Chris Hedges's Blog, page 33

Payback: Trump Ousts Officials Who Testified in Impeachment Inquiry

WASHINGTON — Exacting swift punishment against those who crossed him, an emboldened President Donald Trump on Friday ousted two government officials who had delivered damaging testimony against him during his impeachment hearings. The president took retribution just two days after his acquittal by the Senate.

First came news that Trump had ousted Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, the decorated soldier and national security aide who played a central role in the Democrats’ impeachment case. He was escorted out of the White House complex Friday, according to his lawyer, who said he was asked to leave in retaliation for “telling the truth.”

Related Articles


[image error]







Top White House Aides Call Trump ‘Improper,’ ‘Unusual’



by








[image error]







Trump's Criminality Can Galvanize the Left



by








[image error]







Adam Schiff Accuses Trump of Witness Intimidation



by

“The truth has cost Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman his job, his career, and his privacy,” David Pressman, an attorney for Vindman, said in a statement. The Army said in a statement that Vindman and his twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, who also was asked to leave his job as a White House lawyer on Friday, had been reassigned to the Army.

Next came word that Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, also was out.

“I was advised today that the President intends to recall me effective immediately as United States Ambassador to the European Union,” Sondland said in a statement.

The White House had not been coy about whether Trump would retaliate against those he viewed as foes in the impeachment drama. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Thursday that Trump was glad it was over and “maybe people should pay for that.”

Sondland was a crucial witness in the House impeachment inquiry, telling investigators that “Everyone was in the loop” on Trump’s desire to press Ukraine for politically charged investigations. He told lawmakers how he came to understand that there was a “quid pro quo” connecting a desired White House visit for Ukraine’s leader and an announcement that the country would conduct the investigations the president wanted.

Alexander Vindman’s lawyer issued a one-page statement that accused Trump of taking revenge on his client.

“He did what any member of our military is charged with doing every day: he followed orders, he obeyed his oath, and he served his country, even when doing so was fraught with danger and personal peril,” Pressman said. “And for that, the most powerful man in the world — buoyed by the silent, the pliable, and the complicit — has decided to exact revenge.”

The White House did not respond to Pressman’s accusation.

“We do not comment on personnel matters,” said John Ullyot, spokesman for the National Security Council, the foreign policy arm of the White House where Vindman was an expert on Ukraine.

Vindman’s status had been uncertain since he testified that he didn’t think it was “proper” for Trump to “demand that a foreign government investigate” former Vice President Joe Biden and his son’s dealings with the energy company Burisma in Ukraine. Vindman’s ouster, however, seemed imminent after Trump mocked him Thursday during his post-acquittal celebration with Republican supporters in the East Room and said Friday that he was not happy with him.

“You think I’m supposed to be happy with him?” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. “I’m not. … They are going to be making that decision.”

Vindman, a 20-year Army veteran, wore his uniform full of medals, including a purple heart, when he appeared late last year for what turned out to be a testy televised impeachment hearing. Trump supporters raised questions about the immigrant’s allegiance to the United States — his parents fled the Soviet Union when he was a child —and noted that he had received offers to work for the government of Ukraine, offers Vindman said he swiftly dismissed.

“I am an American,” he stated emphatically.

Trump backers cheered Vindman’s removal, while Democrats were aghast.

“The White House is running a two for one special today on deep state leakers,” Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, wrote on Twitter.

A Twitter account used by the president’s reelection campaign, @TrumpWarRoom, claimed Vindman leaked information to the whistleblower whose complaint about Trump’s call ignited the investigation, and “colluded with Democrats to start the partisan impeachment coup.”

Former Trump NSC official Tim Morrison testified that others had brought concerns that Vindman may have leaked something. Vindman, in his own congressional testimony, denied leaking any information.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the firing was another example of how the “White House runs away from the truth.”

“Lt. Col. Vindman lived up to his oath to protect and defend our Constitution,” Schumer said in a statement. “This action is not a sign of strength. It only shows President Trump’s weakness.”

Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, recalled how Vindman said in testimony before the House impeachment panel that he had reassured his worried father that he would be “fine for telling the truth.”

“It’s appalling that this administration may prove him wrong,” Clinton said in a tweet.

At last fall’s hearing, when the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, addressed him as “Mr. Vindman,” the Iraq War veteran replied, “Ranking member, it’s Lt. Col. Vindman please.”

Defense Secretary Mark Esper was asked what the Pentagon would do to ensure that Vindman faces no retribution. “We protect all of our service members from retribution or anything like that,” Esper said. “We’ve already addressed that in policy and other means.”

Alexander Vindman is scheduled to enter a military college in Washington, D.C., this summer, and his brother is to be assigned to the Army General Counsel’s Office, according to two officials who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Pressman said Vindman was among a handful of men and women who courageously “put their faith in country ahead of fear” but have “paid a price.”

“There is no question in the mind of any American why this man’s job is over, why this country now has one less soldier serving it at the White House,” Pressman said. “Lt. Col. Vindman was asked to leave for telling the truth. His honor, his commitment to right, frightened the powerful.”

___

AP writers Nancy Benac, Zeke Miller, Eric Tucker and Bob Burns contributed to this report.

Roger Kahn, Elegant ‘Boys of Summer’ Author, Dies at 92

MAMARONECK, N.Y. — Roger Kahn, the writer who wove memoir and baseball and touched millions of readers through his romantic account of the Brooklyn Dodgers in “The Boys of Summer,” has died. He was 92.

He died Thursday at a nursing facility in Mamaroneck, a Westchester County suburb, son Gordon Kahn said.

“Roger Kahn loved the game and earned a place in the pantheon of baseball literature long ago. He will be missed, but his words will live on,” Major League Baseball said in a statement.

The author of 20 books and hundreds of articles, Kahn was best known for the 1972 best-seller that looked at his relationship with his father through their shared love of the Dodgers, an object of nostalgia for the many fans who mourned the team’s move to Los Angeles after the 1957 season.

“At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams,” Kahn wrote.

“The Boys of Summer” was a story of lost youth, right down to its title, later borrowed for a hit Don Henley song about a man longing for his past. Kahn’s book moved back and forth between the early 1950s, when he covered the Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune, and 20 years later, when some were ailing (Jackie Robinson), embittered (Carl Furillo) or in a wheelchair (Roy Campanella).

