Twitter wants a Delaware court to order Elon Musk to buy the social media service for $44 billion, as he promised back in April. But what if a judge makes that ruling and Musk balks?
The Tesla billionaire’s reputation for dismissing government pronouncements has some worried that he might flout an unfavorable ruling of the Delaware Court of Chancery, known for its handling of high-profile business disputes.
Musk hopes to win the case that’s headed for an October trial. He’s scheduled to be deposed by Twitter attorneys starting Thursday.
But the consequences of him losing badly — either by an order of “specific performance” that forces him to complete the deal, or by walking away from Twitter but still coughing up a billion dollars or more for breach of contract — has raised concerns about how the Delaware court would enforce its final ruling.
“The problem with specific performance, especially with Elon Musk, is that it’s unclear whether the order of the court would be obeyed,” retired Delaware Supreme Court Justice Carolyn Berger told CNBC in July. “And the courts in Delaware — courts all over — are very concerned about issuing a decision or issuing an order that then is ignored, flouted.”
Berger, who was also a vice chancellor of the Chancery Court in the 1980s and 1990s, stood by those concerns in an interview with The Associated Press but said she doubted the Delaware institution would go so far as to make him complete the deal.
“The court can impose sanctions and the court can kind of coerce Musk into taking over the company,” she said. “But why would the court do that when what really is at stake is money?”
Berger said she expects San Francisco-based Twitter to prevail, but said a less tumultuous remedy for the company and its shareholders would make Musk pay monetary damages. “The court doesn’t want to be in a position to step in and essentially run this company,” she said.
Musk and his lawyers didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Other legal observers say such defiance is almost impossible to imagine, even from a famously combative personality such as Musk. He acknowledged he might lose in August in explaining why he suddenly sold nearly $7 billion worth of Tesla shares.
“I take him at his word,” said Ann Lipton, an associate law professor at Tulane University. “He wants to win. Maybe he’s got his own judgment as to what the odds are. But he’s also being sort of practical about this. He’s getting some cash ready so he doesn’t have to dump his Tesla shares if it turns out he is ordered to buy the company.”
A ruling of specific performance could force Musk to pay up his $33.5 billion personal stake in the deal; the price increases to $44 billion with promised financing from backers such as Morgan Stanley.
The Delaware court has powers to enforce its orders, and could appoint a receivership to seize some of Musk’s assets, namely Tesla stock, if he doesn’t comply, according to Tom Lin, a law professor at Temple University.
In a precedent set just this week involving contempt for noncompliance with a court order, a judge affirmed that shares of a company incorporated in Delaware are personal property subject to the Court of Chancery’s jurisdiction. The judge noted in his Monday ruling that it might be the first time the court has invoked its authority to address ownership of shares in a contempt proceeding, as he divested an entity of its shares and transferred title to another party in the lawsuit.
Speculation that Musk could be threatened with jail time for failing to comply with a ruling is unrealistic, said Berger. “At least, not for the Court of Chancery,” said the former judge. “That’s not the way the court operates.”
But more important, Lin said Musk’s legal advisers will strongly urge him to comply with the rulings of a court that routinely takes cases involving Tesla and other firms incorporated in the state of Delaware.
“If you are an executive at a major American corporation incorporated in Delaware, it’s very hard for you to do business and defy the chancery court’s orders,” Lin said.
Concerns about Musk’s compliance derive from his past behavior dealing with various arms of the government. In a long-running dispute with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he was accused of defying a securities fraud settlement that required that his tweets be approved by a Tesla attorney before being published. He publicly feuded with California officials over whether Tesla’s electric car factory should remain shut down during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
He’s also taken a combative approach in Delaware Chancery Court, calling an opposing attorney a “bad human being” while defending Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity against a lawsuit that blamed Musk for a deal rife with conflicts of interest and broken promises. He and his lawyers have other Delaware cases still pending, including one involving his compensation package at Tesla.
“I think we’ve got a whole lot of players who, as loose a cannon as Elon Musk is, rely on the goodwill of the Delaware courts on an ongoing basis for their businesses,” Lipton said.
Musk’s argument for winning his latest Delaware case largely rests on his allegation that Twitter misrepresented how it measures the magnitude of “spam bot” accounts that are useless to advertisers. But most legal experts believe he faces an uphill battle in convincing Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, the court’s head judge who is presiding over the case, that something changed since the April merger agreement that justifies terminating the deal.
The trial begins Oct. 17 and whichever side loses can appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court, which is expected to act swiftly. Musk and Twitter could also settle the case before, during or after the trial, lawyers said.
Delaware’s courts are well-respected in the business world and any move to flout them would be “shocking and unexpected,” said Paul Regan, associate professor of Widener University’s Delaware Law School who has practiced in Delaware courts since the 1980s. “If there was some kind of crisis like that, I think the reputational harm would be all on Musk, not the court.”
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AP reporter Randall Chase in Dover, Delaware, contributed to this report.
JACKSON, Mich. — Jury selection began Monday in a third trial connected to a 2020 anti-government plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Dozens of people who were called as potential jurors packed the courtroom, even sitting on heating vents. This time the venue is not federal court but a nearly century-old courthouse in Jackson, Michigan.
Joe Morrison, Pete Musico, and Paul Bellar are charged with three crimes, including providing material support for terrorist acts. All were members of the Wolverine Watchmen, a paramilitary group that trained in the Jackson area, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) west of Detroit.
They’re accused of assisting others who have been convicted of conspiring to kidnap Whitmer from her vacation home in northern Michigan.
Lawyers and the judge asked questions to try to weed out biases in the jury pool, including about news consumption, gun ownership and the personal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The selection process could take a day or more.
“Let’s talk about Jan. 6 at the United States Capitol. … A rather uncivilized event,” Assistant Attorney General Bill Rollstin said.
“Hurtful,” a woman replied.
Rollstin mentioned the riot because there will be evidence that Morrison, Musico and Bellar attended an armed legal protest inside the Michigan Capitol in 2020.
At one point, Rollstin asked a group of 15 people if they had heard about federal convictions in the Whitmer plot. No one raised a hand.
Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks pleaded guilty in federal court in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The alleged leaders, Barry Croft and Adam Fox, were convicted at trial in August, while two more men were acquitted last spring.
Lawyers for Morrison, Musico and Bellar say the men cut ties with Fox before the kidnapping plot accelerated in summer 2020; Bellar had moved to South Carolina.
The men also claim they were entrapped by an undercover informant and his FBI handlers.
Investigators secretly recorded hate-filled conversations about Whitmer and other public officials who were denounced as tyrants, especially during the pandemic when businesses were shut down, people were ordered to stay home and schools were closed.
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Find the AP’s full coverage of the kidnapping plot cases: https://apnews.com/hub/whitmer-kidnap-plot-trial. Follow Ed White at http://twitter.com/edwritez .
STOCKHOLM — Swedish scientist Svante Paabo won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for his discoveries on human evolution that provided key insights into our immune system and what makes us unique compared with our extinct cousins, the award’s panel said.
Paabo spearheaded the development of new techniques that allowed researchers to compare the genome of modern humans and that of other hominins — the Neanderthals and Denisovans.
While Neanderthal bones were first discovered in the mid-19th century, only by unlocking their DNA — often referred to as the code of life — have scientists been able to fully understand the links between species.
This included the time when modern humans and Neanderthals diverged as a species, determined to be around 800,000 years ago, said Anna Wedell, chair of the Nobel Committee.
“Paabo and his team also surprisingly found that gene flow had occurred from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, demonstrating that they had children together during periods of co-existence,” she said.
This transfer of genes between hominin species affects how the immune system of modern humans reacts to infections, such as the coronavirus. People outside Africa have 1-2% of Neanderthal genes.
Paabo and his team also managed to extract DNA from a tiny finger bone found in a cave in Siberia, leading to the recognition of a new species of ancient humans they called Denisovans.
Wedell described this as “a sensational discovery” that subsequently showed Neanderthals and Denisovan to be sister groups which split from each other around 600,000 years ago. Denisovan genes have been found in up to 6% of modern humans in Asia and Southeast Asia, indicating that interbreeding occurred there too.
“By mixing with them after migrating out of Africa, homo sapiens picked up sequences that improved their chances to survive in their new environments,” said Wedell. For example, Tibetans share a gene with Denisovans that helps them adapt to the high altitude.
“Svante Pääbo has discovered the genetic make up of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and the Denison hominins,” Nils-Göran Larsson, a Nobel Assembly member, told the Associated Press after the announcement.
“And the small differences between these extinct human forms and us as humans today will provide important insight into our body functions and how our brain has developed.”
Paabo said he was surprised to learn of his win on Monday.
“So I was just gulping down the last cup of tea to go and pick up my daughter at her nanny where she has had an overnight stay, and then I got this call from Sweden and I of course thought it had something to do with our little summer house in Sweden. I thought, ‘Oh the lawn mower’s broken down or something,’” he said in an interview posted on the official home page of the Nobel Prizes.
He mused about what would have happened if Neanderthals had survived another 40,000 years. “Would we see even worse racism against Neanderthals, because they were really in some sense different from us? Or would we actually see our place in the living world quite in a different way when we would have other forms of humans there that are very like us but still different,” he said.
Paabo, 67, performed his prizewinning studies in Germany at the University of Munich and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He is the son of Sune Bergstrom, who won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1982. According to the Nobel Foundation, it’s the eighth time that the son or daughter of a Nobel laureate also won a Nobel Prize.
Scientists in the field lauded the Nobel Committee’s choice this year.
David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, said he was thrilled the group honored the field of ancient DNA, which he worried might “fall between the cracks.”
By recognizing that DNA can be preserved for tens of thousands of years — and developing ways to extract it — Paabo and his team created a completely new way to answer questions about our past, Reich said. That work was the basis for an “explosive growth” of ancient DNA studies in recent decades.
“It’s totally reconfigured our understanding of human variation and human history,” Reich said.
Dr. Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, called it “a great day for genomics,” a relatively young field first named in 1987.
The Human Genome project, which ran from 1990-2003, “got us the first sequence of the human genome, and we’ve improved that sequence ever since,” Green said. Since then, scientists developed new cheaper, extremely sensitive methods for sequencing DNA.
When you sequence DNA from a fossil millions of years old, you only have “vanishingly small amounts” of DNA, Green said. Among Paabo’s innovations was figuring out the laboratory methods for extracting and preserving these tiny amounts of DNA. He was then able to lay pieces of the Neanderthal genome sequence against the human sequencing coming out of the Human Genome Project.
Paabo’s team published the first draft of a Neanderthal genome in 2009. The team sequenced more than 60% of the full genome from a small sample of bone, after contending with decay and contamination from bacteria.
“We should always be proud of the fact that we sequenced our genome. But the idea that we can go back in time and sequence the genome that doesn’t live anymore and something that’s a direct relative of humans is truly remarkable,” Green said.
Katerina Harvati-Papatheodorou, professor of paleoanthropology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, said the award also underscores the importance of understanding humanity’s evolutionary heritage to gain insights about human health today.
“The most recent example is the finding that genes inherited from our Neanderthal relatives … can have implications for one’s susceptibility to COVID infections,” she said in an email to the AP.
The medicine prize kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements. It continues Tuesday with the physics prize, with chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Oct. 10.
Last year’s medicine recipients were David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.
The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
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Jordans reported from Berlin. Ungar reported from Louisville, Kentucky. Maddie Burakoff contributed from New York.
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Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes
A film debuting in over 270 theaters across the United States this week uses a flawed analysis of cellphone location data and ballot drop box surveillance footage to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election nearly 18 months after it ended.
Praised by former President Donald Trump as exposing “great election fraud,” the movie, called “2000 Mules,” paints an ominous picture suggesting Democrat-aligned ballot “mules” were supposedly paid to illegally collect and drop off ballots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But that’s based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cellphone location data, which is not precise enough to confirm that somebody deposited a ballot into a drop box, according to experts.
