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Michael Breen is the author of "The New Koreans" (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017). SEOUL — You’d think South Koreans would all have COVID-19 by now. With a population almost as big as England’s in combined habitable space the size of Belgium, they are more bunched together than almost any other people. And yet, despite this disadvantage, they successfully controlled the outbreak in the last three months with a strategy of testing and tracing that obviated the need for a lockdown. Just under 11,000 people have caught the virus since the first reported case on January 20. That translates into one patient in every 4,450 people. Of these, 260 people have died and more than 1,000 remain isolated. Korea’s strategy of targeted testing and aggressive contact tracing has been held up as a successful example of how to contain the virus — even as other countries have been slow to adopt it. Partly, Korea has done well because it has experience in this type of event and because, as a soc...

SACRAMENTO — California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday proposed a slimmed-down $203 billion state budget that relies on help from Senate Republicans and President Donald Trump to avoid $14 billion in trigger cuts, with the state facing its first deficit in eight years after being blindsided by the coronavirus pandemic. The trigger cuts go back to the last recessionary playbook, proposing significant reductions in everything from schools to health care and the safety net. Newsom squarely pinned the future of those programs on Trump: “These are cuts than can be triggered and eliminated with stroke of a pen," he said, referring to the president. Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have suggested that a federal aid package for states and cities may involve Democrats approving Covid-19 liability waivers for businesses, and McConnell previously said he would not support "blue state bailouts." Federal aid for states has become a partisan matter, with Republican...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Thursday he was mistaken in claiming that the Obama administration had failed to leave a pandemic playbook for the Trump White House. “I was wrong,” McConnell said in an evening interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier. “They did leave behind a plan. So, I clearly made a mistake in that regard.” McConnell had claimed during a Monday campaign event for President Donald Trump that the current White House had not been briefed by the previous administration on preparing for a pandemic at the scale of the novel coronavirus. He also slammed former President Barack Obama for criticizing Trump’s coronavirus response (Obama had privately told former aides that it was an “absolute chaotic disaster”), saying Obama “should have kept his mouth shut.” “We want to be early, ready for the next one, because clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this,” McConnell said on Monday during a...

Sen. Kelly Loeffler has turned over documents to the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Senate Ethics Committee amid ongoing scrutiny over her stock trades, according to her spokesperson. In a statement released Thursday, the Georgia Republican’s spokesperson said the documents showed that she and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, “acted entirely appropriately and observed both the letter and the spirit of the law.” “The documents and information demonstrated her and her husband’s lack of involvement in their managed accounts, as well the details of those accounts,” the statement said. Earlier Thursday, Loeffler repeatedly declined to answer questions about whether the FBI had contacted her about her stock trades, as the agency did for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in relation to her husband’s transactions. The latest statement comes amid an intensifying swirl around senators’ individual stock transactio...

ALBANY — After more than two months of daily coronavirus updates, a new face is appearing on the Andrew Cuomo show, the popular program viewed around the nation. Arkady Belozovsky appeared in a small right-hand corner box on the governor’s briefing screen on Wednesday, delivering sign language with a New York intensity to match Cuomo's and an Empire State assertiveness residents are proud to embrace. “I get it — the way he speaks,” said Belozovsky, who lived in Brooklyn after emigrating from the former Soviet Union as a teenager in 1990. “He’s from Queens. His accent, his style, his mannerisms, it fits the New York stereotype. [People watching] in other states, they say 'Man you sign way too fast, Arkady.’ I say no, that’s how fast they are, they’re direct, they’re blunt.” He actually has been interpreting Cuomo’s words since March 27 for versions of the briefing that appear online, but be hadn’t appeared in-frame until a judge ordered it Monday . All of the nation's ot...

This article is part of the special report Europe's dirty (money) secret. The European Commission is hell-bent on creating a watchdog to enforce the bloc’s anti-money laundering rules. But skeptics fear it won’t have much bite. Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis sounded a rallying call for a European authority last week as the Brussels executive launched an action plan for tackling illicit funds flowing through the EU. “What we should be aiming for is a strong EU supervisor, which can act in case of failure, for example, of national supervisors to act,” the Latvian European commissioner said in an interview. “We have strong, strict anti-money laundering rules, but enforcement is uneven.” The Commission’s action plan also outlines initiatives to harmonize and update anti-money laundering safeguards across the bloc while improving communication channels among financial intelligence units, the agencies in each country that analyze information from banks and other busine...

President Donald Trump’s ousted vaccine chief turned whistleblower will go public with his claims on Thursday in an unusually friendly setting — a hearing chaired by a close congressional ally whose district benefited from his decisions. Rick Bright, who was abruptly removed as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority last month, will air his complaints about the Trump administration's pandemic response in front of a House subcommittee overseen by Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat who represents a Northern California district home to a company that received more than $110 million in awards from BARDA while Bright led the office. Other companies with offices in Eshoo’s district benefited from more than $100 million in awards from BARDA in the decade prior to Bright's leadership. Eshoo, who helped craft the 2006 legislation to create BARDA and has since worked to bolster its authorities, also has been a longtime booster of Bright, including for his work...

The Trump administration has begun the formal process of planning for a potential transition of power if presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins. The administration sent over a report outlining its transition activities to two congressional committees on Wednesday night, announcing it has created a transition planning group -- the White House Transition Coordinating Council, which will advise executive departments and agencies on preparation for a potential transition -- and detailing other aspects of a handoff between administrations. A second panel, the Agency Transition Directors Council, primarily coordinates the transition within agencies. The Office of Management and Budget recently ordered all agency heads to pick career officials to participate in the latter group, which is due to meet on May 27. The law requires both groups to be established six months ahead of a presidential election, according to the Presidential Transitions Improvements Act of 2015. One of the o...

