President Donald Trump signed an executive order on preexisting medical conditions Thursday, amid a global pandemic and growing uncertainty about the future of protections guaranteed by the Obama-era health law his administration is still trying to overturn.In a visit to swing state North Carolina, the president sketched out what aides called a “vision” for quality health care at affordable prices, with lower prescription drug costs, more consumer choice and greater transparency. The president also signed another executive order to try to end surprise medical bills.But while the Trump administration has made some progress on its health care goals, the sweeping changes he promised as a candidate in 2016 have eluded him. Democrats are warning Trump would turn back the clock if given another four years in the White House, and they are promising coverage for all and lower drug prices.Legislation unlikelyThe clock has all but run out in Congress for major legislation on lowering drug costs or ending surprise bills, much less replacing the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.Bill-signing ceremonies on prescription drugs and medical charges were once seen as achievable goals for Trump before the election. No longer.Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said one of Trump’s executive orders would declare it the policy of the U.S. government to protect people with preexisting conditions, even if the ACA is declared unconstitutional. However, such protections are already the law, and Trump would have to go to Congress to cement a new policy.On surprise billing, Azar said the president’s order would direct him to work with Congress on legislation, and if there is no progress, move ahead with regulatory action. However, despite widespread support among lawmakers for ending surprise bills, the administration has been unable to forge a compromise that steers around determined lobbying by a slew of affected interest groups.Health care consultant and commentator Robert Laszewski said he was particularly puzzled by Trump’s order on preexisting conditions.”For more than 20 years we debated ways to protect people from preexisting conditions limitations,” said Laszewski. Former President Barack Obama’s landmark legislation finally established protections, he said.How will it work?”So, after 20 years of national public policy debate and hard-fought congressional and presidential approval, how does Trump conclude he can restore these protections, should the Republican Supreme Court suit overturn them, with a simple executive order?”Health care represents a major piece of unfinished business for Trump.Prescription drug inflation has stabilized when generics are factored in, but the dramatic price rollbacks he once teased have not materialized.And the number of uninsured Americans had started edging up even before job losses in the economic shutdown to try to contain the coronavirus pandemic. Various studies have tried to estimate the additional coverage losses this year, but the most authoritative government statistics have a lengthy time lag. Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation said his best guess was “several million.”Meanwhile, Trump is pressing the Supreme Court to invalidate the entire Obama health law, which provides coverage to more than 20 million people and protects Americans with medical problems from insurance discrimination. The case will be argued a week after Election Day.The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has added another layer of uncertainty. Without Ginsburg, there is no longer a majority of five justices who previously had voted to uphold the ACA.Democrats’ messagingDemocrats, unable to slow the Republican march to Senate confirmation of a replacement for Ginsburg, are ramping up their election-year health care messaging. It is a strategy that helped them win the House in 2018. Former Vice President Joe Biden has said he wants to expand the Obama law and add a new public program as an option.A recent Kaiser Foundation poll found Biden had an edge over Trump among registered voters as the candidate with the better approach to making sure everyone has access to health care and insurance, 52% to 40%. The gap narrowed for lowering costs of health care: 48% named Biden, while 42% picked Trump. The scramble to deliver concrete accomplishments on health care comes as Trump is chafing under criticism that he never created a Republican alternative to Obamacare with 40 days to go before the election.Trump has repeatedly insisted his plan is coming.”We’re signing a health care plan within two weeks,” Trump said in a July 19 interview. He told reporters in August that it would be introduced “hopefully, prior to the end of the month.”During a televised town hall earlier this month in Pennsylvania, Trump again insisted he had a plan — but refused to share its details or explain why he waited more than three years to unveil it.”I have it all ready, and it’s a much better plan for you,” he said.
