Category Archives: War On Drugs

Guns N Roses frontman Axl Rose made headlines last week when he criticized United States Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin. After Mnuchin got into a Twitter spat with Rose, the late night comedy circuit took the feud and ran with it, leading to some hilarious bits on Saturday Night Live and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

Having long been critical of the Trump administration, and more recently its coronavirus response, Axl took the first shot with this tweet:

Mnuchin originally responded with What have you done for the country lately? before accidentally using the Liberian flag emoji instead of the American one. Axl then hit back with, My bad I didnt get were hoping 2 emulate Liberias economic model but on the real unlike this admin Im not responsible for 70k+ deaths n unlike u I dont hold a fed gov position of responsibility 2 the American people n go on TV tellin them 2 travel the US during a pandemic.

Saturday Night Live took notice of the brutality, with Weekend Update co-host Colin Jost commenting, Axl Rose from Guns N Roses got into a Twitter feud with Steve Mnuchin over the administrations coronavirus response, and no matter what your politics are, I think we can all agree thats the dumbest sentence to ever count as news.

Mnuchin attacked Axl Rose, writing, What have you done for this country? Well, what Axl Rose did for this country was, his band tried to win the war on drugs by doing all the cocaine themselves.

After John Oliver recapped the tweets on the May 10 episode of Last Week Tonight, he reveled in Axl Roses unapologetic use of n. There are many amazing things about that, but most of all, youve got to respect Axls commitment to the n. I bet he takes his coffee with milk n sugar, when he gets dressed he likes to put on a t-shirt n kilt, and I bet his favorite book is Harry Potter n the Prisoner of Azkaban, because hes a professional and his art is his life.

Watch the Weekend Update clip below and to see John Olivers bit on Axl Rose, head over to HBO.

Saturday Night's Live's Take on Axl Rose / Steve Mnuchin Twitter War

25 Legendary Rock Albums With No Weak Songs

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Saturday Night Live + John Oliver React to Axl Rose's Feud With Trump Administration - Loudwire

The type of search warrant used when officers from the Louisville Police Departments botched raid that killed Breonna Taylor in March has a deadly history when theyre not executed correctly. Often times, the no-knock warrants that allow law enforcement to legally raid private property without warning disproportionately target Black, brown and poor people, resulting in civil rights lawsuits and in some cases prompting police departments to abandon the controversial practice.

The Louisville Courier-Journal reported that the cops who broke into Taylors home she shared with her boyfriend knocked first despite the nature of their warrant allowing them to skip that formality. But they may not have announced or identified themselves properly since Taylors boyfriend Kenneth Walker used his legally owned firearm to shoot at the door suspecting burglars were trying to gain entry (also known as standing his ground). Police then rushed into the home and shot Taylor and Walker, who survived the barrage of bullets. Taylor, an EMT worker who was an essential worker amid the coronavirus pandemic, did not.

However, it turned out that not only did the cops raid the wrong location, but the suspected drug dealer was also already in custody. That means that neither the police nor the judge who signed the no-knock warrant did their due diligence despite theoretically being well aware of the deadly consequences that botched raised with those warrants can many times result in. All of which brings the focus of the value of Black lives, who, as mentioned before, are far too often the disproportionate targets of such warrants.

In Taylors case, even though the actual address of the actual suspected trap house was 10 miles away from her home, police still arrested Walker and charged him with the attempted murder of a police officer.

Vox cited two separate but similar cases of botched no-knock warrants executed in Texas with unequal results along racial lines. In both cases, each homeowner fired their legal guns at police raiding their homes by mistake. While both men were charged with capital murder, a grand jury did not indict the white suspect while a grand jury allowed the charges to stand against the Black suspect.

No-knock warrants have their history from the war on drugs, an ineffective pretense based on racial profiling. The U.S. Supreme Court reached a unanimous decision in 1997 that drugs warrants like the one in Taylors case do not automatically justify the no-knock treatment, but judges continue to sign and authorize them with impunity.

There was a wave of civil rights lawsuits filed in Arkansas last year after police there were accused of lying to obtain no-knock warrants under even falser pretenses.

All of the lawsuits contend that officers lied to judges to obtain the no-knock search warrants, the Appeal reported in November. In most of the cases, the lawsuits allege officers told the issuing judge that they had used a confidential informant to do a controlled buy of drugs at the home they wanted to search. According to the lawsuits, that information from the confidential informant was made up or the confidential informant was made up by the police to get permission to search the home.

In addition to the avoidable loss of life, its those types of lawsuits and the aforementioned cases in Texas that probably helped convince the Houston Police Department to stop requesting no-knock warrants.

Weve had four officers shot, two civilians killed, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said at the time about no-knock warrants. I dont see the value in them. So thats probably going to go by the wayside.

Meanwhile, back in Louisville, Mayor Greg Fischer was calling for a thorough investigation two months to the day that Taylor was killed in her own home by police on March 13. A pair of online petitions was also making the rounds on social media demanding justice for Taylor and Walker, which includes arresting the officers involved and charging them criminally.

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Continued here:

No-Knock Warrants Like The One Used To Kill Breonna Taylor Have A Deadly History Of Going Wrong - News One

The idea that certain drugs should be prohibited by law is often viewed as simple common sense, but it is actually a recent social phenomenon. The first international laws prohibiting drugs only appeared at the start of the twentieth century, and it wasnt until the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 that banning the non-medicinal trade in drugs like cannabis, cocaine and opiates was accepted across the world.

Since then, the War on Drugs has become a huge driver of the worlds ever-growing prison population. In the UK, more than 1 in 8 of all prisoners currently incarcerated in British prisons are serving their sentences for drug offences. Furthermore, in the UK black people are over-represented in cannabis prosecutions, with over 20% of those convicted for cannabis offences being black, even though they comprise less than 4% of the UKs total population.

However, the 21st century seems to be showing signs of a change in direction. In December 2013, Uruguay became the first nation-sate to legalise cannabis. Uruguay was soon followed by Canada in 2018, with countries such as New Zealand and Mexico currently working on legislation to allow a recreational market to be implemented over the coming year. Furthermore, in the USA, the country that drove the War on Drugs for most of the twentieth century, a host of states from California and Alaska have also legalised recreational cannabis markets.

