Trump plans to name conservative activist Tom Fitton to court oversight agency

President Donald Trump intends to appoint the conservative activist Tom Fitton to a D.C. court oversight body with the power to remove judges in the district’s judiciary.

The White House announced Trump’s intention to name Fitton to the D.C. Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure on Friday afternoon. Fitton is the head of the conservative group Judicial Watch and has advocated the investigation of former Obama administration officials, including Hillary Clinton. He was also a fierce critic of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election.

The announcement was the most significant front-end action by the White House during a day consumed by the president’s health. Trump announced early Friday that he and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive for coronavirus, and he was transferred to Walter Reed Military Medical Center in the afternoon out of what the White House said was an “abundance of caution.“

Fitton has made a name for himself peddling misinformation on a number of current topics, including the scientific consensus on climate change. He has also called for the end of coronavirus safety precautions, such as mask wearing and working from home.

The commission is composed of two lay members, four attorneys and one federal judge. The president can appoint one of the members, who serves for a five-year term. The commission has the power to remove judges for misconduct or force judges into retirement if they become mentally or physically incapacitated.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/36wKyVZ
via 400 Since 1619

Flight attendant breaks down during final flight as employees furloughed

A flight attendant for American Airlines gave an emotional farewell speech to passengers onboard her final flight. 

Breaunna Ross, 29, was travelling from Jacksonville, Florida, to her home city of Dallas, when she lost her composure while making the routine landing announcement during her final shift on September 27.

“As all of you know, the airline industry has been impacted greatly by this global pandemic,” she told passengers while wearing a mask. A colleague filmed her speech and shared it on Facebook. 

“For myself and one other crew member on our flight today, this means we’ll be furloughed Oct. 1, and unfortunately, this is my last working flight before that day comes,” Ross continued. “I will never forget seeing your faces today. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the kindness shown on today’s flight.”

Read More: GOP Sen. Lee tests positive for COVID-19, recently met with SCOTUS nominee Barrett

Ross has been working for the company for 2.5 years. She joins the more than 32,000 employees who have been furloughed by American Airlines and United Airlines, after talks for a $25 billion coronavirus aid package failed in Washington, CNBC reports.

Flight attendants across the country this week give tearful goodbyes on their final flights as more than 40,000 airline employees are furloughed today. pic.twitter.com/WQk7YwwpVA

— Sam Sweeney (@SweeneyABC) October 1, 2020

American’s CEO Doug Parker told employees that the airline “will begin the difficult process of furloughing 19,000 of our hardworking and dedicated colleagues.”

In a message to staff, United said “We implore our elected leaders to reach a compromise, get a deal done now, and save jobs. The company will reportedly cut more than 13,000 jobs. 

“I am extremely sorry we have reached this outcome,” Parker wrote. “It is not what you all deserve. It is a privilege to advocate on behalf of the hardworking aviation professionals at American and throughout the industry, and you have my assurance that we will continue to do so in the days ahead.”

Parker said American will reverse 19,000 furloughs and recall workers if Washington provides federal aid for airlines.

Flight crew members are hitting up social media to share reactions to the furloughs. Ross’ video has more than 130,000 views on Facebook. 

“This job was an escape for me after being unhappy with my job after graduating college,” she said. “It was a job that awarded me many opportunities, a job that I fell in love with.”

In the clip, she also thanked her employer and co-workers.

Read More: Obama wishes Trump and first lady ‘best wishes’ after coronavirus diagnosis

“To my family at American Airlines, thank you for taking a chance on me two and a half short years ago,” Ross said. “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to see this big world. To my amazing crew, I wish each of you the best of luck. We were told in training to be like palm trees, and this is the perfect example: We may bend, but we never break.”

The airline industry has taken a hit amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis. American Airlines has reportedly lost $5 billion this year, while United Airlines lost $3.3 billion. Every airline has been negatively impacted by the pandemic and facing a grim financial future. 

“We are real people,” said Ross in the viral video. “I personally have no kids and am not married, but I know so many of my coworkers who are … Who just bought homes. Who have small children. Who have children in college they have to support. We are a strong group of people and I know everyone will get through this.”

Many passengers reportedly thanked Ross on their way off the plane. In a message on Facebook, she said an individual gave her a handwritten note claiming she inspired them donate to the Make A Wish foundation.

“I don’t know your name, but I know a child’s day will be made better because of you,” the note said.

Have you subscribed to theGrio’s podcast “Dear Culture”? Download our newest episodes now!