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Day: September 24, 2020
The space weather forecasts for the sun could threaten how this report is both broadcast and watched. The next crew of the International Space Station moves closer to launch, and an asteroid the size of a school bus just missed hitting the Earth. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Helsinki Airport is getting creative when it comes to operating safely in the age of COVID-19. Beginning this week, travelers arriving at Finland’s busiest international airport will have the opportunity to take a voluntary coronavirus test that takes 10 seconds and is entirely painless — but it’s not the test that is unusual, rather, it’s who is conducting it.The new state-funded pilot program uses coronavirus-sniffing canines to detect the presence of the virus within 10 seconds with shocking accuracy. Preliminary results from the trial show that the dogs, who have been used previously to detect illnesses such as cancer and malaria, were able to identify the virus with nearly 100% accuracy.FILE – Sniffer dog Miina, being trained to detect the coronavirus from the arriving passengers’ samples, works in Helsinki Airport in Vantaa, Finland, Sept. 15, 2020.Many of the dogs were able to detect the coronavirus long before a patient developed symptoms, something even laboratory tests fail to do.After passengers arrive at Helsinki from abroad and have collected their luggage, they are invited to wipe their necks with a cloth to collect sweat samples that are then placed into an intake box. In a separate booth, a dog handler places the box alongside several cans containing various scents and the canine goes to work.Researchers have yet to identify what it is exactly the dogs sniff when they detect the virus, but a preliminary study published in June found there was “very high evidence” that the sweat odors of a COVID-19-positive person were different from those who do not have the virus. This is key, as dogs are able to detect the difference thanks to their sharp sense of smell.If the dog flags the sample as positive, the passenger is directed to the airport’s health center for a free PCR virus test.While there have been instances that an animal contracts the coronavirus, dogs do not seem to be easily infected. There is no evidence that dogs can pass the virus on to people or other animals.Sniffer dogs Valo, left, and E.T., who are trained to detect the coronavirus disease from the arriving passengers’ samples, sit next to their trainers at Helsinki Airport in Vantaa, Finland, Sept. 22, 2020.Scientists in other countries, such as France, Germany and Britain, are engaging in similar research, but Finland is the first country in Europe to put dogs to work to sniff out the coronavirus.Finnish researchers say that if the pilot program proves to be effective, dogs could be used to quickly and efficiently screen visitors in spaces such as retirement homes or hospitals to help avoid unnecessary quarantines for health care workers.Representatives from the University of Helsinki, who are conducting the trial, said Finland would need between 700 and 1,000 specially trained coronavirus-sniffing dogs in order to cover schools, malls and retirement homes. For broader coverage, even more trained animals— and their trainers— would be required.
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Scientists at the U.S. space agency NASA say a small asteroid – roughly the size of a bus – passed close to Earth on Thursday, flying just 22,000 kilometers above the surface, within the orbit of geostationary satellites that ring the planet. While the proximity to Earth might raise alarm, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California said even if the asteroid had entered the earth’s atmosphere, it almost certainly would have broken up and become a bright meteor.The asteroid, known as 2020 SW, is about five to ten meters wide and was first discovered on September 18 by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona. NASA Plans to Land First Woman on the Moon in 2024Lunar landing will be America’s first since 1972NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) — part of the JPL — then did follow-up observations and confirmed its orbital trajectory, ruling out any chance of impact.CNEOS director Paul Chodas says an object this size, this close to earth, is not uncommon. He says, “In fact, asteroids of this size impact our atmosphere at an average rate of about once every year or two.”After passing the Earth, the asteroid will continue its journey around the Sun, not returning to Earth’s vicinity until 2041, when NASA says it will make a much more distant flyby.The space agency says they believe there are over 100 million small asteroids like 2020 SW, but they are hard to discover unless they get very close to Earth.In 2005, Congress assigned NASA the goal of finding 90 percent of the near-Earth asteroids that are about 140 meters or larger in size. These larger asteroids pose a much greater threat if they were to impact, and they can be detected much farther away from Earth, because they’re simply much brighter than the small ones. Chodas says NASA’s asteroid surveys are getting better all the time, and the agency now expects to find asteroids the size of 2020 SW a few days before they come near Earth.
