22 July 20
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 22 July 20 It's Live on the HomePage Now: Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation!
Elizabeth Warren | To Fight the Pandemic, Here's My Must-Do List
 Elizabeth Warren, The New York Times Warren writes: "Americans stayed at home and sacrificed for months to flatten the curve and prevent the spread of the coronavirus. That gave us time to take the steps needed to address the pandemic - but President Trump squandered it....."
....refusing to issue national stay-at-home guidelines, failing to set up a national testing operation and fumbling production of personal protective equipment. Now, Congress must again act as this continues to spiral out of control.
Those who frame the debate as one of health versus economics are missing the point. It is not possible to fix the economy without first containing the virus. We need a bold, ambitious legislative response that does four things: brings the virus under control; gets our schools, child care centers, businesses, and state and local governments the resources they need; addresses the burdens on communities of color; and supports struggling families who don’t know when the next paycheck will come.
Here’s what the next federal response must include:
Start with funding the robust public health measures we know will work to address this crisis: ramped-up testing, a national contact-tracing program and supply-chain investments to resolve medical supply shortages. Without these measures, we will not be able to adequately reopen safely, more people will die and there will be no economic recovery.
READ MORE  Portland. (photo: Getty Images) ALSO SEE: Trump Threatens to Deploy Federal Agents to Chicago and Other US Cities Led by Democrats
As Trump Threatens Secret Police Deployment Nationwide, Democrats Debate Expanding Surveillance Powers and New Money for DHS
Ryan Grim, The Intercept Grim writes: "The rogue deployment of secret federal police forces in Portland, Oregon, has added a new complication to negotiations over reauthorizing the Trump administration's vast surveillance powers and appropriating new money for the Department of Homeland Security."
In March, a sweeping set of government authorities to monitor people in the United States expired, and Congress continues to debate what limits should be put on such powers before reauthorizing them. And the House is debating its next DHS funding bill, with the Congressional Progressive Caucus pushing leadership not to bring it up for a vote given Trump’s abuse of power and DHS agents’ role in a Portland arrest.
House Democratic leaders, however, are considering lumping in DHS funding with appropriations for the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services, making it more difficult for progressive Democrats to oppose. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said that the CPC is urging leadership either to not bring up the bill at all or to break it off from Labor-HHS and allow for a separate vote.
“What you’re seeing is this giant Trump administration machine deputize every arm of government to engage in their agenda at the expense of democracy and the Constitution, so there aren’t traditional boundaries anymore for any of those pieces of legislation,” Jayapal said. “Every argument is about, do you want to give more tools to the Trump administration to destroy our Constitution?”
But the debate over the government’s surveillance power is happening in a shroud of confusion, as lawmakers are unclear precisely what the intelligence community currently considers legal, given the classified nature of the operations. Leaked Republican talking points suggest the intelligence community is pushing for legal blessing of dragnet surveillance, and the ability to use the data caught up in those dragnets — not to buttress existing investigations with a warrant but to begin new ones.
The GOP talking points, first obtained by Gizmodo and passed out by the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggest that investigators could use “Internet data as a starting point” in launching an investigation. That’s a radical departure from what is understood to be legal and would allow the Department of Homeland Security to collect data on, for instance, every person who visited a website sympathetic to protests in Portland, then begin to surveil each of those people, hunting for a crime that could justify an arrest — an arrest that could then be carried out by unidentified federal troops driving unmarked vans.
The talking point most concerning to civil liberties advocates was built around a hypothetical case involving a bomb builder: “Without this other information to build a probable cause case, this amendment hamstrings the Government from pursuing the bomb-builder with the Internet data as a starting point.”
On Tuesday, Sens. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe demanding assurance that the government is no longer conducting surveillance under the expired authorities, and asking whether the government believes it has authority to conduct such surveillance absent the legislation. The letter includes a reference to an extra-legal mass data collection project Barr himself authorized within the Drug Enforcement Administration when he was serving as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush.
Because so much of the intelligence activity implicated by the legislation lies behind a veil of classification, lawmakers are left to rewrite the rules by piecing together clues. This leaked point is perhaps the most significant clue that the intelligence services are pursuing the ability to perform warrantless, dragnet searches — or are already doing so. Combined with the Trump administration’s willingness to deploy unmarked federal police forces against the will of state and local authorities, the push for expanded surveillance authority is alarming to civil liberties activists. “Secret surveillance cannot coexist with secret police in a free society. Both are inherently problematic and dangerous, but together the threat is immeasurable. It’s hard to escape that conclusion,” said Sean Vitka, senior policy counsel with the group Demand Progress, which is pushing to narrow the scope of the authorities.
