| | |  | BY RENUKA RAYASAM | Presented by |  |
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| With help from Joanne Kenen and Myah Ward
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| QUICK DRAW — Andrew Yang portrayed attacks on him by rival candidates as playing into anti-Asian racism — tying broadsides against him in the New York City mayoral race to a spike in hate crimes in the city, as POLITICO’s Erin Durkin reported today. Yang stood with his wife, Evelyn, outside a Queens subway station where an Asian man was shoved onto the train tracks, and criticized a New York Daily News cartoon depicting him as a tourist as well as broader attacks questioning whether he is a true New Yorker. Earlier in the day, Evelyn Yang called the Daily News cartoon a “racist disfigurement” of her husband. POLITICO’s editorial cartoonist, Matt Wuerker, judges it differently. “The cartoon is totally within bounds,” Wuerker told Nightly today. After all, he said, anyone running for office in New York City has to have thick skin. Yang was mocked on Twitter after telling an interviewer his favorite subway station is Times Square, near his home in Hell’s Kitchen. And Daily News editorial page editor Josh Greenman said of Yang in a statement, “He’s recently revealed there are major gaps in his knowledge of New York City politics and policy.” Still it’s easy to see why many people were offended by the Yang cartoon. Wuerker concedes that his professional forebears were often guilty of shockingly racist work, ridiculous caricatures of Asian Americans, Black people, Latinos and others. “For people who want to question whether America has a racist history, just go back and look at the political cartoons,” Wuerker said. “The history is horrible.” But, Wuerker said, cartoonists, along with the rest of the nation, are evolving. He and his peers may not have always gotten it right in recent years — take a look at some Barack and Michelle Obama cartoons in Nightly’s video conversation — but on the whole, editorial cartoonists have become more sensitive to race. The New York Daily News redrew Yang’s eyes to address some of the original criticism. That is going to be important as more and more people from a wide variety of backgrounds get elected to public office and become the butt of cartoonist jokes. “It’s gonna be a great day when cartoonists can do harsh caricatures of every facial type and no one is going to take umbrage about it,” Wuerker said. “But we’re not there yet.” Watch Matt and Renu talk about the Andrew Yang cartoon and the history of political cartooning. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas for us at rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @renurayasam.
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| | A message from Emergent BioSolutions: At Emergent, we make things you never thought you’d need — until you do. Until you need to counteract an opioid overdose. Or need protection against smallpox, anthrax, cholera, or botulism. And now, we’re in the fight against COVID-19. At Emergent, we take on public health challenges and work to help protect public health. And that’s why We Go. | | | | | BUSINESS AS USUAL — A Gallup poll from last month showed that 51 percent of U.S. workers are still working from home. But as we approach summer, with half of U.S. adults fully vaccinated, the company-wide emails are rolling in: Planning our return to the office. How and when employers bring people back to the workplace will look different everywhere. Some companies have decided their culture can’t survive without the five-days-a-week, in-person grind. Others have said they never need to be face-to-face again. The overwhelming majority fall somewhere in between and are exploring a hybrid workforce. Employees will come into the office for a few days and work from home the rest of the week. PwC, the Big Four accounting firm that employs more than 280,000 people, has had a few offices open since last fall, and is gradually reopening more office space to give employees the option for in-person work. Nightly’s Myah Ward talked to PwC Chief People Officer Mike Fenlon about how he envisions PwC’s post-pandemic workplace. You’ve had a few offices open since September 2020, and you’re opening others this month on an optional basis. How’s that going? We’ve had limited attendance in the office, I would say. But we’ve also seen it start to pick up a bit. And I think the CDC’s recent announcement is probably making people, if they’ve been vaccinated, feel more comfortable in these settings. We intend to open more at scale by September and into October. Come fall, how many days a week do you think people will be in the office? We’ll have a small number of people who are primarily in person in our offices, four or five days a week. These would be roles that really require access to on site technology, or maybe they provide critical in-person support in the office itself. It’s a small portion of our workforce. The other tail would be people whose role can be done very effectively on a primarily remote basis, but might come into the office periodically, to connect with colleagues to collaborate on certain projects. Many of these people were working remotely before the pandemic. But the majority of our people are in this category that we’re calling flex. These are people who will balance remote work and working in the office or at a client site. We’ve estimated, and this is just an estimate, roughly one to three days a week in the office or at a client site. Some people may want to work more in the office as well, and that’s OK. The point is that we’ve seen real benefits in working at scale on a virtual basis, but we also know there are real benefits and that many of our people have missed the opportunity, the energy, the productivity, times of collaborating together in person. How do you envision the office space? Are you rethinking your footprint? Our real estate group has been actively redesigning our space. So we see a space that is even more collaborative. When people come into the office, the design of the space is such that it will maximize my ability to network, to connect, to build relationships, to have those serendipitous encounters. How are you approaching vaccines with your employees? We are not requiring our people to get vaccinated at this time. If our clients require vaccinations, then we’ll give our people the choice to either comply with that or to opt out. And that’s not different from how we manage certain client-specific requirements that occurred pre-pandemic. We’re also at this time not requiring people to disclose a reason for opting out. We have encouraged our people to get vaccinated, consistent with CDC guidance. Are you requiring employees to wear masks? We’re going to take a little more time to assess how states are implementing the CDC guidance, so we can make the best decisions possible. In the meantime, if any of our people want to work in a PwC office, we’ve asked people to continue wearing the mask, unless they're working, for example, alone in an enclosed space.