The book was an instant hit, although Kahn was criticized for sentimentalizing his story.

“Here is a book that succeeded for me despite almost everything about it,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a late book critic for The New York Times.

Retired Dodgers broadcasting great Vin Scully knew Kahn well from their days with the team — Kahn was a beat writer covering the club, and the same age as Scully.

“You couldn’t travel with them without getting emotionally involved. Roger captured that familial spirit of the players in those days,” Scully told The Associated Press on Friday. “The feeling in Brooklyn was always us against the world — the world would be the lordly pinstripers in the Bronx and almost lordly Giants in Manhattan.”

Scully said Kahn singularly distilled the essence of what it was like to be a Brooklyn player and fan of the team.

“He got it right,” Scully said. “Every year in Brooklyn it was wait till next year. It was only right that in all their years they wound up winning only one World Series and then left.”

Among those featured in the book was Carl Erskine, a star pitcher for those Dodgers.

“I turned 93 in December and for a lot of us who played with Brooklyn then and were in that book, I wouldn’t say it gave us eternal life, but it certainly enhanced our careers,” Erskine told the AP from his home in Anderson, Indiana.

Erskine said he and Kahn bonded over their love for poetry. That once came in particularly handy.

“It was still the early days of airplane travel for teams, and we were on one of those piston planes, flying over Pittsburgh on the way from Cincinnati back to New York,” Erskine recalled. “It was pretty bumpy, and were sitting next to each other. To calm our nerves, I started reciting a poem from Robert Service, it was ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee.’ That was able to distract us from the anxiety of that rough plane ride.”

Many years later, Erskine said they were together at a banquet in New York and Kahn mentioned he need to talk to the pitcher about something.

“So we went over to Toots Shor’s and he told me a sad story. He told me he was dry, that he was working on a book but couldn’t finish it and didn’t know whether anyone would read it,” Erskine said.

Hearing what the book was about — it was “The Boys of Summer” — Erskine spurred Kahn by invoking the name of a prominent New York newspaper writer from the Brooklyn era.

“How’d you like to wake up and find out that Dick Young had written your story?” Erskine prodded.

Erskine said he and Kahn stayed in touch over time, from letters in past days to emails in more recent times.

Kahn began his prolific career in 1948 as a copy boy for the Tribune, and soon became a baseball writer, working under famed sports editor Stanley Woodward. He recalled Woodward as “a wonder” who once cured a writer of using the cliche “spine-tingling” by telling him to “go out in the bleachers and ask every one of those fans if his spine actually tingled.”

He started writing about the Dodgers in 1952, and by age 26 was the newspaper’s prominent sports reporter, earning a salary of $10,000, and also covering the city’s other teams, the Giants and the Yankees.

In 1956, he was named sports editor at Newsweek magazine, and served at the Saturday Evening Post from 1963 to 1969 as editor at large. He also wrote for Esquire, Time and Sports Illustrated.

Kahn’s sports writing often drew on social issues, particularly race. He wrote at length about Robinson and his struggles in breaking baseball’s color line, and the two formed a long friendship.

“By applauding Robinson, a man did not feel that he was taking a stand on school integration, or on open housing. But for an instant he had accepted Robinson simply as a hometown ball player,” Kahn once wrote. “To disregard color, even for an instant, is to step away from the old prejudices, the old hatred. That is not a path on which many double back.”

When Kahn was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2006, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig called him “an icon of our game.”

Among Kahn’s other sports books: 2004’s “October Men: Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, and the Yankees’ Miraculous Finish in 1978,” 1986’s “Joe and Marilyn: A Memory of Love,” and 1999’s “A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring ’20s.”

One book caused lasting embarrassment: Kahn collaborated with Pete Rose on the 1989 authorized autobiography “Pete Rose: My Story.” Rose, the major league’s all-time hits leader, had recently been barred from baseball for betting on games and the book featured his insistence that the allegations were untrue.

But Rose acknowledged years later, in a subsequent memoir, that he did gamble. Kahn said his “first reaction was to reach for the barf bag.”

“I regret I ever got involved in the book,” Kahn told the Los Angeles Times in 2007. “It turns out that Pete Rose was the Vietnam of ballplayers. He once told me he was the best ambassador baseball ever had. I’ve thought about that and wondered why we haven’t sent him to Iran.”

Kahn also wrote two novels and two nonfiction books not related to sports: 1968’s “The Passionate People: What it Means to be a Jew in America,” and the 1970’s “The Battle for Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel.” He maintained a friendship with the poet Robert Frost, whom he profiled in the Saturday Evening Post.

He later taught writing at several colleges and lectured at Yale, Princeton and Columbia. In 2004, he served a one-semester fellowship as the Ottaway Endowed Professor of Journalism at the State University of New York in New Paltz.

Kahn was born in Brooklyn in on Oct. 31, 1927, and inherited his love of baseball from his father, Gordon, who played third base for City College.

“There was nobody I enjoyed talking baseball with as much as this green-eyed, strong-armed, gentle, fierce, mustached, long-ball hitting, walking encyclopedia who was my father,” he wrote in his 1997 “Memories of Summer.”

Both of Kahn’s parents were teachers in Brooklyn. His mother, Olga, taught English literature and composition in high school. In recalling the influences on his life as a writer, Kahn mentioned how at bedtime his mother would tell him stories of Greek mythology.

Kahn lived in Stone Ridge in New York’s Hudson Valley.

In addition to his son, survivors include wife Katharine Kahn Johnson and daughter Alissa Kahn Keenan. Another son, Roger Laurence Kahn, died in 1987.

A funeral service is set for Monday in Katonah, New York.

___

Former Associated Press writer Jessica M. Pasko wrote this report. Contributing were AP Baseball Writer Ben Walker in New York, AP Sports Writer Beth Harris in Los Angeles and AP researcher Rhonda Shafner.

Bad Weather Moves into Eastern States; 5 Dead in South

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Extreme wind gusts, blowing snow and widespread flooding made traveling treacherous on Friday as a storm system moved into the northeastern United States, leaving rising water and at least five deaths in its wake across the South.

More than 400,000 homes and businesses were without power Friday after the National Weather Service warned of gusts up to 60 mph (97 kph) from Virginia into New England. Falling trees damaged homes and power lines in many places. North Carolina and Virginia, where hundreds of people had to be pulled from flooded homes, had the most customers without electricity, according to poweroutages.us.

