacked by China cast light on a problem few companies discuss: the pervasive threat from China-based cybertheft.
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A man places flowers outside Google’s Chinese headquarters in Beijing, on Jan. 15, 2010. The tech giant’s accusation that year that it had been hacked by China cast light on a problem few companies discuss: the pervasive threat from China-based cybertheft.
Vincent Thian/AP
NPR tracked down 11 of the total 35 companies. All of them either did not respond to NPR’s request or declined to comment.
A former top Google official who was closely involved in managing the hack told NPR that Google was “infuriated” that no other company would come forward, leaving Google to challenge China alone.
“[We] wanted to out all of the companies by name,” said the official, who spoke on the condition their name not be used because they did not have permission from Google to speak about the incident. “One of the companies we called, said ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve been tracking this for months.’ It was unbelievable. The legal department talked us out of it.”
“We felt like we stood up and did the right thing,” the former official said. “It felt like Helm’s Deep, the battle from The Lord of the Rings in which you’re impossibly surrounded and severely outnumbered.”
James McGregor, a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, who was there at the time, says the companies kept even business organizations like his from speaking out.
“What they should have done is held a press conference and say, ‘We 35 businesses have been hacked,’ and you would have put it right back on China,” says McGregor. “Instead, they just all hid under a rock and pretended it didn’t happen.”
McGregor says their silence left little room for punishment, and worse, he says, it hid the extent of the problem.
Across the ocean, cybersleuth Dmitri Alperovitch was sitting at his desk at a security company in Atlanta when Google called looking for backup. He says when he took a look, he was stunned.
“I knew pretty much right away this is something very different,” says Alperovitch, who is co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “For the first time we were facing a nation-state and intelligence service that was breaking into companies — not governments, not militaries, but private sector organizations.”
But, he says, U.S. government officials were nowhere to be seen.
“They did not even publicly concur with the attributions that Google had made at the time,” he says.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in California on May 1, 2017. Alperovitch said he was stunned after Google announced it was hacked by China.
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Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in California on May 1, 2017. Alperovitch said he was stunned after Google announced it was hacked by China.
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Obama administration officials say they did not turn a blind eye to the Google hack or cybertheft from China.
The administration was struggling with other important priorities, such as North Korea, Iran, the economy and climate change, says Evan Medeiros, Obama’s top China specialist and then a staffer at the National Security Council.
“Direct confrontation with China does not usually result in lasting solutions,” Medeiros says, noting that President Obama secured an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping to halt the attacks and put together a regional trade agreement — the Trans-Pacific Partnership — to add pressure.
But neither measure lasted.
“Hindsight is always 20/20,” he says. “I wish that we had spent more time … finding creative ways to punish them for creating a nonlevel playing field.”
Without those punishments, the attacks continued.
In the year after the Google hack, Alperovitch uncovered two more serious intrusions that, he says, involved thousands of American companies.
In the fall of 2011, he went to the White House to warn officials about what he had found. He sat down in the Situation Room with a half-dozen top administration leaders.
“The most surprising thing to me was the lack of surprise,” Alperovitch says. “I got the distinct impression that none of this was news. When I pressed them on why they were not taking stronger action against China, their response was, ‘We have a multifaceted relationship with China.’ ”
Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with U.S. President Barack Obama following a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 25, 2015. During the visit, the two leaders announced an agreement to halt cyberattacks.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with U.S. President Barack Obama following a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 25, 2015. During the visit, the two leaders announced an agreement to halt cyberattacks.
Pete Marovich/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Alperovitch says White House officials told him that some of the same companies that were being victimized by China also wanted to continue doing business in China.
“They didn’t want to take any action that would jeopardize that billions of dollars of trade we were doing at the time,” he says.
Ask McGregor, the American business representative, how companies can complain about China’s behavior to the U.S. government while simultaneously preventing the government from taking strong action, and his answer is blunt.
“Companies were afraid of China,” he says. “American business companies’ incentives are to make money.”
McGregor today advises dozens of American companies in China, and he says they are confronting a new reality. China is no longer an up-and-comer — it’s a true competitor and quickly closing in on America’s high-tech sector. McGregor says company leaders are beginning to ask whether years of theft and hacking have given China an edge that the United States will no longer be able to stay in front of.
And U.S. government officials are asking whether federal agencies will be able to catch up on enforcement.
Top government leaders told NPR that federal agencies are years behind where they could have been if the theft had been openly addressed.
Even at the Defense Department, as late as 2014, cybertheft from China was not one of the Pentagon’s top priorities.
“Our intelligence agencies were looking at the Middle East, at the Russians,” says Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding, a China expert who worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council.
He says he had never given the issue of Chinese cybertheft much thought. But then, in the fall of 2014, he loaded a confidential briefing into his computer. It was case after case in which the Chinese government had stolen the product designs from almost a dozen high-tech American companies, in a couple of cases almost putting them out of business.
“It immediately changed my conception, my view of the world,” he says. “I realized I did not know how the world worked.”
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping leave an event in Beijing on November 9, 2017. The Trump administration, and the Obama administration before that, have brought concerns regarding cybertheft to the Chinese directly.