The movie was produced by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza and uses research from the Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote, which has spent months lobbying states to use its findings to change voting laws. Neither responded to a request for comment.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: At least 2,000 “mules” were paid to illegally collect ballots and deliver them to drop boxes in key swing states ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
THE FACTS: True the Vote didn’t prove this. The finding is based on false assumptions about the precision of cellphone tracking data and the reasons that someone might drop off multiple ballots, according to experts.
“Ballot harvesting” is a pejorative term for dropping off completed ballots for people besides yourself. The practice is legal in several states but largely illegal in the states True the Vote focused on, with some exceptions for family, household members and people with disabilities.
True the Vote has said it found some 2,000 ballot harvesters by purchasing $2 million worth of anonymized cellphone geolocation data — the “pings” that track a person’s location based on app activity — in various swing counties across five states. Then, by drawing a virtual boundary around a county’s ballot drop boxes and various unnamed nonprofits, it identified cellphones that repeatedly went near both ahead of the 2020 election.
If a cellphone went near a drop box more than 10 times and a nonprofit more than five times from Oct. 1 to Election Day, True the Vote assumed its owner was a “mule” — its name for someone engaged in an illegal ballot collection scheme in cahoots with a nonprofit.
The group’s claims of a paid ballot harvesting scheme are supported in the film only by one unidentified whistleblower said to be from San Luis, Arizona, who said she saw people picking up what she “assumed” to be payments for ballot collection. The film contains no evidence of such payments in other states in 2020.
Plus, experts say cellphone location data, even at its most advanced, can only reliably track a smartphone within a few meters — not close enough to know whether someone actually dropped off a ballot or just walked or drove nearby.
“You could use cellular evidence to say this person was in that area, but to say they were at the ballot box, you’re stretching it a lot,” said Aaron Striegel, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame. “There’s always a pretty healthy amount of uncertainty that comes with this.”
What’s more, ballot drop boxes are often intentionally placed in busy areas, such as college campuses, libraries, government buildings and apartment complexes — increasing the likelihood that innocent citizens got caught in the group’s dragnet, Striegel said.
Similarly, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why someone might be visiting both a nonprofit’s office and one of those busy areas. Delivery drivers, postal workers, cab drivers, poll workers and elected officials all have legitimate reasons to cross paths with numerous drop boxes or nonprofits in a given day.
True the Vote has said it filtered out people whose “pattern of life” before the election season included frequenting nonprofit and drop box locations. But that strategy wouldn’t filter out election workers who spend more time at drop boxes during the election season, cab drivers whose daily paths don’t follow a pattern, or people whose routines recently changed.
In some states, in an attempt to bolster its claims, True the Vote also highlighted drop box surveillance footage that showed voters depositing multiple ballots into the boxes. However, there was no way to tell whether those voters were the same people as the ones whose cellphones were anonymously tracked.
A video of a voter dropping off a stack of ballots at a drop box is not itself proof of any wrongdoing, since most states have legal exceptions that let people drop off ballots on behalf of family members and household members.
For example, Larry Campbell, a voter in Michigan who was not featured in the film, told The Associated Press he legally dropped off six ballots in a local drop box in 2020 — one for himself, his wife, and his four adult children. And in Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office investigated one of the surveillance videos circulated by True the Vote and said it found the man was dropping off ballots for himself and his family.
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CLAIM: In Philadelphia alone, True the Vote identified 1,155 “mules” who illegally collected and dropped off ballots for money.
THE FACTS: No, it didn’t. The group hasn’t offered any evidence of any sort of paid ballot harvesting scheme in Philadelphia. And True the Vote did not get surveillance footage of drop boxes in Philadelphia, so the group based this claim solely on cellphone location data, its researcher Gregg Phillips said in March in testimony to Pennsylvania state senators.
Pennsylvania state Sen. Sharif Street, who was there for the group’s testimony in March, told the AP he was confident he was counted as several of the group’s 1,155 anonymous “mules,” even though he didn’t deposit anything into a drop box in that time period.
Street said he based his assessment on the fact that he carries a cellphone, a watch with a cellular connection, a tablet with a cellular connection and a mobile hotspot — four devices whose locations can be tracked by private companies. He also said he typically travels with a staffer who carries two devices, bringing the total on his person to six.
During the 2020 election season, Street said, he brought those devices on trips to nonprofit offices and drop box rallies. He also drove by one drop box up to seven or eight times a day when traveling between his two political offices.
“I did no ballot stuffing, but over the course of time, I literally probably account for hundreds and hundreds of their unique visits, even though I’m a single actor in a single vehicle moving back and forth in my ordinary course of business,” Street said.
City election commission spokesman Nick Custodio said the allegations matched others that had been debunked or disproven after the 2020 election.
“The Trump campaign and others filed an unprecedented litany of cases challenging Philadelphia’s election with dubious and unsubstantiated allegations of fraud, all of which were quickly and resoundingly rejected by both state and federal courts,” Custodio said.
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CLAIM: Some of the “mules” True the Vote identified in Georgia were also geolocated at violent antifa riots in Atlanta in the summer of 2020, showing they were violent far left actors.
THE FACTS: Setting aside the fact that the film doesn’t prove these individuals were collecting ballots at all, it also can’t prove their political affiliations.
The anonymized data True the Vote tracked doesn’t explain why someone might have been present at a protest demanding justice for Black deaths at the hands of police officers. The individuals who were tracked there could have been violent rioters, but they also could have been peaceful protesters, police or firefighters responding to the protests, or business owners in the area.
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CLAIM: Alleged ballot harvesters were captured on surveillance video wearing gloves because they didn’t want to leave their fingerprints on the ballots.
THE FACTS: This is pure speculation. It ignores far more likely reasons for glove-wearing in the fall and winter of 2020 — cold weather or COVID-19.
True the Vote’s researcher claimed in the movie that voters in Georgia started wearing gloves to prevent their fingerprints from touching ballot envelopes after two women in Yuma, Arizona, were indicted on Dec. 23, 2020 for alleged ballot harvesting in that state’s primary election. But the Arizona indictment didn’t mention anything about fingerprints.
Voting in Georgia’s Jan. 5, 2021, Senate runoff election occurred during some of the coldest weeks of the year in the state, and when COVID-19 was surging.
In a similarly speculative allegation, the film claims its supposed “mules” took photographs of ballots before they dropped them into drop boxes in order to get paid. But across the U.S., voters frequently take photos of their ballot envelopes before submitting them.
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CLAIM: If it weren’t for this ballot collection scheme, former President Donald Trump would have had enough votes to win the 2020 election.
THE FACTS: This alleged scheme has not been proven, nor do these researchers have any way of knowing whether any ballots that were collected contained votes for Trump or for Biden.
There’s no evidence a massive ballot harvesting scheme dumped a large amount of votes for one candidate into drop boxes, and if there were, it would likely be caught quickly, according to Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Iowa.
“Once you get just a few people involved, people start to reveal the scheme because it unravels pretty quickly,” he said.
Absentee ballots are also verified by signature and tracked closely, often with an option for voters themselves to see where their ballot is at any given time. That process safeguards against anyone who tries to illegally cast extra ballots, according to Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and the director of the Elections Research Project.
“It seems impossible in that system for a nefarious actor to dump lots of ballots that were never requested by voters and were never issued by election officials,” Burden said.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
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Ukrainian family killed in Russian attack, despite denials
CLAIM: Grave markers for a Ukrainian family that say they died on March 9 in Izium prove they were not killed by Russian forces, because Russian troops did not enter the Ukrainian city until weeks later.
THE FACTS: The Ukrainian city of Izium was being heavily bombarded by Russian forces on March 9 and the family was killed in the attack, according to people with direct knowledge of the attack on the high-rise building where the family lived, as well as reports from humanitarian groups and Ukrainian officials who documented the destruction. After Ukrainian authorities discovered a mass grave in Izium this month, social media accounts for the Russian embassy in South Africa openly questioned whether one of the families buried at the site had been truly killed in a Russian offensive on the northeastern city. On its social media accounts, the embassy shared a screenshot of a tweet by Andrii Yermak, head of the office of the president of Ukraine, featuring a photo of the Stolpakov family’s grave site. The simple wooden crosses, found in a wooded area among scores of others, mark the date of their deaths as March 9, 2022. “The Russians are killing entire Ukrainian families,” Yermak had tweeted. “Izyum. Olesya, 6 years old. Murdered by the Russian uniformed terrorists. Her parents are buried nearby.” The Russian embassy in its posts falsely claimed that the family could not have been killed by Russian troops, because they were not in the area at the time. But Russian forces did carry out several strikes on Izium on March 9, including one that destroyed a high rise on the east bank of the Severodonetsk River, according to a dozen people with direct knowledge that AP journalists have spoken to in recent days. A woman who previously lived in the building and whose mother died in the blast told the AP the Stolpakovs lived in the high rise and were among those killed. Tetiana Pryvalikhina, a 40-year-old who now lives in Kladno in the Czech Republic with her daughter, said in messages on Instagram written in Ukrainian that many of the bodies couldn’t be removed until about a month after the attack, making identification difficult. Izium’s deputy mayor Volodymyr Matsokin told the AP that about 50 people died in the attack, including the Stolpakov family. Matsokin was among those who posted numerous photos and videos of the destroyed city on social media during those weeks. Ukrainian news outlets also reported that the family died in the March 9 attack, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said in a Sept. 17 tweet that they died in an aerial attack on their home that day. Denis Krivosheev, a deputy director at Amnesty International, called the Russian embassy’s comment “totally disingenuous.” While it’s true that Russian forces did not establish full control of Izium until much later, they were clearly heavily shelling the city at the time the family was killed, he said. “The timing totally fits: our respondents were telling us about events at the time including on and close to 9 March,” he said in an email. George Barros, a Russia expert at the Institute for the Study of War, a D.C.-based group that’s been tracking major developments in the war, agreed. “There is ample documentation of Russian indirect fire against civilian infrastructure in Izyum since at least March 3, several days before Russian forces occupied Izyum,” he wrote in an email Monday. During a media briefing on Thursday, Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow, repeated claims that Russian forces weren’t responsible for the March 9 deaths.
— Associated Press writers Philip Marcelo and Beatrice DuPuy in New York, Lori Hinnant in Ukraine and Dasha Litvinova in Tallinn, Estonia, contributed to this report.
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Biden’s 2021 comments on hurricane preparedness misrepresented
CLAIM: President Joe Biden called for people in Florida to prepare for Hurricane Ian by getting vaccinated against COVID-19.
THE FACTS: Social media users are misrepresenting an August 2021 video in which Biden urged people in hurricane-prone states to get vaccinated in case they needed to evacuate or stay in a shelter. As Hurricane Ian on Tuesday approached the southwest coast of Florida, where 2.5 million people had been ordered to evacuate, the out-of-context clip of Biden spread widely on social media. “If you’re in a state where hurricanes often strike, like Florida or the Gulf Coast or into Texas, a vital part of preparing for hurricane season is to get vaccinated now,” Biden says in the video clip. “Everything is more complicated if you’re not vaccinated and a hurricane or a natural disaster hits.” Some social media users who shared the clip suggested that Biden’s comments were in reference to Hurricane Ian’s expected landfall in Florida. “Protect yourself from incoming hurricanes by getting vaccinated… right now!” wrote a Twitter user who shared the video on Tuesday. But the video is from Aug. 10, 2021. Biden made the comments prior to a White House briefing from FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell and other officials about how the COVID-19 pandemic was impacting hurricane preparedness. But he didn’t say getting vaccinated would protect against hurricanes. In the full video, Biden discussed what he described as the upcoming “peak” hurricane season in the Atlantic region coinciding with the pandemic. “If you wind up having to evacuate, if you wind up having to stay in a shelter, you don’t want to add COVID-19 to the list of dangers that you’re going to be confronting,” Biden said in the video, later adding: “We can’t prevent hurricanes making landfall, but we can prevent people from getting seriously sick and dying from COVID-19.” Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida on Wednesday as a Category 4 storm, leaving destruction in its wake.
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Analysts: China flight cancellations follow normal pattern
CLAIM: There was no flight movement over China as more than 9,000 flights were canceled across the country in a single day last week.