However, Britain is still yet to have a serious national conversation about what is being referred to as the green rush the 21st century growth of a legal cannabis trade. The creation of a legal regulated market for cannabis in North America has become big business in a short space of time. According to marijuana business daily, the legal cannabis industry is estimated to generate between $8 billion to $10 billion in annual retail sales already, and is projected to rise to $22 billion annually by 2022. In the American states that have legalised the drug, California has generated the largest revenues with over $2.75 billion in cannabis sales. Smaller states such as Oregon and Washington have also produced large markets, with Oregon registering $500 million in recreational sales and Washington over $975 million through its recreational market. Some of the biggest cannabis corporations to emerge in this new marketplace include Canada based companies Aurora Cannabis (market cap of over $7billion) and Canopy Growth (market cap of over $12 billion). However, on its current trajectory, it appears that the emergence of a profitable cannabis market may not necessarily challenge economic and racial inequality across society.

In North America, those who have suffered the most under the War on Drugs are also being excluded from the wealth that is being generated in its transition to a legal market. Across many of the states that have legalised cannabis, people with Federal convictions (which includes most drugs crimes) are excluded from gaining cannabis business licences. With the drug war criminalising racial minorities disproportionately, those communities find themselves being punished twice-over once by prohibition and again by being banned from the legal market.

As well as the legal blocks, there are also significant financial barriers to entry. The major banks are reluctant to lend to this new industry, meaning that many of the people able to enter this new industry are independently wealthy already. Furthermore, cannabis companies in North America have often been reliant on seed cash and private capital investment, not only bank loans. Therefore, individuals with the knowledge of how to raise private financing and who are already embedded in networks of wealthy individuals and institutions are often highly present within these cannabis companies. This helps explain why companies and individuals from industries such as tech, pharmaceuticals and mining have been drawn to cannabis.

Recently there have been some exciting new initiatives launched in North America. This includes proposals such as Real Action for Cannabis Equity, or RACE, launched in Boston in September 2019. RACE is a coalition of actors that seeks to promote the interests of entrepreneurs and workers of colour as they try to gain entry into the legal cannabis marketplace. Another organisation aiming at similar changes is the Minority Cannabis Business Association (MCBA). Founded in late 2015, MCBA understands itself as aiming to serve the specific needs of minority cannabis entrepreneurs, workers, and patients/ consumers.

The work of these organisation and other advocates, lawyers and politicians has resulted in more innovative and exciting plans for greater economic equity being included in some cannabis legalisation laws over recent years. For instance, in 2017, the city of Oakland launched its equity programme, through which cannabis business permits would give priority to equity applicants, a category that was defined as either someone whose annual income is less than 80% of the citys average income, someone who is from one of the 21 areas where drug arrests were most prevalent, or someone who has been convicted for a cannabis-related crime after November 5 1996.

In addition, even non-equity applicants that do not fit within this criteria can improve their own chances of gaining permits if they commit to helping equity applicants with free rent or real estate. In 2018, the neighbouring city of San Francisco followed suit with a similar equity programme established through a city ordinance, which included amnesty for weed-related crimes, wiping out or reducing the sentencings for all cannabis-related crime convictions dating back to 1975. This helps empower people who might have been convicted decades ago but are still barred from certain jobs or housing. Most recently, Californias biggest city, Los Angles, has also adopted a social equity program which offers priority application processing and business support to individuals who can show they were disproportionately impacted by the previous laws prohibiting cannabis during the War on Drugs.

As well as initiatives to try to diversify ownership in the cannabis industry, there are also moves towards exploring cooperative forms of ownership of dispensaries. Massachusetts has considered co-op models where people in the city can pool resources and enter into a competitive market. Currently the law allows co-ops to cultivate and deliver cannabis to high-street dispensers, but not to own or operate them.

In terms of consumption, the co-ops have a collection of members who are able to use cannabis together and pool resources in terms of cultivation. In Washington State, it is only legal to set up a co-op for medical marijuana, with each co-op allowed a total of four members. Members must be over 21 and not give away or sell any cannabis they grow to non-members.

However, there has also been a backlash against cannabis co-ops. Colorado, for instance, recently pushed back against the co-op form. Until 2017, recreational cannabis users could group their maximum personal allowance of six cannabis plants into large co-ops, but in April 2017 the state criminalised the practice of individuals growing cannabis for other people as these large co-ops could not be adequately supervised.

If overly marketized, there is a real danger that a legal cannabis market could just create new processes of exclusion and inequality. A profit-driven legal cannabis market could easily be accompanied by even more punitive controls on the black market. This could lead to the worsening of social and racial inequalities in wealth, economic opportunities and criminal justice that emerged during the twentieth century drug war.

On the other hand, cannabis legalisation may offer a rare opportunity to introduce policies that could rebalance some of those inequalities that have plagued society for too long. This opportunity should not be overlooked.

This article is a shortened version of a report that was published by Common Wealth.

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The War on Drugs has failed. But a profit-driven legal market is not the answer - Open Democracy

How does it feel to be a non-essential, but illegally essential worker right now? We chatted with our weed delivery guy about his thoughts on drugs in the time of corona and what its like to be keeping New York City stoned today.

How did you get into the weed business?

The first service I ever worked for had thousands and thousands of contacts in their phone. It was a secret network of people when social media was becoming king. Its kind of like Video Killed the Radio Star. New York was really changing. Whether it was dating or going to the club, all of that changed when Instagram dethroned word-of-mouth.

I started selling weed in New York when California had just legalized it. So it sort of felt like this very much illegal business that was adjacent to the winds of change. Like, you could feel Reagans War on Drugs was really over. I think about the Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball phase, making a totem of your personality, I smoke weed. Then its like, Guess what? Everyone does.

There is this famous Whoopi Goldberg quote where shes talking about women of a certain age having to play sexless roles: Guess what? Grandmas fuck, aunties fuck, old people are fucking, people that dont look like Emily Ratajkowski are fucking. Its the same thing with weed. People are having a tincture, people are having an edible, people you would never think. That was what was so dazzling about that beginning timebecause every run I would meet eight to 15 completely new characters throughout New York City.

