Chris Hedges's Blog, page 157

Democratic Think Tank Center for American Progress Isn’t Fooling Anybody

The Center for American Progress has laid off the unionized staff members of its news site, ThinkProgress. In a statement posted on the ThinkProgress site, the center announced  it was “transitioning ThinkProgress back to its roots by offering analysis of the news, policy and politics.” Former staffers were concerned the site would turn into a communications arm for the think tank’s scholars and staff, which would be against the union contract that guaranteed editorial independence.

The Center for American Progress is one of the most prominent liberal think tanks in Washington, D.C. The nonprofit took in from $40 million to $50 million from 2013-16. It said editorially independent ThinkProgress, which, as the Daily Beast writes, “helped define progressivism during the Obama years,” was running a deficit for years, and it was looking to sell the site.

A statement from the ThinkProgress union countered that “ThinkProgress was not founded to be profitable.” When the center announced its plans for the site, the union’s statement continued, “We now know this was never about money. This was always about power and control.”

As Jack Crosbie writes in Splinter, “In the end, CAP’s arrogant certainty that it could essentially borrow a line out of the Bustle playbook after stressing its support for unions for years and years resulted in public humiliation and less revenue.” It’s not outright union busting, but nonetheless troubling for a supposedly liberal think tank to shutter its editorially independent and unionized news site.

Jason Gordon, the director of communications for the Writers Guild of America, which represents the union, told the Daily Beast, “in light of new developments on the future of ThinkProgress, we are continuing conversations with CAP and exploring our legal options.”

During the Obama presidency, ThinkProgress helped start the careers of multiple prominent journalists and political operatives. Per the Daily Beast:

A testament to its success is found in the list of prominent alumni currently working in politics and journalism. That list includes Faiz Shakir, who now serves as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager; Amanda Terkel, the D.C. bureau chief of the Huffington Post; Nico Pitney, the political director at NowThis; Alex Seitz-Wald, a top campaign reporter for NBC News; Ali Gharib, a senior news editor at The Intercept; and Matt Yglesias, one of the founding members of Vox.

Former ThinkProgress staffers, including The Intercept’s Lee Fang, also suggested the shuttering was about tensions between center-leaning higher-up staff and donors and more leftist writers:

ThinkProgress used to dig into money in politics, influence of lobby power in DC. Then CAP leadership gutted it back in 2012. Later they got a "union" but that didn't change any of the fundamental power dynamics at CAP. Recent develops prove it.

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) September 9, 2019

 

The center’s initial statement on ThinkProgress’s closure said it would not be canceling recurring donations to ThinkProgress automatically; donors would have to contact the center to opt out. However, a center spokesperson later said it was reversing its initial decision and would end the recurring donations.

The Daily Beast reported the spokesperson also said the center was “shelving plans to keep the site running and would instead have it archived,” a small victory for the laid-off writers after the union said they were considering legal action.

 

Proof Joe Biden Has the Mainstream Media in His Pocket

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden last month released a new Iowa TV ad called “Personal,” which recounts the former vice president’s personal tragedy of losing his wife and daughter to a car crash, and the subsequent loss of his son Beau Biden from brain cancer.

Biden presented his story as a celebration of for-profit health insurance by saying that he “couldn’t imagine” what it would’ve been like if their insurance didn’t cover the healthcare required “immediately,” and that he couldn’t “fathom” what would’ve happened if the insurance companies had said for the last six months of his son’s life, “You’re on your own.”

The advertisement continued Biden’s practice of dishonestly conflating Republicans who want to repeal the Affordable Care Act—also known as Obamacare—with those advocating a national health insurance program like most developed countries have. He mentions in the same breath Donald Trump’s efforts to repeal the ACA and proposals for a Medicare for All system, as advocated by rival primary contenders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren:

Health care is personal to me. Obamacare is personal to me. When I see the president try to tear it down, and others propose to replace it and start over. That’s personal to me too. We’ve got to build on what we did because every American deserves affordable healthcare.

Corporate media uncritically transmitted the ad’s message as if it were merely a campaign strategy, instead of explaining what Biden, Sanders and Warren’s proposals actually are, and clarifying for voters whether Biden’s charges against his primary opponents are accurate.

CNN’s report (8/27/19), “Biden Gets ‘Personal’ in New TV Ad in Iowa Focused on Healthcare,” mainly noted that Biden’s new ad …

…highlights his continued support for the Affordable Care Act, at a time when other progressive Democratic candidates are pushing for a “Medicare for All” approach.

