Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden and former vice president and environmental activist Al Gore, apparently from his Nashville home, had an online environmental pow wow this past week.
During this Climate Change Town Hall, Biden accused President Donald Trump of ignoring science. Biden promised that, if elected, he would make the United States rejoin the Paris Climate Accords.
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Curves are flattening worldwide thanks to stringent lockdown efforts.” That bulletin from one of my favorite magazines made me sit up. “Really?” I thought, “Is it because of the stringent lockdown that the ‘curves’ are flattening?”
For that is what “thanks to” means here, right? Because, “propter” in Latin.
No one needs to ask what sort of curves we are talking about here. There is only one subject that is being discussed now towards the end of April 2020: coronavirus, the insidious cold bug brought to the world by the Chinese Communist Party.
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Nearly 10,000 Tennesseans have tested positive for COVID-19 as of Sunday night, according to The COVID Tracking Project’s website.
Updated numbers showed 9,667 Tennesseans tested positive for COVID-19 since it broke out, while the virus had hospitalized 828 state residents. COVID-19 had claimed the lives of 181 Tennesseans as of Sunday, according to The COVID Tracking Project’s website.
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The Food and Drug Administration has ongoing clinical trials for 72 drugs to treat COVID-19, therapeutics that aren’t a cure, but which will treat the symptoms of the disease, FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn announced Friday.
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New photos obtained via satellite show North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s train at his “vacation compound” in a resort town on the eastern coast of North Korea.
38 North – a foreign affairs news and information website that focuses on North Korea – released the photos, reporting the images were captured between Tuesday, April 21 and Thursday April 23.
The news comes amid a flood of rumors recently that the reclusive leader has suffered a catastrophic injury during a heart procedure.
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Anti-fossil fuel activists unsuccessfully attempted to browbeat the film producer behind a new Michael Moore documentary panning green energy into permanently removing the movie over claims that it contains pro-oil industry misinformation.
Activist Josh Fox, climate scientist Michael Mann, and other environmentalists signed onto a petition Friday asking the producer to take down Planet of Humans, claiming Moore’s film relies on old data to claim solar and wind energy is dependent on fossil fuels. Films for Action initially nixed the film before putting it back online, saying the move was meant to engage in debate.
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The attorneys general of Missouri and Mississippi announced this week that they are filing lawsuits against the Chinese government over its handling of the coronavirus, which first appeared in Wuhan late last year and was allowed to spread to the rest of the world.
Missouri AG Eric Schmitt says that China’s “campaign of deceit” has led to great human suffering across the globe.
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The ground is shifting quickly beneath our feet when it comes to tech, privacy, and power. And, although tech companies, their advocates, and even some policymakers, would like us to imagine these issues are cut and dried, they are not.
In their book The Sovereign Individual, published on the eve of the year 2000, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg attempt to grapple with the forthcoming technological changes that the new millennium inevitably would bring. “As technology revolutionizes the tools we use,” they wrote, “it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals, and alters our perceptions.”
This is the dynamic that has been unfolding slowly over the last 20 years, as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have transformed how we engage with communications, culture, commerce, and one another.
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World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was a top official in the Ethiopian government at the same time that it was accused of widespread human rights violations.
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The U.S. Coast Guard is monitoring a situation in which dozens of oil tanker vessels are floating around the Southern California coast as they wait to dock while the country wrestles with what to do with the current glut in crude.
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President Donald Trump took a break from his daily showdowns with the White House press corps Saturday and Sunday that does not mean that the president is staying away from the West Wing press briefing room as he leads the administration’s response to the Wuhan Flu. There was some confusion about whether or not there would be a briefing Sunday. The White House press pool, reporters selected to cover events where it is impractical to have a large crowd was supposed to come in at 4 p.m., at which point they would either cover something or be dismissed. In the pre-Wuhan Flu days, the weekend pool would show up by 9 a.m., load up into a van and then join the president’s motorcade to his Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, where Trump would golf and the reporters would hang out at an Italian restaurant just outside the club’s gate. Those days seem like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. At or about 3:45 p.m., the pool was told to be at the White House for 6 p.m., which got people excited for the return of the COVID-19 briefings, but an hour later,…
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An executive order from Gov. Tim Walz bans evictions, foreclosures, and lease terminations for the duration of the state’s peacetime emergency, but one Democratic lawmaker wants to take things a step further. State Sen. Jeff Hayden (DFL-Minneapolis) recently called for a “rent and mortgage moratorium” in Minnesota, an idea championed by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) in the U.S. Congress. “Every Minnesotan deserves to have a safe, reliable place to call home. Right now, communities across the state are facing loss of income and increasingly exacerbated economic hardships during this public health emergency, while their rent and mortgage obligations continue to pile up,” he said in a statement. Without the “suspension of these payments,” the state will continue to see “devastating consequences both during this public-health emergency and after,” according to Hayden. “Our priority should be to provide the immediate relief Minnesotans so greatly need in a timely manner, and that includes a moratorium on rent and mortgage payments,” he concluded. The Minnesota House is currently considering a bill that would appropriate $100 million from the general fund for housing assistance grants. Under that bill, Minnesotans who are unable to pay their rent or mortgage because of a public-health emergency…
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Sunday that bankruptcy is not an option for Michigan in response to comments last week from U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Whitmer appeared on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday. Stephanopoulos asked her if default was on the table for Michigan.
“No, and it’s outrageous for Senator McConnell to even suggest that,” Whitmer said. “But that’s what the matter is. Our general fund budget when adjusted for the inflation is the same size it was during – when Richard Nixon was our president. We have been incredibly smart stewards and we have not made some of the investments I think we should have as a state because of this artificially low number that we’ve been working with.”
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Gov. Tim Walz today outlined steps forward for Minnesota’s COVID-19 response.
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The opening day of the Great Minnesota Get-Together is still four months away, but state leaders are already suggesting that the whole thing could be called off.
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Six of the state’s most influential business organizations sent a letter to Gov. Mike DeWine last week urging him to reopen the economy as nearly one million Ohioans have now filed unemployment claims since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
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As Ohio works to reopen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic starting May 1, Senate Democrats are urging Gov. Mike DeWine to ensure the state is prepared.
Specifically, they want the governor to require the use of masks in public and to guarantee Ohio has an adequate supply of sanitation items and personal protective equipment (PPE). They also want clear and publicized guidelines for businesses, protections for whistleblowers, child care accommodations for employees who need it and continued teleworking for employees who can or who are in high-risk categories.
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A panel of federal judges ruled 2-1 that Tennessee must allow the “Constitutional right” to abortion during the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic. The decision came Friday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, available online here. Ruling in favor of abortion were Judges Karen Nelson Moore (pictured left) and Helene N. White. The dissenting opinion came from Judge Amul R. Thapar (pictured right), appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017. Moore was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1995 and White was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2008. Moore and White ruled that the so-called right to an abortion applies even during the state’s ban on elective medical procedures during the COVID-19 crisis. And, here, although we have great respect for the challenges Tennessee faces as it responds to this novel public health crisis, we agree with the district court that the State’s response, in this one respect, unduly curtailed constitutional liberty, and that judicial intervention was thus warranted. By the same token, however, we also conclude that, when it comes to the precise scope of the district court’s injunction, the district court went too far in asserting its authority. The case was an…
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