How have transactions with customers changed since the coronavirus outbreak?

Its masked, its glovedits just so weird. Because Ive never really been anonymous doing this, and now I am. Having someone not be able to see your face is a scary thing.

The reality is people are scared. And I get that. But right now, whether its your wine, your weed, whatever youre reaching to for comfort, we are thinking more and more about how we do that, and the state were in when were doing that. And its like, if you cant be nice to your weed delivery guy, who can you be nice to?

Im such a tactile person. I like taking everything out, showing people all of their options. And I think any service worth their salt is doing that. Before corona, I loved the experience of jumping around someones mind and having this sacred experience in their home, being like, Okay, what are you into? What do you like? Do you want something psychoactive and fun for whether youre coding or writing music or folding laundry? Or do you need to brain-drain and relax from the things happening outside of this exchange? Ive never had a job where I was treated better. Ive never had a job where people were nicer to me.

But now, were so starved for that type of interaction. I see it in the faces of the people I deliver to behind their masks. I see the very real desire to connect so much more now. People would always be asking me, Do you want water? Sparkling or flat? I found so much comfort in that, connecting with a stranger or having that familiarity of being able to show up and make someones day. That being gone, and being left with this very capitalistic exchange is hard. Its hard to have people pre-order things and then have to decide based on a name. Thats so wine store sommelier, isnt it? Being like, Ill get this one because it has a duck on it.

I miss it as much as they do. You walk into someones house that collects records and learn about Japanese soul music from the 70s that you didnt know about. Or who painted that painting. Spaces have power, and when someone allows you into them, that is their most outward-facing self. Having it be reduced to curbside clinical interaction is very different.

Have any had any issues with difficult customers lately?

I did have a guy get really upset that I wouldnt come into his house. Hes like, Well, this is really conspicuous. I dont think anyone doing anything illegal ever said, I wish I was less safe. But I was also just like, Lets read the situation, were staring down the edge of a global pandemic. Im obviously holding something in my hands that, for better or worse, will make you feel better. Why are you coming at me with any sort of aggression right now?

I have people buying crazy amounts of cookies, and then theyre so mad that we didnt have the vegan ones that they like. Im sorry if theres butter. I actually asked for 12 oatmeal raisin and four chocolate and you gave me five chocolate and 11 oatmeal raisin and I want a freebie. Ive had people text me and be like, My delivery was 15 minutes late, and Im like, where did you have to be? And theyll always be like, Well, I think I need a free joint for this. Ill be like, You think you need. Gifts are given, not asked for. Remember that about your weed delivery service and youll get more free shit, I promise you. The people who dont ask for things are the people that get things.

What has been most popular with customers?

I think edibles are really where were at right now. Im relieved to see that theyre finally getting that moment in the sun. They sort of dethroned the pen. New York was really running on pens for a long time. People loved the safety and the anonymity of being able to hit a pen in public and being like, This is my e-cig. Then we found out that vitamin E was plugging peoples lungs and poisoning them. Then this all happened, and now edibles are a really great mood stabilizer. I dont know how that hot take got out, but its definitely out.

Are people stocking up on weed?

Honestly, I think people are just smoking more weed because people need more stabilization. And whether that gives you that or not, whether you smoke more and you tailspin out, I think people are still craving that. Theyre craving nothing. A friend of mine said to me, The only rules now are dont drown. And I keep thinking about that.

I do think people are stocking up, and I also think people in buildings are buying together. I think its really cute that people across hallways text each other to be like, Im getting weed but I cant meet the minimum, do you want in on this? They have gummy bears. Thats community.

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A New York City Weed Guy On Drug Dealing in the Age of Coronavirus - Interview

COVIDS WAR ON WOMEN During this plague year, there is almost never good news, only degrees of bad news. Even so, the pandemic has been different (and worse) for girls and women.

Its true that more men are dying than women from Covid-19 around the world but thats not exactly cause for celebration.

Another ambivalent data point: More workplace risk is falling on women, who are more likely to be considered essential workers. The upside to that is still having a job, but at what price? Swedens Foreign Minister Ann Linde pointed out today in a POLITICO interview that 70 percent of those working in health care and elderly care are women.

More of the daily grind tends to fall, on average, on women: From the increased cleaning and chores that come with more time spent in the home, which falls disproportionately to so many female household members, to the extra education and childcare work created through closures of school and day care, where men have also been known, on average, to skimp.

The real-life examples are heartbreaking: Alice Jorge, a woman living with a disability in Belgium who needs support from her sister and a visiting nurse, was recently asked to choose between keeping her Covid-19 positive caregiver or going without professional care. Three women bound to suffer no matter what choices they took.

Domestic violence is up sharply: A new research report by a consortium that includes Johns Hopkins University confirms this: 31 million additional cases of gender-based violence can be expected globally if lockdowns last for an average of six months.

Travel to shelters may be restricted, and a simple phone call to a helpline can itself trigger new violence. Support services are overwhelmed with requests: from a 47 percent increase in calls to Spains national hotline to a 113 percent spike at U.N.-supported hotlines in Ukraine.

We can expect 7 million unplanned pregnancies in 144 low- and middle-income countries, thanks in part to restricted access to contraception, not to mention the 2 million female genital mutilations and countless child marriages projected to increase by the United Nations population agency. The pandemic is deepening inequality, UNFPA Executive Director Natalia Kanem said, slamming the Swiss cheese of a safety net she sees in most countries.

Kanem speaks of childbirth horror stories: pregnant women unable to access caesarian procedures (many of which are unplanned) or blood pressure medication because of redeployed health care resources, or the woman gets to the clinic (and) the midwife isnt there, because theyre also redeployed or sick. Up to two-thirds of maternal and neonatal deaths globally occur because of the absence of properly trained midwives in better times.