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U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping leave an event in Beijing on November 9, 2017. The Trump administration, and the Obama administration before that, have brought concerns regarding cybertheft to the Chinese directly.
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Spalding says he made it his mission to get the word out to other government agencies. But even in 2015, he says, he was met mostly with a shrug.
He says he went to the departments of Commerce and the Treasury, as well as the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. State Department.
“The two responses we got were, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really, really bad.’ And the second one is, ‘That’s not my job,'” Spalding says. “That was almost the universal answer we got every time we went to a senior leader. Bad problem but not my problem.”
Spalding, who retired from the Air Force last year, says in the final years under Obama and now under President Trump, agencies are finally starting to take some action. The Justice Department is bringing criminal cases, the trade representative’s office is investigating China’s dealings and both administrations have brought concerns to the Chinese directly.
But, Spalding says, it may have come 10 years too late.
“We all missed it,” he says. “We have to understand the problem and get to work on it.”
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of this northern Indiana city who in just weeks has vaulted from being a near-unknown to a breakout star in the Democratic Party, officially started his presidential bid here on Sunday, presenting himself as a transformational figure who is well positioned to beat President Trump, despite being young and facing off against many seasoned rivals.
“I recognize the audacity of doing this as a Midwestern, millennial mayor, but we live in a moment that compels us each to act,” Buttigieg said in front of thousands of supporters, jacket-free with his sleeves rolled up. “It calls for a new generation of leadership.”
Buttigieg added, “It’s time to walk away from the politics of the past and toward something totally different.”
The scene for Buttigieg’s rally was a hulking former Studebaker assembly plant, whose closure decades ago rocked this region’s economy. The site has since become a data and education hub pushed by his administration — and central to his technocratic, hopeful pitch that he is ready to help communities still struggling with the effects of globalization.
“Change is coming, ready or not,” Buttigieg told the crowd. “There is a myth being sold to industrial and rural communities: the myth that we can stop the clock and turn it back,” and he touted his attempts in the city to assist the workforce with training and skills programs.
Some attendees drove from around the country after being inspired by Buttigieg’s message and the historic nature of his campaign as a gay presidential candidate.
For Buttigieg, Sunday’s upbeat gathering on a dreary, snowy mid-April afternoon was an important political juncture: a reintroduction to a party that has only begun to pay attention to this mayor with a hard-to-pronounce name, but is now certainly listening closely as it searches for a standard-bearer.
Following a string of buzzy podcast and television appearances, increasingly crowded stops in early voting states, and the release of a best-selling memoir, Buttigieg is suddenly a contender in a crowded Democratic field, with a $7 million fundraising haul in the first quarter of the year and a rapid rise in the polls.
Meanwhile, his husband, Chasten, has become a favorite of Democrats on social media, and Buttigieg has landed on the cover of national magazines, including New York magazine this week, with the headline “How about Pete?”
As rain fell on this city of roughly 100,000 on Sunday morning, thousands lined up under umbrellas and bundled up in jackets, waiting to enter the facility, holding homemade signs and carrying coffee cups and copies of his book, “Shortest Way Home.”
One of them was Ashley Pawlowski, 34, a self-described independent from South Bend who works at a local nonprofit. “The South Bend we all grew up in was very different. He changed this city and brought a new attitude,” she said. “He’s got this ability to help people deep down in his bones.”
Buttigieg’s challenge in the coming months: translating this meteoric momentum and goodwill among Democrats who are eager to cheer a confident, youthful voice from the Midwest into a sustained national campaign that can outpace candidates whose careers have made them popular with activists and donors.
Buttigieg has worked to rub off the heavy sheen of implausibility from his upstart candidacy, insisting that being a two-term mayor of a city in the middle of the country gives him more governing experience than Trump and that he is the face of a new generation that wants to bypass the partisanship and rancor that has gripped Trump’s Washington.
“My face is my message,” Buttigieg often tells voters on the campaign trail, a catchall way of referring to a calm persona that has drawn comparisons to President Barack Obama and to his own political profile: a gay Midwestern mayor, a retired Navy officer who served in Afghanistan and a Rhodes scholar who, if elected, would be the youngest president in U.S. history.
Buttigieg’s path will be anything but a glide. While some once-unknown outsiders, such as Jimmy Carter in 1976, have captured the Democratic nomination, others with electric starts have seen their bids fade.
Buttigieg has generated a swell of enthusiasm among several top Democrats and Obama allies, such as veteran strategist David Axelrod — and Buttigieg has met privately with Obama, who has praised him. Other Democrats remain muted about the mayor.
In recent days, Buttigieg’s record in South Bend has come under scrutiny. His administration’s efforts to knock down blighted houses in the city have been criticized by some Democrats as a policy that was overly aggressive in revamping lower-income areas that are home to many minority voters. South Bend also continues to grapple with a quarter of the city hovering on the poverty line.
Buttigieg’s record on race has drawn criticism from Democrats as well, particularly his demotion of South Bend’s first black police chief, Darryl Boykins, in 2012. Buttigieg has cited a federal investigation of Boykins as his rationale for the ouster, but Boykins went on to sue the city for racial discrimination.
Solomon Anderson, a 57-year-old banker from South Bend, said some in the city’s black community remain unsettled by Buttigieg’s handling of that incident, even as he and others cheered on the mayor’s campaign at the rally on Sunday.
