🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️NewsHero | Study: Black applicants faced PPP discrimination; Ex-CDC say Trump undermines science; Biden wants $2 trillion for climate; Iran unifies to support protesters' death sentence
July 15, 2020 - Issue 139
Welcome to this edition of NewsHero for July 15, 2020.
Dear Heroes,
As shared Monday, it is with a heavy heart that I write to let you know that this will be our last week delivering NewsHero to your inboxes. It has been an honor and a privilege to bring this to you over these last 130+ issues, and we had high hopes of continuing to serve you in this way, however, we have not been able to bring enough subscribers into the fold to emerge from beta and to scale up our team or our product.
For those of you who have subscribed monthly, you will no longer be charged, and for those of you who have subscribed yearly and would like a refund, we will gladly provide you with one. Please just let us know in reply to this email. Any subscriber money that is not refunded and that is not needed in the cost of closing will be donated to the Committee to Protect Journalists (https://cpj.org/) to help support their vital and ongoing work.
I want to thank you for reading and for sharing. I’m sorry that those of you who took the challenge and made NewsHero your only daily read will have to go back to the way things were. I wish there were better options out there but I have yet to find one.
I want to thank all of the NewsHero team who put their hearts and souls into getting us out and into the world and I want to thank our investors and backers for giving us this chance.
I want to thank all of you, our readers, for your generous feedback and for coming along for the ride.
Wishing all the best to you and yours.
Benji, Co-founder NewsHero
Now, on with this issue, which also includes: Nancy Pelosi says she would ‘absolutely’ skip recess to reach a stimulus agreement; an artist in England has put up a statue of a Black Lives Matter protester where a toppled slave trader statue stood; Despite studies that show Black people are much more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement, Donald Trump claims more white people are killed by cops; Committee to Protect Journalists responds over a New York Times journalist refused a work permit in Hong Kong.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci on Capitol Hill in June. (Al Drago for The New York Times)
Former CDC Directors Accuse White House Of Undermining Science
Pelosi would ‘absolutely’ skip recess to reach stimulus agreement
🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️ - John M. Barry, the 4 former CDC directors, and everyone else with a science-first mindset
🦸♀️ - Adm. Brett Giroir, for not lying
🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️ - Nancy Pelosi, for putting American needs ahead of vacation time
🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️ - The big bird that bit Brazil’s Bolsonaro
John M. Barry, author of “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History,” has penned an op-ed for The New York Times with the to-the-point title, “The Pandemic Could Get Much, Much Worse. We Must Act Now.” Barry opens with: “When you mix science and politics, you get politics. With the coronavirus, the United States has proved politics hasn’t worked. If we are to fully reopen both the economy and schools safely—which can be done—we have to return to science.” If we could recommend only one COVID-related read today, it’d be this one.
Four former CDC directors blasted the Trump administration's “repeated efforts to subvert” agency guidelines related to reopening schools, accusing the White House in a potent Washington Post op-ed of undermining science with “partisan potshots,” Axios reports.
“We’re seeing the terrible effect of undermining the CDC play out in our population. Willful disregard for public health guidelines is, unsurprisingly, leading to a sharp rise in infections and deaths,” the authors wrote.
Adm. Brett Giroir, the Trump administration’s coronavirus testing czar, on Tuesday scoffed at Donald Trump’s suggestion that his own public health officials are liars, reports Politico.
“Look, we may occasionally make mistakes based on the information we have, but none of us lie. We are completely transparent with the American people,” Giroir told NBC’s “Today” show.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN on Tuesday she would “absolutely” be willing to forgo the House’s August recess to reach a deal for another relief package to help the country battle the health and economic crises caused by the coronavirus, Axios writes.