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Sir Harold Evans, the charismatic publisher, author and muckraker who was a bold-faced name for decades for exposing wrongdoing in 1960s London to publishing such 1990s best-sellers as “Primary Colors,” has died, his wife said Thursday. He was 92.
His wife, fellow author-publisher Tina Brown, said he died Wednesday in New York of congestive heart failure.
A vision of British erudition and sass, Evans was a high-profile go-getter, starting in the 1960s as an editor of the Northern Echo and the Sunday Times of London and continuing into the 1990s as president of Random House. Married since 1981 to Brown, their union was a paradigm of media clout and A-list access.
A defender of literature and print journalism well into the digital age, Evans was one of the all-time newspaper editors, startling British society with revelations of espionage, corporate wrongdoing and government scandal. In the U.S., he published such attention-getters as the mysterious political novel “Primary Colors” and memoirs by such unlikely authors as Manuel Noriega and Marlon Brando.
He was knighted by his native Britain in 2004 for his contributions to journalism.
He held his own, and more, with the world’s elite, but was mindful of his working class background: a locomotive driver’s son, born in Lancashire, English, on June 28, 1928. As a teen, he was evacuated to Wales during World War II. After serving in the Royal Air Force, he studied politics and economics at Durham University and received a master’s in foreign policy.
His drive to report and expose dated back to his teens, when he discovered that newspapers had wildly romanticized the Battle of Dunkirk between German and British soldiers.
“A newspaper is an argument on the way to a deadline,” he once wrote. He was just 16 when he got his first journalism job, at a local newspaper in Lancashire, and after graduating from college he became an assistant editor at the Manchester Evening News. In his early 30s, he was hired to edit the Daily Echo and began attracting national attention with crusades such as government funding for cancer smear tests for women.
He had yet to turn 40 when he became editor of the Sunday Times, where he reigned and rebelled for 14 years until he was pushed out by a new boss, Rupert Murdoch. Notable stories included publishing the diaries of former Labour Minister Richard Crossman; taking on the manufacturers of the drug Thalidomide, which caused birth defects in children; and revealing that Britain’s Kim Philby was a Soviet spy.
“There have been many times when I have found that what was presented as truth did not square with what I discovered as a reporter, or later as an editor, learned from good shoe-leather reporters,” he observed in “My Paper Chase,” published in 2009. “We all understand in an age of terrorism that refraining from exposing a lie may be necessary for the protection of innocents. But ‘national interest’ is an elastic concept that if stretched can snap with a sting.”
Meanwhile, the then-married Evans became infatuated with an irreverent blonde just out of Oxford, Tina Brown, and soon began a long-distance correspondence — he in London, she in New York — that grew intimate enough for Evans to “fall in love by post.” They were married in East Hampton, New York, in 1981. The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee was best man, Nora Ephron was among the guests.
With Brown, Evans had two children, adding to the two children he had with his first wife.
Their garden apartment on Manhattan’s exclusive Sutton Place became a mini-media dynasty: He the champion of justice, rogues and belles lettres, she the award-winning provocateur and chronicler of the famous — as head of Tatler in England, then Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and as author of a best-selling book about Princess Diana.
Evans emigrated to the U.S. in 1984, initially serving as editorial director of U.S. News & World Report, and was hired six years later by Random House. He published William Styron’s best-selling account of his near-suicidal depression, “Darkness Visible,” and winked at Washington with “Primary Colors,” a roman a clef about then-candidate Bill Clinton that was published anonymously and set off a capitol guessing game, ended when The Washington Post unmasked magazine correspondent Joe Klein.
Evans had a friendly synergist at The New Yorker, where Brown serialized works by Monica Crowley, Edward Jay Epstein and other Random House authors. A special beneficiary was Jeffrey Toobin, a court reporter for The New Yorker who received a Random House deal for a book on the O.J. Simpson trial that was duly excerpted in Brown’s magazine.