THE FACTS: While flight tracking estimates show that thousands of flights were canceled on several days last week, this remains consistent with the high cancellation rates the country has experienced amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and multiple experts told the AP that last week’s air patterns weren’t unusual. As baseless claims of a military coup in China spread online recently, social media users asserted that air traffic data showing more than 9,000 flights canceled across the country on a single day was proof that planes were being grounded amid turmoil in the country. “Absolutely no flight movement over China,” wrote one Twitter user on Sept. 24 while posting an image of the global flight tracking service FlightRadar24 that showed a handful of planes crossing the country. Others claimed that about 9,500 flights were canceled across China on Sept. 21, accounting for nearly 60% of flights that day. But experts say these numbers, as well as some images from flight tracking services, are being presented out of context. Ian Petchenik, director of communications for FlightRadar24, said the images appearing to capture the service’s dashboard over the weekend were likely taken during overnight hours of low flight traffic in China. He added that they also may reflect the fact that FlightRadar24’s display can only show so many flights on screen at a time, meaning if a user zooms out far enough, the number of flights in an area will seemingly disappear. Further, China’s population is not evenly distributed across the country. Because flight density varies greatly depending on the region, some areas are left looking sparse while other areas are more heavily trafficked. “If you’re not understanding what you’re looking at or you’re purposefully misrepresenting what you’re seeing, that becomes an unfortunate byproduct,” Petchenik said. FlightRadar24 data shows that just over 6,000 out of nearly 15,000 flights were canceled on Sept. 21, which Petchenik said falls in line with the high level of daily cancellations that China has recorded for more than two years. While airlines in the U.S., Europe and Australia, among others, reduced the number of scheduled flights in their flight programs amid the pandemic, many Chinese airlines opted not to remove any scheduled flights, instead canceling a large number of flights on a daily basis, Petchenik told the AP. “In no way is this surprising, concerning, suspenseful or anything,” he said. FlightRadar24 data also shows that the three Wednesdays preceding Sept. 21 all also logged more than 5,000 canceled flights. FlightAware, another major flight tracking data company, confirmed to the AP in a statement that its data listed more than 8,000 scheduled flights across China on Sept. 21, nearly 2,000 of which were canceled. Spokesperson Kathleen Bangs confirmed that the cancellations reflected normal air traffic patterns in China. “It’s not uncommon, in fact, it’s pretty much business as usual that we see very high cancellations out of China out of a number of major airports every day,” Bangs added. Cirium, an aviation analytics firm, also told the AP in a statement that Cirium found that the rate of flight cancellations in China on Sept. 21 was “very similar to other recent days.” Social media users spread the false claims of a military coup weeks before China’s ruling Communist Party is set to hold a key congress at which leader Xi Jinping is expected to be granted a third five-year term. But Xi reappeared on state television Tuesday after a several-day absence from public view. He was shown visiting a display at the Beijing Exhibition Hall, his first appearance since he returned from a regional summit in Uzbekistan last weekend. Under Chinese pandemic regulations, he would need to stay in quarantine for a week after returning.
— Associated Press writer Sophia Tulp in New York contributed this report.
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Video of EU flag removal in Italy is from 2013, not 2022
CLAIM: Video shows Italians taking down the European Union flag and replacing it with Italy’s flag after a right-wing group, Brothers of Italy, won its national election.
THE FACTS: The video, filmed on Dec. 14, 2013, in Rome, shows a member of a neo-fascist group tearing down the E.U. flag, not Italians demonstrating after the election this week. Following the victory of a party with neo-fascist roots in the country’s national election on Monday, social media users are sharing a nearly 10-year-old video to falsely claim it shows a crowd’s reaction to what is set to be Italy’s first far-right-led government since World War II. The video shows a man climbing up a ladder to a balcony to remove the E.U. flag, displayed outside the E.U. Commission office in Rome. A crowd of people chant and wave Italian flags before police break up the group. “EU Flag Ripped Down as Right-Wing Party sweeps Italian elections,” an Instagram post, which features a screenshot of the video states. But the video was filmed and uploaded to YouTube on Dec. 14, 2013. It shows a member of CasaPound, a neo-fascist group, removing the flag. CasaPound said in a statement on its website on Dec. 14, 2013, that its then-vice president, Simone Di Stefano, had been arrested for taking the E.U. flag. The group stated that Di Stefano wanted to replace the E.U. flag with the tricolor flag to protest Italian involvement in the international organization. While it’s not immediately clear who first filmed the video, dozens of local news outlets picked up the footage and reposted it that year. CasaPound also used a still frame from the same footage in its statement about the event, showing a man in a red, white and green mask and black jacket holding the blue E.U. flag from a balcony of the commission office. The group shared the video on its YouTube page, with the caption in Italian: “CasaPound blitz at European Union headquarters – flag stolen, police charges – December 14, 2013.” On Monday, Brothers of Italy won the most votes in Italy’s national election, making Giorgia Meloni the country’s first woman premier, the AP reported. Italy’s move to the far right places a eurosceptic party in a position to lead a founding member of the European Union and its third-largest economy.
While there’s no way to predict if the U.S. will be as hard-hit, “last year we were going into flu season not knowing if flu was around or not. This year we know flu is back,” said influenza specialist Richard Webby of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.
Annual flu shots are recommended starting with 6-month-old babies. Flu is most dangerous for people 65 and older, young children, pregnant women and people with certain health problems including heart and lung diseases.
Here’s what to know:
REVVED-UP SHOTS FOR SENIORS
As people get older, their immune system doesn’t respond as strongly to standard flu vaccination. This year, people 65 or older are urged to get a special kind for extra protection.
There are three choices. Fluzone High-Dose and Flublok each contain higher doses of the main anti-flu ingredient. The other option is Fluad Adjuvanted, which has a regular dosage but contains a special ingredient that helps boost people’s immune response.
Seniors can ask what kind their doctor carries. But most flu vaccinations are given in pharmacies and some drugstore websites, such as CVS, automatically direct people to locations offering senior doses if their birth date shows they qualify.
Webby advised making sure older relatives and friends know about the senior shots, in case they’re not told when they seek vaccination.
“They should at least ask, ‘Do you have the shots that are better for me?’” Webby said. “The bottom line is they do work better” for this age group.
If a location is out of senior-targeted doses, it’s better to get a standard flu shot than to skip vaccination, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
All flu vaccines in the U.S. — including types for people younger than 65 — are “quadrivalent,” meaning they guard against four different flu strains. Younger people have choices, too, including shots for those with egg allergies and a nasal spray version called FluMist.
WHY FLU EXPERTS ARE ON ALERT
Australia just experienced its worst flu season in five years and what happens in Southern Hemisphere winters often foreshadows what Northern countries can expect, said Dr. Andrew Pekosz of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
And people have largely abandoned masking and distancing precautions that earlier in the pandemic also helped prevent the spread of other respiratory bugs like the flu.
“This poses a risk especially to young children who may not have had much if any previous exposure to influenza viruses prior to this season,” Pekosz added.
“This year we will have a true influenza season like we saw before the pandemic,” said Dr. Jason Newland, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Washington University in St. Louis.
He said children’s hospitals already are seeing an unusual early spike in other respiratory infections including RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, and worries flu likewise will strike earlier than usual — like it did in Australia.
The CDC advises a flu vaccine by the end of October but says they can be given any time during flu season. It takes about two weeks for protection to set in.
The U.S. expects 173 million to 183 million doses this year. And yes, you can get a flu shot and an updated COVID-19 booster at the same time — one in each arm to lessen soreness.
FLU SHOTS OF THE FUTURE
The companies that make the two most widely used COVID-19 vaccines now are testing flu shots made with the same technology. One reason: When influenza mutates, the recipes of so-called mRNA vaccines could be updated more quickly than today’s flu shots, most of which are made by growing influenza virus in chicken eggs.
Pfizer and its partner BioNTech are recruiting 25,000 healthy U.S. adults to receive either its experimental influenza shot or a regular kind, to see how effective the new approach proves this flu season.
Rival Moderna tested its version in about 6,000 people in Australia, Argentina and other countries during the Southern Hemisphere’s flu season and is awaiting results.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The invisible line dividing two of Alabama’s congressional districts slices through Montgomery, near iconic sites from the civil rights movement as well as ones more personal to Evan Milligan.
There’s the house where his grandfather loaded people into his station wagon and drove them to their jobs during the Montgomery Bus Boycott as Black residents spurned city buses to protest segregation. It’s the same home where his mother lived as a child, just yards from a whites-only park and zoo she was not allowed to enter.
The spot downtown where Rosa Parks was arrested, igniting the boycott, sits on one side of the dividing line while the church pastored by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the protests, sits on the other.
The lines are at the center of a high-stakes redistricting case bearing Milligan’s name that will go before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, setting up a new test of the Voting Rights Act and the role of race in drawing congressional boundaries.
At the center of the case is a challenge by various groups arguing that the state violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the political power of Black voters when it failed to create a second district in which they make up a majority, or close to it. African Americans account for about 27% of the state’s population but are the majority in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts.
“Our congressional map is not reflective of the population that lives in Alabama,” said Milligan, 41, one of several voters who joined interest groups in filing the lawsuit.
The case the Supreme Court will take up Tuesday centers on whether congressional districts in Alabama were drawn to reduce the political influence of Black voters, but it’s also part of a much broader problem that undermines representative government in the U.S. Both major political parties have practiced gerrymandering — drawing congressional and state legislative boundaries to cement their hold on power — but Republicans have been in control of the process in far more states since after the 2010 elections. That has allowed them to win an outsized share of statehouse and U.S. House seats and means GOP policies — including on abortion restrictions — often don’t reflect the will of most voters.
An Associated Press analysis from 2017 showed that Alabama had one of the most gerrymandered congressional maps in the country.
Republicans dominate elected office in Alabama and are in charge of redistricting. They have been resistant to creating a second district with a Democratic-leaning Black majority that could send another Democrat to Congress.
A three-judge panel that included two appointees of President Donald Trump ruled unanimously in January that the Alabama Legislature likely violated the Voting Rights Act with the map. “Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the panel said.
The judges ordered state lawmakers to draw new lines for this year’s election and create a second district where Black voters either made up a majority or near majority of the population. But on a 5-4 vote in February, the Supreme Court sided with Alabama to allow this year’s congressional elections to take place without adding a second predominantly Black district. Two justices suggested it was too close to spring primaries to make a change.
The lawsuit claims the Alabama congressional map dilutes the voting strength of Black residents by packing a large number of them into a single district — the 7th, where 55% of voters are Black — while fragmenting other communities. That includes the state’s Black Belt region and the city of Montgomery.
The current districts leave the vast majority of Black voters with no realistic chance to elect their preferred congressional candidates anywhere outside the 7th district, the lawsuit contends.
“This is just about getting Black voters, finally, in Alabama the opportunity to elect their candidates of choice. It’s not necessarily guaranteeing that they will have their candidate elected,” said Deuel Ross, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is representing the plaintiffs.
The groups contend that the state’s Black population is large enough and geographically compact enough to create a second district. Milligan, who is six generations removed from enslaved ancestors who lived in the Black Belt, ticked off the consequences for Black residents who are not able to have representation that aligns with their needs: addressing generational poverty, the lack of adequate internet service, Medicaid expansion and the desire for a broader array of health care services.
“In choosing not to do that, you’re denying the people of the Black Belt the opportunity to elect an additional person that can really go to the mat on their interests,” said Ross, who is one of the attorneys who will argue the case in a challenge backed by the Biden administration.
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African Americans served in Alabama’s congressional delegation following the Civil War in the period known as Reconstruction. They did not return until 1993, a year after the courts ordered the state to reconfigure the 7th Congressional District into a majority-Black one, which has since been held by a succession of Black Democrats. That 1992 map remains the basis for the one in use today.
“Under numerous court challenges, the courts have approved this basic plan. All we did is adjust it for population deviation,” said state Rep. Chris Pringle, a Republican and chairman of the legislative committee that drew the new lines.