During World War II, women on the U.S. homefront think Rosie the Riveter entered the workforce out of a call to sacrifice for the common good. During this pandemic, women are being called back but this time to the frontlines.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Of course Matthew McConaugheys mask says just keep livin. Reach out with tips: [emailprotected] or on Twitter at @renurayasam.

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In these unprecedented times, Americas biopharmaceutical companies are coming together to achieve one shared goal: beating COVID-19. We are expanding our unique manufacturing capabilities and sharing available capacity to ramp up production once a successful medicine or vaccine is developed. Explore our efforts.

THE COVID DOCTRINE For much of the nations 100 days at war with the coronavirus, Donald Trump has been a commander in chief in search of an exit strategy, Adam Cancryn writes. The president has promised the virus will simply disappear, touted unproven treatments as miracle cures and fantasized about a near future of economic resurgence and rapid return to normalcy. Yet as the White House shifts its focus away from the public health response and toward rebuilding an economy ravaged by the pandemic, there remains little clear sense even within his own administration of how close the U.S. is to victory, and what winning the war even looks like.

PINS AND NEEDLES Our executive health editor Joanne Kenen emails: Theres some good news on the vaccine front including word that the country is getting a new vaccine leader. Peter Marks has emerged as the Trump administrations unofficial vaccine czar (minus the cross and pearls) at the FDA, filling in the gap created by the abrupt ouster of Rick Bright from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. Marks will advise BARDA and other agencies on vaccine and gene therapy approval, health care reporter Sarah Owermohle reports.

News of Marks growing involvement comes amid a spate of heartening though still, we cant emphasize enough, very preliminary news about vaccine development, here and abroad. Oxford has a candidate vaccine thats safe in humans; its still testing whether it can create a strong enough immune response to combat the coronavirus. Three other companies have announced accelerations of clinical trials, though widespread availability in the best possible scenario is still months away.

Even if we get a vaccine, Joanne writes, big questions have to be answered.

Who gets it second? First responders will get it first. But how are we going to define a first responder? Anyone who works at a hospital? Only doctors and nurses? Doctors in the community? Police? Firefighters? The military?

But then who gets it second? The elderly and immune compromised because they are vulnerable? The young and healthy because they transmit it? Essential workers because theyre essential? The well-connected? And who decides?

Its possible several vaccines will come on the market at around the same time in different countries, so there could be multiple answers to this question. But this is going to be a huge bioethical knot, colliding with geopolitics. Theres no guarantee that a U.S. company will get to market first and if the World Health Organization has a role in vaccine allocation, we can anticipate some obvious conflicts.

How effective is it? If we get a good but not great vaccine like the seasonal flu shots it will still reduce transmission, but it wont wipe out the virus completely. Well still have to deal with Covid-19, though on a more manageable scale.

Who pays for it? Even if insurers, governments or, in countries other than our own, national health systems pay for immunization, the costs can be passed on indirectly through higher taxes or higher premiums.

How much does it cost? Some of the companies say they dont plan to make a profit, but vaccines are expensive. In the U.S., Trump has largely shunned national approaches, leaving states to fend for themselves as they try to acquire lab testing supplies, protective gear, ventilators and other essential pandemic-fighting goods. A similarly fragmented approach could make vaccine acquisition more expensive and complicated.

How do we make enough of it? One of BARDAs roles is to help ramp up production, and theyve started addressing this. But to make 7 billion vaccines, enough for everyone around the globe, will require commitment, creativity and cooperation that the world hasnt been very good at of late.

How fast will poor countries get access? Good question.

Will the anti-vaxxers take it? Well see. Best guess is that some will, and some wont, because not everybody who opposes vaccines does so for the same reasons or with the same intensity. Some people who dont want their child to get a measles shot may weigh the costs and the benefits differently for a coronavirus vaccine. Amid rising fears of bioterrorism after 9/11, a poll found deep but not overwhelming support for a smallpox vaccination campaign. But that was a hypothetical threat. This one is all too real.

A SMALL BREAKTHROUGH More than three decades ago, researchers made their first big breakthrough against HIV, when they showed that the drug AZT could slow the progression of the virus. Its a moment that Anthony Fauci compared to todays results about the drug remdesivir, which a clinical trial showed could help Covid patients recover more quickly.

Faucis reference to AZT was a bit like a secret code, Sarah Owermohle tells us. He was suggesting that the remdesivir results were a breakthrough, but a modest one. AZT is the shorthand for azidothymidine, a drug that won FDA approval in March 1987, when HIV patients were desperate for any treatment even one with rough side effects that was dogged by questions about whether it actually extended life. It took another decade before the development of drugs that turned HIV from a death sentence into a chronic condition.

HIV and Covid-19 are complex, but distinctly different, viruses, and drug development times are a lot faster now than they were in the 1980s and 90s. But Faucis implication was clear: Remdesivir could be a good first step in fighting Covid, but probably isnt a miracle drug.

A SICK ECONOMY The U.S. economy shrank at a 4.8 percent annual rate last quarter as the pandemic shut down much of the country. A huge percentage of the decline came from the health care industry, with a halt in elective procedures harming profits.

CLAIMS DENIED As businesses in Georgia, Texas and other states throw open their doors, many employees are scared that their employers arent taking proper health precautions. Yet if they refuse offers to return to their jobs theyll be ineligible for unemployment, reporter Megan Cassella tells us.

Trump has declared meatpacking plants essential businesses even as they spawn outbreaks across the country. Frontline health workers are having trouble getting masks, gloves, gowns and other protection equipment, so what hope do nail salons and restaurants have of getting the gear they need?

But for now, Covid fears arent a valid reason not to go back to work.

Some states are trying to take steps so that workers who feel unsafe arent forced to choose a paycheck over their health. Colorado and New York are looking at how to give workers more flexibility. In Georgia, the state labor agency is encouraging employers to negotiate back-to-work plans with employees so that if a business partially reopens, workers who feel unsafe can continue to collect unemployment. In Texas, advocates are asking the workforce commission to add voluntarily leaving work due to COVID-19 as a valid reason to claim assistance.

But other states, like South Carolina and Tennessee, are telling workers they will lose unemployment aid the same week they turn down an offer.

