Pushing opioids. Bribing doctors. Making millions. FRONTLINE and the Financial Times investigate how Insys Therapeutics profited from a fentanyl-based painkiller up to 100 times stronger than heroin — and how some Wall Street investors looked the other way.
Since 2007, communities like Whitewater have faced a Great Recession, an opioid epidemic, economic stagnation, a pandemic, and now another recession. Whitewater’s like places that had to endure both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl at the same time.
It’s notable that, as with the novel coronavirus, America has mostly viewed the opioid crisis as a public health matter. However poorly addressed (or simply ignored), opioid addiction and the coronavirus are rightly public health matters.
Another public health crisis – a surge in the use of crack cocaine in the ‘80s and early ‘90s – wrongly received a punitive, rather than therapeutic, response.
In this moment of increased cultural awareness, the Draconian approach to one group of drug users remains another example of wrongly-biased enforcement.
Monday in Whitewater will see scattered thunderstorms with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 20m 11s of daytime. The moon is waxing crescent with 1.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets in closed session at 6:15 PM, with an open session beginning at 7 PM.
On this day in 1943, future United States senator from Wisconsin Joseph McCarthy breaks his leg during a drunken Marine Corps ceremony.
The coronavirus pandemic ripped through the American economy at an incredibly rapid pace — so rapidly that it’s been difficult for economists and others to understand what exactly is going on.
Our best data sources about the economy are wildly out of date: Unemployment data comes out just once a month, and GDP data only four times a year. However, a new data source put together by a research group at Harvard, drawing on a variety of corporations’ private data, now allows economists to track what has happened to the economy in real time.
The data they collated shows that the economic crash has been driven disproportionately by the actions of high-income Americans, whose consumer spending has crashed more than that of poorer Americans, devastating low-income workers and small businesses in rich areas.
The data also suggests that economic relief measures have done little for small businesses: Stimulus spending tended to go to Amazon or Walmart, not small local stores, and small businesses eligible for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans are generally not any better off than ones that were not eligible.
And researchers who developed the data found official orders “reopening” states do not increase economic activity, and so appear to endanger public health without any economic benefit.
The picture that emerges in a new working paper based on the economists’ findings is of an economy frozen in place. Simply declaring the economy “reopened” does not seem to do anything to spur high-income people to spend more, and it’s not clear that anything can until the real threat passes.
A cluster of mysterious deaths, some involving infants and children, is under scrutiny amid questions of whether the novel coronavirus lurked in California months before it was first detected. But eight weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide hunt for undetected early COVID-19 deaths, the effort remains hobbled by bureaucracy and testing limits.
Among those awaiting answers is Maribeth Cortez, whose adult son, Jeremiah DeLap, died Jan. 7 in Orange County while visiting his parents. He had been healthy, suffering on a Friday from what he thought was food poisoning, and found dead in bed the following Tuesday, drowned by fluid in his lungs.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 20m 19s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.0% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1989, the United States captures Guam from Spain.
Donald Trump calls the coronavirus ‘kung flu’ and ‘the Chinese virus’ during a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday night. The US president also tells the crowd that he had asked his people to slow down Covid-19 testing across the country because it would find more cases.
President Donald Trump couldn’t wait. His presidency is nosediving, with bad news erupting all around him. His answer was Tulsa, a campaign rally in blood-red Oklahoma, the state he won by a crushing 36 points in 2016.
But Tulsa did not deliver. The event that was supposed to trumpet his return to greatness — and the country’s return to normalcy — instead brought embarrassing scenes of empty bleachers, a dismantled stage and a familiar speech unsuccessfully trying to reignite public fears.
After raising expectations with claims that a million people had requested tickets for his first campaign rally in more than three months, the vacant seats were the biggest story of the night. It was a bad omen for November, and Trump undoubtedly saw it with his own eyes as he scanned a sea of blue seats devoid of supporters on the top level of the arena that he and his campaign had said would be bursting beyond capacity; so full, they expected, that the campaign planned for a second outdoor speech to bring an additional 40,000 people unable to find a seat indoors.
Instead, the outdoor speech was cancelled, the stage dismantled. The campaign absurdly tried to explain by claiming that protesters blocked the entrances. But every reporter there confirmed that was not true.
If you love model trains, you will lose your mind on our visit to Miniatur Wunderland. There are more than 1,000 trains traveling 16,000 kilometers of track at the world’s largest model railway, located in Hamburg, Germany. But it’s not just trains. This small-scale world of wonder features mini versions of landscapes ranging from the canals of Venice to a lit-up Las Vegas. It’s also home to the world’s largest model airport, and hundreds of flights take off every day. Enough with the description. It’s time to explore this spectacular creation with our intrepid guide, Great Big Story producer Jacob Harrell. Stick around for the choose-your-own-adventure portion of the trip. We’re offering you the chance for a deeper dive into Miniatur Wunderland’s tiny versions of Las Vegas, Scandinavia, Switzerland and Venice.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with an occasional thundershower and a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 23s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Bolton’s account, across several pages of his book, squarely addresses these parts of the record. A few examples.