CNN also falsely asserted that Medicare for All advocates are proposing to enroll everyone in a national health insurance program and “eliminate” private health insurance. In fact, no Medicare for All proponent supports banning private health insurance. For example, Sanders’ Senate bill—which is cosponsored by other candidates like Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren—bans private health coverage that duplicates the coverage offered by the government, because it would be rendered obsolete, and still allows for supplemental private coverage (The Week, 7/3/19).

The Washington Post’s “Biden Knocks Trump, Democratic Rivals in New TV Ad Touting Affordable Care Act” (8/27/19) trivialized the issue of healthcare by covering Biden’s ad in terms of the political horserace, emphasizing the role it plays in his campaign strategy—rather than explaining the differences between the various candidates’ proposals. The Post’s John Wagner merely notes that Biden’s ad “knocks both President Trump and some of his Democratic hopefuls” and “suggests they are all a threat to the Affordable Care Act.”

The Hill (8/27/19) continued the Post’s horserace-focused coverage, noting that Biden’s ad “appears to hit Biden’s 2020 rivals for proposing ideas to replace Obamacare,” and that it “illustrates the Biden campaign’s latest effort to tie the former vice president to the Obama administration.”

CBS (8/27/19) framed Biden’s ad as “an emotional appeal to Iowa caucus voters” and mentioned his proposal to add a public option, while uncritically transmitting Biden’s false assertion that his “Democratic rivals” want to “scrap the law and start over,” which Biden has slammed as “unrealistic.”

The New York Times’ report, “Why This Joe Biden Health Care Ad Stands Out” (8/27/19), stood out for its bad reporting, functioning essentially as an advertisement for the advertisement. The Times’ Katie Glueck described the ad as an “extraordinarily emotional appeal” for Biden’s candidacy and his healthcare proposal, describing it as being “striking” for its “wrenching images,” and mentioning how some voters have cited Biden’s “ability to connect with people after facing so much personal adversity of his own” to explain their support. The Times never mentions what Biden’s healthcare proposal actually is—perhaps because the ad itself doesn’t do so.

Instead, the Times reported on Warren’s rising poll numbers in Iowa and how “emphasizing his partnership with Mr. Obama” has “been a central strategy in Mr. Biden’s campaign.” The piece claimed that Biden has “not always been comfortable” using the deaths of family members for political purposes, because it would tread on “sacred ground,” but this hesitation now appears to be gone.

But when reports on Biden’s “Personal” ad observe that it is an “oblique” attack against Sanders and Warren’s Medicare for All proposals, they have a journalistic obligation to investigate whether or not these attacks are true.

Corporate media have shown they have no problem devoting attention to tracking other falsehoods Biden has told on the campaign trail, like when he offered “my word as a Biden” that a false war anecdote was “the God’s truth” (Washington Post, 8/29/19). Perhaps this is because telling lies about Medicare for All protects insurance industry profits (FAIR.org, 4/29/19), which are not threatened by the exposure of fake war stories?

Others have already documented the numerous falsehoods Biden has told about Medicare for All, among them the notion that Medicare for All advocates are trying to “scrap Obamacare” and cause a “hiatus” or a lapse in coverage for up to three years (Jacobin, 7/18/19). Medicare for All advocates don’t support repealing the ACA or creating a lapse in coverage; Sanders’ bill in particular has a four-year transition period in which Medicare is continually expanded to cover everyone (Common Dreams, 7/15/19).

While horserace coverage predominated, some exceptional reports attempted to gauge the accuracy of Biden’s attacks on Medicare for All proponents by explaining their proposals. CNBC (7/15/19) explained that Medicare for All wouldn’t “do away with the ACA in the same way that repeal of the ACA would,” and noted that Sanders’ legislation would create a “more comprehensive government-run system” that would include dental, vision and mental health services, while eliminating deductibles and co-pays. Vice News’ “Joe Biden: It Would Be An Insult to My Dead Son for Everyone to Have Healthcare” (8/27/19) offered an excellent breakdown of Biden’s ad and its falsehoods:

In all, the ad is saying that healthcare is personal to Joe Biden because his son died; that as a father, he believes the best and most legitimate way to honor his dead son’s legacy would be to implement further incremental regulatory reform, along the lines of what Barack Obama did; and that people who disagree and think that radical reform is necessary—among them, presumably, the 80% or so of Democrats who say it’s important to nominate a presidential candidate who supports Medicare for All—are dishonoring his son’s legacy.