“Not everyone is over it,” Anderson said. “He has tried to be a healer, to be inclusive, but it hasn’t always been easy.”
Axelrod, watching Buttigieg’s crowd from afar, noted on Twitter that the crowd “seems very large, very impressive but also very white — an obstacle he will have to overcome.”
And Buttigieg’s 2015 comment that “all lives matter,” which has been called insensitive by those in the Black Lives Matter movement that seeks to address issues facing black Americans with law enforcement, prompted him to reassure a civil rights group this month that he understands their concerns and stands in solidarity with their cause.
Buttigieg’s campaign is aware of the growing spotlight on his mayoral decisions and is determined to showcase his record and make the case that running a city like South Bend enables him to understand vexing national issues from a ground-level perspective. Sunday’s rally featured introductory speeches from mayors from other states who have become allies, following Buttigieg’s work in mayoral groups and his unsuccessful run for Democratic National Committee chairman in 2016.
“The horror show in Washington is mesmerizing. It’s all-consuming. But starting today, we’re going to change the channel,” Buttigieg said.
Nan Whaley, the mayor of Dayton, Ohio, called Buttigieg “the polar opposite in every way to Donald Trump.” Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, endorsed him and said it seemed as though “the world is arriving in South Bend.”
“5 years ago I came out to my family,” tweeted one supporter, Matthew Miller. “I never thought 5 years ago I’d be driving 8 hours through the night with my Republican father right by my side to go see the first openly gay man announce he’s running for president.”
Buttigieg’s policy proposals have been relatively broad compared to others in the field and so far tethered to his belief that American democracy needs to undergo a systemic renewal that includes a debate over possible changes to the U.S. Constitution, including expanding the Supreme Court and making the confirmation process less partisan and eliminating the electoral college.
On Sunday, he spoke out against the rise of white nationalism, voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering and the influence of corporate money in campaigns.
“Sometimes a dark moment brings out the best in us,” Buttigieg said.
Detail of a scarf print from the Beyond Buckskin Boutique. Photo courtesy of shop.beyondbuckskin.com. Download Full Image
Morris said by spearheading innovative partnerships and leveraging resources from ASU, tribes and community organizations, she hopes that Inno-NATIONS will create a “collision community,” causing a ripple effect of economic change in tribal communities.
Both events are free and take place at The Department in downtown Phoenix.
Inno-NATIONS will also launch a three-day pilot cohort with approximately 20 Native American businesses starting in June.
“Beyond Buckskin” features Jessica Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa, Dartmouth graduate and entrepreneur, who grew a small online store into a successful boutique on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
The store promotes and sells Native American-made couture, streetwear, jewelry, and accessories from more than 40 Native American and First Nations artist, employing tribe members from the Turtle Mountain community.
ASU Now spoke to Metcalfe to discuss her work.
Jessica Metcalfe
Question: We’ve seen Native American fashion emerge and evolve. How did you get into the business?
Answer: I was writing my master’s thesis in 2005 and my advisor at the time had told me about some research she had done, which looked at Native American fashion in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. She had wondered if I was interested in picking up where her research left off. I looked into it and found that there were these breadcrumbs, little bits here in there, that something had been going on in the past 60-70 years, but hadn’t been looked at as a collective movement.
Through my doctoral dissertation, what I discovered was that Native American fashion has gone through waves of acknowledgements by the broader public, but what we’re experiencing now is perhaps the biggest wave yet.
You have designers like Patricia Michaels out at New York’s Style Fashion Week and the Native Fashion Now traveling exhibit touring the country, so there’s really a lot of exciting things happening lately. It’s coming from a collective movement. Designers basically grouping together to share costs but also to put together more events to cause a bigger ruckus.
Q: How did you build your online store into a brick-and-mortar business?
A: I first launched a blog in 2009 as an outlet for my dissertation research, and wanted to share it with more people and to also get more stories and experiences. My readers kept asking where could they see and buy these clothes? At that time, there wasn’t an easy way to access functions like a Native American Pow Wow or market in order to do that.
I had established a rapport with designers through my research and writing. They saw what I was doing through the blog and then a question popped into my head. “How would you feel about creating a business together?” There were 11 initial designers who said they needed the space, and I worked with them to sell their goods online. We just now opened our design lab on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation. We are creating a system where we can meet demand and maximize a need in Indian Country.
We employ Native Americans from ages 15 to 22. There aren’t a whole lot of opportunities for people that age on the reservation. They either work at the grocery store or the gas station. One of them is interested in film and photography and so they run our photo shoots. Another person is interested in business entrepreneurship, and they get to see how an idea goes from concept to execution.
Q: The subtext is that this isn’t just about fashion but, history, representation and cultural appropriation?
A: Our clothing is just more than just objects. It’s about how the material was gathered, what the colors represent, what stories are being told and how does that tie into our value system. One of the things I often discuss is the Native American headdress. Our leaders wear them as a symbol of their leadership and the dedication to their communities. These stories are a way to share our culture with non-Natives and protect our legacy for future generations.
Q: Why is it important for Native American businesses to branch out into other cultures?