Alabama argued in court filings that the state’s Black population is too spread out to be able to create a second majority district without abandoning core redistricting principles such as keeping districts compact and keeping communities of interest together. Drawing such a district, the state argued, would require mapping acrobatics, such as connecting coastal areas in southwest Alabama to peanut farms in the east.
In a statement to The Associated Press, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said the map is “based on race-neutral redistricting principles that were approved by a bipartisan group of legislators.” He said it looks similar to three prior maps, including one cleared by the Justice Department and another enacted in the 2000s by “the Democrat-controlled Legislature.”
“The Voting Rights Act does not force states to sort voters based on race,” Marshall said in a statement. “The VRA is meant to prohibit racial gerrymanders, not require them.”
Standing in a meeting room at the Alabama Statehouse and pointing to a poster-size version of the map, Pringle said lawmakers prioritized a race-neutral approach. The lawsuit alleges the Republican lawmakers packed Black voters into certain areas, but Pringle said when they were drawing lines they “turned race off” as an option on the computer. Only later did they apply the racial data points.
“I think the Supreme Court is going to back us up that we complied with existing law,” Pringle said.
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Alabama’s 7th Congressional District snakes a winding path from the western neighborhoods of Birmingham through the state’s Black Belt — a swath of land named for the rich soil that once gave rise to antebellum plantations — to sections of Montgomery.
Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, who has represented the district, has been the lone Democrat among the state’s seven House members since she took office in 2011. The state’s other six districts have reliably elected white Republicans for the last decade.
Sewell was the only member of Alabama’s delegation to support restoring the most effective anti-discrimination provision of the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted in a 2013 Supreme Court decision that also arose from an Alabama case. The provision, referred to as preclearance, forced Alabama, other states and some counties with a history of voting discrimination to get Justice Department or federal court approval before making any election-related changes.
Some Black voters outside Sewell’s district say they feel their concerns are overlooked because there is no motivation for Republican officeholders in districts that favor the GOP to pay attention to their issues.
“Fair representation and full representation of the voters in the state of Alabama would mean that a third of the population should get a third of the representation in Congress, and that at least includes one additional seat,” Sewell said. “Look, I think that I would welcome the opportunity to have another seat where I have a colleague that will fight for, you know, voting rights and civil rights, that that will understand that this country has gotten far when it comes to diversity. But we have a long ways to go.”
Alabama’s congressional delegation voted unanimously for the CARES Act, which provided federal aid to state and local governments during the Trump administration as the COVID-19 outbreak was erupting across the country. But that unity vanished when President Joe Biden took office.
Sewell was alone in the delegation in supporting the American Rescue Plan, legislation passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress and signed by Biden. Among other things, she said, the bill benefited community health centers and the health care response at historically Black colleges.
One of them, Alabama State University, was founded two years after the Civil War and in an area where the districts divide. Sewell also was alone in supporting other significant legislation since Biden took office — including the $1 trillion infrastructure bill and the recent Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other provisions, capped out-of-pocket drug costs for Medicare recipients and helped millions of Americans afford health insurance by extending coverage subsidies.
Those types of priorities speak to the Rev. Murphy Green, a local political activist who is supporting the long shot bid by the Democratic candidate in the race for the 2nd Congressional District, where the Republican incumbent won with 65% of the vote two years ago.
He particularly pointed to the health care price controls enacted by Democrats, including for insulin. While diabetes also is a problem for white residents, it is especially systemic among Black people and the cost of drugs to combat it is a priority, Green said in an interview.
“I am a diabetic,” he said. “My congressman voted against price controls on the cost of insulin.”
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Montgomery, which is split into two congressional districts, is a municipal version of the state when it comes to redistricting.
From customers at a well-known barbershop to shoppers at a convenience store, from groups sitting in empty lots and residents in some of the neighborhoods that are being shifted, the question of who represents them in Congress and who will be on the ballot in November brings a range of answers.
The 2nd Congressional District seat has been held by white Republicans for decades, except for two years when a conservative white Democrat got a bounce from turnout related to Democrat Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.
Of dozens of people approached, the majority are aware there is an Alabama case going to the Supreme Court, but they don’t know details of the racial gerrymandering behind the case. Some are unaware of who their congressional representative has been.
In Heritage Barber and Style Shop, a local Black barbershop that rides the line between the 2nd and 7th congressional districts and sits across from Alabama State, Stephen Myers, 77, talks about the state’s maps and attempts to minimize Black voting strength.
“What’s different?” he said.
In the decades he has lived in his home, Myers said he has never had the opportunity to cast a “meaningful” vote for a Democrat. Keeping people motivated under those conditions is a challenge, he said.
The operator of a civil rights site tour, Myers said he passed along the significance of voting to his children and grandchildren, but motivating the current generation? “That’s a good question,” he said.
The frustration is shared by the Rev. Benjamin Jones, who heads the St. James Missionary Baptist Church, a congregation of about 300 tucked into the former farmlands of east Montgomery County.
He recalled the sacrifices of older generations during the civil rights movement. His father, for example, would attend protests and marches that sometimes ended with him going to jail, while his mother would stay home so she could bail him out.
“So it is frustrating to know that people went through those type things, but seemingly in 2022 there hasn’t been that much progress in the voting arena in terms of being able to elect people,” he said. “It’s not about someone who shares your same skin tone, but someone who at least cares enough about your politics to be concerned about your issues.”
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The strategy to challenge a map with a safe majority-Black district comes with risks. As the case goes before the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, advocates fear an adverse ruling could affect future redistricting cases.
Five conservative justices were in the majority in the February vote blocking the use of the map during this year’s elections. A sixth, Chief Justice John Roberts, objected to the procedure his colleagues used to prevent the districts from being redrawn.
But Roberts has a long history of opposition to the Voting Rights Act and wrote the opinion in the 2013 Supreme Court decision that dismantled part of the law.
The February decision by the court is “a troubling sign of what may be to come,” said Michael Li, senior counsel in the Democracy Center for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
He said there is a real chance the Supreme Court could further gut the Voting Rights Act and “make it all but impossible to use.”
“If the VRA doesn’t apply in the Black Belt of Alabama, it is hard to see it applying in many places,” Li said.
The effects of a decision in favor of Alabama could be widespread, potentially allowing states to dismantle or alter districts that have elected Black, Latino and other minority candidates.
Standing by King’s former church in downtown Montgomery, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs acknowledges the risk.
“I am nervous and I’m not afraid to say that,” said 26-year-old Khadidah Stone. “I think the nervous part is looking at what happened in the summer with Roe v. Wade. When I’m looking at that, I look at what else is up to possibly being attacked.”
Even if the plaintiffs prevail, the Alabama Legislature could redraw the lines in a way that actually could jeopardize the one majority Black, Democratic-leaning district. Lowering the percentage of Black voters in Sewell’s district could take an overwhelmingly safe district to one that is less so.
Hank Sanders, a Democrat and former longtime state senator who helped draw the congressional map Alabama put in place 20 years ago, said there is a risk that “you could end up losing both.”
But he said the risks have always been there in pursuing civil and voting rights. That is especially true in Alabama and more specifically Montgomery, where memorials to those advances coexist within sight of statues and memorials honoring the Confederacy.
“If we didn’t take risks and we didn’t take a chance, we’d still be in segregation now,” he said.
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Sherman reported from Washington. Associated Press data reporter Aaron Kessler contributed to this report.
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Associated Press coverage of democracy receives support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ap_politics
BANGKOK — Shares dropped in Europe and Asia on Monday while oil prices surged more than $3 a barrel amid dire warnings over energy shortages in Europe if Russia cuts off gas supplies.
Germany’s DAX fell 1% to 11,998.26 while the CAC 40 in Paris shed 1.2% to 5,690.88. Britain’s FTSE 100 lost 0.8% to 3,305.79. On Wall Street, the future for the S&P 500 was up 0.2% while the contract for the Dow industrials gained 0.4%.
In its quarterly gas report, the Paris-based International Energy Agency said people will have to save at least 13% over the winter if Russia cuts off the last trickle of gas that’s flowing to Europe.
Europe faces “unprecedented risks” to its natural gas supplies this winter after Russia cut off most pipeline shipments and could wind up competing with Asia for already scarce and expensive liquid gas that comes by ship, the IEA said.
Reports that major oil producers plan further production cuts were also exerting upward pressure on energy prices.
U.S. benchmark crude oil gained $3.18 to $82.67 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It lost $1.74 to $79.49 per barrel on Friday.
Brent crude oil, the standard for pricing international oil, rose $3.29 to $88.43 per barrel.
OPEC and allied oil-producing countries, including Russia, made a small trim in their supplies to the global economy a month ago, underlining their unhappiness as recession fears help drive down crude prices.
In Asian trading, Japan’s Nikkei 225 index gained 1.1% to 26,215.79 after a Bank of Japan quarterly survey showed sentiment among manufacturers has darkened, reflecting rising costs, the weakening yen and lingering pandemic-related restrictions.
The headline measure for the “tankan,” measuring sentiment among large manufacturers, was plus 8, down from plus 9 the previous quarter. The tankan measures corporate sentiment by subtracting the number of companies saying business conditions are negative from those responding they are positive.
“Today’s Tankan survey suggests that while the services sector is benefitting from the subsiding virus wave, the outlook for the manufacturing sector continues to worsen,” said a report from Capital Economics. It noted it was the third consecutive decline in sentiment for the world’s third largest economy.
The BOJ has kept interest rates below zero in a longstanding effort to encourage inflation and keep deflation at bay as the country ages and its population shrinks. That has kept the value of the yen weak relative to the U.S. dollar, which has been strengthening as the Federal Reserve raises rates to combat decades-high inflation.
The dollar was trading at 145.15 yen early Monday, up from 144.68 yen late Friday. That raised speculation that the central bank might once again intervene to prevent the yen from weakening further. The euro was at 97.98 cents, up from 97.96 cents.
The stunning and swift rise of the U.S. dollar against other currencies, meanwhile, raises the risk of creating so much stress that something cracks somewhere in global markets.
Elsewhere in Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index fell 0.8% to 17,079.51. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 slipped 0.3% to 6,456.90. Taiwan’s Taiex lost 0.9% and Bangkok’s SET declined 1.8%.
Wall Street closed out a miserable September on Friday with the S&P 500′s worst monthly skid since the coronavirus pandemic crashed global markets. It’s now at its lowest level since November 2020 and is down by more than a quarter since the start of the year.
The Fed has been at the forefront of the global campaign to slow economic growth and hurt job markets just enough to undercut inflation but not so much that it causes a recession. On Friday, the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation showed it was worse last month than economists expected. That should keep the Fed on track to keep hiking rates and hold them at high levels a while, raising the risk of it going too far and causing a downturn.
The S&P 500 fell 1.5% on Friday while the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1.7%. The Nasdaq composite slid 1.5% and the Russell 2000 lost 0.6%.
Other worries hang over global markets, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A U.K. government plan to cut taxes sent bond markets spinning recently on fears it could make inflation even worse. Bond markets calmed a bit only after the Bank of England pledged last week to buy however many U.K. government bonds are needed to bring yields back down.
Twitter wants a Delaware court to order Elon Musk to buy the social media service for $44 billion, as he promised back in April. But what if a judge makes that ruling and Musk balks?
The Tesla billionaire’s reputation for dismissing government pronouncements has some worried that he might flout an unfavorable ruling of the Delaware Court of Chancery, known for its handling of high-profile business disputes.
Musk hopes to win the case that’s headed for an October trial. He’s scheduled to be deposed by Twitter attorneys starting Thursday.
But the consequences of him losing badly — either by an order of “specific performance” that forces him to complete the deal, or by walking away from Twitter but still coughing up a billion dollars or more for breach of contract — has raised concerns about how the Delaware court would enforce its final ruling.
“The problem with specific performance, especially with Elon Musk, is that it’s unclear whether the order of the court would be obeyed,” retired Delaware Supreme Court Justice Carolyn Berger told CNBC in July. “And the courts in Delaware — courts all over — are very concerned about issuing a decision or issuing an order that then is ignored, flouted.”
