Big Time News Blog: 05/05/20

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hospitalized with infection, court announces

05/05/20 5:36 PM

Trump says he might give federal coronavirus aid to states if they comply with his political demands

Trump has been sharply criticized for suggesting a quid pro quo between states and the federal government during a public-health crisis.

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Bangladesh eases some restrictions, extends lockdown to May 16

Bangladesh authorities said on Monday they will gradually open up more factories, as well as farms and logistics operations, as they try to diminish the economic impact of a coronavirus lockdown which they extended to May 16. The move followed a decision last week to reopen more than 2,000 garment factories that supply global brands, after a month-long shutdown. The official tally of confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus rose by 688 to surpass 10,000, the health ministry said.

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Why shut down his own coronavirus task force? Trump wants someone to blame if things get worse

Vice President Mike Pence says the cornavirus task force could end in early June. Why?

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Navy Ships Transit Through Barents Sea Near Russia for 1st Time Since Cold War

The operation was announced weeks after Russian aircraft were spotted flying near Alaska.

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Hannity Pleads With Anti-Lockdown Protesters He Praised: Please, No Rifles

In back-to-back segments on Monday night, Fox News star Sean Hannity—who has repeatedly cheered on anti-shutdown protests against coronavirus stay-at-home orders—pleaded with demonstrators to keep their rifles and tactical gear at home.Hundreds of protesters, many armed with long guns, swarmed Michigan’s Capitol building last Thursday to rail against the state’s continued shelter-in-place orders amid the pandemic. Images of gun-toting protesters storming and crowding the state house sparked bipartisan criticism, though President Donald Trump called them “very good people.”Speaking to frequent guest Dan Bongino on Monday evening, Hannity—who has recently gushed over the protests—groused that the sight of demonstrators packing rifles and dressed in military gear is a “distraction” to the real message of reopening the economy.No one is a “bigger defender” of the Second Amendment than he is, Hannity said, but still he blasted the demonstrators for adopting a “militia look,” claiming that it is “dangerous” and “puts the police at risk.”“No one should be attempting to intimidate officials,” Hannity added. “God forbid something happens—they are going to go after all of us law-abiding Second Amendment people.”After Bongino said he didn’t fully agree with the Fox host as “people are fed up,” Hannity snapped back that “nobody’s going to hear them” because they were showing force against law enforcement and government officials. Bongino relented somewhat, saying he felt that the “liberal media” would try to paint the armed protesters as a “crazed bunch of lunatics.” At the same time, he insisted they were standing up for the Constitution and Bill of Rights, prompting Hannity again to denounce the optics of it all.“This is a distraction, though,” the pro-Trump host said. “I’m never going to take anyone’s rights. But this is a distraction.”Later in the program, he posed the same question to Fox News contributors Tammy Bruce and Mike Huckabee, asking them both if they felt the armed protesters created a “tough environment where nobody can hear you.”“I agree,” Huckabee responded. “Just because there’s some things we can do that doesn’t mean we should do.”“I wish I said that,” Hannity said.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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The US and Sweden may have approached the coronavirus differently, but they could both end up with high death rates

Sweden avoided a lockdown entirely, while states across the US have relied on stay-at-home orders to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

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Students at 25 universities sue for refunds after campuses close due to coronavirus

“It’s just not the same experience I would be getting if I was at the campus," said Grainger Rickenbaker, who filed a lawsuit against Drexel University.

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Woman killed by alligator in SC was doing homeowner's nails

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Trump gives up on virus fight to focus on economic recovery – and re-election