If Joe Biden wants to get personal, I can also get very personal. Before my mother passed away last month, following an amputation for bone cancer, I was caring for and accompanying her to many doctors’ appointments, and I recall the numerous times my mother was rejected from hospitals for not having the proper insurance, along with delays, redundant tests and the frequent anxiety of wondering whether her insurance would cover her treatment—because we don’t live in a country where healthcare is a human right.

People can use personal tragedies as justification for perpetuating and inflicting injustices on others, and they can also use those tragedies as inspiration and motivation to prevent others from going through the same hardships. Biden’s latest ad is an example of the former masquerading as the latter, and corporate media’s coverage of it exemplifies how some personal tragedies are amplified and others neglected to protect corporate profits.

Donald Trump Smears the Victims of Hurricane Dorian

Echoing the racist and dehumanizing rhetoric he has repeatedly deployed against Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and others, President Donald Trump on Monday told reporters—without offering a shred of evidence—that there may be “very bad gang members” and “drug dealers” among those fleeing the Bahamas in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian.

The president’s comments sparked outrage, with the Sierra Club responding that “Donald Trump’s racism and cruelty knows no bounds.”

“He needs to do his job and respond to the ongoing humanitarian crisis,” the group tweeted. “We rise in solidarity with the Bahamian people.”

Trump’s remarks came hours after hundreds Bahamian refugees were ordered off a ferry headed for Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, purportedly because they did not have U.S. visas. Brian Entin, a reporter for WSVN 7 News in Miami who was on the vessel, said “this is not normal” and noted Bahamians can usually travel to the U.S. with just a passport and a printout of their police record.

“We have to be very careful,” Trump told reporters Monday, defending the decision to remove hurricane victims from the ferry and warning that “very bad people” could be attempting to enter the U.S. after Dorian devastated the Bahamas, killing dozens and destroying tens of thousands of homes.

Watch:

Trump defends prohibiting some people from hurricane-ravaged Bahamas from entering the United States because he doesn’t want “very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very very bad drug dealers” here. pic.twitter.com/BL7q93xtfD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 9, 2019

In a statement Monday night,  Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, said the move to deny hurricane victims entry is “disgraceful and goes against everything we are supposed to stand for as a nation.”

“These are people whose homes and livelihoods have been totally destroyed, who have lost family members,” said Prakash. “But instead of welcoming them with open arms and offering support, we’re sending them back to an island with little shelter, no food, and no access to basic necessities.”

Prakash said Sunrise and allies are planning to rally outside Customs and Border Protection (CBP) offices in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday to demand that the Trump administration “stop turning away people fleeing destruction.”

“As the climate crisis makes storms like Dorian stronger and deadlier, will we build bigger walls and keep polluting and making the crisis worse, or will we give the most vulnerable a safe haven in their time of most dire need and commit ourselves to tackling this crisis?” added Prakash. “The survivors of Hurricane Dorian are climate change refugees fleeing disaster, and they deserve compassion and support, not isolation and exclusion.”

Number of Uninsured Americans Rises for 1st Time in a Decade

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans without health insurance edged up in 2018 — the first evidence from the government that coverage gains from President Barack Obama’s health care plan might be eroding under President Donald Trump.

The Census Bureau also said in an annual report Tuesday that household income rose last year at its slowest pace in four years and finally matched its previous peak set in 1999. Median household income rose 0.9% in 2018 to an inflation-adjusted $63,179, from $62,626 in 2017.

The data suggest that the economic expansion, now the longest on record at more than 10 years, is still struggling to provide widespread benefits to the U.S. population. Solid gains in household incomes in the past four years have returned the median only to where it was two decades ago. And despite strong growth last year in the number of Americans working full time and year-round, the number of people with private health insurance remained flat.

One bright spot in the report was that the poverty rate fell for a fourth straight year to 11.8%, its lowest point since 2001. The proportion of households led by women that were poor fell to a record low.

“While any reduction in poverty or increase in income is a step in the right direction, most families have just barely made up the ground lost over the past decade,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

Though income inequality narrowed last year, it remains near record levels reached in 2017. Last year, the richest 5% of the U.S. population captured 23% of household income.

An estimated 27.5 million people, 8.5% of the population, went without health insurance in 2018. That was an increase of 1.9 million uninsured people, or 0.5 percentage point.

More people were covered by Medicare, reflecting the aging of the baby boomers. But Medicaid coverage declined. The number of uninsured children also rose, and there were more uninsured adults ages 35-64.

Though the increase in the number of uninsured Americans last year was modest, it could be a turning point, the first real sign that coverage gains under Obama could be at least partly reversed. This year, the number of uninsured could rise again because a previous Republican-led Congress repealed fines under the Affordable Care Act for people who remain uninsured if they can afford coverage.