A: Native American people desperately need to diversify their economic opportunities on and off the reservations. Up until recently, people haven’t thought of fashion or art as a viable career path.
A recent study conducted by First Peoples Fund that found a third of all Native American people are practicing or are potential artists. That is a huge resource we already have in Indian Country and we need to tap it and develop it, and push for Natives in various fields to look at themselves as entrepreneurs and launching businesses.
Now, Native American people have an opportunity to make a positive impact in their local communities by reaching people through their art and sharing our culture with the rest of the world.
Eli Broad made his billions building homes, and then he used that wealth — and the considerable collection of world-class modern art he assembled with his wife — to shape the city around him.
Dogged, determined and often unyielding, he helped push and prod majestic institutions such as Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art into existence, and then, that done, he created his own namesake museum in the heart of Los Angeles.
With a fortune estimated by Forbes at $6.9 billion, the New York native who made California his home more than 50 years ago flourished in the home construction and insurance industries before directing his attention and fortune toward an array of ambitious civic projects, often setting the agenda for what was to come in L.A.
Active and still looking ahead until late in life, Broad died Friday afternoon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Suzi Emmerling, a spokesperson for the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, said in a statement. A cause of death was not given.
“We join the city of Los Angeles in mourning the loss of Eli Broad. The city and the nation have lost an icon,” Los Angeles Times Executive Chairman Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and his wife, Michele, said in a statement.
“Eli’s life story is an inspiration and a testament to the possibilities America holds,” they said. “The Broads’ support and leadership of the cultural, educational and medical institutions that sustain us have been transformative. Our thoughts are with Edye and their family and we’re forever grateful to her and Eli.”
Civic transformation was “his driving force,” Barry Munitz, a longtime Broad associate and former chancellor of the California State University, told The Times in 2004.
Eli Broad, philanthropist, art collector and builder, has died at 87.
Broad spent millions to endow medical and scientific research programs, including stem cell research centers at UCLA, USC, UC San Francisco and Harvard. He was also a deep-pocketed booster of public education reform who funded charter schools, a training academy for school district executives and, for a dozen years, the annual $1-million Broad Prize for high-achieving urban school districts.
But he left his most visible legacy as a cultural philanthropist and broker, whose money and world-class modern art collection made him a powerful and often controversial force on the local arts scene.
In the late 1970s, he became the founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and he bailed it out of a financial scandal three decades later with a $30-million grant.
In the 1990s, when the effort to build Disney Hall was falling apart, he took charge of a $135-million fundraising campaign to complete construction in 2003.
That year, he also pledged $50 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to build the contemporary art wing that bears his name.
Calling himself a “venture philanthropist,” he expected his benefaction to bring more than a pat on the back and naming rights. He regarded his donations as investments, the success of which he would judge by their returns, whether in the form of scientific breakthroughs, improved test scores or higher museum attendance.
“I am a builder,” the tall, white-haired Broad once told The Times. “I don’t like to preside over the status quo and simply write checks.”
His demands made some potential recipients think twice about accepting money from Broad. “Too many strings,” said the leader of a major Los Angeles nonprofit, who asked not to be named. Others put it less politely. “Eli is a control freak,” Disney Hall architect Frank Gehry said of his former client in a 2011 segment of CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
Broad was known not only for aggressive involvement in his philanthropic projects but also for a tendency to withdraw his support when developments failed to go his way. These traits were well known in L.A.’s art world, in which he was an unavoidable force.
“The truth is that Eli is L.A.’s most prominent cultural philanthropist, and if you run a museum in this city you have a relationship with him one way or another,” Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, where Broad once sat on the board, said in a 2010 Vanity Fair article.
Broad’s relationships with the institutions he enriched were often vexing.
In 2010, as a dominant member of the MOCA board, he steered the museum toward the controversial choice of Jeffrey Deitch, a New York gallery owner from whom he had purchased art, to be its new director. In 2012 he forced the resignation of the museum’s longtime chief curator, Paul Schimmel, who had clashed with Deitch over shows involving celebrity artists such as Dennis Hopper that seemed to pander to popular tastes. Several board members resigned in protest, including Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie.
In 2013, with MOCA struggling financially, Broad tried to broker a merger between the museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a match that made little sense to many in the museum world. The proposal died amid sharp questioning by critics, including the New York Times’ Roberta Smith, who wrote: “The combination of the domineering Mr. Broad and unusually passive trustees has forced to its knees one of the greatest American museums of the postwar era.”
At LACMA, Broad insisted that the much-needed modern art wing be called the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and personally recruited architect Renzo Piano to design it and a board to govern it. LACMA agreed to his terms without a solid pledge from the multibillionaire to donate works from the 2,000-piece contemporary art collection he had built with his wife, Edythe.
Just before the 80,000-square-foot building’s formal unveiling in 2008, Broad stunned much of the museum world by announcing that he would not be giving LACMA his treasure trove of Warhols, Rauschenbergs and Lichtensteins. Instead, he said he would lend works to the museum from the private art foundation he founded in 1984, an arrangement that he believed would ensure the art he and his wife had amassed over decades would be seen and not stored away.
His decision brought pointed headlines, such as the one accompanying a New York Times story: “To Have and Give Not.” Time magazine’s Richard Lacayo was most blunt, writing on his blog, “LACMA got screwed.”