The debate has played out in public between Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and an ally of the intel community, and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, who is a critic of mass surveillance and the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In the Senate, Wyden pushed an amendment, co-sponsored by Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., that would bar federal authorities from using a dragnet to collect search and browsing history. The amendment fell one vote short of the 60 needed to advance, but the fight for it isn’t over. Two senators who missed the vote, Patty Murray of Washington and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have said they’re supportive, and Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., may also be gettable on a new vote, as he said he voted no on the measure because he was told by Democratic House leaders that the amendment effectively did away with FISA, which is not true.
In any event, a companion amendment was introduced in the House, led by Reps. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio. Ahead of a vote in the Judiciary Committee in May, Chair Jerry Nadler abruptly canceled the hearing, amid concerns among backers of the bill that Lofgren may have had the votes to pass her amendments.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered Schiff and Lofgren to negotiate a way forward, and they reached a short-lived compromise that would bar such dragnet searches “of U.S. persons.” Lofgren told the New York Times that such language barred dragnet searches, as it is impossible to guarantee that such a search won’t gather intelligence on Americans. Based on that interpretation, Wyden endorsed the measure. But then Schiff told the New York Times that he interpreted the language differently, saying that as long as agents didn’t intentionally target Americans, incidental collection was OK. Following Schiff’s statement, Wyden took the unusual step of withdrawing his support. “It is now clear that there is no agreement with the House Intelligence Committee to enact true protections for Americans’ rights against dragnet collection of online activity, which is why I must oppose this amendment, along with the underlying bill, and urge the House to vote on the original Wyden-Daines amendment,” Wyden said.
Critical to understanding the legislation is the definition of a “U.S. person.” The National Security Agency is clear that the term does not apply to all people in the United States, but only to citizens and “an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence.” Recipients of DACA — the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — are not considered lawfully admitted, but rather are able to remain in the country with their deportation proceedings indefinitely deferred. Undocumented immigrants, too, would fall outside those protections, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only ones vulnerable. Intelligence agencies, under Schiff’s interpretation of the language, could legally target DACA recipients for warrantless dragnet surveillance, which would then make whatever data they also collected on American citizens the legal result of incidental collection. That secret data could be turned over to secret federal police, who could make arrests from unmarked vehicles.
Instead of resolving the conflict, the House voted to go to a conference committee to negotiate with the Senate, but the Senate has yet to do the same, as reformers believe their leverage increases each day the authorities continue to be expired.
On the funding side, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is pushing House leadership to vote on the DHS appropriations bill, having secured a reduction in the number of beds available for immigrant detention. But others in the caucus argued that the win is less than it appears, as authorities need fewer beds than before, having successfully deported so many from detention. The internal CHC vote was close and contentious, according to two members of Congress familiar with the drawn out deliberations, meaning that the caucus’ push for a vote is less than unified.
Either way, Congress is nearly certain to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government rather than independent appropriations bills, so the debate over funding is largely symbolic. Jayapal said that approving new money now for DHS is “adding insult to injury for immigrants across the country but also peaceful protesters against white supremacy.”
READ MORE Mike Pompeo. (photo: Getty Images)
US Orders China to Close Houston Consulate, Beijing Vows Retaliation
Marty Johnson, The Hill Johnson writes: "The U.S. has ordered that the Chinese government shut down its consulate in Houston, citing the need to protect American intellectual property." READ MORE  Photojournalists Nicole Hester, Matthew Hatcher and Seth Herald (who took this photo) were shot with rubber pellets by Detroit Police Cpl. Daniel Debono in an 'unprovoked' attack, according to prosecutors. Debono faces three counts of felonious assault. (photo: Nicole Hester/Seth Herald/AFP via Getty Images)
Detroit Officer Charged Over Journalists Being Shot With Rubber Pellets
Jason Slotkin, NPR Slotkin writes: "A Detroit police officer is facing charges over accusations that he fired rubber pellets at three photojournalists who were covering anti-racism protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd."
Cpl. Daniel Debono, 32, is charged with three counts of felonious assault for allegedly firing the nonlethal ordnance at MLive photographer Nicole Hester and independent photojournalists Seth Herald and Matthew Hatcher in the early morning hours of May 31.