Berger, who was also a vice chancellor of the Chancery Court in the 1980s and 1990s, stood by those concerns in an interview with The Associated Press but said she doubted the Delaware institution would go so far as to make him complete the deal.
“The court can impose sanctions and the court can kind of coerce Musk into taking over the company,” she said. “But why would the court do that when what really is at stake is money?”
Berger said she expects Twitter to prevail, but said a less tumultuous remedy for the company and its shareholders would make Musk pay monetary damages. “The court doesn’t want to be in a position to step in and essentially run this company,” she said.
Musk and his lawyers didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Other legal observers say such defiance is almost impossible to imagine, even from a famously combative personality such as Musk. He acknowledged he might lose in August in explaining why he suddenly sold nearly $7 billion worth of Tesla shares.
“I take him at his word,” said Ann Lipton, an associate law professor at Tulane University. “He wants to win. Maybe he’s got his own judgment as to what the odds are. But he’s also being sort of practical about this. He’s getting some cash ready so he doesn’t have to dump his Tesla shares if it turns out he is ordered to buy the company.”
A ruling of specific performance could force Musk to pay up his $33.5 billion personal stake in the deal; the price increases to $44 billion with promised financing from backers such as Morgan Stanley.
The Delaware court has powers to enforce its orders, and could appoint a receivership to seize some of Musk’s assets, namely Tesla stock, if he doesn’t comply, according to Tom Lin, a law professor at Temple University.
The court has made such moves before, such as in 2013 when it held Chinese company ZTS Digital Networks in contempt and appointed a receiver with power to seize its assets. But after coercive sanctions didn’t work, the receiver asked the court five years later to issue bench warrants calling for the arrest of two senior executives the next time they visited the U.S.
Speculation that Musk could be threatened with jail time for failing to comply with a ruling is unrealistic, said Berger. “At least, not for the Court of Chancery,” said the former judge. “That’s not the way the court operates.”
But more important, Lin said Musk’s legal advisers will strongly urge him to comply with the rulings of a court that routinely takes cases involving Tesla and other firms incorporated in the state of Delaware.
“If you are an executive at a major American corporation incorporated in Delaware, it’s very hard for you to do business and defy the chancery court’s orders,” Lin said.
Concerns about Musk’s compliance derive from his past behavior dealing with various arms of the government. In a long-running dispute with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he was accused of defying a securities fraud settlement that required that his tweets be approved by a Tesla attorney before being published. He publicly feuded with California officials over whether Tesla’s electric car factory should remain shut down during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
He’s also taken a combative approach in Delaware Chancery Court, calling an opposing attorney a “bad human being” while defending Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity against a lawsuit that blamed Musk for a deal rife with conflicts of interest and broken promises. He and his lawyers have other Delaware cases still pending, including one involving his compensation package at Tesla.
“I think we’ve got a whole lot of players who, as loose a cannon as Elon Musk is, rely on the goodwill of the Delaware courts on an ongoing basis for their businesses,” Lipton said.
Musk’s argument for winning his latest Delaware case largely rests on his allegation that Twitter misrepresented how it measures the magnitude of “spam bot” accounts that are useless to advertisers. But most legal experts believe he faces an uphill battle in convincing Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, the court’s head judge who is presiding over the case, that something changed since the April merger agreement that justifies terminating the deal.
The trial begins Oct. 17 and whichever side loses can appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court, which is expected to act swiftly. Musk and Twitter could also settle the case before, during or after the trial, lawyers said.
Delaware’s courts are well-respected in the business world and any move to flout them would be “shocking and unexpected,” said Paul Regan, associate professor of Widener University’s Delaware Law School who has practiced in Delaware courts since the 1980s. “If there was some kind of crisis like that, I think the reputational harm would be all on Musk, not the court.”
TOKYO — Business sentiment among large manufacturers worsened for the third straight quarter, a Bank of Japan survey showed Monday, as the nation grappled with rising costs, the dropping value of the yen and restrictions on economic activity over the coronavirus pandemic.
The headline measure for the “tankan,” measuring sentiment among large manufacturers, was plus 8, down from plus 9 the previous quarter.
The tankan measures corporate sentiment by subtracting the number of companies saying business conditions are negative from those responding they are positive.
Worries are growing about how the Bank of Japan hasn’t gone along with other central banks in tightening interest rates to curb growing inflation. Japan has been trying to fight deflation in recent years and has kept interest rates at near zero.
The nose-diving yen is also a concern, although a cheap yen has in the past been lauded as helping the nation’s big exporters like Toyota Motor Corp., by raising the value of overseas earnings.
The rising costs of imports, including energy as well as food, is hurting Japan, when the U.S. dollar is now trading at nearly 145 yen, when it used to be at 130-yen levels just a few months ago. A year ago, the dollar cost 111 yen.
Sentiment among large nonmanufacturers improved to 14 from 13, according to the latest tankan.
The world’s third-largest economy has struggled for decades to keep growth going. But the stagnation has worsened the last two years because of reduced travel and supply shortages caused by the pandemic.
The war in Ukraine has added to the problems for a resource-poor nation that imports almost all its oil.
The return of individual visa-free travel later this month is certain to work to boost incoming tourists.
The pandemic had squelched overseas tourism, which had sustained economic activity in recent years.
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Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama
Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw said Sunday he has been treated for two forms of cancer in the past year.
Bradshaw said on “Fox NFL Sunday” that he was diagnosed with bladder cancer late last year and was treated at Yale University Medical Center, including surgery.
“As of today, I am bladder cancer free,” Bradshaw said.
The 74-year-old then said he found a tumor in his neck earlier this year and it turned out to be a Merkel cell tumor, a rare form of malignant skin cancer. He was treated at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
“Folks, I may not look my old self, but I feel like my old self,” Bradshaw said. “I’m cancer free, I’m feeling great.”
Bradshaw played his entire career (1970-83) with the Pittsburgh Steelers and won four Super Bowls.
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More AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl and https://twitter.com/AP—NFL
PARIS — Valentino’s Paris fashion show on Sunday saw black cars snared for blocks dropping off battalions of celebrities who, amid the commotion, just couldn’t find the entrance.
Seated VIP guests were sweatily crammed in together inside the Le Marais’ Carreau du Temple venue, waiting as the show started an hour late. Outside, screaming members of the public braved the rain for hours just for a glimpse of their favorite stars.
Fever pitch like this at Paris ready-to-wear fashion shows is reminiscent of the French capital’s pre-pandemic fashion scene — and one more visible sign the industry is buoyant again after the devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Here are some highlights of Sunday’s spring-summer 2023 collections in Paris:
VALENTINO’S REVEAL
“Cuts and transparencies reveal the persona,” the brand said of designer Pierpaolo Piccioli’s glitzy spring collection that mixed gimmicks with moments of thoughtful fashion skill.
Models with faces and necks completely covered in disturbing interlocking “V” make-up began the show, introducing the theme of the reveal.
The exploration of inside-out or back-to-front continued in a beautiful nude skin-like top with matching nude pants speckled sparingly with diaphanous plumes on model Anna Cleveland.
A coat had ostrich feathers peaking out from inside through the hems. The sides of some dresses were scooped out, while a dazzling purple sequined floor-length gown revealed the model’s flesh only at the back.
Yet at times it felt as if the lauded Italian designer may have tried to fit too much in. By outfit number 91, it also felt exhausting — with fashion insiders fidgeting for the show to wrap up.
The Valentino finale was the true reveal of the show, which was livestreamed: The models did not even walk past seated guests as usual, but straight outside to the cheering general public, making some inside feel superfluous.
RAIN ON GIVENCHY’S PARADE
Rain would normally be a good thing in the green thickets of the Jardin des Plantes, the gardens in central Paris.
For Givenchy’s outside runway, it was another story.
VIP guests including Olivia Rodrigo survived torrential downpours only thanks to helpers clutching transparent umbrellas. But the show had to go on. For Matthew M. Williams, a designer who has garnered lukewarm reviews of late, this collection was a little like crunch time.
For spring, the U.S. designer moved his street aesthetic in a dressier direction — likely trying to bring him to the safer ground of the age-old house’s traditional aesthetic. He had some success.
An oversized tweed black bolero cut a creatively surreal silhouette atop a pencil-thin mini dress, twinned with Matrix-style shades. Elsewhere, features such as ruching on a silken top, or draping on a fluid skirt, resembled thick organic sinews or ribs.
This felt like a good, gently transgressive direction for the house immortalized by Audrey Hepburn’s LBD.
However, many of Williams’ design elements still felt out of place on the haute Paris runway, such as 90s lowslung cargo shorts that seemed off-kilter. Furthermore, they clashed with the black silken ruffled cuffs that dangled down.
THE ART OF THE INVITATION
The art of the chic invite is still very much a staple of the Paris luxury industry.
The little works of art sometimes provide a hint as to what the collection has in store; other times, they are just plain wacky.
Balenciaga’s spring invite was — unfathomably — a real used leather wallet containing real French franc notes, a health security card, a photo of a pet cat, and credit cards as well as other things spilling out. Countless videos appeared on social media of surprised guests opening their “invite.”
One fashion inside exclaimed: “But how do you know how to get to the show?”
Valentino’s invitation was a smooth black cube that opened to have nothing inside but a QR code. Chanel’s was a card of Kristen Stewart’s face that was so big it could not fit into letter boxes.
BARBARA BUI IS SMART
Low-key French designer Barbara Bui is a good example of how the pandemic affected the fashion industry — for better and for worse.
Many houses went digital during the lockdowns, opting to show a fashion film instead of staging a show, which was for many months prohibited. In this spring Paris season — like in Milan’s — the industry seems to be very much back to pre-pandemic runways, yet Bui’s was one of a spattering of collections that continued with the fashion film format.
It’s a smart move: Smaller houses like Bui’s have benefited from the new flexibility as runway collections are clearly much more expensive to produce.
The collection’s spring video featured a couple of lovers in a French country house seeking each other out and seemingly wearing each other’s clothes — a good theme for a co-ed fashion show.
The film’s use of light sat well with the fluidity of a loose white tuxedo suit on a bare chest, or a giant multicolored foulard thrown nonchalantly over the male model’s naked shoulder. A cobalt blue one-shoulder piece was set off by the male model’s long bright red and androgynous nail polish.
Lviv, Ukraine – Four-year-old Teona sits in a room filled with purple beanbags and other sensory toys, patting an inflated balloon vigorously with both her hands. She seems cheerful and vivacious, occasionally crying out in joy. Speaking to her in a kindly, measured tone is a play therapist, Sofia. Her job is to help Teona improve her social skills. Watching the two interact, it’s hard to imagine that the last few months have been intensely traumatic for Teona in ways that she cannot articulate.
For now, she is safe at the Dzherelo Children’s Rehabilitation Centre, an NGO offering rehabilitation services and treatment for young people with disabilities in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. The journey was not easy, though. She and her mother, Viktoria Plyush, 33, fled by train, waiting fearfully at dangerous checkpoints before arriving on July 9, just over four months after Russian forces captured their hometown of Hola Prystan in the southern region of Kherson.
Teona has non-verbal autism, and before the Russians overran Hola Prystan she had been attending a kindergarten that provided play and speech therapy. For months, her mother clung to the hope that Ukrainian forces would liberate the area. Teona had been confined to their home for several months, unable to go to school or see any of her classmates, who had all gone to Poland or Romania with their families. She grew agitated, covering her ears and screaming constantly.
“All the facilities for children with developmental disabilities shut down because they refused to cooperate with the Russian occupiers, which we think is the honourable thing to do,” Plyush says. A mild-mannered woman with a determined gaze, she sits ramrod straight in her chair as she speaks, occasionally glancing at Teona as she plays with Sofia.
The family lived in fear. “Rockets were flying everywhere and there were no air raid sirens to warn us,” she recalls. The only times she left the house were to dash out to the market to buy food. The last straw came when she heard about the Russian army kidnapping civilians or fighters with Ukrainian loyalties.
Teona wailed throughout the arduous two-day journey from Hola Prystan into Lviv.