Although Broad had said over the years that he would not go the way of Armand Hammer and Norton Simon, he ultimately did decide to build his own museum. He settled on a prime downtown lot adjacent to MOCA and Disney Hall for the Broad, the eponymous museum and art lending library that opened in September 2015, part of his vision to cement Grand Avenue as the cultural heart of L.A.
“We believe we have reinvented the American art museum,” he wrote in a 2019 L.A. Times essay on Los Angeles’ cultural evolution.
Broad was a major architecture patron, who over the years supported projects by many of the world’s top architects, including Zaha Hadid — who designed the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, Broad’s alma mater — Cesar Pelli and Richard Meier.
Closer to home, he and his wife made major gifts to UCLA for a fine arts complex and to Caltech for a biological sciences center. He also supplied a $10-million endowment for programming and arts education at Santa Monica College’s performing arts center.
Born in New York on June 6, 1933, Broad was an only child who grew up in Detroit, where his Lithuanian immigrant father, Leon, worked as a house painter before operating several five-and-dime stores. His mother, Rita, was a seamstress who later worked as a bookkeeper for her husband.
The family name was spelled Brod and pronounced like the slang term for a woman, which made young Eli the butt of many jokes. This grew tiresome, so in junior high he added an “a” to his last name and told people “Broad, rhymes with ‘road.’“
“Some of the teasing continued,” he recalled in his 2012 memoir, “Eli Broad: The Art of Being Unreasonable,” “but it didn’t really sting anymore. I had changed myself.”
He graduated with a degree in accounting from Michigan State University in 1954, the same year he married Edythe “Edye” Lawson. In 1956 their son Jeffrey was born, followed three years later by another son, Gary. His wife and sons survive him.
At 20, Broad had become a certified public accountant — one of the youngest in Michigan history. He shared office space with Donald Kaufman, a carpenter-contractor who was married to his wife’s cousin. In 1957 he and Kaufman borrowed $25,000 from Broad’s father-in-law and launched a home-building company, Kaufman & Broad (now KB Home).
Broad had heard of a company in Ohio that beat its competition by building houses without the customary basement. “I didn’t understand why you couldn’t do that in Michigan,” he said in a 2006 Vanity Fair profile. “So we came up with a product, which I modestly called the Award Winner, which sold for $13,740, and vets could move into it for, like, 300 bucks. My idea was if they could move out of garden apartments into three-bedroom houses for less than rent and have equity and the tax benefits, it worked.”
His hunch proved correct. The houses sold quickly, and Kaufman & Broad became the biggest independent builder of single-family homes in the country. The company expanded into Arizona and California. Broad was a millionaire before he turned 30.
In 1963, after Kaufman retired, Broad moved the company from Phoenix to Los Angeles. He and his wife bought a home in Brentwood.
At first, Los Angeles, with geographic sprawl unlike Detroit or Phoenix, baffled him. But gradually he became a master of the metropolis, joining civic boards and elite social circles. Richard Riordan, the venture capitalist and future L.A. mayor, became a close friend.
“Los Angeles is a meritocracy,” Broad told Los Angeles magazine in 2003. “It’s one of the few cities you can move to without the right family background, the right religious background, the right political background, and if you work hard and have good ideas, you’re accepted.”
He got involved in politics, running California Democrat Alan Cranston’s first winning campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1968. Four years later, afraid that Democratic Sen. George McGovern was too soft on the Soviet Union, he served as vice chairman of Democrats for Nixon. Broad later led the successful effort to bring the 2000 Democratic National Convention to Los Angeles.
While he was building Kaufman & Broad, his wife, Edythe, immersed herself in L.A.’s gallery world. Before long her husband became an ardent collector too.
Their first major purchase came in 1972 when they paid $95,000 for a Van Gogh drawing. Broad eventually found modern art more to his liking and began accumulating works by such artists as Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Damien Hirst.
In the late 1970s, he led a campaign that raised more than $10 million to launch a museum dedicated to modern art. With a personal donation of $1 million, he became founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art and influenced the selection of Japanese modernist Arata Isozaki to design it.
In 1984, he stepped down as MOCA chair after disagreements with the board but remained one of the city’s most powerful art patrons.
In 1994, Riordan enlisted him to resuscitate the fundraising campaign for Disney Hall, which had been stalled by an economic recession. Riordan and Broad each contributed $5 million to the effort, and with Broad leading the charge the $135-million goal was reached by 1998. Despite a major tiff with architect Gehry, with whom Broad had a troubled history (Gehry designed his Brentwood home but was fired when Broad thought he was taking too long), the concert hall opened in 2003 to jubilant reviews. Broad received the lion’s share of credit for its completion.
His role in reviving the Disney Hall project established him as Los Angeles’ most formidable philanthropist. Los Angeles magazine put him on the cover in June 2003 with the headline, “He has more pull than the mayor, more art than the Getty, and more money than God. Does Eli Broad own LA?”
He acknowledged that people often questioned his motives. He liked putting his name on buildings and always sought the best return on his investments.