With water levels were rising fast after up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain in just three days, the Tennessee Valley Authority said it began making controlled releases from some of its 49 dams in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and North Carolina. That could lead to more flooding downstream, so people who live near the water should be wary, said James Everett, senior manager of the utility’s river forecast center in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Creek water was still raging Friday in Alabama’s Buck’s Pocket State Park, where a person was seen inside a car as it disappeared under the surface two days earlier. Rangers walked for miles above the swollen creek but found no trace of the vehicle, so authorities sent up a state helicopter crew on Friday.

“The weather is better, but the water is not. The water is several feet higher than normal. It’s extremely high and fast.” Alabama Trooper Chuck Daniel told The Associated Press. “Until that water slows down, nobody’s going to get in that water.”

It took nearly three weeks last year to recover the body of an 18-year-old who was in a Jeep that got swept into the water in the same area.

The National Weather Service was using radar data and making damage assessments to confirm many reports of tornadoes touching down, including spots in Virginia and Maryland, near the nation’s capital, meteorologist Isha Renta told the AP. In the Tampa, Florida, area, tornadoes blew a tree onto a mobile home, trapping an elderly woman, and toppled a construction crane along interstate 275.

The dangerous winds formed the leading edge of a band of weather that stretched from Tennessee to Maine on Friday, blowing snow into northern states. As much as 4 inches (10 centimeters) fell overnight in Ohio, contributing to car accidents in the Akron area, and the Ohio Department of Transportation urged people to make room for nearly 1,300 state crews working to improve the icy conditions.

Up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) of snow was predicted in West Virginia, and Gov. Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency in Virginia, where he said more than 500 people had to be rescued from their homes as the waters rose.

Citing floods, rain, snow, power outages or all of the above, many school districts canceled classes in state after state.

Earlier, the weather destroyed mobile homes in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, caused mudslides in Tennessee and Kentucky and flooded communities that shoulder waterways across the Appalachian region.

Authorities confirmed five storm-related fatalities, in Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Anita Rembert was killed and her husband was injured, but their child and two grandchildren were unhurt as high winds destroyed two mobile homes near the town of Demopolis, Alabama, according to the county’s emergency management director, Kevin McKinney. They emerged to a scene littered with plywood, insulation, broken trees and twisted metal.

At least four other people died in vehicles that were hit by falling trees or lost control in heavy rain or floods. Authorities pleaded with motorists to avoid driving where they can’t see the pavement.

A driver died in South Carolina when a tree fell on an SUV near Fort Mill, Highway Patrol Master Trooper Gary Miller said. The driver’s name wasn’t immediately released.

In North Carolina’s Gaston County, Terry Roger Fisher was killed after his pickup truck hydroplaned in heavy rain, plunged down a 25-foot (8-meter) embankment and overturned in a creek, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol said, according to news outlets.

An unidentified man died and two others were injured Thursday when a car hydroplaned in Knoxville, Tennessee, and hit a truck, police said in a news release.

And in Tennessee, 36-year-old teacher Brooke Sampson was killed and four people were injured when a rain-soaked tree fell on a van carrying Sevierville city employees, officials said. The crash, though still under investigation, appeared to have been weather-related according to preliminary information, said Tennessee Highway Patrol spokesman Lt. Bill Miller.

There’s little room to relax after this storm blows through, because there’s more wild weather to come.

“We do expect another storm system to come along about midweek next week and bring heavy precipitation to some of the same areas that just saw it over the past 24 hours. So something to keep an eye on for next week,” meteorologist Greg Carbin of the Weather Prediction Center told the AP.

Schools around New York were closed as the storm moved through the state. Operators of the Thruway reduced the highway’s speed limit from 65 mph (105 kph) to 45 mph (72 kph) across more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) amid snowy, icy conditions.

In northern New York, an ice storm left more than 35,000 customers without power as falling tree limbs brought down power lines.

___

Associated Press staffers Jeff Martin in Atlanta; Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia.; Tamara Lush in Tampa, Florida; Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee; John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia; and Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio; contributed to this report.

Antarctica Temperatures Trigger Fear of Rapid Ice Melt

Climate scientists on Friday revealed the latest troubling new observation in Antarctica, illustrating the consequences of the rapid warming of the area brought on by the manmade climate crisis.

As The Guardian reported Friday, researchers stationed at the Esperanza research station at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula found that temperatures reached 64.9º Fahrenheit (18.3º Celsius)—the highest temperature logged since scientists began recording the continent’s temperature in 1961.

#Antártida | Nuevo récord de temperaturas

Syrian Advance Sends Hundreds of Thousands Fleeing in Idlib

BEIRUT — Turkey on Friday sent more troops and tanks to bolster its military presence in northwestern Syria, where President Bashar Assad’s forces have been advancing in a devastating, Russian-backed offensive that has sparked a massive wave of people fleeing in wet and blustery winter weather.

Syria’s Idlib region near the border with Turkey is the last rebel-held bastion in the war-ravaged country. The push by Assad’s forces into towns and villages in the province over the past months has uprooted more than a half-million people who fled the advancing troops. Many of them already have been displaced several times in the 8-year-old Syrian war.

Related Articles


[image error]







The Domino Effect of Trump's Syria Withdrawal



by








[image error]







Joint Turkish and Russian Patrols Begin in Syrian Region



by








[image error]







Trump Is Inviting Genocide in Northern Syria



by Juan Cole

The campaign also has angered Turkey, which backs the rebels, and brought the two countries’ troops into a rare, direct confrontation: At least eight Turkish troops and civilians and 13 Syrian soldiers have been killed.

As Syrian and Russian warplanes indiscriminately pounded hospitals, clinics and schools in the enclave, civilians packed their belongings in cars, taxis and pickup trucks. They streamed toward the Turkish border with few options left that are outside Syrian government control.

Many end up in tents or sheltering in abandoned buildings during rainy and windy weather, with temperatures hovering around freezing but predicted to fall over the weekend.

“If they stay, they run the risk of falling victim to the indiscriminate violence taking place in urban areas. If they leave, they have nowhere to go, “ said Lorenzo Redalié, head of the Aleppo office of the International Committee of the Red Cross. ”The shelters can’t accommodate everyone, and it is more and more challenging for humanitarians to reach them and meet their needs.”