Now, Plyush, her husband and Teona live with her sister in Lviv. Plyush is relieved that Teona can resume the therapy she needs, and not be isolated any longer.
Despite her sunny disposition and the friends she’s made at Dzherelo, Teona is still on edge following her ordeal. After months at home with Plyush in Hola Prystan, she also has separation anxiety, screaming if her mother is out of sight for more than a few minutes.
But it’s not just Teona who has needed extra care after all the stress she has endured. Yaroslava Nikashin, 35, an easy-going and warm social worker at Dzherelo, says that her work in recent months has focused on supporting parents and ramping up psychological help and counselling for caregivers. “Some of the parents like her [Plyush] seem calm, but on the inside, they’re also really scared and sad,” she says.
Despite worries that financing for NGOs like Dzherelo will dwindle as the war drags on and most financial aid is diverted to the armed services, Nikashin has made up her mind to continue her work. “We have to try and maintain both the quality and quantity of the services we offer and give as much as we can,” she says.
The Dzherelo centre, in a suburb of Lviv, offers treatment and rehabilitation services for disabled young people [Amandas Ong/Al Jazeera]
Challenges accessing support
As the Russian invasion grinds into its eighth month, Ukrainians with intellectual and physical disabilities – as well as their carers – continue to encounter huge challenges in accessing the support they need.
According to two Brussels-based NGOs, the European Disability Forum and Inclusion Europe, some 2.7 million people with disabilities are registered in Ukraine. Of these, an estimated 261,000 have intellectual disabilities. Both organisations have documented a drastic deterioration in the quality of life for Ukrainians with disabilities.
Some are unable to access medication or food, while those with developmental disabilities have seizures or become aggressive while frightened by shelling. In addition, wheelchair users or those with mobility issues are not able to access bomb shelters, so people with physical disabilities have no choice but to remain at home, leaving them at a disproportionate risk of death. Thousands more are believed to be trapped in care homes or poorly-maintained institutions, cut off from their communities and languishing in neglect.
Since the end of June, Dzherelo has been working with UNICEF and the Ukrainian government on an emergency intervention, dispatching mobile teams of medical experts to seven regions of western Ukraine, focusing on remote areas where children with physical impediments and developmental difficulties might struggle to receive the assistance they need. In total, Dzherelo has supported more than 750 families through this scheme and their Lviv facility.
Zoreslava Liulchak, the director of Dzherelo, says that in the early days of the war, the centre met people at the train station in Lviv who had carried their children for the entire journey from the east to western Ukraine, as they were not able to bring wheelchairs from home. “There’s also a big problem with leaving itself,” she adds. “The Russians often do not release people from the occupied territory.”
She cites the example of a rehabilitation specialist from Kherson who is now working at Dzherelo. Along with his two nephews who have cerebral palsy, he had to escape through Russian-controlled Crimea, as they were not permitted to leave via any other route. These stories are commonplace, Liulchak says, and such stressful journeys can “provoke complications in physical and psychological conditions” already experienced by children with disabilities.
A trampoline at the Dzherelo centre, which has helped more than 750 families through a joint emergency programme focusing on remote areas which started in late June [Amandas Ong/Al Jazeera]
Gruelling, expensive work
Some 735km (575 miles) away in Galway, Ireland, 40-year-old Ukrainian disability rights activist Yuliia Sachuk is all too familiar with the frustrations faced by people with disabilities who are trying to evacuate to safety – whether to western Ukraine or abroad. As the chair and co-founder of Fight for Right, a female-led Ukrainian NGO for disability rights, Sachuk and her team of nearly 30 have been overworked arranging the delivery of essential medications, financial support and legal advice for more than 4,100 individuals in the disabled community since the end of February.
Sachuk was studying for a master’s in disability law in Galway when she returned home in early 2022 as tensions were rising in eastern Ukraine. She fled the country in the late hours of February 24, following the invasion, with her 17-year-old son and sister after hearing about a bombing near a medical facility for people with disabilities. Their train from Kyiv kept stopping amid explosions and she frantically texted other activists in neighbouring countries for help. One of her contacts helped the family get to Romania, and eventually to Ireland. Her husband has remained in Ukraine and is volunteering with the Territorial Defence Forces.
Sachuk says her work has been non-stop, gruelling and expensive. Arranging a medical evacuation for a person with disabilities, especially from the worst-affected cities, can cost the equivalent of $5,100 to $10,300 – in part due to the equipment needed.
The group started a GoFundMe online crowdfunding campaign to help with evacuations and support those who cannot leave with food and medicine. As of late September, it has raised 481,096 euros ($464,188) of its 700,000-euro ($675,390) goal. According to Sachuk, requests for help from people with disabilities continue to stream in.
Aside from receiving initial guidance from two US-based organisations – the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies and the World Institute on Disability – on how to set up Fight For Right’s response strategy, Sachuk says they were let down by other international disability charities.
“In the first months of the war, all these organisations were not helpful at all when it comes to direct support. Nobody worked with us,” Sachuk says. “If [we’re talking about] getting a person here and now to help a disabled person to their car, or to buy some food or medicine, all of these organisations have failed.” Ukrainian disability organisations were left on their own to save people, she says.
With sadness, she recalls the first few months of the war when she received goodbye calls and messages from people with disabilities in occupied regions. “They were stuck in their houses and they didn’t have the possibility of evacuation,” she says.
Sachuk knows intimately what it means to live with a disability. Born in the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk with severe congenital visual impairment, she was in and out of hospital throughout her childhood as she underwent multiple eye surgeries. Her sight is still poor today but she says she manages to get by with the aid of magnifying glasses and enlarged letters on computer screens. “When you have lived with this for all your life, you get used to it, and stop thinking of it as a problem,” she says.
She credits her parents for fighting for her to attend a state-run school, instead of one of the boarding schools for children with disabilities that are infamous for rampant abuse and mistreatment. At school, she was bullied by classmates.
She remembers hearing stories about children with disabilities who were confined to their homes as some parents were ashamed of them. “It was just not talked about so much in the past,” she says.
Sachuk is proud of how Fight for Right has brought people with disabilities safety and comfort. She recalls how, in June, her team helped organise the delivery of a prosthetic breast from Germany to a woman in the northeastern city of Kharkiv in Ukraine. The woman had had a mastectomy following a breast cancer diagnosis and was also suffering from mobility problems. “She was just so, so happy. She couldn’t believe it was possible,” Sachuk remembers.
Routine is critical
One formidable task for NGOs working with people with developmental disabilities is the pressure to provide stability amidst the turmoil of war. Routine is especially important for children with autism; disarray can jeopardise any progress that comes with therapy.
Anna Perekatiy, founder of the Start Centre in Lviv, an NGO that supports children with developmental disabilities, says 35 displaced families from regions in eastern Ukraine that were shelled intensely by the Russians, such as Kherson, Donetsk and Mykolaiv, have come to her for help since the start of the war. They have children with a range of physical, developmental and learning disabilities. Some 90 percent of them have autism.
“These children need stability, they need permanent therapy to help them develop crucial skills,” says Perekatiy, who has a 12-year-old son with autism. She stresses that children’s development deteriorates quickly when pedagogical therapy is put on pause.
Olha Chermayina, left, and her daughter Alisa, who has non-verbal autism, play at the Start Centre. When their city of Berdyansk was occupied in late February, Alisa’s speech therapy was disrupted [Amandas Ong/Al Jazeera]
Two-year-old Alisa has non-verbal autism – a diagnosis that she only formally received upon arriving in Lviv from her home in Berdyansk in southeastern Ukraine. Her mother, 37-year-old Olha Chermayina, cries as she describes how Alisa’s behaviour changed when the Russian occupation began. “She stopped making eye contact and shut down completely,” Chermayina recalls. As doctors fled the city, there was no proper medical care for children, and Alisa had no access to speech therapy.
When the family began to feel the impact of food shortages, they decided to flee. Upon arriving in Lviv, Chermayina and her husband Shota took Alisa to a children’s hospital, where a doctor confirmed she had autism. “He said we would have to start her treatment right from the beginning,” Chermayina says. “We’re taking a risk in staying here, but … we don’t know if she’ll get the care she needs if we go abroad, and there’s no guarantee that she can get used to it there.” Today, Alisa goes to the Start Centre five times a week.
Many children with disabilities were deprived of educational opportunities once the war started, as they could not partake in the online learning offered in mainstream schools. Perekatiy is also frustrated by the lack of governmental support, with the majority of rehabilitative services provided by NGOs like hers. She says the “old Soviet education system”, where the learning needs of people with disabilities were largely ignored, has meant that those who need support still feel stigmatised. Though she is optimistic that attitudes are changing, she worries that recognition of these needs won’t come quite fast enough for those most affected by the war.
Nine-year-old Milena, her hair in braids, who is from Bilytske in Donetsk, enjoys a play session at the Dzherelo centre [Amandas Ong/Al Jazeera]
Structured environment
Even for children with intellectual disabilities who may not have outwardly shown signs of trauma, a structured environment is just as important for their development. In Dzherelo’s spacious garden, with its trampoline and playground, Olena Filippova watches her daughter, nine-year-old Milena, play with other children.
At the beginning of April, Filippova travelled with Milena, who has Down’s Syndrome, westward from their home city of Bilytske in Donetsk. Unable to get on a bus to Poland, she decided to stay in Lviv and enrol Milena at Dzherelo for play therapy five days a week. For the time being, the pair lives in an overcrowded dormitory for internally displaced people where the conditions are dismal. But Filippova, 49, a secondary school teacher, hopes to secure a teaching job in the autumn.
Milena, who has limited speech and communicates predominantly with gestures, is curious and observant, having picked up new words in Ukrainian simply by listening to other people. Since she grew up speaking Russian, the linguistic switch is particularly remarkable. “But she’s very mischievous,” Filippova laughs. “Once she knows a new word, she’ll say it once but refuse to repeat it. It’s like she’s making fun of me.”
For Milena, it was only after the war started that she began receiving specialist care. In Bilytske, Milena attended a regular kindergarten where Filippova says the teachers “made sure to be very inclusive” and had similar play therapy but for only two hours a week, which her mother felt wasn’t sufficient.
“My daughter was born at a time when rehabilitation centres [for children with learning disabilities] were just starting to open,” she says. As the field opens up and improves, she hopes that “with this change of circumstances, Milena will start talking to me”.
From left to right, Volodymyr, Ivanka, and Danylo, long-term residents of the Emmaus Centre, are shown with two of the centre’s assistants, including Tetiana, standing, in the building’s lounge [Amandas Ong/Al Jazeera]
A glimmer of hope
At the Emmaus Centre, a home for adults with intellectual disabilities on the grounds of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, residents offer fellow members of the disabled community a glimmer of hope by showing how stability and opportunities can facilitate social integration.
Emmaus provides individualised care – its four assistants live on site and support its five permanent residents – aged between 25 and 45 – with all aspects of their lives, from vocational training to employment to daily tasks such as shopping for groceries. At Emmaus’s request, the residents interviewed are referred to by their first names only.
The atmosphere in the home is relaxed and inviting, the residents chatting and laughing with each other. Sitting at the dining table in a cosy room lit by the afternoon sun, 32-year-old Ivanka speaks enthusiastically about her experiences with the 500-odd displaced people with disabilities who have over six months sought refuge at Emmaus and its surrounding dormitories for a few days at a time. Emmaus supported their subsequent evacuation to other countries in Europe.
Ivanka, who has a developmental disability, attended a boarding school for years, only coming to live in Emmaus in September 2017. “It was good when the refugees came because I was able to volunteer as a nanny for some of their children,” she says. In particular, she misses a pair of twin boys who were five months old and had mobility issues. Prior to the war, she had been regularly attending a workshop where she learned to craft origami and artwork for sale. “I stopped going because it was not safe. There was no bomb shelter near the place where the workshop was held. But I hope to go back soon,” she says with a smile.