In 1995, he purchased a Lichtenstein painting called “I … I’m Sorry” for $2.5 million and paid with his American Express card, reportedly so he could rack up frequent-flier miles. He later donated the miles to California Institute of the Arts in Valencia for student travel. But the real reason for putting a seven-figure tab on his credit card, he said in his memoir, was to keep earning interest on the $2 million until the bill was due.
Strategic planning, as well as keeping a sharp eye on the bottom line, was what got him to the top of two industries. He had taken Kaufman & Broad into the life insurance business in the 1970s, when the housing market was in a slump. In the 1980s, he expanded into annuities and other financial services, which he eventually spun off into a separate company, SunAmerica. In 1993, he stepped down as chairman of Kaufman & Broad to run SunAmerica, his second Fortune 500 company.
In 1999, he sold SunAmerica to American International Group for $18 billion, and he retired in 2000 to become a full-time philanthropist.
Flush with cash from the sale, he committed $2 billion to his philanthropies, including $100 million to create the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which supports school reform. It has spent more than $600 million since 1999 on a variety of initiatives.
As with the arts, Broad demanded a hands-on role in improving education.
He played a prominent role in the development of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s downtown arts high school. He personally helped recruit two superintendents, former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer and veteran educator John Deasy. But his ambitions ranged beyond L.A. and California.
In 2002, his foundation began to fund the Broad Prize, which targeted urban districts with large achievement gaps. It exemplified its founder’s philosophy of tying monetary awards to concrete results such as gains in student test scores. Disappointed in the slow pace of improvement, he suspended the prize in early 2015.
He also founded the Broad Superintendents Academy, the largest training program in the nation for urban school superintendents. Its more than 150 fellows, many of them from business, the military and other fields outside education, undergo a 10-month program heavy on corporate-style management techniques and have gone on to leadership positions not only in Los Angeles (Deasy is a Broad graduate) but also in New York, Chicago and other major city school districts. In 2019, Broad announced he was moving the academy to Yale University.
The wealth and vision that created these initiatives also made Broad a target of scorn by some education experts. One of his most prominent critics was education historian Diane Ravitch, who assailed Broad along with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and others as members of “the billionaire boys’ club” of business titans whose top-down reform efforts weaken the voices of parents and teachers unions.
“His Broadies are leading districts and states,” Ravitch wrote in her blog in 2012. “Some are educators, some are not. Some are admired, some are despised. But the question remains, who elected Eli Broad to reform the nation’s schools? He is like a spoiled rich kid in a candy shop, taking what he wants, knocking over displays, breaking jars, barking orders.”
None of this discouraged Broad. “Our role is to take risks that government is not willing to do,” he told Newsweek in 2011. “The fact that I don’t concern myself about criticism or pushback helps.”
Broad made an offer to buy the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune in 2015, saying he believed the papers should be owned by a Californian. His offer, which had reportedly been solicited by Tribune Publishing, was rejected. The newspapers were later purchased by Soon-Shiong, a Los Angeles biotech billionaire.
Notoriously impatient — ”Let’s move on” was his favorite way of telling people they were wasting his time — Broad liked to stay busy, multitasking even during his leisure time. The only regret he expressed about an extraordinarily successful life was that he spent too much time building his businesses and not enough time being a father to his sons, neither of whom has sought the public spotlight.
“I was serious, focused, demanding, and not much fun,” Broad wrote in his memoir. “I took the boys with me to tour subdivisions, and now I realize that’s not exactly how kids want to spend their weekends. I missed too many moments.”
“I am unreasonable,” he wrote. “It’s the one adjective everyone I know — family, friends, associates, employees, and critics — has used to describe me…. But I believe that being unreasonable has been the key to my success.”
Woo is a former Times staff writer. Times staff writer Steve Marble contributed to this report.
India is home to 200 million Muslims. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, they have faced mounting threats to their status in the majority-Hindu country. And on Wednesday, they were walloped by a new worrisome development: The upper house of India’s Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB).
The legislation turns religion into a means of deciding whom to treat as an illegal immigrant — and whom to fast-track for citizenship. The bill is being sent to President Ram Nath Kovind for his approval (he will almost certainly sign it), and then it will become law.
At first glance, the bill may seem like a laudable effort to protect persecuted minorities. It says Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians who came to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan won’t be treated as illegal. They’ll have a clear path to citizenship.
But one major group has been left out: Muslims.
That’s no coincidence.
The CAB is closely linked with another contentious document: India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC). That citizenship list is part of the government’s effort to identify and weed out people it claims are illegal immigrants in the northeastern state of Assam. India says many Muslims whose families originally came from neighboring Bangladesh are not rightful citizens, even though they’ve lived in Assam for decades.
When the NRC was published in August, around 2 million people — many of them Muslims, some of them Hindus — found that their names were not on it. They were told they had a limited time in which to prove that they are, in fact, citizens. Otherwise, they can be rounded up into massive new detention camps and, ultimately, deported.
So far, this measure affects potentially 2 million people, not all 200 million Muslims in India. However, Modi’sruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has said it plans to extend the NRC process across the country.
Muslims have faced increasing discrimination and violence over the past few years under Modi’s BJP. But the one-two punch of the NRC followed by the CAB takes this to a new level. The country is beginning to look less like a seculardemocracy and more like a Hindu nationalist state.