The post Flight attendant breaks down during final flight as employees furloughed appeared first on TheGrio.

from TheGrio https://ift.tt/3cVrDFn

Social media companies go into fire-alarm mode over Trump diagnosis

Social media companies scrambled within minutes of President Donald Trump’s shocking 1 a.m. tweet Friday announcing that he’d tested positive for the coronavirus, seeing it as a moment to show how far they’ve come in handling crises.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others got to work quickly, pulling together staff to predict what type of lies and rumors were likely to surface and how to deal with them — drawing on policies they’ve developed in recent months for pandemic and election misinformation.

But the social media giants are straining to make real-time judgment calls on borderline content, having to quickly figure out what counts as a conspiracy and what’s just speculation at a time in politics when anything seems possible. As they grapple with that task, voters could be inundated with a new wave of misinformation just weeks ahead of the election.

There are posts circulating, for example, that — without evidence — raise doubts about whether Trump is being honest about his diagnosis or that speculate that the episode is part of a plan for Trump to retreat before declaring war on his political enemies buried deep inside government.

The companies began moving nearly immediately after Trump’s tweet. YouTube started responding to searches for Trump and Covid with authoritative news videos from sources like CBS and the BBC “within minutes of their diagnosis being made public,” spokesperson Ivy Choi said. TikTok focused its so-called elections war room on tracking Trump’s diagnosis within 20 minutes of the tweet, according to spokesperson Jamie Favazza.

And Facebook, the world’s largest social network, stood up an ad hoc “operations center” — like the ones built around presidential debates and primary election contests — to tackle the Trump-Covid news well before the work day started in Washington, spokesperson Andy Stone said.

Some calls are easy, the companies say. Posts hoping President Trump will lose his life to the virus are banned under the major platforms’ restrictions on bullying or hateful conduct.

“Content that wishes, hopes or expresses a desire for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against an individual is against our rules,” Twitter said in a statement. Facebook and TikTok have similar policies.

For those that provided clearly false or misleading information, the platforms employed a technique they adopted in the aftermath of the disastrous 2016 presidential election: outsourcing the calling of balls and strikes to third party fact checkers.

On Friday, a widely circulated post said that military “Doomsday planes” were spotted on the east coast of the U.S. — put there to defend against attacks from foreign adversaries taking advantage of a supposedly incapacitated Trump. Facebook attached a “Missing Context” label to it, based on reports from fact checkers including The Associated Press.

Similarly, Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, put a “False Information” label on posts suggesting that “The Simpsons” animated television program once featured a cartoon Trump in a coffin, citing outside fact checkers.

Other content, the companies say, is more challenging, like posts arguing that Trump is using his diagnosis — perhaps falsely — to avoid his Oct. 15 debate with Joe Biden or to gin up sympathy before the November election.

Many such claims fall into a bucket that YouTube and others call “borderline content” — posts that toe right up against the line of what the platforms prohibit but don’t cross it.

Conspiracy theories pose a particular challenge for the platforms for many reasons, including that it can be difficult to disprove a negative and they often are cloaked in coded language that is meaningful only to their targeted audience.

In many cases, the sites respond by attempting to limit the spread of that sort of material, like by ranking it lower in search results, rather than getting rid of it altogether.

The companies are facing tough calls — sometimes where questionable posts are coming from high-profile accounts. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) tweeted Friday morning, “Remember: China gave this virus to our President @realDonaldTrump and First Lady @FLOTUS. WE MUST HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE.”

A Twitter spokesperson said that the tweet didn’t violate any Twitter rules and thus no action would be taken on it.

Asked about another eye-catching post — one circulating that said that Trump’s current quarantine is part of a plan, detailed by the group QAnon to hide away before launching battle against a supposed pedophile ring run by prominent Democrats — Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said that the post was going through Facebook’s third-party fact-checking process, adding that how long that took was up to the fact checkers.

In the meantime, said Stone, the post’s distribution has been reduced, including it ranking lower in Facebook’s algorithm-driven news feeds as it otherwise might. The major platforms argue that they’ve generally figured out how to push that sort of conspiracy thinking to the margins of their sites.

And some prominent social platforms said that they aren’t seeing any meaningful misinformation or questionable content pop up around the Trump diagnosis.

“We haven’t seen a ton of this content yet thankfully,” said TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza, pointing to the generally light vibe of the platform and the lack of traction there for political disinformation.

Many of the social media companies have been upbraided by critics for not taking more seriously the threat of disinformation ahead of the 2016 election, and for being slow to come to terms with threats to this election.

Facebook, for example, was widely criticized for taking months before deciding to add flags calling into question some of Trump’s posts that sowed doubt about mail-in voting and only moving in August to crack down on QAnon groups on the platform.

Graham Brookie, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said it’s too soon to judge how well the major platforms performed in the first 24 hours of the Trump diagnosis news because it typically takes days for disinformation to move from the Internet’s fringes to the mainstream.

But Brookie says the worry is the platforms retreat to their old playbook for handling bad political information. Said Brookie, “I would hope that their approach to public health misinformation is the standard that is applied, as opposed to their approach to political content,” which he called “reactive” and “backfooted.”

