US Street News

OAKLAND, Calif. — Modoc County — one of California's most desolate jurisdictions with no known coronavirus cases — says it will allow bars, restaurants and churches to reopen Friday despite Gov. Gavin Newsom's statewide lockdown. “We’re not in this at all to defy anything. We align with the plans. We’re just at a different phase in this because of where we are and how we live,” Heather Hadwick, deputy director of the county's Office of Emergency Services, told POLITICO on Thursday. Modoc officials submitted a plan last week to Newsom outlining their proposal to lift the statewide lockdown order, but the governor has given no indication he intends to free individual counties from his statewide restrictions. The county issued a strategic reopening plan this week that would allow bars, restaurants, churches and non-essential businesses to reopen indoor operations with proper social distancing — all banned under Newsom's current restrictions. The plan still recommends ...

Hours after meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House, Gov. Phil Murphy said Thursday that New Jersey will receive hundreds of thousands of pieces of personal protective equipment and coronavirus test kits from the federal government. The Trump administration will ship PPE — which New Jersey has struggled to procure — to 358 nursing homes in the state, Murphy said, including 220,000 masks, 19,000 goggles, 200,000 gowns and 1 million pairs of gloves. The virus has struck particularly hard in the state’s nursing homes. In addition, the federal government will provide 550,000 new Covid-19 test kits and 750,000 swabs, which Murphy said will allow the state to conduct about 20,000 tests per day, more than twice the number that are now being performed. “This is a tremendous boost to our overall testing capacity,” Murphy said during his daily briefing in Trenton. “And as I have noted many times already, having a robust testing program is not just a key thing in the here and n...

Hanna Linderstål wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole of anti-5G theories would go. The Stockholm-based researcher had been studying online groups opposed to the new technology for years. Then she watched as the movement reached a tipping point earlier this year amid the coronavirus outbreak — spilling into criminality with a spate of arson attacks against telecom masts. In the space of just a couple of weeks, more than 60 masts have been hit by arson attacks in the U.K. It prompted Boris Johnson's office to condemn the attacks as caused by a “crazed conspiracy theory” and "putting lives at risk." On the Continent, the Netherlands is the hardest-hit country with 22 arson attacks and three attempted attacks linked to 5G concerns. Ireland has seen three such attacks, Cyprus has seen two and Belgium, Italy, Sweden and Finland have all seen at least one, recent figures from industry associations ETNO and GSMA showed. The outrage behind these attacks — fear that 5G ra...

Boeing will not seek federal funding to stay afloat amid the coronavirus crisis after raising $25 billion in bond sales, the aerospace manufacturer and defense contractor announced on Thursday. “The robust demand for the offering reflects strong support for the long-term strength of Boeing and the aviation industry,” the company said in a news release. “We will continue to assess our liquidity position as the health crisis and our dynamic business environment evolve.” Boeing, along with the rest of the aviation industry, had been reeling from the dramatic decline in air travel because of the coronavirus pandemic. The company had also come under fire after two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft crashed, in 2018 and 2019, killing a total of 346 people and grounding the entire line of jets. The federal government had designated $17 billion for the American aircraft builder in its $2 trillion CARES Act, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company proposed further federal funding to save it fro...

The Justice Department has launched a review of the $670 billion emergency loan program that Congress created to avert layoffs at small businesses, as the Trump administration ratchets up scrutiny of whether certain borrowers should have received funding. The department's inquiry has already turned up potential fraudulent activity by businesses that sought the so-called Paycheck Protection Program loans, a spokesperson confirmed. The disclosure came after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned companies this week that they would face possible criminal liability if they pursued the government-backed aid improperly — a comment made in the context of discouraging larger companies from seeking the forgivable loans. Mnuchin also announced that the Small Business Administration would apply extra scrutiny to loans of more than $2 million. Bloomberg News first reported the Justice Department review. The news of the DOJ's involvement was probably inevitable. Policymakers designe...

Congress set aside more than $6 billion in the CARES Act to help students as the coronavirus upended their plans, leaving some without food and housing. But Eastern Michigan University had another plan: Use some of federal funds to help market its summer classes. The university is offering a federally funded rebate to students who sign up for online summer classes — including visitors who enroll from other universities — of $500 for one class and $1,000 for two or more courses. The school’s so-called EMU CARES Grant, which draws on $13.7 million of federal taxpayer funds that was set aside for the school, is credited to those who sign up for classes. “Wondering what happens tomorrow? The answer is the future. Register today for #EMU Virtual Summer Courses! Undergrad and grad students receive an EMU CARES Grant -- $500 for 3 credits, $1,000 for 6,” the university tweeted earlier this week. News about the EMU CARES Grants are prominently featured on its website. The university’s use ...

LANSING, Mich. — The Republican-led Michigan Legislature refused Thursday to extend the state’s coronavirus emergency declaration and voted to authorize a lawsuit challenging Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s authority and actions to combat the pandemic. The step came as hundreds of conservative activists, including some who were openly carrying rifles, returned to the Capitol to denounce her stay-at-home order. Whitmer wanted lawmakers to extend her emergency declaration by 28 days. It expires late Thursday. But at the same time, she believes she has other powers to respond to the crisis and does not need a legislatively-approved extension except to ensure that health care workers would continue to have special legal protections. She has said the state of emergency will continue regardless, which Republicans dispute and plan to challenge in court. The declaration is the foundation for Whitmer’s stay-at-home measure, which will remain in effect through May 15, and other directives...