If the Indian government proceeds with its plan, in a worst-case scenariowe could be looking at the biggest refugee crisis on the planet. The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and the US Commission on International Religious Freedom have all warned that this could soon turn into a humanitarian disaster of horrifying proportions.
The Citizenship Amendment Bill
The CAB is only the latest measure the Indian government has taken to marginalize its Muslim minority (more on this below). This measure is particularly blatant in its discrimination.
The CAB will grant citizenship to a host of religious minorities who fled three nearby countries where they may have faced persecution — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan — before 2015. But Muslims will get no such protection.
The BJP is positioning the CAB as a means of offering expedited citizenship to persecuted minorities. “It seeks to address their current difficulties and meet their basic human rights,” said Raveesh Kumar, a spokesman for the country’s Ministry of External Affairs. “Such an initiative should be welcomed, not criticized by those who are genuinely committed to religious freedom.”
After the CAB passed on Wednesday, Modi tweeted: “A landmark day for India and our nation’s ethos of compassion and brotherhood! … This Bill will alleviate the suffering of many who faced persecution for years.”
In fact, this bill is likely to increase the suffering of many Muslims and is discriminatory on its face, as some of the BJP’s political opposition and several human rights advocates in India have noted.
Shashi Tharoor, whose Congress party opposes the CAB, dubbed it “fundamentally unconstitutional.”
Cedric Prakash, a Jesuit priest and human rights advocate, said in an emailed statement that by “assuring citizenship to all undocumented persons except those of the Muslim faith, the CAB risks … destroying the secular and democratic tenets of our revered Constitution.”
India’s Constitution guarantees everyone equality under the law. Religion is not a criterion for citizenship eligibility, a decision that goes all the way back to the 1940s, when India was founded as a secular state with special protections for minorities like Muslims.
Harsh Mander, a noted rights advocate of Sikh origins, wrote that the CAB represents “the gravest threat to India’s secular democratic Constitution since India became a republic.” He said that if the bill becomes law, he’ll declare himself a Muslim out of solidarity. Meanwhile, he’s also calling for Indians to fight the CAB with a nationwide civil disobedience movement.
Already, protests are underway. In Assam’s capital, authorities have shut down the internet and implemented a curfew. The New York Times reported:
The Indian Army was deployed in the northeastern states of Assam and Tripura as protests grew bigger and more violent. The police were already battling demonstrators over the past few days with water cannons and tear gas. More than 1,000 protesters gathered in the heart of Assam’s commercial capital, Guwahati, yelling: “Go Back Modi!” In other areas, angry men stomped on effigies of Mr. Modi. Crowds set fire to tires and blocked thoroughfares with trees.
As protests against the legislation erupted in different corners of the country, the debate centered on what kind of country India should be.
“The idea of India that emerged from the independence movement,” said a letter signed by more than 1,000 Indian intellectuals, “is that of a country that aspires to treat people of all faiths equally.” But this bill, the intellectuals said, is “a radical break with this history” and will “greatly strain the pluralistic fabric of the country.”
Meanwhile, international human rights organizations are up in arms. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom said India is taking a “dangerous turn in the wrong direction,” adding that the US should weigh sanctions against India if it enshrines the bill in law.
Activists from All Assam Students’ Union burn effigies of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others associated with the Citizenship Amendment Bill.Getty Images
However, Modi enjoys strong support from the Hindu majority, members of which seem to applaud himeven more loudly when he cracks down on Muslims. And the country has swung to the right since he first came to power in 2014. It’s noteworthy that the bill passed not only in the lower house of parliament, where the BJP enjoys a majority, but also in the upper house, where it does not.
Now, the CAB will almost certainly be signed into law. The only hope for those who oppose it is that it will be struck down in court on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.
Muslims stripped of citizenship may end up in massive detention camps
Exacerbating Muslim Indians’ anxiety about the citizenship bill is the recent rhetoric around the NRC.
Those in Assam whose names do not appear on the NRC have been told the burden of proof is on them to prove that they are citizens. But many rural residents don’t have birth certificates or other papers, and even among those who do, many can’t read them; a quarter of the population in Assam state is illiterate.
Residents do get the chance to appeal to a Foreigners’ Tribunal and, if it rejects their claims to citizenship, to the High Court of Assam or even the Supreme Court. But if all that fails, they can be sent to one of 10 mass detention camps the government plans to build, complete with boundary walls and watchtowers.
The first camp, currently under construction, is the size of seven football fields. Even nursing mothers and children will be held there. “Children lodged in detention centers are to be provided educational facilities in nearby local schools,” an Indian official said.
If the detainees in the camps end up being expelled from India — and that is the government’s plan — this could constitute a wave of forced migration even greater than that triggered by Myanmar in 2017, when hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims were displaced.
And it’s not clear where the newly stateless people would go. Neighboring Bangladesh has already said it won’t take them. All this has induced such intense anxiety that some Muslims are committing suicide.
By undermining the status of Muslims, India is undermining its own democracy
India is known as the largest democracy in the world. But its current government is leading it away from democratic norms.