“The timetable is the timetable of the American people needing their unemployment insurance, their direct payments, their assistance for rent and mortgage foreclosure, forbearance in terms of that. And we need it for states and localities to be able to pay their employees who are meeting the needs of their constituents. And you know what, we need it to open the economy by testing, tracing, treating, isolating,” Pelosi said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci told The Atlantic today that efforts by certain White House officials to discredit him are “bizarre” and that it “ultimately hurts the president” to undermine a top health official in the middle of a pandemic, writes Axios.
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro on Monday was bitten by an ostrich-like bird he was trying to feed while entering into his second week of quarantine at the presidential palace, Fox News reports. Bolsonaro announced on July 7 that he tested positive for coronavirus. A rhea, a type of large, flightless bird native to South America reportedly pecked at Bolsonaro while he was trying to feed it.
Jen Reid poses in front of the new resin and steel statue portraying her, entitled “A Surge of Power (Jen Reid)” by artist Marc Quinn, after the statue was put up on the empty plinth of the toppled statue of a 17th century slave trader, in Bristol, England, Wednesday, July 15, 2020. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)
Artist Puts Up Statue Of Black Lives Matter Protester Where Toppled Slave Trader Stood
Study reveals Black applicants faced discrimination getting PPP loans
🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️ - Street Riders NYC
🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️ - The bar that pulled the KKK-looking beer, and the customers that called them on it
🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️ - Public health experts valuing the CDC
🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️ - Marc Quinn, Jen Reid
According to a study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an activist group that fights discrimination, white applicants for Paycheck Protection Program loans were treated better than Black applicants, Politico reports. The group found “different levels of encouragement to apply for loans, different products offered and different information provided by bank representatives.”
Street Riders NYC is an activist group leading mass bicycle protests. It started with a few bicyclists trying to protect Black Lives Matter marchers, NBC News reports. They’ve since become an influential group organizing rides weekend after weekend and flood New York's roads demanding change.
A bar in Connecticut has pulled a beer from its shelves after customers complained (aka pointed out) that the bottle looked like a Ku Klux Klan hood, reports Fox News. According to the beer’s brewer, the bottle was actually designed to denounce racism. The Yellow Belly beer is made by Swedish brewery Omnipollo and Buxton Brewery in the U.K., the Hartford Courant reports (please click this article so you can see the beer). Then follow it up with this.
New polling from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy shows a majority of voters support ten key police reform policies proposed by competing House and Senate bills that Congress failed to advance last month, reports Politico.
Public health experts say bypassing the CDC could damage the quality of data and the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, reports The Washington Post, regarding the Trump administration’s new data reporting protocol which, along with circumventing the CDC, suggests that sending the National Guard to hospitals might improve data collection.
An artist has put up a statue of a Black Lives Matter protester on the plinth in Bristol, England, formerly occupied by a statue of a slave trader, AP News reports. Marc Quinn created the life-size resin and steel likeness of Jen Reid, a protester photographed standing on the plinth after demonstrators pulled down the statue of a 17th-century slave trader and dumped it in Bristol’s harbor on June 7. The statue, titled “A Surge of Power (Jen Reid),” was put up before dawn today without approval from city officials, according to AP News.
This from Politico: Speaking with CBS News’ Catherine Herridge, Donald Trump claimed that more white people die at the hands of police than Black people and that the Confederate battle flag is a beloved symbol equal to the Black Lives Matter movement. In another interview that day, he said that a St. Louis couple who pointed guns at protesters had a right to do so.
Here’s Politico’s headline: “Trump focuses on white people killed by police, defends Confederate flag”
And fears that Trump may get re-elected are genuine.
It’s unbearably stupefying.
Here’s a report from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health that says: Black people are more than three times as likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter
You gaslighting narcissist. (it’s our last week)
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event, Tuesday, July 14, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. (Patrick Semansky)
Biden Announces Plan To Put $2 Trillion Toward Climate Change
Activists fume over Trump’s plan to weaken National Environmental Policy Act
🦸♀️ - The CIA for secret cyberattacks for U.S. security?
🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️ - Joe Biden, for making climate change a priority
🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️ - Environmental advocates
The CIA has conducted a series of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since Donald Trump signed a secret authorization, known as a presidential finding, in 2018, according to former U.S. officials, Yahoo News reports in an exclusive.
The “very aggressive” finding “gave the agency very specific authorities to really take the fight offensively to a handful of adversarial countries,” said a former U.S. government official, including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, which are named in the document.
Fifteen states along with Washington, D.C., Tuesday morning unveiled a new pact to get zero-emission trucks, vans, buses and other big vehicles out on the roads quicker.
“While trucks and buses only account for 4 percent of vehicles on the road, they are responsible for nearly 25 percent of total transportation sector greenhouse gas emissions,” the announcement says.
Joe Biden expanded his energy and climate plans Tuesday with a call for spending $2 trillion over four years on climate-friendly infrastructure, writes Axios.
“We can live up to our responsibilities, meet the challenges of a world at risk of a climate catastrophe, build more climate-resilient communities, put millions of skilled workers on the job, and make life markedly better and safer for the American people all at once and benefit the world in the process,” Biden said.
Speaking of Trump’s climate jabs, he’s once again making things suck more by weakening “one of the nation’s bedrock conservation laws, the National Environmental Policy Act, limiting public review of federal infrastructure projects to speed up the permitting of freeways, power plants and pipelines,” writes The New York Times.
“This may be the single biggest giveaway to polluters in the past 40 years,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. He accused the Trump administration of “turning back the clock to when rivers caught fire, our air was unbreathable and our most beloved wildlife was spiraling toward extinction.”
The Associated Press calls the act a foundational Nixon-era environmental law that is credited with ensuring decades of scrutiny of major projects and giving local communities a say.
“Soaring methane emissions threaten to put climate change goals out of reach,” according to two new studies, reports NBC News. “This completely overshoots our budget to stay below 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming,” said Benjamin Poulter, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Poulter is an author on both studies published Tuesday, one in the journal Earth System Science Data and the other in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Source: The New York Times
Iranian Protesters Sentenced To Death See Flood Of Support On Social Media
Rights groups call for repeal of sentences
🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️ - Anti-government protesters and their supporters
Using the hashtag #DontExecute, the people of Iran flooded social media following the Tuesday announcement of death sentences for three men who had taken part in anti-government protests in November, reports Newsweek.
Iranians from all walks of life—teachers, doctors, designers, cooks, actors, directors, artists, homemakers, bloggers, The New York Times said—have a message for the government: Stop the executions.
“I’m next, you’re next, we’re next,” read a meme that was widely shared online.
It was a rare moment of solidarity among Iranians of varying political views around a single issue, The Times writes. Human rights activists said it suggested that Iranians were seeking new ways to be heard.
Amnesty International posted a statement on Twitter on Tuesday calling on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to repeal the death sentences against the three protesters. “Their trial was unfair & they said they were subjected to torture through beatings, electric shocks and being hung upside down,” the human rights organization wrote.
Copies of The New York Times newspaper are displayed for sale at a news stand in Hong Kong on July 15, 2020. New York Times journalist Chris Buckley was recently denied a work permit to remain in the special administrative region. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
NYT Journalist Denied Work Permit In Hong Kong, CPJ Responds
US Navy does ‘sail-by’ in South China Sea
🦸♀️ - Donald Trump, for opposing Beijing’s national security law
🦸♀️🦸♀️ - The U.S. Navy, for watching the South China Sea
🦸♀️🦸♀️🦸♀️ - Chris Buckley + Committee to Protect Journalists
Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he has signed a bill sanctioning Chinese officials over Beijing's national security law for Hong Kong, reports Axios. He also signed an executive order ending preferential treatment for Hong Kong.
“This law gives my administration powerful new tools to hold responsible the individuals and the entities involved in extinguishing Hong Kong’s freedom. ... Their freedom’s been taken away, their rights have been taken away, and with it goes Hong Kong, in my opinion, because it will no longer be able to compete with free markets,” Trump said.