Evans took on memoirs by the respected — Colin Powell — as well as the disgraced: Clinton advisor and alleged call girl client Dick Morris. He visited Noriega’s jail cell in pursuit of a memoir by the deposed Panamanian dictator. In 1994, he risked $40,000 for a book by a community organizer and law school graduate, a bargain for what became former President Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father.”
Evan’s more notable follies included a disparaged, Random House-generated list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century, for which judges acknowledged they had no ideal how the books were ranked, and Brando’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me.”
As Evans recalled in “My Paper Chase,” he met with Brando in California, first for dinner at a restaurant where the ever-suspicious actor accused Evans of working for the CIA. Then they were back at Brando’s Beverly Hills mansion, where Brando advocated for Native Americans and intimated that he had sex with Jacqueline Kennedy at the White House.
After a follow-up meeting the next afternoon — they played chess, Brando recited Shakespeare — the actor signed on, wrote what Evans found a “highly readable” memoir. He then subverted it by kissing CNN’s Larry King on the lips, “stopping the book dead in its tracks,” Evans recalled.
Evans left Random House in 1997 to take over as editorial director and vice president of Morton B. Zuckerman’s many publications, including U.S. News & World Report and The Atlantic, but stepped down in 2000 to devote more time to speeches and books.
More recently, he served as a contributing editor to U.S. News and editor at large for the magazine The Week. In 2011, he became an editor-at-large for Reuters. His guidebook for writers, “Do I Make Myself Clear?”, was published in 2017.
“I wrote the book because I thought I had to speak up for clarity,” he told The Daily Beast at the time. “When I go into a cafe in the morning for breakfast and I’m reading the paper, I’m editing. I can’t help it. I can’t stop. I still go through the paper and mark it up as I read. It’s a compulsion, actually.”
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U.S. pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson has begun late-stage human trials of a single-dose COVID-19 vaccine in the United States. Dr. Paul Stoffels, Johnson & Johnson’s chief scientific officer, told reporters Wednesday that 60,000 participants have begun receiving the vaccine across 215 locations in the United States, as well as internationally in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and South Africa. Dr. Stoffels said Johnson & Johnson moved into the late-stage trial after seeing positive results from its combined Phase 1 and 2 trials in the U.S. and Belgium. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is the fourth potential coronavirus vaccine undergoing large-scale Phase 3 testing in the United States, joining Moderna, AstraZeneca and a joint effort by Pfizer and German-based BioNTech. All four efforts are being developed under the Trump administration’s President Donald Trump walks past a U.S. map of reported coronavirus cases as he departs following a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news briefing at the White House in Washington, July 23, 2020.Speaking to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Dr. Stephen Hahn said those decisions will be made by career FDA scientists following the agency’s “rigorous expectations for safety and effectiveness.” The FDA and other federal scientific and regulatory agencies have seen their credibility diminished by constant administration efforts to revise their reports and guidelines to maintain Trump’s views about the nature of the pandemic. The United States is leading the world in both the number of total COVID-19 cases with over 6.9 million, and fatalities, at almost 202,000. The United States and many other nations are experiencing a surge of new coronavirus cases, prompting many to reimpose a set of strict lockdowns first ordered at the outset of the pandemic. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday in a televised address that the nation’s four largest provinces have entered a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re on the brink of a Fall that could be much worse than the Spring,” Prime Minister Trudeau warned. Canada has seen an average of 1,123 new cases daily over the past week, compared with an average of 380 new cases a day in mid-August. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Thursday that the country is returning to a full lockdown effective Friday, and lasting for two weeks as its infection rate spirals out of control. Schools, entertainment venues and most businesses will be closed, while restaurants will be limited to delivering food. Residents will be required to stay within 500-1,000 meters of their homes, except for work and shopping for food and medicine, while outdoor gatherings will be strictly limited to 20 people.