Even in boom times, states reject a high share of unemployment claims. Well probably learn Thursday that another 3.5 million people filed for unemployment assistance last week. Thats on top of the 26 million whove already lost their jobs in the past five weeks.

Our question for readers this week: Seeing any interesting, fun or meaningful signs related to the coronavirus? Snap a photo sometime this week and send it to Renu at [emailprotected], and well share the best ones on Friday.

GRAND OLD PACHYDERM Matt Wuerker dives into an old question on partisan symbols in the latest edition of Punchlines: Why is the elephant the symbol of the Republican Party?

MASS HYSTERIA Italian politicians clash with the Catholic clergy at their own peril, and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has risked doing just that by keeping churches closed because of coronavirus. The prime minister's decision to extend the ban on all religious ceremonies until further notice, except for funerals, has infuriated religious officials. When the lockdown started, most priests quietly accepted the need to suspend services and found alternative ways to connect with their flocks, such as holding ceremonies by video or taking confession by the roadside. But now that other places are gradually reopening, the clergy don't see why they should be last on the list.

82,000

The number of job losses forecast in the bus industry, according to a report released last week by the American Bus Association. The industry could see losses of up to $14 billion. Many of the 3,000 private bus companies in the U.S. are small, serving a range of uses from taking kids to school, sporting events and field trips, ferrying seniors on weekend getaways and connecting small towns with major destinations. (h/t transportation reporter Tanya Snyder)

Portuguese army chief of staff Gen. Jos Nunes da Fonseca attends a briefing of school workers on disinfection procedures. | Armando Franca/AP Photo

DEEP FRIED STATE Belgium, the North Sea homeland of moules frites and mayonnaise, is the world's biggest exporter of frozen fries, but it has been hammered by the pandemics trade slowdown. The Belgian potato industry has warned that more than 750,000 tons of potatoes could be thrown away more than 40 percent of the harvest. And though Belgium's potato industry has urged patriots to take a high-calorie hit for the team by heading down to their local friteries twice a week to help reduce the spud surplus, it's increasingly clear that 11 million Belgians won't be able to handle the deep-fried mission alone. With restaurants and bars closed, and large summer events canceled, fries wont be as ubiquitous as they often are this summer. "Our entire sector is facing a big crisis. We don't just invite all Belgians to eat more fries, but the entire world," said Ward Claerbout from Agristo, a potato processing company in the west of Belgium.

Correction: Tuesdays edition of POLITICO Nightly incorrectly stated which tracks Iowa will open without spectators. The state will reopen certain race tracks without spectators but not horse and dog tracks. We regret the error.

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In these unprecedented times, Americas biopharmaceutical companies are coming together to achieve one shared goal: beating COVID-19. The investments weve made have prepared us to act swiftly: Rapidly screening our vast global libraries to identify potential treatments and have 284 clinical trials underway Dedicating our top scientists and using our investments in new technologies to speed the development of safe and effective vaccines Sharing learnings from clinical trials in real time with governments and other companies to advance the development of additional therapies Expanding our unique manufacturing capabilities and sharing available capacity to ramp up production once a successful medicine or vaccine is developedExplore our efforts.

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Covid's war on women - Politico

A pregnant Native American woman incarcerated in a federal prison in Texas was diagnosed with coronavirus and died in federal custody on Tuesday, officials said.

Andrea Circle Bear, 30, had been sentenced to more than two years in prison on a drug charge this January. She delivered her baby by caesarean section while on a ventilator in a Texas hospital on 1 April, and died there on 28 April.

Circle Bears child survived, but officials declined to provide any additional information on the babys condition or where the child is now, out of respect for the family and for privacy reasons, a Bureau of Prisons spokesman said.

The 30-year-old woman had a pre-existing medical condition that made her more at risk for a severe case of coronavirus, according to federal officials, who did not specify what the condition was.

Andrea should never have been in jail in the first place. Period, the Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley said Wednesday during a discussion hosted by The Appeal, a criminal justice news site.

That she was there at all is cruel and negligent, Pressley said, calling Circle Bear one of many people trapped inside of prison systems because of systemic inequities and a failed war on drugs.

Circle Bear had admitted to selling 5.5 grams of methamphetamine to a confidential informant in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, over two different days in April 2018, according to court documents. She pled guilty to the charge of maintaining a drug-involved premises.

This January, Circle Bear, who was already five months pregnant, according to court documents, was sentenced to 26 months in federal prison by Judge Roberto A Lange.

Her sentencing documents note that Circle Bear had a history of substance abuse and recommended her as a candidate for a prison substance abuse treatment program. The documents also recommended that she be placed in a prison medical facility, given that she was pregnant, and due to deliver her child in early May.

The Department of Justice touted Circle Bears sentencing in a January press release. Dont let yourself or your property get mixed up in the world of illegal drugs. It ends badly, the US attorney Ron Parsons said in a statement.

Circle Bear is the 29th federal inmate to die in the Bureau of Prisons custody since late March. As of Tuesday, more than 1,700 federal inmates have tested positive for Covid-19. About 400 of those inmates have recovered.

On 20 March, Circle Bear had been transferred from a local jail in South Dakota, to FMC Carswell, a federal prison medical facility in Fort Worth, Texas, officials said.

The prison medical facility was more than 1,000 miles away from Circle Bears home of Eagle Butte, South Dakota, which is part of the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian reservation.

As a new inmate in the federal prison system, Circle Bear was quarantined as part of the Bureau of Prisons plan to slow the spread of the coronavirus, according to a press release from the bureau.

Eight days after she arrived, she was taken to a local hospital for potential concerns regarding her pregnancy, but was discharged from the hospital the same day and brought back to the prison, officials said. Three days later, prison medical staff members decided she should be brought back to the hospital after she developed a fever, dry cough and other symptoms, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

Circle Bear was put on a ventilator the same day she arrived at the hospital and her baby was born the next day, officials said. She tested positive for Covid-19 days later.