President Donald Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone is appealing his conviction and three-year-plus prison sentence for seeking to impede congressional and FBI investigations into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016. A lawyer for Stone filed a formal notice Thursday asking the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the case brought by special counsel Robert Mueller that led to trial last November where a jury found Stone guilty on all seven felony charges he faced. The new filing doesn’t offer arguments against Stone’s convictions or sentence, but defense attorney Seth Ginsberg specifically included in the appeal U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s ruling earlier this month denying Stone’s bid for a new trial based on claims of juror misconduct and bias. Stone’s lawyers argued that the forewoman of the jury, Tomeka Hart, misled the court by failing to disclose social media posts about the Mueller investigation. But Jackson ruled ...

Most of the estimated 23 million independent contractors and gig workers made newly eligible last month for unemployment benefits during the coronavirus pandemic are still waiting for relief. Six weeks after the pandemic set off a continuing wave of massive layoffs, only 21 states have started paying out benefits to self-employed workers and others not traditionally eligible, according to the Labor Department. That's up from 10 last week. The payments are being made under a new temporary program, Pandemic Unemployment Assistance . New Jersey is one of the states where self-employed workers are still waiting. More than 100,000 self-employed workers applied for jobless benefits there over the past several weeks, but the state won’t begin paying out the benefits until Friday, according to New Jersey state officials. They said the state will then need to take more time to verify those workers’ eligibility. “The Department has worked hard over the past month to get this program up a...

A powerful array of EU countries including Germany is lining up against a key element of the post-coronavirus economic recovery plan floated by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Von der Leyen has proposed that the Commission raise money on financial markets, using guarantees that would be provided by EU members raising the ceiling on how much they could contribute to the EU budget. A large chunk of those funds would likely go to southern European countries such as Italy and Spain, which have been hit hard by the pandemic and have limited fiscal room for maneuver. But, although the Commission has yet to present a formal proposal, that central element of the plan is already facing deep skepticism from Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, Helsinki and The Hague — highlighting once again a north-south divide when it comes to questions of EU financial solidarity. Von der Leyen has said recovery funds, which she has suggested would generate at least €1 trillion of investment, wil...

Like so many Republicans running for Congress in 2010, Justin Amash, then a 30-year-old state representative from West Michigan, was disgusted with a president who had abused his executive authority, expanded the powers of the federal government, and rung up historic amounts of debt and deficit. But unlike his fellow Tea Party conservatives, Amash wasn’t fixated on Barack Obama. “I got active in politics in part because of what George W. Bush was doing,” Amash told me years later, retracing his political rise. “The Obama backlash, of course, started around the time of the Tea Party. But a lot of us blamed George W. Bush for Obama in the first place.” Amash didn’t come to Washington looking for partisan warfare. He was more interested in fighting for the heart and soul—and future—of the Republican Party. It was an exhilarating time to be a hard-charging conservative. The Bush-era Republican Party, Amash believed, had become indistinguishable from the Democratic Party, two cogs in a b...

Americans filed 3.8 million new jobless claims last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday, pushing to 30.3 million the six-week claims tally as the coronavirus pandemic battered the economy. The new report, which covers the week ending April 25, likely understates the total number of Americans who lost their jobs as the death toll from the disease climbed above that of the Vietnam war. Self-employed workers who were made temporarily eligible last month for jobless benefits under the CARES Act are mostly left out of the count, as only 21 states have updated their systems to begin cutting unemployment checks to those workers. Eleven of those states implemented the program in just the past week. The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on the economy as businesses across the country shut down and millions of workers were laid off or forced to stay at home. The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that the U.S. economy shrank at a 4.8 percent annual rate last quarter, which ...

President Donald Trump weighed in Wednesday on newly released government records and recent media reports regarding the FBI’s 2017 investigation into Michael Flynn — calling the probe that resulted in his former national security adviser’s pleading guilty before a federal court a “scam.” “.@CNN doesn’t want to speak about their persecution of General Michael Flynn & why they got the story so wrong,” Trump wrote on Twitter just before midnight. “They, along with others, should pay a big price for what they have purposely done to this man & his family. They won’t even cover the big breaking news about this scam!” A spokesperson for CNN did not immediately return a request for comment. Prior to that social media post, the president shared stories Wednesday evening from Fox News and the right-wing news website The Daily Caller reporting on a cache of FBI records unsealed earlier in the day by a federal judge. Those documents revealed new details about the origins of the bu...

Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is about to launch its first major TV ad offensive of the general election — a move that comes as the president attempts to reverse a dangerous slide six months out from the election. The campaign is expected to spend seven figures on a nationwide advertising blitz touting Trump’s performance managing the coronavirus crisis, according to two people familiar with the plans. The spots will begin Sunday and air for a week. The campaign expected to follow with a second wave of ads unloading on Joe Biden. The push comes at a trying moment for the president. Trump’s political advisers last week briefed him on internal polling showing him trailing Biden in battleground states, prompting the president to scold his campaign manager, Brad Parscale. The campaign's polling also showed that an initial surge in support for Trump over his handling of the crisis has evaporated. The first flight of ads will depict Trump as showing leadership in the face of op...

CNN’s Jake Tapper was brutally direct in his question to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who recently lifted his state’s stay-at-home order, in favor of a gradual reopening of business. Are you worried, Tapper asked, that a premature move could “cost your constituents their lives?” Polis was blandly indirect in his answer. While he might wish to have “next week’s information and next month’s information available to me today,” the Democratic governor said, “that’s not the world we live in.” During a pandemic that likely will continue for months, he’s looking for a path forward in “an ongoing sustainable way,” one that takes into account citizens’ interests “psychologically, economically, and from a health perspective.” The murkiness of Polis’ reply requires translation. To my ear, he was saying something like this: Yes, some people are going to die of Covid-19 who wouldn’t if I keep a full lockdown in place. I hope not too many or too fast. But keeping the risk of death as low as possibl...