The Census report is sure to play into 2020 presidential politics. Health care is the leading issue for Democrats, with proposals including Sen. Bernie Sanders’ call for a government-run system to cover everyone and former Vice President Joe Biden’s idea for expanding Obama’s law and adding a government plan open to virtually anyone.

Democrats are laying the blame Trump, long accusing his administration of deliberately undermining Obama’s health care law. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday blamed Trump’s “cruel health care sabotage” for the rising number of uninsured people. In a statement, the California Democrat said Trump’s ongoing efforts to erode Obama’s health law have forced Americans to “live in constant fear of an accident or injury that could spell financial ruin for their families.”

Trump spent most of his first year in office unsuccessfully trying to get a Republican Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He is now asking a federal appeals court to overturn it as unconstitutional. The president also slashed the program’s sign-up season ad budget and scaled back funding to help people navigate the enrollment process. Trump also removed a subsidy for insurers, thereby triggering a jump in premiums.

Yet ACA enrollment has held fairly steady, with about 20 million people covered by its mix of subsidized private plans and a Medicaid expansion for low-income individuals. The Census report found that Medicaid coverage declined by 0.7 percent from 2017.

Trump Dismisses John Bolton, Says They ‘Disagreed Strongly’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday forced out John Bolton, his hawkish national security adviser with whom he had significant disagreements on Iran, Afghanistan and a cascade of other global challenges.

The two men offered opposing accounts on Bolton’s less than friendly departure, a leave-taking example of what had been a fractious relationship almost from the start.

Trump tweeted that he told Bolton Monday night his services were no longer needed at the White House and Bolton submitted his resignation Tuesday morning. Bolton responded in a tweet of his own that he offered to resign Monday “and President Trump said, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.'”

Trump said that he had “disagreed strongly” with many of Bolton’s suggestions as national security adviser, “as did others in the administration.”

The departure comes at a trying moment for the Trump administration on the world stage, weeks ahead of the United Nations General Assembly and as the president faces pressing decisions on a host of foreign policy issues.

In recent months, tensions have risen between Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over influence in the president’s orbit and how to manage the president’s desire to negotiate with some of the world’s most unsavory actors.

Since joining the administration in the spring of last year, Bolton has espoused skepticism about the president’s whirlwind rapprochement with North Korea and has advocated against Trump’s decision last year to pull U.S. troops out of Syria. He masterminded a quiet campaign inside the administration and with allies abroad to persuade Trump to keep U.S. forces in Syria to counter the remnants of the Islamic State and Iranian influence in the region.

Bolton was also opposed to Trump’s now-scrapped notion to bring Taliban negotiators to Camp David last weekend to try to finalize a peace deal in Afghanistan.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was traveling with Trump Monday, said reports of Bolton’s dissent on the Taliban meeting was a “bridge too far” for Trump.

One Republican familiar with the disagreements between Trump and Bolton said the adviser’s opposition to a possible meeting between Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was a precipitating factor in the dismissal. French President Emmanuel Macron has been trying to broker such a meeting, possibly on the sidelines of the upcoming U.N. General Assembly, in the hope of salvaging the international Iran nuclear deal that Trump withdrew from.

Bolton and his National Security Council staff were also viewed warily by some in the White House who viewed them as more attuned to their own agendas than the president’s — and some administration aides have accused Bolton’s staff of being behind leaks of information embarrassing to Trump.

Bolton’s ouster came as a surprise to many in the White House. Just an hour before Trump’s tweet, the press office announced that Bolton would join Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a briefing. A White House official said that Bolton had departed the premises after Trump’s tweet and would no longer appear as scheduled.

In a further sign of acrimonious relationship, a person close to Bolton told reporters that they had been authorized to say one thing — that since Bolton has been national security adviser there have been no “bad deals” on Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Syria. The person, who did not divulge who had given the authorization, was not allowed to discuss the issue by name and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

When asked to respond to the person’s comment, White House press secretary Grisham smiled and told reporters: “I don’t know how to read” it. “Sounds like just somebody trying to protect him,” she added.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said the move was a cause for worry.

“I’m legitimately shaken by the grave instability of American foreign policy today,” Murphy tweeted. “I’m no Bolton fan, but the world is coming apart, and the revolving door of U.S. leadership is disappearing America from the world just at the moment where a stable American hand is most needed.”