Federal and state prison records listed Circle Bears race as Native American. A spokesperson for the Cheyenne River Sioux tribal government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

An attorney who represented Circle Bear also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Circle Bears pregnancy made her high risk for the virus, but she would not be considered priority for release under the Bureau of Prisons and justice department guidelines on releasing prisoners to home confinement to help stop the spread. She was already on a ventilator when an expanded home confinement memo was handed down by the justice department in early April.

William Barr, the US attorney general, ordered the increased use of home confinement and the expedited release of eligible inmates by the Bureau of Prisons, with priority for those at low- or medium-security prisons, starting with virus hot spots. Under the Bureau of Prisons guidelines, the agency is prioritizing the release of those who have served half of their sentence or inmates who have 18 months or less left and who served at least 25% of their time.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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US inmate with coronavirus dies weeks after giving birth on a ventilator - The Guardian

After weeks of downplaying the threat posed by COVID-19 as it spread across the world and into the United States, President Donald Trump was finally taking it seriously on March 18.

"I view it as, in a sense, as a wartime president," he told reporters in the White House's briefing room that day. "I mean, that's what we're fighting," he said, before invoking a now-oft-repeated metaphor about the virus as "an invisible enemy."

Framing the pandemic as a war serves mostly as a way for the presidentand the government more generallyto sweep aside skepticism and dodge difficult questions about handling the crisis. Should we think twice before imposing export restrictions that will weaken global resilience to the virus? No time, this is a war! Should the government be able to order workers to stay home, then order them back to work against their will? Generally no, but this is war! Can we protect privacy while building a massive surveillance apparatus to track the spread of the disease? That might be nice, but this is war!

Some of that might make sense during an actual waryou don't want your domestic manufacturers selling goods to your enemies, for onebut it misses the point in our current crisis. There is no us-versus-them happening here. A virus cannot be cowed. It doesn't want our land or to change our regime, and it cannot be forced to surrender by throwing bodies at it.

As Daniel Larison noted in an excellent piece for The American Conservative earlier this month, "declaring war on abstractions and inanimate objects has become a bad habit" for the American government.

Indeed, America has spent 20 years fighting an amorphous "war on terror" that's outlived all of our initial enemies, consumed trillions of taxpayer dollars, and actually created new enemies by destabilizing the Middle East and North Africa. The federal government's "wars" on poverty and drugs have been equally unsuccessful and now serve mostly as federal jobs programs for bureaucrats and cops.

Less than three months after the first American died of COVID-19, and six weeks after Trump declared himself a wartime president, the disease has now claimed more than 58,318 American livesthe number that perished in the Vietnam War. Passing that symbolic threshold provides a useful way to comprehend the severity of the disease, but it doesn't make the war analogy useful.

Writing at The Bulwark, Jonathan Last notes that both the Vietnam War and the COVID-19 pandemic were made worse by incompetent government officials who lied to the American people. That's a worthwhile observation. Both crises undermined Americans' trust in institutions and presidents, and both overlapped and amplified existing cultural faultlines.

But the metaphor's usefulness ends there. For starters, Vietnam killed mostly young Americans, while COVID-19 is mostly killing the olda distinction that might seem callous, but one that nevertheless changes how the crisis effects the national psyche. In many other senses, the war metaphor actually primes Americans to expect more bad government. Unlike an actual war, we shouldn't be calling for the government to do whatever it takes to keep us safe. Not only can it not actually do that, but its record of trying to is also rather bad.

"Comparing the pandemic to war is also somewhat demoralizing when we reflect on our government's record of waging war over the last half-century. There are scarcely any true successes in that record that we can point to that would give us confidence that the government can 'win' now," Larison writes. "Unfortunately, the only things that the government's response has in common with previous war efforts is that the U.S. was badly unprepared for what came next and the president had an unrealistic expectation of how quickly the problem would be taken care of."

Continued here:

No, COVID-19 Isn't Like the Vietnam War. It Isn't Like Any War. - Reason

Having been a war correspondent much of my life, I cant shake the feeling that the war against the coronavirus is a lot like the real thing.

Normally, I would avoid using a war metaphor for a medical disaster, if only because it has been so loosely applied by so many politicians doomed to failure: Consider Lyndon Johnsons war on poverty, Nixons war on cancer and his war on drugs, which Ronald Reagan escalated, making it an unending war to this day.

But the coronavirus war is something new, if only in the terrible toll it has taken in lives and the way it has altered the lives of the rest of us.

Like so many others in New York, to which I retreated months ago for surgery and a long recuperation, I now suddenly find myself in quarantine to be sure I dont acquire the coronavirus. Not since the siege of Sarajevo three decades ago have I been forcibly cooped up in the same building for weeks, afraid to step outside for fear of some life-changing or life-ending encounter.

And I live with the same sense that my personal liberty, freedom of movement and right to life have been stripped from me.

Having covered most of the major wars since Cambodia in 1979, I do feel as if Im in a war, or at least in a war zone. In Sarajevo, if you stepped out the door, Serbian snipers would put a bullet in you, always aiming for the head. And so you just stared at the door and yearned to go through it, but didnt dare.

The current battle against a deadly virus feels just as dangerous, but without sharpshooters. The homeless panhandler who spat in my direction during my one brief foray outdoors (to a mailbox) wasnt nearly as good a shot as a Serbian sniper, thank God.

Now we all worry about stepping outside and getting coughed upon by the wrong person. One of the most horrifying pictures to come out of the pandemic so far has been of a packed subway car in the London Underground, with everyone cheek to jowl and no one wearing a mask. You could just imagine the virus jumping between people.

Then there is a comparison of leadership. A well-known adage says that even the best of plans in war does not survive the first bullet fired. Now two unprepared national leaders who have never themselves gone to war, President Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, have put their efforts to control the pandemic at least verbally on a par with the tactics of generals, as if they had comparable knowledge of combat.

Indeed, Mr. Johnson described himself as leading a wartime government even before he became a casualty of Covid-19. Now the prime minister can even be rated a veteran, mercifully released from hospital treatment to complete his recovery, and his pregnant fiance, Carrie Symonds, might be classed as collateral damage that horrible 20th-century term, having apparently contracted the disease from her wartime leader. President Trump, more clumsily, has appropriated for himself the title of wartime leader. He even trotted out the much derided Vietnam War trope that he could see light at the end of the tunnel an official lie repeated over and over again back in the 1960s to excuse repeated military failure. Evidently, Mr. Trump was unfamiliar with what the doubters said then: that any light in that tunnel was probably the headlight of an oncoming train.