1. Only “circumstantial evidence” of what Trump said or did? Bolton provides direct evidence.
“I took Trump’s temperature on the Ukraine security assistance, and he said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over.”
John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened
2. Trump’s actions were to pursue anti-corruption, not to help his campaign? Bolton confirms it was the latter, unequivocally.
“When, in 1992, Bush 41 supporters suggested he ask foreign governments to help out in his failing campaign against Bill Clinton, Bush and Jim Baker completely rejected the idea. Trump did the precise opposite.”
John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened
3. No evidence of a quid pro quo for military assistance? That’s what Bolton’s direct evidence establishes (see #1).
4. The White House suspended aid to Ukraine as part of a general review of foreign economic assistance? Bolton writes that this was a false cover.
“Mulvaney and others later argued that the dispute over Ukraine’s security assistance was related to rescinding the economic assistance, but this was entirely an ex post facto rationalization.”
John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened
As for the infamous phone call with Ukraine’s president, Bolton thought it simply fit into the ongoing scheme. “Nor, at the time, did I think Trump’s comments in the call reflected any major change in direction; the linkage of the military assistance with the Giuliani fantasies was already baked in. The call was not the keystone for me, but simply another brick in the wall,” the former national security advisor writes.
The Trump administration announced late Friday that Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, who has overseen a number of investigations involving the president and his political campaign, will be leaving that job, though Berman fired back that he had not resigned and intends to stay in the job to ensure the cases continue unimpeded.
The surreal Friday night standoff marks the latest battle over the Trump administration’s management of the Justice Department. Democrats have decried what they charge has been the politicization of the department under President Trump and his attorney general, William P. Barr.
Barr announced the personnel change in a statement, saying the president plans to nominate the current chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, for the job.
Berman’s office has been conducting a criminal investigation of President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in a campaign finance case that has already led to charges against two of Giuliani’s associates.
Confronted by a raucous crowd of opponents fearing government intrusion, Walworth County Board members have backed away from a measure outlining public safeguards against the coronavirus.
County officials said the proposal would have reinforced state law granting county government the authority to quarantine people afflicted with communicable diseases.
But opponents shouting and heckling during a June 9 county board meeting accused officials of moving to undermine individual constitutional freedoms with the public health initiative.
“This seems like something that would happen in Russia — not here,” said Madison Elmer, an opponent from the town of Walworth.
The ordinance recommended by county staff would authorize health workers to quarantine people infected with a communicable disease, involuntarily if necessary.
The measure authorized staff to destroy a person’s furniture or clothing to avoid spreading disease. In addition, it permitted “quarantine guards” to keep infected people isolated, with fines of up to $500 for violations.
County officials said Wisconsin state law already allows counties to take all such actions, if needed, to protect public health in the event of a communicable disease outbreak like the coronavirus.
There are, truly, significant powers to act under Wisconsin law: seeWis. Stat. § 252 (Communicable Diseases). They are, as the chapter makes plain, to be used only during the spread of a communicable disease.
In this way, it is false and ignorant to compare public health measures to conditions “in Russia.” To be libertarian – as I am – requires that someone assess accurately the threats to liberty. Provisional and limited health measures would not render Walworth County like Russia, either under Putin or as it was under the Soviets.
Madison Elmer, who sadly may pass as the most learned man in the Village of Walworth, could use a bit of reading between ignorant claims at disrupted public meetings.
Forget Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Resident Evil 8, because upcoming Playstation 5 title Stray puts you in the paws of a cat trying to escape a cybercity.
Friday in Whitewater will see an afternoon thundershower with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
One morning two weeks ago, Megan Hunt woke up fearing the worst.
The novel coronavirus pandemic was surging in Nebraska, and the 34-year-old midtown Omaha resident was winded, short of breath, sore, and had digestive issues, she told The Daily Beast. She continued to self-isolate, let her 10-year-old daughter help with the cooking, and tried to get a COVID-19 test from her state’s brand new, seemingly high-tech mass testing initiative: TestNebraska.com.
But when she completed the online survey of symptoms, the site told her she didn’t qualify.
“I have spoken to many people who have had the same experience,” said Hunt. “I reported my symptoms honestly, and I was not selected for testing.”
Hunt still doesn’t know if she ever had COVID-19. But she does feel confident that her state’s test regime, the bizarre brainchild of Utah “tech bros” with a surreal assist from Iowa native Ashton Kutcher, is “the Fyre Fest of coronavirus testing,” as she told The Daily Beast.