Ivanka and Danylo are among the five permanent residents at the Emmaus Centre [Amandas Ong/Al Jazeera]
Two of her other housemates found their lives severely disrupted when the war began. One, 33-year-old Volodymyr, who has Down’s Syndrome, lost his job as a cleaner in a tech company several months ago. Having immensely enjoyed it, it was he who first suggested that other residents of the house would benefit from working.
“We are hoping to find him something else in the meantime,” says Tetiana Chul, one of the assistants at Emmaus.
“But it is still important to help out,” Volodymyr interjects. With not much on his plate at the moment, he spends his days cooking and cleaning for his roommates, and often volunteers to do chores on behalf of the staff. In his free time, he watches TV programmes from the 1990s and dreams of visiting Turkey, where one of his favourite soap operas is set.
Another resident, 25-year-old Danylo, who also has Down’s Syndrome, was taken by his family to Poland at the start of the war. “They felt I would be safer there. It was fun and I enjoyed going to school in Poland, but the language barrier was difficult for me,” he confesses. He ended up missing his friends in Lviv so much that his family agreed that he should return – and now he is back at Emmaus.
Danylo thumbs through a photo album to show Al Jazeera photos of his time in Poland. Suddenly, he recalls his mother, who died a few years ago and whom he calls his best friend. “Her lifelong dream was for me to live in a place like this, where I could be independent, and loved. I miss her very much,” he says, choking up with tears.
As Ivanka pats him on the shoulder, Chul holds out her hand to comfort him, and he kisses it. “Because of you, I am happy now,” he tells them.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has upgraded Malaysia’s air safety rating to Category 1, allowing the country’s carriers to expand flights to the United States after a three-year hiatus, Transport Minister Wee Ka Siong said Saturday.
Wee said the move will bolster tourism and economic growth in Malaysia, which opened up from pandemic shutdowns in April.
“With the return to Category 1, our airlines can now mount new flights to the U.S. and have code sharing with American carriers. There is no more barrier now,” said Wee, who was in Montreal for an ICAO assembly. “This is good news after the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Riad Asmat, CEO of low-cost carrier AirAsia Malaysia, said it was a “very good start.” He said AirAsia, currently the only Malaysian carrier that flies to the United States — from Kuala Lumpur to Honolulu — will seek opportunities to expand in the U.S.
The FAA lowered Malaysia’s rating in November 2019 to Category 2 due to non-compliance with safety standards. The FAA identified deficiencies in areas including technical expertise, record keeping and inspection procedures.
Under the FAA system, countries are listed either as Category 1, which meets International Civil Aviation Organization standards, or Category 2, which doesn’t meet standards.
Wee told an online news conference that the downgrade prompted Malaysia to restructure its Civil Aviation Authority and make various efforts to strengthen its aviation workforce, documentation processes and inspection methods to ensure effective safety oversight.
He said the FAA was satisfied the issues identified in 2019 had been rectified, but found 29 new problems in its December assessment. Those issues were swiftly rectified in the first half this year, he said, and the FAA has restored Malaysia’s Category 1 rating.
Malaysia Airlines CEO Izham Ismail said the national carrier will resume flight plans with its partners, especially American Airlines, but didn’t elaborate.
HONOLULU — U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Hawaii this week amid lingering community frustration and distrust after jet fuel from a military storage facility last year spilled into Pearl Harbor’s drinking water, poisoned thousands of military families and threatened the purity of Honolulu’s water supply.
Austin traveled to the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in the hills above Pearl Harbor on Friday and met the commander of the joint task force in charge of draining its tanks so it can be shut down.
He also met with several families affected by the fuel spill and Hawaii state officials, the military said in a news release. The meetings were closed to the media, and Austin didn’t hold a news conference afterward.
Outside Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam, several dozen protesters held signs saying “Navy Lies” and “Shut Down Red Hill.” People driving by — including many exiting the base — honked in support.
Samantha McCoy, whose husband is in the Air Force, said her family suffered migraines, rashes, skin sores and gastrointestinal problems that only subsided when they moved out of military housing last month.
She called on Austin to make more medical care available to families.
“It took four months of daily migraines to even get a referral to a neurologist. And that’s really unacceptable,” she said at the protest.
Cheri Burness, who lives in Navy housing, won’t drink the tap water in the house she shares with her sailor husband and their two teenage children because she doesn’t believe that it’s safe 10 months after the spill.
Her family has spent $3,000 of their own money to install filters on all the faucets in the house so they can bathe, brush their teeth and wash their dishes. She spends $70 to $100 a month to have water delivered to their home for drinking. They also use bottled water.
She recalled how Navy leaders initially told Pearl Harbor water users their water was safe to drink after the November spill. The Navy only told people to stop drinking their tap water after the state Department of Health stepped in.
The Navy later flushed clean water through its pipes to cleanse them. In March, the state Department of Health said the tap water in all residential areas served by the Navy’s water system was safe to drink.
But Burness said she never got to see the reports for her house after it was tested. She was only told her water was good.
“I don’t trust them because cause they did nothing to show me that it ever was fine,” Burness said in a telephone interview.
A Navy investigation released in July showed a cascading series of errors, complacency and a lack of professionalism led to the fuel spill, which contaminated tap water used by 93,000 people on the Navy’s water system.
Nearly 6,000 sought medical attention for nausea, headaches and rashes. Some continue to complain of health problems.
The military put families up in hotels for several months, but stopped paying once the health department cleared people to resume drinking their tap water.
Kristina Baehr, an attorney with Texas-based Just Well Law, sued the federal government last month on behalf of four families but said she will be adding more individuals from among the 700 clients she represents. Burness and McCoy are among her clients.
“They didn’t warn them to stop drinking it, and 6,000 people went to the emergency room,” she said. “Then, many of these people have only gotten sicker over time.”
Baehr said her clients were not among those chosen to speak to Austin. If they had such an opportunity, she said they would tell him to have officials stop saying no one is medically affected by the spill and that there are no long-term effects.
They would also encourage him to provide appropriate medical care to families, safe housing because families claim the homes were not properly remediated, and compassionate reassignment to other bases to all those who ask.
“A lot of people are still stuck in the houses that made them sick,” she said. “So it’s very simple, let people out of the houses that made them sick and fix the houses so that they’re safe for the next people.”
The spill upset a broad cross-spectrum of Hawaii, from liberals to conservatives and veterans to environmentalists. Many Native Hawaiians have been angered given the centrality of water in Hawaii’s Indigenous traditions. It has also increased deep-seated distrust of the U.S. military among many Native Hawaiians that dates to the U.S. military-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893.
Dani Espiritu, who was also at Friday’s protest, said the military was taking risks with Native Hawaiian lives, land and culture.
“All of our cultural practices are tied to aina,” she said, using the Hawaiian word for land. “And so as you poison aina and jeopardize the health and well-being of communities, you are also jeopardizing every traditional practice that are tied to those places.”
The military plans to drain fuel from the tanks by July 2024 to comply with a Hawaii Department of Health order to shut down the facility.
Honolulu’s water utility and the Sierra Club of Hawaii have expressed concerns about the threat Red Hill poses to Oahu’s water supply ever since 2014, when fuel leaked from one of the storage tanks. But the Navy reassured the public that their water was safe and that it was operating the storage facility properly.
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Associated Press writer Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel said Friday there is no timetable for the return of quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who suffered a concussion when he hit his head against the turf a day earlier against the Cincinnati Bengals.
McDaniel also defended the team’s handling of Tagovailoa’s injury last Sunday in a win over the Buffalo Bills, when the QB took a hit from linebacker Matt Milano late in the first half and appeared to hit his head on the turf. Tagovailoa stumbled when he got up and was taken to the locker room to be evaluated for a concussion, then returned to the game at the start of the third quarter.
McDaniel reiterated Friday that Tagovailoa was cleared by several layers of medical professionals during last Sunday’s game and said the QB did not have a head injury.
“My job as a coach is here for the players. I take that very serious,” the first-year coach said. “And no one else in the building strays from that.”
Many observers questioned why Tagovailoa was allowed to return to the field against the Bills. He was not in the concussion protocol leading up to Thursday’s game.
“There was no medical indication from all resources that there was anything regarding the head,” McDaniel said Friday. “If there would have been, of course, I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I prematurely put someone out there.”
Tagovailoa had an MRI on Friday in addition to the X-rays and CT scans that were taken the night before at a hospital in Cincinnati. He had a headache Thursday night and Friday morning, McDaniel said.
“I’m not even really thinking about timetables or anything regarding him as a player right now,” McDaniel said. “It’s all about Tua the person.”
Tagovailoa was sacked by Bengals defensive tackle Josh Topou late in the first half of Thursday night’s loss to the Bengals. On the play, he spun awkwardly and was thrown to the turf. While on the ground, Tagovailoa appeared to display the fencing response, with his fingers frozen in front of his face.
He remained down for more than seven minutes before being loaded onto a backboard and stretchered off the field.
The Dolphins later said he was conscious and had movement in all of his extremities. He was discharged from the hospital Thursday night and flew back to Miami with the team.
McDaniel said Tagovailoa was interacting with teammates on the flight home. He sat next to McDaniel and talked to him about the game.
“His personality was normal Tua,” McDaniel said.
Before the injury, Tagovailoa was having a breakout season, highlighted by throwing a career-high six touchdown passes in a Week 2 win over Baltimore.
Now the former Alabama star faces another obstacle in what has been an up-and-down career.
The Dolphins, amid a rebuild in 2020, drafted Tagovailoa No. 1 overall to be a franchise-altering player following a college career that included a 2018 national championship.
But when that didn’t happen as quickly as Miami anticipated, questions arose about whether to stick with the young quarterback or go in another direction.
Tagovailoa seemed to be answering those questions through the first three weeks of the season, efficiently utilizing the weapons that Miami surrounded him with during the offseason, including star receiver Tyreek Hill, to lead the Dolphins to a 3-0 record heading into Thursday’s game.
Including his 110 passing yards before leaving Thursday’s game, Tagovailoa is second in the league in passing yards (1,035) and he has thrown 10 touchdowns with three interceptions.
Tagovailoa has dealt with several injuries, including a dislocated right hip in 2019 at Alabama.
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NEW YORK — Some U.S. health officials are conceding that monkeypox is probably not going away anytime soon.
The disease’s spread is slowing but the virus is so widespread that elimination is unlikely, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That conclusion was in a recent CDC report, and echoed Friday by Marc Lipsitch, director of science in the agency’s disease-forecasting center.
Lipsitch hesitated to say monkeypox is permanently here to stay, but he said it stands to be a continuing threat for the next few years.
“It’s in many geographic locations within the country” as well as in other countries, Lipsitch told The Associated Press. “There’s no clear path in our mind to complete elimination domestically.”
The virus has mainly spread among gay and bisexual men, though health officials continue to stress that anyone can be infected. It’s important that people at risk take steps to prevent spread and that vaccination efforts continue, Lipsitch said.
The CDC report contained some good news: The U.S. outbreak seems to have peaked in early August. The average number of daily cases being reported — fewer than 150 — is about a third what it was reported in the middle of the summer, and officials expect the decline will continue for at least the next several weeks.
Lipsitch attributed the good news to increasing vaccinations, cautious behavior by people at risk and infection-derived immunity in the highest risk populations.
Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agreed that it’s unlikely that spread of monkeypox will stop in the U.S. anytime soon, but he said it’s still possible in the long term.
If domestic transmission were stopped, infections may still continue if people catch the virus while traveling internationally, he said. But the declining cases makes it seem like “we’ve turned a real corner.”
“The efforts underway are succeeding, and should be continued, if not intensified,” he said.
With case numbers going down, this is a good time for local health departments to take a new stab at doing intensive contact tracing to try to stop chains of transmission, he said.
Monkeypox is endemic in parts of Africa, where people have been infected through bites from rodents or small animals, but it wasn’t considered a disease that spreads easily among people until May, when infections emerged in Europe and the U.S.
There have been more than 67,000 cases reported in countries that have not historically seen monkeypox. The U.S. has the most infections of any country — more than 25,600. One U.S. death has been attributed to monkeypox.