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President Donald Trump met with nine Republican state attorneys general on Wednesday to discuss the fate of a legal immunity for internet companies after the Justice Department unveiled a legislative proposal aimed at reforming the same law. Trump met with attorneys general from Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and West Virginia. Also Wednesday, the Justice Department, which is probing Google for potential breaches of antitrust law, held a call with state attorneys general’s offices to preview a complaint to be filed against the search and advertising giant, perhaps as soon as next week, according to two sources familiar with the matter. It is normal for the department to seek support from state attorneys general when it files big lawsuits. Critics have accused Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., of breaking antitrust law by abusing its dominance of online advertising and its Android smartphone operating system as well as favoring its own businesses in search. The White House said the legal immunity discussion involved how the attorneys general can utilize existing legal recourses at the state level—in an effort to weaken the law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet companies from liability over content posted by users. After the meeting, Trump told reporters he expects to come to a conclusion on the issue of technology platforms within a short period. It was not immediately clear what conclusion he was referring to. He said his administration is watching the performance of tech platforms in the run-up to the Nov. 3 presidential election. “In recent years, a small group of powerful technology platforms have tightened their grip over commerce and communications in America,” Trump said. “Every year countless Americans are banned, blacklisted and silenced through arbitrary or malicious enforcement of ever-shifting rules,” he added. Trump, who himself frequently posts on Twitter, said Twitter routinely restricts expressions of conservative views. Earlier on Wednesday, the Justice Department unveiled a legislative proposal to reform Section 230. It followed through on Trump’s bid earlier this year to crack down on tech giants after Twitter Inc. placed warning labels on some of Trump’s tweets, saying they have included potentially misleading information about mail-in voting. The Justice Department’s proposal would need congressional approval and is not likely to see action until next year at the earliest. Unless the Republicans win control of the House of Representatives and maintain control of the Senate in the November elections, any bill would need Democratic support. The Justice Department proposal primarily states that when internet companies “willfully distribute illegal material or moderate content in bad faith, Section 230 should not shield them from the consequences of their actions.” It proposes a series of reforms to ensure internet companies are transparent about their decisions when removing content and when they should be held responsible for speech they modify. It also revises existing definitions of Section 230 with more concrete language that offers more guidance to users and courts. It also incentivizes online platforms to address illicit content and pushes for more clarity on federal civil enforcement actions. The Internet Association, which represents major internet companies including Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Google, said the Justice Department’s proposal would severely limit people’s ability to express themselves and have a safe experience online. The group’s deputy general counsel, Elizabeth Banker, said moderation efforts that remove misinformation, platform manipulation and cyberbullying would all result in lawsuits under the proposal.
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The United Nations and Britain will co-host a global climate summit on December 12, the fifth anniversary of the landmark Paris Agreement, the world body said Wednesday.The announcement came days after Chinese President Xi Jinping told the U.N. that the world’s largest greenhouse gas polluter would peak emissions in 2030 and attempt to go carbon neutral by 2060, a move hailed by environmentalists.”We have champions and solutions all around us, in every city, corporation and country,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.”But the climate emergency is fully upon us, and we have no time to waste. The answer to our existential crisis is swift, decisive, scaled-up action and solidarity among nations.”The world remains off-track to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, which scientists say is crucial to prevent runaway warming that would leave vast swaths of the planet inhospitable to life.”In light of this urgency, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson will co-host a landmark global event convening global leaders … to rally much greater climate action and ambition,” the statement said.Session on ThursdayThe two were to address the issue at a climate round-table meeting hosted by Guterres on Thursday.National governments will be invited to present more ambitious and high-quality climate plans at the summit, which would involve government leaders, as well as the private sector and civil society.According to the U.N., the December 12 summit is intended to increase momentum ahead of the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP 26) to be held in Glasgow in November 2021.Recent data show greenhouse gas concentrations reaching record levels, worsening extreme events such as unprecedented wildfires, hurricanes, droughts and floods.
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