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said Charles Kupperman, the deputy national security adviser and a former Reagan administration official and defense contracting executive, would fill Bolton’s role on an acting basis. Trump said he would name a replacement for Bolton next week.

Bolton was named Trump’s third national security adviser in March 2018 after the departure of Army Gen. H.R. McMaster.

Bolton was always an unlikely pick to be Trump’s third national security adviser, with a world view seemingly ill-fit to the president’s isolationist “America First” pronouncements.

He’s championed hawkish foreign policy views dating back to the Reagan administration and became a household name over his vociferous support for the Iraq War as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under George W. Bush. Bolton briefly considered running for president in 2016, in part to make the case against the isolationism that Trump would come to embody.

Still, Trump has admired Bolton for years, praising him on Twitter as far back as 2014. Trump has told allies he thinks Bolton is “a killer” on television, where Bolton is a frequent face on Fox News, though the president has voiced some unhappiness about Bolton’s trademark mustache.

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AP writers Matthew Lee and Jonathan Lemire contributed.

American Barbarity on the Border

The United States’ current immigration system is functioning exactly the way it is supposed to—it is designed to make people suffer.

The amount of violence the U.S. inflicts on people from around the world is all done in our name. It has become such a common occurrence that, like a fire alarm that blares randomly every day, it has lost all sense of urgency. We tune it out until it becomes white noise.

This is the case for the tens of thousands of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border who are the targets of Trump and his administration’s dehumanizing, intentional cruelty.

The featured series of photographs is from my third assignment to that border, where I have been covering the ongoing and ever-escalating refugee/humanitarian crisis.

This time, I crossed over from Brownsville, Texas, into Matamoros, Mexico. I was embedded with the Atlanta-based group Lawyers for Good Government—a nonprofit organization founded by Traci Feit Love after the 2016 election that has not tuned out the border crisis. Members of the organization have spearheaded a program called Project Corazon and have mobilized nearly 50 other heavy-hitting law firms, all of whom are working on a pro-bono basis to help prepare asylum seekers for upcoming immigration court hearings.

This was unlike Tijuana, Mexico—across the border from San Ysidro, California—where hives of various law enforcement agencies were a common sight when I was there last December and January. In Matamoros, the cartels seem to rule and run the border. I saw a gaggle of armed Federales officers only once there, a half-dozen of them “Mad-Max”-ing atop two militarized trucks through the border area. They were gone within seconds.

Here in Matamoros, no one I speak with on the ground has much trust for the Federales (or the Mexican government, for that matter), and frankly, I could not determine whether their absence makes me feel better or worse.

Cartel scouts masquerade as penny entrepreneurs, selling trinkets and food while walking past the cars waiting in line to drive through customs and into the U.S. They watch everything that is going on in and around the plaza, where dozens of tents are set up on a swath of concrete and roast throughout the day as the temperature often climbs over 100 degrees.

Even now, during hurricane season, it is difficult to move the asylum seekers into shelters, farther from the border. Their overriding fear is that they’ll be taken away, perhaps bused back to the country they had fled. For many, that is a death sentence.

Two rugged trees offer umbrellas of dappled shade in this makeshift community. It’s prime real estate for everyone trying to find a modicum of normalcy, to have a family meal, charge a cellphone, create a sidewalk school for the children, learn the “next steps” from the volunteer lawyers, laugh, play, cry, joke, comfort and tell their stories, hoping that someone will listen.

In a pre-border-crossing meeting with the volunteer lawyers who have been flown in as part of Project Corazon, Texas-based lawyer Jodi Goodwin explains one of the cartel’s abduction tactics: “If you see a bunch of shiny SUVs pull up to the plaza, you alert each other and immediately leave, get across the border.” Goodwin speaks from experience; she has been working with asylum seekers in Mexico for over two decades.

Everyone is a target there. The children are in acute danger of kidnapping (and of contracting life-ruining illnesses). The women live in perpetual fear of sexual assault and, I was told, some carry condoms to—perhaps, maybe—engineer self-care while being brutally raped, a scenario that is baffling to fathom. Many of the men carry around an invisible bulk of their broken lives—which is true for the women and children, too.

Most everyone living in this camp had at one prior point made it into the United States and had made their case for asylum. Some had to swim across the Rio Grande, which is approximately 100 yards away from the tents, but they still had to pay the cartels to allow them to do so. And because there is no running water (or any services to speak of), they often pay the cartels so they can wash clothes or bathe in the river too.

Months before, Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter, Valeria, had drowned on this very stretch of river trying to reach Brownsville, Texas. The viral photo of their bodies floating face-down near the riverbank depicts the desperation for a better life that more and more migrants are forced to endure.