The Syrian offensive appears aimed for now at securing a strategic highway in rebel-controlled territory, as opposed to an all-out campaign to retake the entire province, including the city of Idlib, the densely populated provincial capital.

Earlier this week, Syrian government troops took control of the former rebel town of Saraqeb, which is strategic because it sits on the intersection of two major highways. One of them leads to the capital, Damascus, to the north, and another connects to the country’s western and eastern regions.

Turkey, which backs the Syrian opposition and has been monitoring a cease-fire in the rebel enclave, has protested the government assault, calling it a violation of the truce it negotiated with Russia. In recent weeks, Ankara sent in troops and equipment to reinforce monitoring points it set up to observe a previous cease-fire, which has since crumbled, and also deployed forces around towns that are threatened by the Syrian advance.

Associated Press video showed a long line of armored vehicles and trucks, some carrying tanks, filing into rebel-controlled rural areas of the province. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, said the new troops were deployed west of the town of Saraqeb. It was fifth known deployment of new troops into Syria over the last week, according to the Observatory and other opposition news outlets.

‘’It is shocking that civilians continue to bear the brunt of hostilities between all parties to the conflict,” U.N. Human Rights spokeswoman Marta Hurtado said.

‘’It appears foreign powers are battling for territorial and political gains, while blatantly disregarding their obligation to protect civilians,” she told reporters in Geneva.

Idlib and nearby rural Aleppo are the last rebel-held areas in Syria. They are home to more than 3 million people, most of them already displaced by violence.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been on the move in recent weeks, fleeing toward areas closer to the Turkish border. Many of them are being housed in temporary shelters.

Of the 580,000 people who have been displaced since Dec. 1, UNICEF estimated that about 300,000 of them are children.

Also on Friday, Russia’s Defense Ministry accused Israel of nearly shooting down a Syrian passenger jet with 172 people aboard during a missile strike on the suburbs of Damascus a day earlier. A spokesman for the Israeli prime minister did not respond to a request for comment, and the AP was unable to verify the Russian allegation. Israel rarely acknowledges any strikes carried out in Syria.

Turkish officials say three Turkish observation posts are inside Syrian-controlled areas in Idlib. A security official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government rules, insisted the posts would not be evacuated.

Turkey’s Defense Ministry warned the army would respond “even more forcefully” to any attack on the observation posts, adding: “Our observation posts will continue carrying out duties.”

There was a brief respite Friday from the air campaign, residents and opposition activists said, with almost no bombardment reported. It was not clear whether that was due in part to a storm that battered the area with strong winds and heavy rain.

The violence has also raised tensions between Moscow and Ankara, which have been working together to secure cease-fires and political talks despite backing opposite sides of the conflict.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said a Russian delegation is scheduled to arrive in Ankara on Saturday to discuss the situation in Idlib. A meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin could follow, Cavusoglu said.

“We will do whatever is necessary to stop the human drama, the disaster” in Idlib, Cavusoglu said.

___

Associated Press Writer Jamey Keaten in Geneva, Daria Litvinova in Moscow and Zeina Karam in Beirut contributed.

The Census Is Not Safe From Donald Trump

When the Supreme Court ruled in June that the Trump administration could not place a citizenship question on the 2020 census, civil rights advocates breathed a sigh of relief.

Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, called the outcome “a victory for democracy.”

“The administration deliberately sought to increase the political power of whites at the expense of already underrepresented communities,” Johnson said in a statement.

Trump administration officials had claimed the question was needed in order to properly enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But just weeks before the ruling, documents uncovered by the daughter of the late GOP strategist Thomas B. Hofeller suggested a partisan motive for the question. By including it, Hofeller had determined, the administration could acquire detailed data that would aid in redrawing legislative districts “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”

But shortly after being rebuffed by the high court, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to mine their records to create a list of noncitizens anyway.

“We will utilize these vast federal databases to gain a full, complete and accurate count of the non-citizen population, including databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration,” Trump announced at a White House Rose Garden press conference in July. “We will leave no stone unturned.”

The same day, Trump issued an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to start collecting citizenship data – and ordering federal agencies to assist the bureau in this task.

In the months since, the bureau has been hard at work figuring out just how to build the president’s list. In a public meeting in September, the Census Bureau’s chief scientist, John Abowd, said a research program was underway at the bureau to meet the requirements of Trump’s executive order. And then he said something explosive: Even without a citizenship question, the bureau now can accurately identify whether a respondent is a citizen at least 90% of the time.

At that meeting of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, Abowd said the bureau would augment census data with information collected by the Social Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security and state governments to estimate citizenship.

And in an interview in November, Abowd confirmed that the bureau was on track to provide the citizenship data Trump has been seeking, with 90% accuracy.

“That’s the number we’ve been saying,” Abowd said. “That’s based on the 2010 census and on the assumption that the techniques we used in combination with the 2010 census will be just as effective on the 2020 census.”

What the citizenship data will be used for isn’t yet entirely clear. Abowd insisted that the list of noncitizens will be used only for statistical purposes and that individuals’ citizenship status will be kept secret. And Trump’s July 11 executive order states that the list will be used only “for making broad policy determinations” and “has nothing to do with enforcing immigration laws against particular individuals.”

Civil rights organizations and legal scholars say it’s unlikely that Trump would brazenly turn over the Census Bureau’s list to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Doing so would violate a federal law that specifically protects the privacy of census data. And to do so, he’d need the involvement of Census Bureau officials who have sworn an oath to protect the information they gather.

Still, advocates worry.

“I think it would be foolhardy to ever underestimate this administration’s willingness to violate the law,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is suing the administration over its collection of citizenship data.

As early as 2018, statisticians at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine warned that the administration’s drive to compile a list of citizens appeared to push boundaries.

An academies statistics committee wrote in August of that year that plans to place a citizenship question on the census were not just a “ ‘reinstatement’ of a citizenship question to the decennial census for statistical purposes but rather the intended use of census responses as seed data to construct an ongoing citizenship status registry, something never before proposed as a task for the Census Bureau.”

“If it’s really a registry,” Don Dillman, a member of the committee, told a reporter, “I don’t know where it would start – and where it would end.”

The White House did not respond to several requests for comment for this story.

There are also lingering questions about how secure the data the Census Bureau is collecting will be.