You gaslighting narcissist. (Sorry, sometimes that thing goes off on its own)
China’s foreign ministry said today Beijing will impose retaliatory sanctions against U.S. individuals and entities, Reuters reports. “Hong Kong affairs are purely China’s internal affairs and no foreign country has the right to interfere,” the ministry said.
After the U.S. State Department called Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea and attempts at dominance unlawful, the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Ralph Johnson further challenged China with a sail-by operation Tuesday, Business Insider reports.
“This freedom of navigation operation upheld the rights, freedoms, and lawful uses of the sea recognized in international law by challenging the restrictions on innocent passage imposed by China, Vietnam and Taiwan,” the Navy said in a statement. “Unlawful and sweeping maritime claims in the South China Sea pose a serious threat to the freedom of the seas.”
In response to the Hong Kong Immigration Department’s denial of New York Times reporter Chris Buckley’s work permit, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement:
“Barring a New York Times journalist from working in Hong Kong violates the fundamental promise of press freedom given repeatedly to the Hong Kong people,” said Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “We urge Hong Kong immigration authorities to reverse this decision, which undermines the free flow of information critical to Hong Kong’s success.”
Four States Are Sharing Driver's License Info To Help Find Out Who's A Citizen - NPR
Trump Administration Strips C.D.C. of Control of Coronavirus Data - The New York Times
The second act of the COVID-19 tragedy - Corona Daily
Brazil’s government hid the data for Covid-19. Then volunteer developers got to work. - Rest of World
Timing of Carlson's vacation familiar to Fox News viewers - AP News
Mysterious 'Dirty Dancing' lake is filling up with water 12 years after it dried up - CNN
Kansas Republican Rep. Steve Watkins charged with voter fraud - Politico
Sources:
The Pandemic Could Get Much, Much Worse. We Must Act Now. - The New York Times
Brazil's President Bolsonaro bitten by ostrich-like bird during coronavirus quarantine: local media - Fox News
4 former CDC heads say Trump's undermining of agency puts lives at risk - Axios
Pelosi "absolutely" would skip August recess to reach coronavirus stimulus deal - Axios
‘None of us lie’: Coronavirus testing czar rejects Trump’s attacks on health officials - Politico
Anthony Fauci says White House effort to discredit him is "bizarre" - Axios
Meet Street Riders NYC, The Activist Group Leading Mass Bicycle Protests - NBC News
Bar pulls beer from sale after customer claims the bottle looks like a KKK hood - Fox News
Americans agree on police reforms that have divided Washington, new poll shows - Politico
Trump administration recommends the National Guard as an option to help hospitals report coronavirus data - The Washington Post
Trump focuses on whites killed by police, defends Confederate flag - Politico
Statue of Black protester replaces toppled UK slave trader - AP News
Black applicants faced discrimination in securing PPP loans, study finds - Politico
Black people more than three times as likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter - Harvard
Exclusive: Secret Trump order gives CIA more powers to launch cyberattacks - Yahoo News
States team up in push for electric heavy vehicles - Axios
Biden unveils $2 trillion clean energy and infrastructure plan - Axios
Trump looks to scale back environmental reviews for projects - AP News
Soaring methane emissions threaten to put climate change goals out of reach - NBC News
Trump Weakens Major Conservation Law to Speed Construction Permits - The New York Times
In Iran, Rare Protests (Online) Against Capital Punishment - The New York Times
Iran Throttles Internet After Anti-Execution Hashtag Goes Viral - Newsweek
Trump signs bill sanctioning China over Hong Kong security law - Axios
US warship challenges China in South China Sea after claims rejection - Business Insider
China Vows to Retaliate After Trump Signs Hong Kong Sanctions Bill - The New York Times
China vows retaliation after Trump ends preferential status for Hong Kong - Reuters
Hong Kong denies work permit to New York Times correspondent Chris Buckley - Committee to Protect Journalists