It is because of Trump’s “Return to Mexico” policy that most asylum seekers are back in Matamoros, where they are stuck in horrific limbo, waiting for their day in U.S. immigration court. The backlog, however, is depressing. According to a New York Times article on the pending immigration cases in the court system, ”the average case now takes 578 days to complete.”

To read article after article about the disastrous U.S. immigration policy—or to simply listen to pundits or politicians argue about asylum seekers as if it’s an exercise in high school debate—can make the very real plight of thousands of people seem like an abstraction. But to see it, to bear witness to this suffering is a way of humanizing, a way of showing others that these are people who could be your sister, your brother, your mother, your father, your friend.

PHOTO ESSAY | 25 photosScenes From Matamoros (Photo Essay)

Johnson to Suspend U.K. Parliament After 3 Defeats on Brexit

LONDON—The simmering showdown between Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Britain’s Parliament over Brexit came to a head as lawmakers delivered three defeats to the government’s plans for leaving the European Union, before being sent home early Tuesday for a contentious five-week suspension of the legislature.

In a session that ran past midnight, Parliament enacted a law to block a no-deal Brexit next month, ordered the government to release private communications about its Brexit plans and rejected Johnson’s call for a snap election to break the political deadlock.

Parliament was then set to be suspended at the government’s request until Oct. 14, a drastic move that gives Johnson a respite from rebellious lawmakers as he plots his next move.

Johnson said he would cut short the parliamentary term so he can outline his domestic agenda at a new session of Parliament in October. But opponents called the move anti-democratic and illegal.

“It is blindingly obvious why we are being shut down — to prevent scrutiny,” Labour Party Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer said.

In the first of the day’s blows to Johnson, an opposition-backed measure designed to stop Britain from crashing out of the EU on Oct. 31 without a divorce deal became law after receiving the formal assent of Queen Elizabeth II. The law compels the government to ask the EU for a three-month delay if no deal has been agreed by Oct. 19.

Legislators also demanded the government release, by Wednesday, emails and text messages among aides and officials relating to suspending Parliament and planning for Brexit amid allegations that the suspension is being used to circumvent democracy.

Under parliamentary rules, the government is obliged to release the documents.

In a statement, the government said it would “consider the implications of this vote and respond in due course.”

Britain is due to leave the EU on Oct. 31, and Johnson says the country’s delayed exit must happen then, with or without a divorce agreement to smooth the way. But many lawmakers fear a no-deal Brexit would be economically devastating, and are determined to stop him.

“I will not ask for another delay,” Johnson said. But he has few easy ways out of it. His options — all of them extreme — include disobeying the law, which could land him in court or even prison, and resigning so that someone else would have to ask for a delay.

The prime minister has had a turbulent week since Parliament returned from its summer break on Sept. 3. He kicked 21 lawmakers out of the Conservative group in Parliament after they sided with the opposition, and saw two ministers quit his government — one of them his own brother.

Early Tuesday, lawmakers rebuffed, for a second time, Johnson’s request for an early election, which he said was “the only way to break the deadlock in the House.”

Opposition parties voted against the measure or abstained, denying Johnson the two-thirds majority he needed. They want to make sure a no-deal departure is blocked before agreeing to an election.

“We’re eager for an election, but as keen as we are we, we are not prepared to inflict the disaster of a no deal on our communities, our jobs, our services, or indeed our rights,” Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said.

Johnson acknowledged Monday that a no-deal Brexit “would be a failure of statecraft” for which he would be partially to blame.

On a visit to Dublin, Johnson said he would “overwhelmingly prefer to find an agreement” and believed a deal could be struck by Oct. 18, when leaders of all 28 EU countries hold a summit in Brussels.

The comments marked a change of tone, if not substance, for Johnson, who is accused by opponents of driving Britain at full-tilt toward a cliff-edge Brexit.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar warned Johnson that “there’s no such thing as a clean break,” and if Britain crashed out, it would “cause severe disruption for British and Irish people alike.”

Johnson and Varadkar said they had “a positive and constructive meeting,” but there was no breakthrough on the issue of the Irish border, the main stumbling block to a Brexit deal.

The EU says Britain has not produced any concrete proposals for replacing the contentious “backstop,” a provision in the withdrawal agreement reached by Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May that is designed to ensure an open border between EU member Ireland and the U.K.’s Northern Ireland.