A statement on Monday by Wayne County prosecutors said the photojournalists, who covered the protests and wore their press credentials, encountered Debono and two other officers after protests had largely died down for the night.
The three photographers were walking when they met Debono, who was dressed in riot gear and carrying his department-issued firearm and a weapon that fired the rubber pellets, prosecutors said. The three identified themselves as members of the press and held their hands up when he approached and they asked to cross the street. It was when they began to cross the street, prosecutors say, that Debono fired the rubber pellets in an "unprovoked" shooting.
All three photographers sustained multiple injuries, with Hester sustaining the most.
"The evidence shows that these three journalists were leaving the protest area and that there was almost no one else on the street where they were. They were a threat to no one. There are simply no explicable reasons why the alleged actions of this officer were taken," Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said in the statement.
The felonious assault charge carries a maximum penalty of four years, prosecutors note.
Claims and reports of excessive police violence have been frequent during protests that began with the police killing of George Floyd in May in Minneapolis. Alongside protester accounts, multiple journalists have also come forward saying they too had been targeted or arrested by police while covering protests.
Several journalists told NPR in June that they had been fired upon with rubber rounds, tear gas and pepper spray. In May, freelance photojournalist Linda Tirado said she had been blinded in her left eye likely by a rubber bullet that struck her face.
And in perhaps one of the more surreal moments captured recently on live TV, CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his crew were arrested on the air, while covering protests in Minneapolis.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which monitors aggressive actions against journalists in the U.S., has recorded some 241 attacks on journalists during protests, most of which were by law enforcement. At least 72 journalists have been arrested, the organization reports.
During an unrelated press conference on Monday, Detroit Police Chief James Craig said he had been alerted to the alleged attack by a news outlet that employed one of the photojournalists. Craig said the department launched an investigation and suspended Debono over the incident.
Craig said the investigation had been given to prosecutors for their review.
Craig added that "by and large," his department performed in a "spectacular manner" even as protests sometimes turned violent.
"Our officers have responded very appropriately, so this should not reflect, as an agency, that this one incident defines how we manage our protests," Craig said on Monday.
 The first patient enrolled in Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine trial receiving an injection at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore in May. (photo: University of Maryland School of Medicine/AP)
Pfizer Gets $1.95 Billion to Produce Coronavirus Vaccine by Year's End
Noah Weiland, The New York Times Excerpt: "The Trump administration on Wednesday announced a nearly $2 billion contract with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and a smaller German biotechnology company for up to 600 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine." Two pharmaceutical companies announced a nearly $2 billion contract for 600 million doses of a vaccine, with the first 100 million promised before the end of the year.
If the vaccine proves to be safe and effective in clinical trials, the companies say they could manufacture the first 100 million doses by December.
Under the arrangement, the federal government would obtain the first 100 million doses for $1.95 billion, with the rights to acquire up to 500 million more. Americans would receive the vaccine for free. Before it could be distributed, it would first need at least emergency approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Isarael arrives to chair the weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem, June 30. (photo: Getty Images)
Israel's Annexation Plan Is the Latest Stage in a Long History of Violent Dispossession
Greg Shupak, Jacobin Shupak writes: "Annexation would see Israel claim sovereignty over roughly 30 percent of the West Bank, including most of the Jordan Valley and more than 230 illegal Israeli settlements." READ MORE  A tree in a deforested area in the middle of the Amazon. Scientists are discovering a strong correlation between deforestation and disease outbreaks. (photo: Raphael Alves/AFP/Getty Images)
The Link Between Deforestation and Disease
Nathan Rott, NPR Rott writes: "Deforestation has gotten worse under the pandemic."
With the coronavirus occupying global attention, there's less regulation of logging and mining operations. It's worrisome news, because scientists are discovering a strong correlation between deforestation and disease outbreaks.
A 2017 paper linked recent forest loss to 25 Ebola outbreaks that have occurred since 1976.
NPR national correspondent Nathan Rott speaks with Short Wave reporter Emily Kwong about the challenges faced by tropical forests — environments rich in biodiversity. Human activity is fragmenting those habitats. How does that result in an increased risk of animals-borne diseases transmitting to humans? And what can be done to protect those forests?
You can read Nathan Rott's reporting on the link between deforestation and disease here.
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