But one big advantage they had this time around: time zones. The companies said they were helped by the fact that they were getting the news of Trump’s tweet — sent around 10 p.m. California time — when much of the rest of the country was asleep. That allowed them to get a jump on preparations before much of the United States woke up.

The platforms are so massive and content moves so quickly, however, that the deluge can make getting ahead of misinformation a monumental task. Trump’s tweet announcing his diagnosis — his most popular tweet ever — was retweeted more that 894,000 times.

Mark Scott contributed to this report.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/3jqb3Qt
via 400 Since 1619

Warp Speed's focus on vaccines may have shortchanged antibody treatments

One of the drugs President Donald Trump was given soon after being diagnosed with the coronavirus is an experimental cocktail of monoclonal antibodies — a treatment that some infectious disease experts believe has been given short shrift by Trump’s own administration.

The White House’s Operation Warp Speed has thrown its weight and its money behind finding a coronavirus vaccine. That intense focus has come at the expense of the monoclonal antibodies, a potential treatment that could combat Covid-19 outbreaks before and after a safe and effective vaccine is widely available.

The monoclonal antibody treatments, which mimic antibodies the body makes naturally, show promise as both a therapy for people who fall ill with the coronavirus, like Trump, and possibly as a way of preventing Covid-19 infection in high-risk groups.

Trump got the treatment under a special access program offered by Regeneron. That drugmaker and Eli Lilly are the two furthest along in developing this type of drug.

The idea is to roll the treatments out more broadly under an FDA emergency authorization, and use them as a bridge to vaccination. Even if a vaccine is approved late this year, it will take months to get it to hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of people around the world.

But Warp Speed has so far spent less than $1 billion to support the development and manufacturing of three monoclonal antibody treatments, versus almost $10 billion on six vaccines. That choice may have slowed late-stage trials and manufacturing of the laboratory-made antibodies that fight Covid-19. And once monoclonal antibodies are approved, there may be shortages, said experts, including one of the drugmakers.

The manufacturing of antibody treatments, which are administered as infusions, is a complicated and costly process that requires specialized expertise and facilities. Time and funding to scale up production is of the essence.

Janet Woodcock, the long-time senior FDA official who is now head of therapeutics at Warp Speed, said in an interview that the government program does plan to invest in more monoclonal antibody treatments beyond the first trio. If the clinical trial results are strong, the government also will likely purchase doses and provide them to Americans at no cost, the same approach Warp Speed is taking with vaccines, she said.

The two candidate antibodies that are furthest along — from Regeneron and Eli Lilly — are being evaluated in late-stage trials as treatments in both outpatient and hospital settings. Researchers are also exploring whether they prevent infection in high-risk populations, like nursing homes and meatpacking plants.

Both companies have seen hiccups in enrolling people in their clinical trials, but early data is now beginning to surface. Neither company has yet published its data in a peer-reviewed journal.

Lilly in September released promising initial data showing its antibody treatment reduced virus levels in patients and lowered the rate of hospitalizations. Lilly CEO David Ricks said in an interview that the data could be enough to seek an emergency authorization from the FDA but he didn’t discuss the timing. Lilly will make more than 100,000 doses ready by the end of the year, but there will be shortages, he said.

Regeneron in late September also released promising data on its antibody cocktail. The higher dose of the treatment tested in the late-stage trial was administered to Trump on Friday after his Covid-19 diagnosis.

The early data on 275 people outside of the hospital showed how the treatment helped reduce viral loads and symptoms. But it’s unclear if that data will be enough for an emergency authorization because the FDA might want to wait for data from hospitalized patients, where it’s easier to administer the treatment, according to Geoffrey Porges, an analyst with the investment bank SVB Leerink.

If the infusion is provided in the hospital setting, it won’t be a problem, Woodcock confirmed.

But if monoclonal antibodies — mAbs, for shorthand — are administered on an outpatient basis, Warp Speed is still working carefully through different scenarios on where these infusions will take place. Warp Speed doesn’t want to mix centers administering cancer treatments with Covid-19 treatments, she noted. And they can’t be given in a setting like a retail pharmacy; it must be a more specialized center.

The FDA could issue emergency use authorizations for antibody treatments anywhere from a few weeks to a month or two from now, HHS Secretary Alex Azar said at a House committee hearing on Friday. But even with an EUA, there will be people diagnosed with Covid-19 who need access to antibody treatments that won’t be able to get them — either because of their high price tag or because the supplies are thin.

Regeneron CEO Len Schleifer has said that manufacturing capacity for monoclonal antibodies may not match potential need. Warp Speed provided Regeneron with about $450 million to make between 70,000 to 300,000 treatment doses, with the first coming before the end of the year.