OAKLAND — Federal regulators said Wednesday they rejected certification earlier this month of the N95 masks that California had ordered from a Chinese firm in a massive $990 million purchase, a starker characterization of what transpired than Gov. Gavin Newsom gave last week. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health did not detail its reasons for denying the company BYD, saying an on-site assessment of the company’s N95-model respirators deemed the equipment “not acceptable” on May 4. BYD can tweak its design and again seek approval under an expedited review process, federal regulators said. "The review of the documentation provided to NIOSH for the design, manufacturing and quality inspection of the device was concerning," the agency said in a statement. A week ago, Newsom conceded that the deal was running into problems, saying it had been "delayed" by a snag in federal approval. A May 6 contract amendment subsequently released by California ...

New Jersey could be facing a shortfall of more than $10 billion through the end of the next fiscal year because of the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, according to new preliminary projections from the state Treasury department. “Based on a wide variety of economic assumptions, the State of New Jersey may be looking at a combined $10.104 billion revenue shortfall over the remaining months of Fiscal Year 2020 through the end of Fiscal Year 2021,” Treasurer Elizabeth Maher Muoio said in a statement late Wednesday. “While there are many moving parts, what is clear is that this decline would be worse than the Great Recession.” New Jersey, like many other states, is anticipating a severe budget crunch in the months ahead as businesses have temporarily shuttered and economic activity has slowed during the pandemic. New Jersey is the only state to push back its budget deadline. Traditionally, the budget must be enacted by June 30, but the new deadline is Sept. 30. The proje...

After Republicans and Democrats spent 90 minutes whipsawing between alternate realities, the top lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis paused for a fleeting display of humanity toward each other. "If the distance between me and you on any issue were five steps, I'd be happy to take three of them," House Majority Whip James Clyburn said to his GOP counterpart, Republican Whip Steve Scalise, as the panel's first meeting came to a close Wednesday. "I'd be happy to take the other two," Scalise replied. In fact, the parties started the day miles apart and ended it even further away. The first meeting of the new panel tasked with probing the government's coronavirus response won't be remembered for unearthing groundbreaking new policy information — and might not be remembered at all. But it was a visual distillation of the increasing dysfunction that has gripped Congress amid the coronavirus response and threatens to und...

For his critics, Anthony Fauci cemented his status as the Rasputin of public health with his Senate testimony this week. The director of the National Institutes for Health gently, but unmistakably, struck a different tone than President Donald Trump, earning rebukes from talk show hosts and Fox News anchors, as well as fueling the outrage of the #FireFauci claque on Twitter. Although Fauci’s every utterance is now examined with the same care as pronouncements of the pope, his words weren’t exactly earth-shattering. He said that if there are careless reopenings in the wrong conditions, “we will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks.” Does anyone doubt that’s a possibility? Or that, per Fauci, new uncontrolled outbreaks will not only lead “to some suffering and death that could be avoided but could even set you back on the road to trying to get economic recovery”? No serious person would argue there are no hazards to opening back up or that it should be done heedl...

President Donald Trump has faced plenty of criticism from Democrats throughout the coronavirus pandemic — including for his refusal to wear a mask. But according to a new survey, even most Republicans think Trump and Vice President Mike Pence should sport face coverings when traveling in public. It’s a rare point of bipartisan consensus during a public health crisis that’s become deeply politicized. Whether encouraging a rapid economic reopening or excoriating China for mishandling the initial outbreak, GOP lawmakers and leading party figures have largely fallen in line with the administration’s coronavirus messaging as Trump seeks to engineer a financial recovery and salvage his reelection campaign. On the issue of masks, however, more than 70 percent of respondents in a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll to be published Wednesday say that when Trump and Pence travel, they should wear face coverings in public places. Concurring with that position are 82 percent of Democrats, 70 percent...

Voters in California and Wisconsin will choose new members of Congress in special elections Tuesday night that will provide one of the first indicators of the electorate’s mood since the coronavirus gripped the nation. The districts include a suburban Los Angeles swing seat that Democrats flipped in 2018 and a formerly competitive district in Wisconsin that’s shifted decisively into the Republican column. Both parties are watching the results closely for tea leaves about which party’s voters are more motivated this year, and also how elections conducted primarily through mail balloting will fare ahead of a dramatic expansion of absentee voting expected for the general election. Republicans are heavily favored to hold a rural district in northwestern Wisconsin vacated by former GOP Rep. Sean Duffy. The more telling battle is in California 25th District, where Democrats are at risk of losing a seat they won handily two years ago. Democratic state Assemblywoman Christy Smith is squar...

Donald Trump launched his political career turbocharging the conspiratorial birther movement. Now Trump is trying to keep his presidency afloat with another theory about his predecessor: Obamagate. Over the last three days, Trump has tweeted and railed about unproven claims that President Barack Obama, in his final days in office, orchestrated a plot to damage the incoming president. “He got caught, OBAMAGATE!” Trump tweeted on Sunday, one of 126 tweets and retweets — the second-highest single-day total of his presidency — that kept returning to Obama. The term has become an all-caps rallying cry for Trump. “OBAMAGATE makes Watergate look small time!” he tweeted on Monday. Trump then pinned an “OBAMAGATE!” tweet to the top of his profile to promote a segment from Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The theory, as Trump’s allies have described it, is that Obama was involved in an effort to entrap Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who pleaded guilty in 2017 to lyin...