With Covid-19 deaths set to almost double this month, the president is putting the stock market before lives, critics say * Coronavirus – latest US updates * Coronavirus – latest global updates * See all our coronavirus coverageDonald Trump is effectively abandoning a public health strategy for the coronavirus pandemic and showing “clear willingness to trade lives for the Dow Jones”, critics say.A leaked internal White House report predicts the daily death toll from the virus will reach about 3,000 on 1 June, almost double the current tally of about 1,750, the New York Times revealed on Monday.Yet at the same time, Trump has scrapped daily coronavirus task force briefings and marginalized his medical experts in favour of economic officials flooding the airwaves to urge states to reopen for business – even amid rising infection rates.On Tuesday morning, before boarding Air Force One to visit a medical mask-making facility in Arizona for his first long trip since late March when the outbreak escalated in the US, Trump weighed a predicted surge in deaths against economic revival.“There is no great win, one way or the other, but I will tell you where there is a win, we are going to build a country, I did it once, two months ago we had the best economy in the history of the world, but we are going to do it again and that’s what we’re starting … it’s going to happen pretty fast.”The top US public health expert on the White House coronavirus task force, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned in a CNN interview the previous evening that there will be a “rebound” of new coronavirus cases in the US if the country rushes towards a “premature” reopening of society and business.“How many deaths and how much suffering are you willing to accept to get back to what you want to be some form of normality sooner rather than later?” he asked.And on Tuesday morning New York governor Andrew Cuomo warned against what he called a life or death “trade-off” when planning how and when to lift restrictions.“The faster we reopen the lower the economic costs, but the higher the human costs because the more lives lost. That, my friends, is the decision we are really making,” Cuomo said at his daily briefing.Critics are now sharply questioning the Trump administration approach to what Fauci called “a very difficult choice” that weighs a death toll against economic catastrophe.“They’ve decided in a very utilitarian kind of way that the political damage from a collapsed economy is greater than the political damage from losing as many as 90,000 more Americans just in June,” said Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist. “We’re witnessing the full-scale application of a kind of grisly realpolitik that is a clear willingness to trade lives for the Dow Jones.”In a sign of the shift, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie told CNN that increased deaths could be worth it if the economy reopens. “Of course, everybody wants to save every life they can – but the question is, towards what end, ultimately?” said Christie, a Republican who led Donald Trump’s presidential transition team in 2016. He added: “Are there ways that we can … thread the needle here to allow that there are going to be deaths, and there are going to be deaths no matter what?”When Trump declared a national emergency on 13 March, hopes rose that, for all the early downplaying and missed testing opportunities, the federal government was finally ready to attack the crisis with full force.Trump quickly branded himself a “wartime president” and, on 31 March, somberly braced Americans for a “very, very painful two weeks” ahead. His daily White House coronavirus taskforce briefings earned comparisons with campaign rallies, sometimes running for more than two hours, but also featured respected experts, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, armed with graphics and science.On 23 April, however, Trump pontificated about injecting disinfectant into coronavirus patients, prompting worldwide disbelief and derision. The briefings would never be the same again and over the past week have been replaced by set-piece events touting an economic comeback.On Sunday, tellingly, when Trump held a Fox News virtual town hall entitled “America Together: Returning to Work” at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, he was accompanied not by Birx and Fauci but Vice-President Mike Pence and the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.The president has been egged on by Fox News hosts who question whether the virus is any worse than the common flu, doubt the value of physical distancing and contend that the economic shutdown, which has cost at least 30m jobs, shows the cure is worse than the problem.On Saturday, a Washington Post report suggested Trump had been encouraged to pivot from the health crisis to the economic fightback by an internal White House analysis that suggested the daily death toll would peak in mid-April then fall away significantly. His “decision-making has been guided largely by his re-election prospects”, the Post added.But death toll predictions from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a model favored by the White House, were raised on Monday from 72,000 to 134,000 by the start of August because, it said, states are relaxing physical distancing too soon.Now, critics say, Trump seems ready to shrug at the losses as collateral damage, paying greater heed to his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, than Birx or Fauci.Wilson, author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, warned: “They may end up making the situation so bad with a second wave in the summer and a third wave in the fall that we end up with a much worse set of economic challenges than if we’d taken our bitter medicine and stayed shut down until we were through the early part of this crisis.”The grim news remains inescapable but the administration hopes its economic message will offer at least some counter-programming.Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary, said: “Almost by necessity, they are changing their strategy. They are pinning all of their hopes on getting the economy reopened, using their economic spokespeople and hoping that the American public has a high toleration for the death count moving up. It sounds terrible to say and even worse to do.“I think you won’t be seeing much from the scientists any more – the news is that bad – and they’re just going to turn a blind eye to the fact that what they’re doing is going to kill more people, because ultimately the way the president makes decisions is what’s good for his re-election.”

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Protesters Say the Police Use Social Distancing to Justify Crackdown

By BY AZI PAYBARAH from NYT New York https://ift.tt/3b4OETT

Risky Business? NASA and Tom Cruise Talk Movie Plans

By BY KENNETH CHANG from NYT Science https://ift.tt/2SEKmfs

New York Must Hold Democratic Presidential Primary, Judge Rules

By BY MATT STEVENS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2L7qOMA

Administration to Phase Out Coronavirus Task Force

By BY NOAH WEILAND, MAGGIE HABERMAN AND DAVID E. SANGER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2YDBMS0

Stop Pressuring Joe Biden on His Choice for Running Mate

By BY ELIZABETH DREW from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/2WwLALa

Zoom (Money) Bombing

By BY NICK CORASANITI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2zVCqQy

Trump Gives Phoenix Mask Factory Visit a Campaign Feel

By BY MICHAEL CROWLEY from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2YBZvSI

Virus Whistle-Blower Says Trump Administration Steered Contracts to Cronies

By BY SHERYL GAY STOLBERG from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2zgFzdj

Children Are Falling Ill With a Baffling Ailment Related to Covid-19

By BY JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN AND PAM BELLUCK from NYT New York https://ift.tt/2YE9Xt6

Trump’s Inspector General Pick Vows Independence From the White House

By BY ALAN RAPPEPORT from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3cbqitc

Senators Descend on Quiet Capitol, Sacrificing Pomp for Safety’s Sake

By BY EMILY COCHRANE from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/35BSvqv

EU aims to counter Chinese, Russian influence at Balkan summit

European Union (EU) leaders host a summit on Wednesday with their six Balkan counterparts whose praise for Chinese and Russian support during the coronavirus crisis has ruffled feathers in the bloc, officials and diplomats said.