Modi champions a hardline brand of Hindu nationalism known as Hindutva, which aims to define Indian culture in terms of Hindu history and values and which promotes an exclusionary attitude toward Muslims. UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet recently expressed concerns over “increasing harassment and targeting of minorities — in particular, Muslims.”
Muslims comprise approximately 14 percent of the national population. and more than twice that in Assam state. In the 2019 Indian election, one of Modi’s central campaign promises was that he’d get the NRC in shape and deal with the Muslim migrants in Assam once and for all. Other BJP members have used dehumanizing language to describe the Muslims there.
“These infiltrators are eating away at our country like termites,” BJP president and home minister Amit Shah said at an April rally. “The NRC is our means of removing them.” Shah has openly said the goal is to deport those who are deemed illegal immigrants.
Last month, Shah said the government will conduct another count of citizens — this time nationwide. This could be used to clamp down on Muslims throughout India, potentially triggering a huge humanitarian disaster.
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La crisis en la autoridad cultural del conocimiento no es propiedad exclusiva de los medios: se aplica a otras instituciones clave de la vida moderna, como la medicina, la ciencia y la educación. Se ha expresado, por ejemplo, en los debates sobre el papel de las vacunas en el autismo, de la que se han hecho eco los medios de comunicación y que ha preocupado a muchos padres, a pesar de las reiteradas declaraciones contrarias de expertos en medicina. También vemos rastros de esta crisis en la ciencia. La controversia de la evolución versus el creacionismo sigue viva y afecta la enseñanza de la biología en muchas escuelas de Estados Unidos, a pesar de la falta de apoyo hacia el creacionismo de fuentes científicas de buena reputación. Instituciones sociales como los medios, la medicina, la ciencia y la educación tenían la capacidad de moderar de manera eficaz la noción propuesta por Robert Park de que “un hecho es solamente un hecho en algún universo del discurso”, y así crear un terreno común entre segmentos diversos de la población. Pero esta capacidad parece ser menos efectiva en estos días que en el pasado.
Dos aeronaves militares sobrevolaron la población colombiana, según testigos. Es la segunda vez, en menos de una semana, que sucede un hecho similar.
Autoridades de Colombia confirmaron la incursión por parte de los helicópteros, que cruzaron por encima de varias casas y hasta la estación de Policía.
“Tenemos una confirmación de las autoridades militares y además por el corregidor de Paraguachón que se acercó a mi oficina y me confirmó que el hecho es cierto”, dijo Eliécer Quintero, secretario del gobierno de Maicao, en La Guajira.
El funcionario aseguró que “le corresponde al Ejército Nacional cubrir toda el área fronteriza y defender la soberanía de nuestro país”.
En Paraguachón, pobladores señalan que esto hace parte de las provocaciones del Gobierno de Maduro, inmerso en una grave crisis interna y duramente cuestionado por la comunidad internacional.
El sábado pasado, también en la misma localidad, se denunció que miembros de la Guardia Nacional incursionaron, realizaron tiros al aire y lanzaron gases lacrimógenos. El hecho generó una nota de protesta por parte de la Casa de Nariño.
Un desaparecido en plena campaña electoral. Un Gobierno que reacciona tarde. Una oposición oportunista. Un país sin verdad.
En NOTICIAS de esta semana…
TODOS MIENTEN
La trama de intereses y versiones manipuladas detrás del caso Maldonado; bochornosa grieta mediática y los secretos de los mapuches. Mentiras de uno y otro lado en la investigación. Pistas plantadas, factor electoral y contradicciones de la Gendarmería.
Caso Nisman: en exclusiva, las impactantes pruebas de la pericia clave sobre la muerte del fiscal. Las imágenes del disparo y la defensa de Lagomarsino.
Los meteorólogos están de moda: la cobertura del huracán Irma los ubicó como protagonistas de la televisión durante todo un fin de semana. Con explicaciones sobre la formación de los vientos y las tormentas, alcanzaron picos de rating sorprendentes. La pelea entre universitarios y presentadoras sexys del tiempo.
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Psicoanálisis y poder: ¿tiene sentido hoy la disciplina que Freud creó? Élisabeth Roudinesco, una de sus máximas autoridades, defiende su vigencia. Presidentes “border” y el análisis de Macri.
Mentes distintas: con un modo particular de experimentar el mundo, los chicos con síndrome de Asperger precisan ayuda para desarrollar su potencial.
The coronavirus pandemic has entered a “new and dangerous phase” as daily Covid-19 cases hit record highs, the World Health Organization warned Friday.
The number of new cases reported Thursday “were the most in a single day so far” at 150,000, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference from the agency’s Geneva headquarters.
Almost half of the total cases were reported from the Americas, Tedros said, with a large number coming from Southern Asia and the Middle East.
“Many people are understandably fed up with being at home. Countries are understandably eager to open up their societies and economies. But the virus is still spreading fast. It is still deadly and most people are still susceptible,” he said.
The coronavirus has sickened more than 8.5 million people worldwide and killed at least 454,359, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Tedros said world leaders and the public need to “exercise extreme vigilance” against the virus, urging them to “focus on the basics.”
“Continue maintaining your distance from others. Stay home if you feel sick. Keep covering your nose and mouth when you cough. Wear a mask when appropriate. Keep cleaning your hands,” he said.
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