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| — Kinzinger calls for MTG to be kicked out of GOP conference over Holocaust remark: Rep. Adam Kinzinger today called for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to be booted from the House Republican conference over her comparing mask requirements to the Holocaust. “You can’t stop somebody from calling themselves a Republican,” the Illinois lawmaker said today in a POLITICO Live event, referring to his colleague from Georgia. “What we can do as a party is take a stand and say you don’t belong in our conference. That’s what I think we should do. I think we should kick her out of the conference, prevent her from coming to conference meetings, benefiting from conference materials.” — Senate Republicans plan infrastructure counteroffer as talks stall: Senate Republicans plan to present the White House with another infrastructure counteroffer Thursday, even as the prospects for a bipartisan deal grow increasingly dim. “I think we were pretty clear on where we define physical infrastructure, and I think the American people are behind us on this,” GOP lead negotiator Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) told reporters today. “I think we’ve got good momentum, but we’ll see what their reaction is.” Meanwhile, Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) reiterated that he won’t lower the 60-vote threshold even if Senate Republicans block an independent commission on Jan. 6 in the coming days. — U.S. to reopen Jerusalem consulate, upgrading Palestinian ties: Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced today that the U.S. would reopen its consulate in Jerusalem — a move that restores ties with Palestinians that had been downgraded by the Trump administration. The consulate long served as an autonomous office in charge of diplomatic relations with the Palestinians. But former President Donald Trump downgraded its operations and placed them under the authority of his ambassador to Israel when he moved the embassy to Jerusalem. — Antiracism teaching ban divides Oklahoma ahead of Tulsa massacre centennial: A century after white rioters razed the heart of Tulsa’s Black community, Oklahoma is now swept up in a national culture war over how schools teach kids about racism and sexism.
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“We can get to nationwide police reform. We just have to do it state by state.” New Mexico House Speaker Brian Egolf to Liz Crampton in a story, coming Wednesday morning to POLITICO’s The Fifty , that explores the statehouse movement to change policing in America. |
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| | SUBSCRIBE TO WEST WING PLAYBOOK: Add West Wing Playbook to keep up with the power players, latest policy developments and intriguing whispers percolating inside the West Wing and across the highest levels of the Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today. | | | | | | | TAKING ON THE ALGORITHMS — The European Commission is expected to demand that Facebook, Google and Twitter alter their algorithms — and prove that they have done so — to stop the spread of online falsehoods, according to three people briefed on the proposals that will be published Wednesday. Under the new rules, which must be negotiated with the world’s largest social media companies after they are published, Brussels will also require the firms to disclose how they are responding to the spread of disinformation on their platforms; what measures they are taking to either remove or demote specific content or accounts that promote falsehoods; and provide online users with greater transparency on how they are targeted with digital ads. The measures would mark the farthest any country or region has gone in forcing tech companies to disclose the inner workings of the algorithms used to populate social media feeds. These machine-learning tools have been criticized for promoting viral hateful or false content, including material associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, over more mainstream sources. The companies deny wrongdoing.
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10,262 of 101 million The number of Americans fully vaccinated against Covid-19 who by the end of April reported a “breakthrough” infection to the CDC, representing just 0.01 percent of the fully vaccinated population, according to a new report by the agency. |
| | | ELEGY WRITTEN IN A CYBER CHURCHYARD — Health care editor at large Joanne Kenen emails Nightly: Unless somebody jinxes this in the next 12 hours, Wednesday marks two weeks since anybody has posted in our newsroom’s #coronavirus Slack channel. Don’t get me wrong. If there’s one remote-work obsession that proliferated this year, it’s our Slack channels. We still have plenty of places to chat about the coronavirus and how the newsroom can keep throwing everything we’ve got at it. Nor are we under the illusion that the pandemic is vanquished, over, kaput. We’re still reporting on it intensely, across multiple newsroom teams. A few intermittent messages still show up in the coronavirus email group. But over the past year-plus, we’ve all learned way more than we ever wanted to know about coronavirus pandemics, so we don’t need to share, compare and ask one another questions so much via that Slack channel, created on March 14, 2020, by my health team colleague David Lim. That was the week we were shutting down and heading home, not imagining that well over a year would pass until we’d venture back. The channel currently has 133 members and two emoji: a spiky coronavirus and an ambulance. There are a few other grim icons we could have added. But now, as the number of vaccinations rises and the numbers of deaths and hospitalizations fall, the intensity we were living with up until a few months ago has begun to ebb. I’m looking forward to a summer of hugging children, seeing friends and killing off that Slack channel — or at least putting it into hibernation.
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| | A message from Emergent BioSolutions: At Emergent, we make things you never thought you’d need — until you do. Until you need to counteract an opioid overdose. Or need protection against smallpox, anthrax, cholera, or botulism. And now we’re in the fight against COVID-19. At Emergent, we take on public health challenges. For over 20 years, we have produced therapies and vaccines to help protect public health. And that’s why We Go. | | | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | |
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