An open border is crucial to the regional economy and underpins the peace process that ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

Opposition to the backstop was a key reason Britain’s Parliament rejected May’s Brexit deal with the EU three times earlier this year. British Brexit supporters oppose the backstop because it locks Britain into EU trade rules to avoid customs checks, something they say will stop the U.K. from striking new trade deals with countries such as the United States.

Varadkar said he was open to any alternatives that were “legally workable,” but none had been received so far.

“In the absence of agreed alternative arrangements, no backstop is no deal for us,” he said.

Meanwhile, Speaker John Bercow, whose control of business in Britain’s House of Commons has made him a central player in the Brexit drama, announced he would step down after a decade in the job.

The colorful speaker, famous for his loud ties and even louder cries of “Order!” during raucous debates, told lawmakers he will quit the same day Britain is due to leave the EU, Oct. 31.

Throughout the three years since Britain voted to leave the EU, Bercow has angered the Conservative government by repeatedly allowing lawmakers to seize control of Parliament’s agenda to steer the course of Brexit.

He said he was simply fulfilling his role of being the “backbenchers’ backstop” and letting Parliament have its say.

“Throughout my time as speaker, I have sought to increase the relative authority of this legislature, for which I will make absolutely no apology,” he said.

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Gregory Katz contributed to this story.

North Korea Fires Projectiles Hours After Offering Talks With U.S.

SEOUL, South Korea—North Korea launched two unidentified projectiles into the sea on Tuesday, South Korea’s military said, hours after the North offered to resume nuclear diplomacy with the United States in late September.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that the North Korean projectiles fired from its South Phyongan province, which surrounds its capital city of Pyongyang, flew across the country before landing in the waters off its east coast.

It said South Korea will monitor possible additional launches by North Korea. But the statement gave no further details like exactly what projectile North Korea fired.

On Monday night, the North’s first vice foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, said North Korea is willing to resume nuclear diplomacy with the United States in late September but that Washington must come to the negotiating table with acceptable new proposals. She said if the proposals don’t satisfy North Korea, dealings between the two countries may come to an end.

Choe’s statement and the following projectile launches were apparently aimed at pressuring the United States to make concessions when the North Korea-U.S. talks restart. North Korea is widely believed to want the United States to provide it with security guarantees and extensive relief from U.S.-led sanctions in return for limited denuclearization steps.

U.S. President Donald Trump called North Korea’s announcement “interesting.”

“We’ll see what happens,” Trump said. “In the meantime, we have our hostages back, we’re getting the remains of our great heroes back and we’ve had no nuclear testing for a long time.”

There was no immediate comment from the White House following reports of the launches.

In the late-night statement carried by state media, Choe said North Korea is willing to sit down with the United States “for comprehensive discussions in late September of the issues we have so far taken up, at a time and place to be agreed.”

Choe said she hopes the United States will bring “a proposal geared to the interests of the DPRK and the U.S. and based on decision methods acceptable to us.” DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name.

She warned that “if the U.S. side fingers again the worn-out scenario which has nothing to do with new decision methods at the DPRK-U.S. working negotiation to be held with so much effort, the DPRK-U.S. dealings may come to an end.”

Talks on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament fell apart in February when Trump rejected North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s demand for sweeping sanctions relief in return for partial disarmament at their second summit in Vietnam.

It was a huge embarrassment for the young North Korean leader, who made a dayslong train trip to the Vietnamese capital to obtain the sanctions relief he needs to revitalize his country’s troubled economy.

In April, Kim said he was open to another summit with Trump but set the end of the year as a deadline for the U.S. to offer improved terms for an agreement to revive the nuclear diplomacy.

Kim and Trump met again at the Korean border in late June and agreed to restart diplomacy, but there have no public meetings between the sides since then.

In recent months, North Korea has carried out a slew of missile and rocket tests to protest joint military drills between the U.S. and South Korea that North Korea views as an invasion rehearsal. Some experts said the North Korean weapons tests were also a demonstration of its expanding weapons arsenal aimed at boosting its leverage ahead of new talks with the United States.

Most of the North Korean weapons tested in July and August have been short range. This suggests that North Korea hasn’t wanted to lift its self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests, which would certainly derail negotiations with Washington.

Trump has downplayed the latest North Korean weapons tests, saying the U.S. never restricted short-range tests.

The Secret to Living Longer Is Being Rich, Study Reveals

The top 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the 150 million Americans in the bottom 60% of the country’s wealth distribution, according to a January working paper from University of California at Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman.

America’s rich frequently pay lower taxes, use their money to influence public policy and do not have to choose between paying medical bills and paying their rent. They also don’t suffer the indignity of having strangers comment on the groceries they purchase with SNAP benefits, as describes in her memoir, “Maid.” Add to all this another benefit of wealth, according to a new study from the Government Accountability Office: a longer lifespan.