In 2016, the bureau organized an internal “hack,” challenging a team of its data scientists to reverse engineer census responses from the broad aggregate datasets that are made public after each count. By applying a mathematical concept called the database reconstruction theorem, the team took the limited public records and successfully identified individual respondents with an extraordinary level of accuracy.

Meanwhile, the 2020 census is the first census ever to give respondents the option to fill out the form online, which millions of Americans are expected to do. And the Census Bureau’s new IT platforms may themselves be susceptible to data breaches. During a 2018 test of the bureau’s new systems, the census website was hacked from Russian IP addresses, Reuters reported.

Census Bureau officials insist their data systems are secure and say the agency is implementing an additional, far more effective method of keeping any 2020 data that is released anonymous.

If the Trump administration is going to build a list of noncitizens, said Keshia Morris, census project manager at Common Cause, which advocated against the citizenship question, then “I feel the Census Bureau is probably the best place to do that, because of their confidentiality protections. But if their security isn’t good enough and anyone, including our enemies, can hack that data, then it’s definitely something to be concerned about.”

When the Census Bureau hacked itself

Census data is supposed to be sacrosanct: locked away, free from prying eyes and special interests.

But while this privacy guarantee applies to individual census responses, the same isn’t true for aggregate data. The Census Bureau long has published hundreds of summary tables of its data – a statistical portrait of who Americans are and where they live and work. The information is widely used by business, government and academia to inform and shape an array of policy decisions.

For decades, the Census Bureau has employed statistical techniques to mask this public data to protect respondents’ privacy. In 2010, the bureau applied a “swapping” technique – essentially switching out information about some households that are at high risk of being individually identified for others within the same geographic area. For example, in 2010, as The New York Times reported, the bureau swapped out some data about a couple who were the sole residents of Liberty Island, which houses the Statue of Liberty. In order to protect the couple’s privacy, the bureau switched some of the couple’s answers with responses from another couple elsewhere in the state who shared similar characteristics.

Yet even before the 2010 census, some experts had warned that these summary tables could be used to reverse engineer the original individual census responses. Applying the database reconstruction theorem, summary databases could be combined with other publicly available information to reconstruct underlying personal data.

In response to these security concerns, Abowd in 2016 assigned a team of data scientists to see if they could hack the 2010 census in this way.

The results of this internal “attack” were eye-opening. The team was able to accurately reconstruct the census responses for individuals’ age, sex, race, ethnicity and census block for almost half of the U.S. population.

Alarmingly, the team also proved it could name names. By comparing results to personal information collected in a commercially available database, the team was able to correctly identify the names of about 17% of the total population, or about 52 million people.

Hackers might have gone further, bureau officials acknowledged.

“This attack that we simulated is really just the tip of a very large iceberg,” Census Bureau statistician Philip Leclerc told a meeting at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine last year.

Robert Groves, who led the Census Bureau from 2009 to 2012, stressed that at the time of the 2010 census, the bureau was taking all the privacy measures it thought was necessary. It wasn’t until years later that he and others realized how susceptible the public data tables were to reconstruction.

“In retrospect, we were releasing more data than we probably should have,” Groves told Reveal.

A privacy panacea?

For the 2020 census, the bureau has embraced a new strategy for protecting its public data from hacks: a technique called differential privacy.

According to Harvard University computer scientist Cynthia Dwork, it’s a method of masking or camouflaging large amounts of data by creating a “synthetic” version of the data that’s been collected. That allows the findings and patterns of the information to be shared without the underlying data being published anywhere – and therefore vulnerable to being reconstructed.

Dwork, who helped develop the technique, describes differential privacy as “provably future-proof,” meaning it’s immune even to hacking techniques that haven’t been devised yet.

Abowd has echoed this “future-proof” claim at public meetings and in his interview with Reveal.

“The future-proof nature of differential privacy basically assumes infinite computing power and infinite knowledge,” Abowd told Reveal. “Suppose that you knew every bit in the confidential data except one. No amount of future computing will help you to get any closer to that one bit.”

Abowd said by email that differential privacy will be used to protect all the information the bureau collects, including the sensitive citizenship data. “The modern disclosure avoidance system that we have adopted for the 2020 Census, called differential privacy, will ensure that publications, even block-level publications, cannot be used for enforcement activities aimed at individuals, including immigration enforcement,” Abowd wrote.

Kobbi Nissim, a computer science professor at Georgetown University and an expert on database security issues, was more cautious.

“I’m one of the inventors of differential privacy, and I would say this is the best guarantee we have now, but I would not claim that it’s a panacea,” he said. “I think that anybody who is claiming that any measure of privacy protection is a panacea is short-sighted.”

Meanwhile, the Census Bureau faces another fundamental threat: straight-up hacking of the underlying data itself.

In its December report, Reuters found that an overcomplicated rollout of new technology has left the Census Bureau’s computer networks open to this risk. Hackers working from computers with Russian IP addresses attempted to access census data during a test run of the census website in 2018.

Census Bureau officials insist that the threats Reuters identified are overblown and that the sensitive data that will be collected from millions of Americans online will remain safe.

But given that the Census Bureau is for the first time collating perhaps the most sensitive data of all, citizenship data, not everyone is convinced.

“This is the kind of thing that you’d like to have a decade of experimentation with,” said Groves, the former Census Bureau director. “There is no zero risk. That’s just impossible, and that’s our problem.”

Hiring Surges in January as Americans Flood Into Job Market

WASHINGTON — Hiring jumped last month as U.S. employers added a robust 225,000 jobs, bolstering an economy that faces threats from China’s viral outbreak, an ongoing trade war and struggles at Boeing.

The Labor Department also said Friday that a half-million people streamed into the job market in January, though not all of them found jobs. That influx meant that more people were counted as unemployed, and it boosted the jobless rate to 3.6% from a half-century low of 3.5% in December.

Related Articles


[image error]







Corporate Media's Twisted Idea of a 'Strong Economy'



by








[image error]







Trump’s Rosy Economic Outlook Is a Big Lie



by Sonali Kolhatkar








[image error]







The ‘Private Governments’ That Subjugate U.S. Workers



by Chris Hedges

The government’s monthly jobs report signaled that businesses remain confident enough to keep hiring, with the pace of job growth accelerating from a year ago. Solid consumer spending is offsetting drags from the trade war and declining business investment.