More deserving of respect for their knowledge and courageous experience are the genuine heroes on the front lines in the intensive-care units and the Spaniards and French people, God bless them, who inspired many New Yorkers to publicly applaud their medical personnel daily. Unfortunately, for every self-sacrificing front-line nurse or emergency room doctor, there are also legions of government officials squabbling in an unseemly display of another truism that war brings out the best in men and women, and the worst in their governments and leaders.

See, for example, the rhetoric of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Trump. They have chillingly described their efforts as a war against an invisible enemy. So what else is new to any soldier? In war, you fight an invisible enemy whether its a guerrilla in the mountain or the sniper in his hide or a pilot at 10,000 feet, since the whole point of the exercise is to not be seen by your enemies so that you can kill them but they cant kill you. In the war against the coronavirus, this rings particularly true and will do so until we have a vaccine.

Does that make this medical war better or worse than a traditional shooting war? About the same. In both, the norms of civilized conduct among people break down and rights quickly go out the window and everyone goes along with that. On the scale of American casualties the coronavirus war is right up there with all of our recent shooting wars. Johns Hopkins has the American death toll at around 45,000 so far, which is not much less than the 20-year tally of Americans who gave their lives in Vietnam and whose names are etched in the Vietnam Memorial Wall: 58,318.

Simon Tisdall, a columnist for The Guardian, pointed out a trenchant passage from the French philosopher Albert Camuss novel The Plague: There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared. When war breaks out, people say: It wont last long, its too stupid. And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesnt prevent it from lasting. Stupidity always carries doggedly on.

Sadly, so do plagues.

In Britain, the National Health Service has called for an army of volunteers, especially medical personnel, invoking patriotic propaganda campaigns from the World War II era. Your NHS needs you! the posters read. And as in World War II, there are great hopes that American industrial will again carry the day, this time by churning out tens of thousands of ventilators, millions of face masks, perhaps even billions of quick coronavirus tests and ultimately vaccines.

So far, only bits of that have come to pass, amid complaints that front line medical personnel were having to wash their face masks by hand and use plastic trash bags for hospital gowns. When youre at war, you arm troops before they come under fire, Chris Cuomo, a CNN anchor who contracted Covid-19 and is the brother of New York States governor, Andrew Cuomo, lamented on the air.

In fact, there have been plenty of shooting wars in which soldiers complained of a lack of P.P.E. personal protective equipment a military acronym that the medical profession has now picked up.

In addition, we have seen things that would have been unthinkable only a year ago, such as government measures that have millions of people, most of them poor and out of work, effectively incarcerated in their homes. Such arbitrary uses of state power also feel creepily familiar from other wars, however justified they are in the efforts to stop the virus. If they work, some lives may be saved, but many more will be ruined.

Still, while some impatient voices have called for some of those restrictions to be lifted, most individuals are going along with them. That is another common feature of wars an entire society sometimes joins in supporting its government no matter how repressive its measures. Nazi Germany was the most extreme example, of course, but the populations of Serbia during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s and Russia in recent years also slavishly accepted the aggressive actions of their leaders no matter how extreme they were. The peer pressure during wartime is just so powerful that very few people can stand up to it. Its the rare citizen who speaks out against the received wisdom of the bellicose herd.

So too with the current war. There has been little challenge to an extraordinary interference by the government in its citizens lives: putting perhaps up to half of the population out of work without any right of appeal, and dubious compensation in the form of a handout check signed by President Trump in a brazen vote-buying ploy.

War is indeed stupid, and the warlike aspects of the campaign against the coronavirus are no exception. Since Mr. Trump declared war on his invisible enemy, it has only gotten worse, and weve become the country with the most cases. Yet Mr. Trump says were going to win this war with this invisible enemy when we still dont even really know all the ways in which this enemy gets from one victim to another.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Jake Nordland in Brighton, England.

Rod Nordland is The Timess bureau chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, an international correspondent at large, and has worked as a journalist in more than 150 countries during 40 years overseas.

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Is the Light at the End of This Tunnel the Beam of an Oncoming Train? - The New York Times

On the night of March 2, 2002, a team of U.S. Navy SEALs flew onto a mountaintop along the Shahikot Valley in eastern Afghanistan. They were an advance force for a large American contingent targeting Taliban leader Saifur Rahman Mansoor and his fighters occupying fortifications along the valley.

The planned assault on Mansoor was part of the Pentagons evolving High Value Target strategy, which assumes that armies, insurgencies and criminal networks depend on a small number of key leaders for their existence and that killing these leaders will collapse an organization.

The High Value Target concept is the product of and justification for a sprawling yet secretive complex of armed drones, CIA operatives, National Security Agency eavesdroppers and military Special Operations Forces that grew out of the twin crises of the War on Drugs and War on Terror and which today costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars annually while making America less safe.

And its the subject of an important book. Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins, by Harpers journalist Andrew Cockburn, should be required reading alongside Robert Greniers CIA memoir 88 Days to Kandahar.

As Cockburns captivating, terrifying book explains, the SEALs in Shahikot were assassins, following orders to preemptively kill a man that U.S. policymakers had decided might somehow eventually pose a threat to the United States.

It was a faulty assumption. Mansoor was actually trying to make peace with the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul when the Pentagon and CIA targeted him. But then, High Value Target operations often proceed from bad intelligence, as Cockburn repeatedly illustrates in Kill Chain.

And thats in part because targeted killing relies heavily on drones those ostensibly precise, remote, robotic spies and killers that, in fact, are manpower-intensive and mechanically unreliable and whose sensors are sometimes so imprecise that their operators cannot readily distinguish innocent civilians from insurgents and terrorists.