Even as life expectancy in general is on the rise, it “has not increased uniformly across all income groups, and people who have lower incomes tend to have shorter lives than those with higher incomes,” the report reveals.

Both poor and middle-class Americans are less likely than the wealthy to live into their 70s and 80s, the GAO found. More than 75% of the wealthiest Americans who were in their 50s in 1991 were still alive in their 70s in 2014. By contrast, less than half of the poorest 20% of 50-somethings surveyed were alive by the same year.

The GAO report attributes this discrepancy to multiple factors, including a large gap in retirement savings and a lack of assets like homes to draw on to help offset unexpected costs for lower-income Americans. This causes a dependence on Social Security benefits to pay bills of all kinds, including medical bills.

The GAO report’s results echo previous studies on the relationship between wealth and lifespan in America. A 2016 study by economists from Stanford, Harvard and McKinsey and Co, among others, found that “In the United States between 2001 and 2014, higher income was associated with greater longevity, and differences in life expectancy across income groups increased over time.” Low-income residents in wealthier areas, however, tended to live longer than residents of uniformly poor communities, with a difference of up to 15 years for men, and up to ten for women.

A University of Washington study from 2017 found the gap could vary by up to 20 years depending on the region of the United States.

“Over time, the top fifth of the income distribution is really becoming a lot wealthier — and so much of the health and wealth gains in America are going toward the top,” Harold Pollack, a health care expert at the University of Chicago who is not affiliated with the report told the Post. He called those disparities “a failure of social policy.”

Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., commissioned the GAO report in 2016, The Washington Post explains, after meeting with residents of MacDowell County, W.Va., where, Sanders aides tell the Post, the average life expectancy is 64 years old.

“We are in a crisis never before seen in a rich, industrialized democracy,” Sanders said in a statement. “For three straight years, overall life expectancy in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world has been in decline.” He adds, “If we do not urgently act to solve the economic distress of millions of Americans, a whole generation will be condemned to early death.”

Read the entire GAO report here.

Judge Reinstates Nationwide Halt on Trump Asylum Policy Plan

OAKLAND, Calif. — A U.S. judge in California on Monday reinstated a nationwide halt on the Trump administration’s plan to prevent most migrants from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar ruled in Oakland that an injunction blocking the administration’s policy from taking effect should apply nationwide.

Tigar blocked the policy in July after a lawsuit by groups that help asylum seekers. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals limited the impact of Tigar’s injunction to states within the area overseen by the appeals court.

That meant the policy was blocked in the border states of California and Arizona but not in New Mexico and Texas.

In his ruling, Tigar stressed a “need to maintain uniform immigration policy” and found that nonprofit organizations such as Al Otro Lado don’t know where asylum seekers who enter the U.S. will end up living and making their case to remain in the country.

“The court recognized there is grave danger facing asylum-seekers along the entire stretch of the southern border,” Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.

Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, criticized the ruling at a White House briefing.

“I’m frustrated at the unprecedented judicial activism that we have experienced every single time that this administration comes up with what we believe is a legal rule or policy that we really believe that will address this crisis, we end up getting enjoined,” he said. “It’s very, very frustrating.”

The courts have halted some of Trump’s key policy shifts on immigration, including an earlier version of an asylum ban. The president has prevailed on several fronts after initial legal setbacks, for example, when the Supreme Court recently lifted a freeze on using Pentagon money to build border walls.

The rules issued by the Trump administration in July apply to most migrants who pass through another country before reaching the United States. They target tens of thousands of Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty who cross Mexico each month to seek asylum and would affect asylum seekers from Africa, Asia and South America who arrive regularly at the southern border.

The shift reversed decades of U.S. policy in what Trump administration officials said was an attempt to close the gap between an initial asylum screening that most people pass and a final decision on asylum that most people do not win.

U.S. law allows refugees to request asylum when they get to the U.S. regardless of how they arrive or cross. The crucial exception is for those who have come through a country considered to be “safe,” but the law is vague on how a country is determined to be safe. It says pursuant to a bilateral or multilateral agreement.

People are generally eligible for asylum in the U.S. if they fear returning to their home country because they would be persecuted based on race, religion, nationality or membership in a particular social group.

The Border Patrol apprehended about 50,000 people at the southern border in August, a 30 percent drop in arrests from July amid summer heat and an aggressive crackdown on both sides of the border to deter migrants.

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Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.