The job gains also give President Donald Trump more evidence for his argument that the economy is flourishing under his watch. The Democratic contenders vying to oppose him, who will debate Friday night in New Hampshire, have embraced a counter-argument: That the economy’s benefits are disproportionately benefiting wealthier Americans.

Economists cautioned that a large chunk of January’s job growth reflected temporary increases from unseasonably warm weather. Construction firms, hotels, and restaurants, which benefit from better outdoor conditions, accounted for about one-third of last month’s gains.

Still, taken as a whole, Friday’s job growth reflects an economy that shows continued strength 11-plus years into a record-long expansion.

“While favorable weather conditions likely flattered the headline figures in today’s employment report, the key takeaway is that jobs growth continues to run at a solid pace,” said Neil Dutta, head of economics at Renaissance Macro Research.

January’s jobs report doesn’t appear to reflect any economic damage from the coronavirus, which has sickened thousands in China, closed stores and factories there and led many international businesses to suspend operations involving China. The virus’ impact likely came too late in the month to affect Friday’s jobs data.

Nor did Boeing’s decision to halt production of its troubled 737 MAX appear to have much impact on last month’s hiring gain. But the repercussions could begin to restrain job growth in the coming months.

Despite the brisk pace of hiring in January, hourly pay is up just 3.1% from a year earlier, below a peak of 3.5% last summer, though still above the inflation rate.

The public’s confidence that jobs are plentiful is helping persuade more people outside the workforce to begin looking for one. The proportion of Americans either with jobs or actively looking for one rose to 63.4%, the highest since June 2013.

Friday’s report also included, for the first time, data on same-sex couples who were included in broader figures on married people. The overall unemployment rate for married men was 1.7% in January and for married women 2.1%.

With fewer unemployed people to choose from, many companies are having to work harder to fill jobs. Tracy Graziani, co-owner of Graziani Multimedia with her husband, Lou, says she has struggled to find workers with web developer skills in her town of Mansfield, Ohio, population 47,000, an hour from Cleveland and Columbus.

So the couple have decided to develop their own web specialist, hiring a college student part time and training him. With their business growing, they have little choice. A strong economy typically enables more companies to train their workers.

“We hope when he graduates, he’ll stay on with us,” Tracy Graziani said, though many college grads move away.

Friday’s employment report included the government’s annual revisions of estimated job growth. The revisions showed that hiring was slower in 2018 and early last year than previously estimated. Employers added 2.3 million jobs in 2018, down from a previous estimate of 2.7 million.

That total gives Trump slightly less to boast about. Job growth in 2018 had previously topped 2016’s total. But the revised figures indicate that hiring in each of the first three years of Trump’s tenure trails the pace in the final three years of the Obama presidency.

The revisions also lowered February 2019’s job gain from 56,000 to just 1,000. That revision barely maintained the record-long streak of hiring that began after the Great Recession and has now reached 112 months.

The report may help keep the Federal Reserve on the sidelines in the coming months. With wage growth moderate, companies will face less pressure to raise wages in the coming months. That should keep inflation in check.

Factory hiring, however, will likely be slowed in coming months by Boeing’s decision to suspend production of its troubled aircraft, the 737 MAX. One Boeing supplier, Spirit Aerosystems, has said it will cut 2,800 jobs. Those layoffs occurred after the government’s survey for the January jobs report and will likely affect the hiring figures released next month.

Still, manufacturers shed jobs in January for the third time in four months, cutting 12,000 positions, mostly because of layoffs in auto plants. Companies as a whole have cut back sharply on their spending on plants and equipment, in part because of Trump’s trade conflicts. That pullback in spending may continue to hamper manufacturers.

In the meantime, consumers remain confident about the economy and are spending steadily, benefiting such industries as restaurants, hotels, and health care. A category that mostly includes hotels and restaurants added a robust 36,000 jobs. Health care providers added more than 47,000.

All told, economists have forecast that the economy will expand at a roughly 2% annual rate in the first three months of this year, roughly the same as its 2.1% annual growth in the final three months of last year.

Pete Buttigieg Blasted for Declaring Himself ‘Official’ Victor in Iowa

Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and CNN came under fire late Thursday for uncritically boosting the latest batch of Iowa Democratic caucus results, which—as documented by news outlets and observers—contained a number of glaring errors that the Iowa Democratic Party has yet to fix.

After CNN anchor Chris Cuomo introduced Buttigieg at a town hall at Saint Anselm College Thursday night as the “leader” of the Iowa caucuses with “100%” of precincts reported, the former mayor declared, “That’s fantastic news to hear that we won.”

“Sen. Sanders clearly had a great night, too, and I congratulate him and his supporters,” said Buttigieg, who later sent an email to supporters proclaiming that he “officially won the Iowa caucuses.”

This is CNN’s frontpage right now.

let’s start with this: Everyone on Twitter & the NYT website now knows that it’s not actually “100%.” That there’s at least one if not more precinct missing.

I mean, I could go on, but come on. pic.twitter.com/kYb8Enbdnf

— Taniel (@Taniel) February 7, 2020

But both Cuomo and Buttigieg failed during the town hall to note widespread concerns that the supposedly complete Iowa caucus results—which showed Buttigieg leading by one-tenth of a percentage point in state delegate equivalents (SDEs)—were riddled with obvious errors.

“I’m more embarrassed for CNN than for the [Iowa Democratic Party] tonight,” tweeted Daniel Nichanian, editor of The Appeal, who highlighted a slew of errors in the caucus results. “It’s one thing for a party to do PR (or whatever this is). It’s another thing for a media outlet to just take what’s effectively a party’s verifiably incorrect press release and broadcast it as if it’s gospel.”

CNN said it “plans to report a winner” as early as Friday afternoon if no candidate files an official request for a recount. “Unacceptable,” Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project said of CNN and Buttigieg’s handling of the results.

The Associated Press, on the other hand, announced Thursday night that because “there is evidence the party has not accurately tabulated some of its results, including those released late Thursday that the party reported as complete,” it is unable to declare a winner.

Despite the Iowa Democratic Party’s claim that 100% of the precinct results have been reported—an assertion echoed by many media outlets—one observer highlighted what appeared to be a completely missing precinct. The Des Moines Register‘s tally of the caucus results remains at 99.9% with 1764 of 1765 precincts reporting.