More than 97% of U.S. cases are men. The vast majority have been men who reported recent sexual contact with other men.
Though cases have been declining, the proportion of new cases that have information about recent sexual contact is also down, officials said. That’s causing a growing blind spot about how the virus may be spreading, Lipsitch noted.
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The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Fans of Naomi Judd, the late matriarch of the Grammy-winning country duo The Judds, will have a chance to say goodbye and rejoice in their hits in a final tour helmed by daughter Wynonna and all-star musical partners.
The Judd family continues to grieve her sudden death during a year that should have been a celebration. The tour was announced only weeks before Naomi Judd, 76, took her life on April 30, the day before their induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
“It’s devastatingly beautiful to go back to the past and relive some of these memories,” said Wynonna Judd this week as she sat on a tour bus after rehearsals. “Yesterday I was in rehearsal and there’s a part in the show where they sync up Mom singing with me. And I turned around and I just lost it.”
The 11-city tour starts Friday night in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and will include stops in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Fort Worth, Texas, and Nashville before ending in their home state in Lexington, Kentucky. Special guests include Brandi Carlile, Ashley McBryde, Little Big Town, Kelsea Ballerini, Trisha Yearwood, Faith Hill and tour opener Martina McBride.
Judd’s husband Larry Strickland, and her two daughters, Wynonna and Ashley, reflected on their mother’s legacy, not only in music, but as a caregiver and an advocate. The red-headed duo scored more than a dozen No. 1 hits, combining young Wynonna’s powerful vocals with Naomi’s family harmonies and stage charm. Reflecting their Appalachian roots with polished pop stylings, their hits included “Why Not Me,” “Mama He’s Crazy,” “Rockin’ With the Rhythm of the Rain,” and “Love Can Build a Bridge.”
Naomi’s husband of nearly 33 years said he hopes that fans feel uplifted to hear their hit songs performed again in arenas. But he knows he will struggle when he sees his wife on the big screens or hears her voice again.
“I’m having trouble now just seeing pictures of her. I don’t know how much I can handle,” Strickland said.
Strickland said his wife was excited to tour again with her daughter because she loved the connection with the fans. The storyline of the single mother supporting two daughters becoming one of the biggest duos in country music history, along with Naomi’s flashy wardrobe and bubbly approachability, made fans identify with her.
“She loved being on the stage and singing,” Strickland said. “She loved people. And she would do her twisting and twirling. She was the harmony singer. She was all about her hair and the little dresses that she would have made. And so that was her world.”
Her family has endless stories of Naomi Judd’s empathy and passion for helping, her love of animals, especially dogs, and her desire to learn. A nurse by trade before her music career, she was on the board of the American Humane Association and was a member of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her daughter Ashley recalled how she walked around with $20 and $50 bills in her bra and would hand them out to people, especially women.
Wynonna Judd said that recently she visited the same hospital outside Nashville where her mom died. And she noticed that on one of the walls in the emergency room were pictures of volunteers who helped assist patients.
“And there’s a picture of my mother in the cutest little wig and she has her name tag, ‘Naomi Judd,’” she said.
Naomi Judd struggled most of her life with depression, which she shared openly in her book “River of Time: My Descent into Depression and How I Emerged With Hope.” Her family said she was also being treated for bipolar disorder and PTSD.
“That’s the complexity of this issue, because my mother, even in her darkest hour, would put on her wig and go down to the emergency room and help other people during their emergencies,” Wynonna Judd said, her strong voice cracking. “So I find it pretty devastating that she got to a point where she was done helping herself.”
Strickland, too, noted how mental illness affected his wife. Despite feeling incredibly excited for the tour, her mental state was deteriorating, he said. Strickland said she was seeing a psychiatrist, but her depression was resistant to treatment, and they were trying different types of medication to help her.
“The lows that she would experience with her mental illness just seemed to get worse,” he said.
Since The Judds debuted in the 1980s, the family has lived under the public eye, headlining awards shows and appearing on magazine covers, in books and TV shows. But Naomi’s death has only intensified scrutiny, to the point where the family is dispelling rumors that there is a dispute over the estate. Strickland, who is Ashley and Wynonna’s stepfather, was named the executor of the estate.
Ashley Judd said it was “obviously natural, good, and proper that Mom’s estate would flow to Pop, her partner of 43 years and then upon his eventual passing, come to her daughters.”
The actor was with her mother when she died and has advocated for the family’s legal request to keep police investigative records relating to her mother’s death from being publicly released. After an appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower court. Ashley Judd said that privacy should be afforded to any family dealing with suicide.
“We are an open family,” she said. “We’re committed to raising awareness about the walk with mental illness and reducing shame and stigma, guiding people towards resources, and helping families build resistance to and resilience from the devastation. And there’s also a certain dignity and decency that’s necessary around the actual day of the death.”
Wynonna Judd said since her mother’s death, people who have had similar experiences have reached out to her to ask that mental illness resources and information are provided to fans during the tour.
“This is very real to me. This is not just show business. This is an opportunity to help someone out there not end their life,” she said. “We must get rid of the stigma of the words mental illness because people will not reach out for help.”
Wynonna’s relationship with her mother was sometimes filled with drama, but it continues to this day, when she sits under a tree at her home in Tennessee and processes her grief. “I love my mother and she makes me crazy still. Your relationship with your mother never ends,” she said. “I still talk to her and it’s awesome and it’s hard.”
The family wants the fans to remember Naomi Judd as a beautiful, talented, smart and colorfully complex woman, who had highs and lows, and was honest about her journey.
“I want them to see that in adversity, in death, there is life,” said Wynonna Judd.
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The national suicide and crisis lifeline is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.
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Online: https://www.thejudds.com/
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Follow Kristin M. Hall at https://Twitter.com/kmhall
About half of the American public has heard little or nothing about the new COVID-19 bivalent booster, a new survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation has found. The new booster targets the omicron variants that have become dominant around the world.
One in five of those surveyed said they had heard “nothing at all” about the new boosters. Some 17% said they had heard “a lot” about the boosters, while 33% said they had heard “some” about the new shots. About a third said they’d already gotten the new booster or intended to do so as soon as possible.
“Intention is somewhat higher among older adults, one of the groups most at risk for serious complications of a coronavirus infection,” the authors wrote. “Almost half (45%) of adults ages 65 and older say they have gotten the bivalent booster or intend to get it ‘as soon as possible.’”
Source: Kaiser Family Foundation
The news will likely disappoint health experts who cheered the regulatory authorization of the new boosters in August. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency-use authorization to boosters developed by Moderna MRNA, +1.36%
and by Pfizer PFE, -0.07%
and German partner BioNTech BNTX, +1.53%
for use in people aged 12 and older who have had an initial series of a COVID vaccine, including those who have already had one or more booster doses.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending that all adults get one of the bivalent boosters at least two months after completing a primary series of shots. So far, some 7.6 million people in the U.S. have received it, according to the CDC.
Once again, the country’s partisan divide is evident, with 6 in 10 Democrats saying they’ve already had the shot or will get it soon, compared with 1 in 8 Republicans.
“Notably, 20% of Republicans say they will ‘definitely not’ get the new COVID-19 booster dose, while a further 38% of Republicans are unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated and therefore not eligible for the new updated COVID-19 booster dose,” the survey authors said.
In the U.S., known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since late April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people are testing at home, where data are not being collected.
The daily average for new cases stood at 47,569 on Thursday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 26% from two weeks ago and now at the lowest level since late April. Cases are rising in 14 states and are sharply higher in several. Montana leads the count with a 75% rise in the last two weeks, followed by Washington with a 48% rise. Cases are up by double digits in Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and New Jersey.
The daily average for hospitalizations was down 13% to 28,639, while the daily average for deaths was down 11% to 407.
The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual COVID shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to COVID could be challenging. Illustration: Ryan Trefes
• The U.K. is the only G-7 country whose economy is smaller now than before the pandemic, the Guardian reported, citing data released Friday by the Office for National Statistics. The ONS released figures showing that rather than the economy being 0.6% larger than it was in February 2020, a combination of a deeper recession during the pandemic and a weak recovery had left it 0.2% smaller. All the other major economies in the G-7, including France and Italy, recovered strongly enough to be larger than they were in February 2020.
• Taiwan is the latest country to end mandatory COVID quarantines for people arriving from overseas, the Associated Press reported. Officials said that beginning Oct. 13, the previous weeklong quarantine requirement would be replaced with a seven-day self-monitoring period. A rapid antigen test will still be required upon arrival, but people showing no symptoms will be allowed to take public transportation.
• Germany’s health ministry is warning of a rise of COVID cases heading into the fall and is urging older people in particular to get a second booster shot, the AP reported separately. Other European countries such as France, Denmark and the Netherlands are also recording an increase in cases, German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach told reporters in Berlin. “We are clearly at the start of a winter wave,” he said.
COVID-19 lockdowns, corruption crackdowns and more have put China’s economy on a potential crash course with the U.S. and the rest of the world, the Wall Street Journal’s Dion Rabouin explains. Illustration: David Fang
• The first Chinese mRNA-based COVID vaccine has received government approval — in Indonesia, the New York Times reported. The shot, developed by Walvax Biotechnology 300142, +0.49%,
Suzhou Abogen Biosciences and the Chinese military, was cleared this week by Indonesia for emergency use. Countries all over the world, including Indonesia, have embraced mRNA vaccines, and they are considered among the most effective vaccines that the world has to offer. But more than two years into the pandemic, they are not yet available in China, which has relied on an increasingly draconian “zero-COVID” approach to keep cases and deaths from the virus low.
• Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and a supporter of Russia’s war on Ukraine, has tested positive for COVID-19, the church’s press service said on Friday, Reuters reported. The church said Kirill, 75, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had canceled all his planned trips and events and had “severe symptoms” requiring bed rest and isolation. It said his condition was “satisfactory.”
The U.S. leads the world with 96.3 million cases and 1,059,291 fatalities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 225.3 million people living in the U.S., equal to 67.9% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 109.9 million have had a booster, equal to 48.8% of the vaccinated population, and 23.9 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 36.6% of those who received a first booster.
BEIJING — China on Friday dismissed complaints from two U.S. congressmembers over the quarantining of American diplomats and their family members under the country’s strict COVID-19 regulations.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said China “adopts a science-based and effective epidemic prevention protocol for both Chinese and foreigners coming to China without discrimination.”
The policy, Mao said, is “open and transparent.” Regardless of their status, all U.S. visitors accepted China’s epidemic policies, including post-entry medical observation and health monitoring, Mao told reporters at a daily briefing.
“Such statements by individual U.S. lawmakers are really absurd and completely groundless,” Mao said, adding that the congressmen appeared to be showing signs of “China phobia.”
Republicans James Comer of Kentucky and Michael T. McCaul of Texas wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday asking for clarification on the quarantining of U.S. diplomats and family members by the People’s Republic of China.
“U.S. Embassy officials in Beijing recently confirmed that 16 U.S. diplomats and their family members — throughout the pandemic — have been involuntarily held in quarantine camps and subjected to strict confinement measures with no definitive release date,” their letter stated.
“Committee Republicans are concerned that U.S diplomats could be or have been pressured to surrender intelligence while detained in PRC quarantine camps,” it said. “The PRC poses a geopolitical threat to the United States and should not be coercing U.S. diplomats into and surveilling them under draconian quarantine policies.”
The U.S. Embassy had no immediate comment on the letter on Friday.
The letter followed an article in the Washington Post newspaper in July which cited the embassy saying 16 U.S. diplomatic personnel or their family members had “been sent, against their will, to Chinese government medical quarantine centers since the pandemic began.”
It said the State Department concluded that was a “clear violation” of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and that U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns has since secured a promise that U.S. diplomats and their family members would be allowed to quarantine in their homes or at the embassy rather at government-run isolation centers notorious for poor hygiene, overcrowding and a lack of privacy.
Mao said she was not aware to the situation of the 16 Americans mentioned or how the number had been arrived at.
“It is even more nonsense to say that China obtained intelligence from the U.S. through quarantine,” she said.