More data from a late-stage Regeneron trial is expected before the end of the year, but lots of unknowns remain on how and where the antibody treatments will be administered and who will get them first.

“It’s fair to say that the vaccine has been prioritized, maybe with good reason. It’s also hard to say that the skew hasn’t had an impact” on antibody treatments, said Jacqueline Wolfrum, director of MIT’s Biomanufacturing Research Program.

Early delays in enrolling participants in Lilly and Regeneron trials raised concerns among experts that the federal government did not provide enough funding early on.

Although Regeneron now says it has enrolled 2,000 patients across five late-stage trials, early recruitment delays pushed Woodcock and NIH Director Francis Collins to send a letter to trial sites working on convalescent plasma trials to also prioritize the Regeneron treatment.

“I think we need to do some very serious soul searching after this is over,” Woodcock said regarding the state of U.S.-based Covid-19 clinical trials in general. “It’s like starvation in the midst of plenty,” she said, as competition for enrolling patients in different trials in academic medical centers is fierce, even as one thousand or more people are getting sick and dying on a daily basis and cannot access any trials.

Lilly, however, said that early funding was not a constraint for its clinical work. The company did not initially seek help from Warp Speed, according to Lilly Vice President Andrew Adams. But he said Lilly’s efforts to enroll patients in its late-stage trials have been hampered more by the peaks and troughs of the virus and the shifting locations of the virus over time.

To try to combat the troughs, one of Lilly’s late-stage mAb trials is using retrofitted RVs and trailer trucks to deploy their treatment quickly to people in nursing homes and assisted living facilities in different areas where the virus is spreading.

But for other antibody treatment developers that don’t have the financial strength of Lilly or Regeneron, the lack of early government support may have delayed more of these promising treatments.

“Manufacturers that do not have that funding will have to think very hard about how best to maximize their opportunity while not exposing themselves to undue risk of failure,” said Paul Barone, co-director of MIT’s Biomanufacturing Consortium. “While each company will make its own choices, you are more likely to make different decisions when others are covering the costs.”

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/2SiFg8g
via 400 Since 1619

Census Bureau says count will continue through end of October

The Census Bureau said Friday that its count will continue through Oct. 31, yielding after a back-and-forth battle with a federal judge in California.

Late last month, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ruled that the decennial count must continue, ordering that the schedule the Census Bureau's attempt to wrap up enumeration was inoperative due to the coronavirus pandemic, and counting should extend until the end of October.

Despite Koh’s ruling, the Bureau issued a brief statement on Monday saying that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross ordered the “target date” to “conclude 2020 Census self-response and field data collection operations” was Oct. 5.

Koh rejected the Bureau’s decision to cut the count off on Oct. 5, writing that the Bureau was disobeying her original order. She said the Census Bureau was “chaotic, dilatory, and incomplete” in following her original injunction, and issued a clarified injunction, directing the Bureau that it must continue its count through Oct. 31, and publicize its efforts to do so, including texting employees on Friday to inform them.

On Friday evening, a release from the Bureau said that it had messaged employees to say the count will go on. “As a result of court orders, the October 5, 2020 target date is not operative, and data collection operations will continue through October 31, 2020,” the message read. “Employees should continue to work diligently and enumerate as many people as possible. Contact your supervisor with any questions.”

The final schedule still remains in flux: The government has appealed Koh’s rulings, but a circuit court rejected a plea for a stay earlier in the week.

Like much of American life, the decennial count of every person in the country was thrown into disarray by the pandemic. The Census Bureau initially pleaded with Congress to extend deadlines for the count for 120 days.

The proposed deadlines would have pushed field collection until the end of October, with apportionment data — the population count used for determining the number and population of each state's congressional districts — being submitted to the president by April 30, 2021, instead of by year's end. Congress never granted the extension, and in early August, the Bureau officially announced it was reversing its request for an extension and would deliver apportionment data by the end of the year.

The shortened timeline worried experts both inside and outside the agency, who feared that a politically motivated acceleration could lead to a flawed count that determines billions of dollars of funding and how states are represented in the House of Representatives. Koh's ruling mandates that the Bureau follow the schedule the agency asked Congress for in light of the pandemic.

Simultaneously, there is other legal battles over a July memorandum issued by President Donald Trump, which looked to exclude undocumented immigrants from the appointment count. A separate panel of judges blocked that memorandum in September, which has also been appealed by the government to the Supreme Court.

It's not clear when apportionment data will ultimately be finalized, including whether it would occur before Jan. 20 of next year, the presidential inauguration, which could result in a change of administrations depending on the election results.

Earlier on Friday, the Bureau announced that over 99 percent of American households have been enumerated. However, several states are below that benchmark.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/3jp2s0E
via 400 Since 1619