“On quick examination, all of my ‘favorite’—forgive me—possible/likely errors are still there,” New York Times reporter Nate Cohn tweeted in response to the new batch of results. The Times reported Thursday that “more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data, or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses.”

“I suspect I can say this without crossing the line into opinion: this is the worst conceived and executed electoral contest I have ever seen,” Cohn added.

The Sanders campaign, which declared victory in Iowa Thursday on the basis of its overwhelming and clear lead in the popular vote, issued a statement Thursday night highlighting more than a dozen “discrepancies in the state delegate equivalent data” that it sent to the Iowa Democratic Party.

“Tonight’s release of data by the Iowa Democratic Party confirms Sen. Bernie Sanders won the Iowa caucus,” Sanders’ senior adviser Jeff Weaver said. “We also feel confident that the discrepancies we’re providing tonight, in addition to those widely identified in the national media, mean that the SDE count will never be known with any kind of certainty.”

“Given the rules changes we fought for that required the release of the popular vote count,” said Weaver, “SDEs are now an antiquated and meaningless metric for deciding the winner of the Iowa caucus.”

The latest results showed Sanders with a more than 6,000-vote lead over Buttigieg in the first alignment and a more than 2,600-vote lead in the final alignment.

The discrepancies released by the Sanders campaign can be viewed below:

.@BernieSanders campaign declares victory in the Iowa Caucus, calls the SDE totals an “antiquated and meaningless metric” and says the count “will never be known with any kind of certainty.” Releases a bunch of discrepancies in precincts they think will boost Sanders: pic.twitter.com/QJ0ti6oWlQ

— Iowa Starting Line (@IAStartingLine) February 7, 2020

During his own town hall at Saint Anselm College Thursday night, just ahead of Buttigieg’s, the Vermont senator said “it is really sad that the Democratic Party of Iowa, if I may say so, screwed up the counting process quite so badly.”

“But at the end of the day,” Sanders added, “we ended up winning the popular vote.”

Sanders said he expects to end up with the same number of national pledged delegates in Iowa as Buttigieg and noted that he is now focused on winning the Feb. 11 New Hampshire primary.

“We’ve got enough of Iowa,” Sanders said to laughter from the audience. “Move on to New Hampshire.”

The Coronavirus Panic Exposes the Pathology of Nationalism

For years, scientists have warned about superbugs and other infectious agents borne out of industrial agricultural practices or unleashed by climate change. The fears of a new disease with no known cure that is spreading like wildfire have been the bases of plots for science fiction books and movies. We have had serious scares before: SARS, Ebola, avian flu. Today, we have a new mystery disease, the coronavirus strain innocuously dubbed 2019-nCoV. Misinformation about the virus and its impacts has been transmitted at lightning speed, fomenting fear, confusion and xenophobia. What we do know is that the virus is spreading fast. In the face of this danger, borders are being closed, flights are being canceled, travel is being banned and racism is rising.

Lawrence O. Gostin is a leading expert on infectious diseases and global health, and a public health professor at Georgetown University, where he directs the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. He also co-chairs the Lancet Commission on Global Health Law and served on two global commissions to report on the lessons learned from the 2015 West Africa Ebola epidemic. In a recent interview, he explained to me that very little is known about the coronavirus, but so far it appears “the death rate is relatively low — higher than flu but lower than SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] or MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome].” What we do know, he said, is that “it is a really dangerous global threat.”

Fears of this new disease have sparked many reported incidents of racism toward Chinese people and people perceived to be Chinese. Asian and Asian American students at U.S. universities are reporting heightened tensions, judgmental looks and outright xenophobia. The Los Angeles Times relayed one student’s account: “She thinks racist sentiment has been latent. ‘The coronavirus is bringing it to the surface.’”

Gostin calls such attacks “simply disgraceful,” “unconscionable” and “morally wrong.” From his years of experience studying the global impact of contagion, he said, “We often do this with infectious diseases. We blame the victim.”

How and where did the disease develop? Gostin explained that “the epicenter of the epidemic was an animal market in Wuhan, which Chinese authorities quickly disinfected and took down.” We know that it is quite common for these sort of infections to jump from animal species to humans; in fact, in 2002, the deadly SARS originated in southern China, eventually killing hundreds of people before it was stopped. SARS is thought to have originated in a species of bats and then it jumped to another species called civets. A market with such animals is thought to have been the cause of the disease passing to humans. But eliminating or strictly regulating these places is difficult. “Wet markets,” as they are called, are an integral part of Chinese culture and indeed, as an Indian they remind me of the markets in many Indian cities — a farmer’s market version of fresh meat and poultry vendors where consumers buy directly from producers.

It’s easy to blame China for the disease. Although Western governments are happy to do business with China and hinge the global economy on the availability of cheaply made consumer goods, politicians and media outlets are openly critical of its human rights abuses — while almost never mentioning Western mistreatment of immigrants or incarcerated people, and more for comparison. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just referred to China’s Communist Party as the “central threat of our times,” and focused his recent trip to Europe on warning allies of the dangers of China.

China is neither innocent nor is it the threat that Pompeo claims. It does bear responsibility for delaying the warning to global health authorities for several weeks that a new virus strain had developed. Gostin explained that “in that time, five million people left Wuhan city” as part of the traditional travel period for the Lunar New Year, leading to “a large delay and miscalculation” in gauging the scope of the outbreak and containing it.

Gostin is also critical of China’s lockdown of 50 million people, considered the “largest mass quarantine in history.” He explained, “[I]t’s unprecedented in the history of humankind,” unimaginable in any other nation than modern China. But more than unethical, Gostin believes it may not be effective because “the first rule of public health is to gain the trust of the population.” But the mass lockdown has reportedly generated fear and panic — a natural response for anyone feeling “trapped as guinea pigs in a zone of contagion.” Gostin explained that while trapped, people will be “cross-infecting one another,” and once the quarantine is lifted, they will leave. He worried that as a result of the desperation and anxiety created by the lockdown, there may be “emotional and mental health and stress-related illnesses” as well.