Indeed, Kill Chain opens with a detailed recounting of a 2011 incident in Afghanistan in which a U.S. Air Force drone crew, in its eagerness to strike insurgents, accidentally killed 23 civilians including two young boys. Every murder of a civilian and every clumsy, pointless targeted killing fuels the fire of resistance that guarantees the United States will always be at war.

America isnt supposed to assassinate people Pres. Ronald Reagan had banned the practice. But after the 9/11 attacks, Washington started doing a lot of things it isnt supposed to do. Assassination targeted killing, in government parlance was already standard practice in Americas disastrous campaign against Latin American drug kingpins when it also began driving post-9/11 counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies.

But as Cockburn spells out, assassinating enemy leaders usually backfires even when the targets are legitimately bad dudes. If it had been paying attention, the U.S. government would have noticed that targeting drug kingpins in the 1990s actually increased narcotics supply by making room for younger, crueler drug lords and more of them. The same principle applies to terrorists and insurgents.

Still, drones have made assassination easier and easier for the government to defend. Question a government official about some robotic strike, as Cockburn did several times, and the official might show you a blurry drone video that proves the killing was legal and necessary.

But drones cant see very well. Shoddy robot intel was one reason that, on that Afghan night 13 years ago, the U.S. assassins became the targets. Hundreds of Taliban fighters far more than the Americans had expected opened fire on the SEALs and a follow-on force of Army Rangers.

The hills blocked long-range radios and senior commanders all over the globe issued competing, fragmentary orders. From such a great distance, no one could coordinate the warplanes orbiting over the valley.

The SEALs and Rangers survived Shahikot well, most of them did, anyway thanks in part to timely intervention by a pair of Air Force pilots in low- and slow-flying A-10 Warthog attack jets. The flyboys in their ugly warplanes coordinated the air support that helped save the men on the ground.

A-10 flyer Capt. Scott Campbell and his wingman didnt depend on some drone operator thousands of miles away to describe the world and the enemy to them. They became a two-man air traffic control center, relaying frantic calls for help from the ground to the circling planes while warning bombers off strikes that might hit friendly positions, Cockburns writes.

Staring out the canopy of their heavily-armored planes, the pilots had their own fingertip feel of the battlefield.

And in so doing, Campbell and his wingman embodied an older, more moral and far more effective mode of warfare one that Cockburn casts as the opposite of the High Value Target strategy with its bad assumptions, poor intel and worse results.

Its worth noting that today the Air Force is desperately trying to retire many of its roughly 300 A-10s over Congresss repeated objections. But the drones and SEALs are going strong. And nobody dares touch the CIAs funding.

Time was, America gathered intelligence firsthand without depending overmuch on expensive technology that rarely works. Time was, America sent highly-trained warriors into battle to confront, and defeat, our enemies only after looking them in the eye, proverbially speaking.

Time was, America didnt kill people with the push of a button merely because some flimsy theory proposes that a few murders followed by a few more, and a few more after that, ad infinitum -- can somehow negate ideology, rewrite human nature and eliminate uncertainty from the world.

Cockburn mourns that times passing and expertly describes the era weve made, the one were stuck with until we change our ways. The era of high-tech, self-defeating assassins.

David Axe is defense editor at The National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.

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Drone Killings Don't Work, According to This Book - The National Interest

Photo: The Canadian Press

Many of us are shaking our heads at images of Americans protesting in the streets to open up the country in the middle of a pandemic.

For people who lovetheir freedom so much, its surprising Americans havent pushed for the right to grow and smoke pot without getting thrown in jail. In fact, keeping cannabis on the wrong side of the law is to the countrys fiscal detriment.

Legalizing cannabis across the U.S. would be a major financial boon for the country. Analysts from Cowen & Co. estimate the U.S. cannabis market is worth about $56 billion and about 90% of sales are going untaxed in the illegal market.

For those states lucky enough to have legal markets, retail stores are in a major slump. After seeing strong sales at the start of the shutdown similar to Canada where consumers stocked up at the start of isolation stores are now struggling without tourists flashing their debit and credit cards.

Themajor disconnect between the legal states and a federal government that still considers the whole industry as illegal means legal cannabis companies, declared in some areas as an essential service in the pandemic, cant access any federal aid.

Cannabis sales in Colorado have reportedly tumbled more than 20 per cent compared to a year ago, and in Nevada theyve dropped about 15 per cent. Analysts expect sales to get even worse before they get better, especially with U.S. unemployment claims hitting about 26.5 million.

It seems counterintuitive, but COVID-19 may end up being a catalyst for federal legalization.

The chairman of Curaleaf, a major U.S. cannabis company that has entered intoa deal to merge with Canadas Canopy Growthif and when cannabis legalizes federally in the U.S., said there happens to be a precedent-setting event.

Boris Jordantold CNBCthat right after the Great Depression, the U.S. government put a priority on tax revenue generation.

They lifted prohibition on alcohol and therefore started to tax it and it became a major revenue generator for both the federal and the local governments around the country, he said.

Jordan said post-COVID-19, governments will again be looking for ways to generate revenue. And cannabis is a significant revenue generator that is largely untapped in the U.S.

There is of course a major barrier to federal legalization across the border politicians.

Still, if theres one thing that can make a staunch politician more pliable its an election year. With the U.S. set to vote on Nov. 3, cannabis is likely to be a key issue.

There have been rumblings that President Donald Trump is considering making federal legalization one of his pet election issues.

On the other side of the spectrum, Democrats have selected one of theirleast cannabis friendly candidatesas the presumptive nominee: former vice president Joe Biden.

Hes spent much of his political career as a general in the war on drugs, insisting that cannabis is a gateway drug. In 2010, hetoldABC News it would be a mistake to legalize.

Now with an election looming and Bernie Sanders having a large chunk of support within the party,Biden has softened his stance.While he continues to oppose legalization, Biden said he does support more modest reforms such as decriminalizing possession, expunging past records, allowing medical cannabis and letting states set their own laws without federal interference.

What is clear right now is that laws across the U.S. are a hazy unfair patchwork in some states, people are incarcerated for selling weed, and in others, people are getting rich off it.

For it to truly be the land of the free, that has to change.

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Weed in the USA - By the ounce - Castanet.net