While China bears some blame, here in the U.S. there are deep concerns about whether President Donald Trump’s administration is adequately prepared for a pandemic. Under Trump’s leadership, former national security adviser John Bolton dissolved the National Security Council’s global health security team. That team, according to Mother Jones, was a “group of world-class infectious disease and public health experts,” and was “working on implementing a national biodefense strategy to coordinate agencies in order to make the United States more resilient to the threat of biowarfare and epidemics.” Trump has additionally lowered the budgeted amount for global health funding. Gostin is worried that “taking away all of this expertise and coordinating function at the White House and at the interagency level is a serious disservice to the United States because we are not prepared.” He pointed out that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also seen its funding for overseas operations severely curtailed. He lamented, “We don’t learn the lessons of history. We just lurch from complacency when there is no disease to panic when there is. That’s no way to be prepared.”

The development and spread of dangerous new diseases are all but inevitable as the past several years have demonstrated. Rather than scramble to respond to each new contagion as it occurs, Gostin suggests investing in “upstream solutions” rather than “downstream” ones, such as “preparedness and prevention, and robust health systems in place.” They are “cheaper and better for the public health,” he said. What he is suggesting is antithetical to the rising right-wing populism the world over that has put more faith in strong borders, nationalism and deregulation rather than in cooperation, solidarity and greater investments in safety nets.

As a global health expert, Gostin insisted the most important message he wanted to convey to those worried about the coronavirus is this: “The idea of America First, the nationalist populism, is against everything that we believe in in global health.” He explained, “We believe in mutual solidarity, we believe in strong institutions like the World Health Organization and the U.N. We believe in international cooperation. All of those things have been devalued by the Trump administration.”

Chinese Doctor Who Sounded the Alarm About Virus Outbreak Dies

BEIJING — A Chinese doctor who got in trouble with authorities in the communist country for sounding an early warning about the coronavirus outbreak died Friday after coming down with the illness.

The Wuhan Central Hospital said on its social media account that Dr. Li Wenliang, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist, was “unfortunately infected during the fight against the pneumonia epidemic of the new coronavirus infection.”

“We deeply regret and mourn this,” it added.

Li was reprimanded by local police for “spreading rumors” about the illness in late December, according to news reports. The outbreak, centered in Wuhan, has now infected over 28,200 people globally and killed more than 560, triggering travel restrictions and quarantines around the world and a crisis inside the country of 1.4 billion.

The World Health Organization tweeted: “We are deeply saddened by the passing of Dr Li Wenliang. We all need to celebrate work that he did” on the virus.

Within a half-hour of announcing earlier Friday that Li was in critical condition, the hospital received nearly 500,000 comments on its social media post, many of them from people hoping Li would pull through. One wrote: “We are not going to bed. We are here waiting for a miracle.”

Li was among a number of medical professionals in Wuhan who tried to warn colleagues and others when the government did not, The New York Times reported earlier this week. It said that after the mystery illness had stricken seven patients at a hospital, Li said of them in an online chat group Dec. 30: “Quarantined in the emergency department.”

Another participant in the chat responded by wondering, “Is SARS coming again?” — a reference to the 2002-03 viral outbreak that killed hundreds, the newspaper said.

Wuhan health officials summoned Li in the middle of the night to explain why he shared the information, and police later forced him to sign a statement admitting to “illegal behavior,” the Times said.

“If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier,” Li said in an interview in the Times via text messages, “I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency.”

In other developments in the outbreak:

Youngest Patient

A newborn in China became the youngest known person infected with the virus.

The baby was born Saturday in Wuhan and confirmed positive just 36 hours after birth, authorities said. But precisely how the child became infected was unclear.

“The baby was immediately separated from the mother after the birth and has been under artificial feeding. There was no close contact with the parents, yet it was diagnosed with the disease,” Zeng Lingkong, director of neonatal diseases at Wuhan Children’s Hospital, told Chinese TV.

Zeng said other infected mothers have given birth to babies who tested negative, so it is not yet known if the virus can be transmitted in the womb.

More Hospital Beds

China finished building a second new hospital Thursday to isolate and treat patients — a 1,500-bed center in Wuhan. Earlier this week, another rapidly constructed, 1,000-bed hospital in Wuhan with prefabricated wards and isolation rooms began taking patients.

Authorities also moved people with milder symptoms into makeshift hospitals at sports arenas, exhibition halls and other public spaces.

All together, more than 50 million people are under virtual quarantine in hard-hit Hubei province in an unprecedented — and unproven — bid to bring the outbreak under control.

In Hong Kong, hospital workers demanding a shutdown of the territory’s border with mainland China were on strike for a fourth day. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam announced a 14-day quarantine of all travelers entering the city from the mainland starting Saturday, but the government has refused to seal the border entirely.

Quarantined Cruise Ships

Two docked cruise ships with thousands of passengers and crew members remained under 14-day quarantines in Hong Kong and Japan.

Ten passengers confirmed to have the virus were escorted off the Diamond Princess at the port of Yokohama near Tokyo, after 10 others were taken off the previous day. About 3,700 people were confined aboard the ship.

“It’s going to be like a floating prison,” passenger David Abel lamented on Facebook. He had set out on a 50th wedding anniversary luxury cruise but found himself in his cabin, eating a “lettuce sandwich with some chicken inside.”

More than 3,600 people on the other quarantined ship, the World Dream, underwent screening after eight passengers were diagnosed with the virus.

NEW DRUG

Testing of a new antiviral drug was set to begin on a group of patients Thursday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The drug, Remdesivir, is made by U.S. biotech company Gilead Sciences.

Antivirals and other drugs can reduce the severity of an illness, but “so far, no antivirals have been proven effective” against the new virus, said Thanarak Plipat, deputy director-general of Thailand’s Disease Control Department in the Health Ministry. He said there are a lot of unknowns, “but we have a lot of hope as well.”

More Fallout

From Europe to Australia and the U.S., universities that host Chinese students or have study-abroad programs are scrambling to assess the risks, and some are canceling opportunities and prohibiting student travel.

Central banks in the Philippines and Thailand have cut their interest rates to fend off economic damage from the outbreak in China, the world’s second-biggest economy, with 1.4 billion people. China is a major source of tourists in Asia, and corporations around the world depend on its factories to supply products and its consumers to buy them.

The organizers of the Tokyo Olympics again sought to allay fears that the 2020 Games could be postponed or canceled because of the crisis.

___

Associated Press writers Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Elaine Kurtenbach in Bangkok contributed to this report.