THE INTERNET RESEARCH Agency is infamous for flooding mainstream social media platforms with compelling disinformation campaigns. The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, deploys strategicdata leaks and destabilizing cyberattacks. But in the recent history of Russia’s online meddling, a third, distinct entity may have been at work on many of the same objectives—indicating that Russia’s disinformation operations went deeper than was publicly known until now.
Dubbed Secondary Infektion, the campaign came on the radar of researchers last year. Today, the social media analysis firm Graphika is publishing the first comprehensive review of the group’s activity, which seems to have begun all the way back in January 2014. The analysis reveals an entity that prioritizes covering its tracks; virtually all Secondary Infektion campaigns incorporate robust operational security, including a hallmark use of burner accounts that only stay live long enough to publish one post or comment. That’s a sharp contrast to the IRA and GRU disinformation operations, which often rely on cultivating online personas or digital accounts over time and building influence by broadening their reach.
Secondary Infektion also ran disinformation campaigns on a notably large array of digital platforms. While the IRA in particular achieved virality by focusing its energy on major mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Secondary Infektion took more than 300 platforms in all, including regional forums and smaller blogging sites.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program allows certain persons who arrived in the United States as children to apply for a forbearance of removal. Today, a five-person majority of the nation’s high court ruled in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California that the Trump Administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act when it rescinded DACA because the memorandum ending the program failed to meet the requirement of providing a reasoned explanation for rescission (inadequately addressing the consequences of ending DACA).
The Trump Administration may yet undertake a new effort at a more thorough analysis, malicious though that would be; its hasty prior effort was found inadequate.
(The case was consolidated with Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People et al. and Wolf, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, et al. v. Batalla Vidal et al.)
The Trump campaign has been running ads accusing Biden of being soft on China. That avenue of attack – always dubious, as it was Trump who started a trade war with China to the detriment of American consumers and farmers – has now slipped away, as the allegation’s in Bolton’s book now place Trump at the center of a scheme to solicit Chinese help with his, Trump’s, re-election.
One does not have to support Bolton’s preferred policies or maneuvering to see that, as a political matter, Bolton’s account of Trump’s wheedling for Chinese electoral support, condoning of Chinese concentration camps, and praise for China’s dictator makes discussion of China disadvantageous for Trump.
The ad for the Lincoln Project is called Chyna, by the way, because Trump often pronounces the country’s name that way, in a childish attempt to mock Chinese speakers’ pronunciation into English.
There are sound, imperative reasons to oppose China’s dictatorship; there’s no reason to think that Trump has acted on any sound basis.
See alsoBolton book dismantles Wall Street narrative of Trump as a China hawk (“Bolton depicts a president in over his head on the world stage, in thrall to his authoritarian counterpart, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and motivated primarily by desperation to cut a trade deal he could tout on the campaign trail. Most damning, Bolton writes that Trump centered trade negotiations on his own reelection bid, explicitly seeking Xi’s help in his race.”)
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-eight. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 7.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified District’s Employee Handbook Committee Committee meets at via Zoom Online at 3:30 PM.
On this day in 1873, Susan B. Anthony is fined $100 for attempting to vote in the 1872 presidential election.
By his own account, Bolton remained at Trump’s side even long after he witnessed the president soliciting the Chinese communist leadership to help him win reelection. The “turning point” only came when Trump changed his mind about bombing Iran, a longstanding Bolton objective.
So there are lots of bullets with which to shoot the messenger, and yet still some reason to believe that the message may survive to inflict its own slow-bleeding wound.
Even with all the inequities of the US electoral system, Trump’s 40% core voters will not be enough to get him reelected. He needs some independents and that’s where Bolton’s book may well deepen and accelerate the process of corrosion.
“For independents and more moderate Republicans who voted for him in 2016 in key swing states, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona, the Bolton revelations may further increase “Trump fatigue”, Schiller said. “Given that the US 2020 presidential election will be decided by razor thin margins in these states, if these voters stay home, or worse defect to Biden, Trump loses.”
The Bolton memoir also blunts the central attack line the Trump campaign is using against his Democratic opponent.
On the day the news of the book broke, it was running Facebook ads portraying Biden as Xi’s ventriloquist’s doll, and hugging a map of China with the tagline “Sleepy Joe loves China”. All of that becomes more awkward when the incumbent has told Xi he was “the greatest Chinese leader in 300 years!”, and quickly amending that to “the greatest leader in Chinese history.”
Polling through mid-2020 has shown Trump consistently trailing Joe Biden in the mitten state, including a survey released last week showing Trump trailing Biden by a 15-point margin (50 to 35 percent).
Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has only increased her popularity. Her approval numbers during the COVID-19 crisis, which has hit Michigan disproportionately hard, have remained in the mid-60s, while Trump’s have been mired in the low 40s. Whitmer gave her support to Biden at a pivotal moment in advance of his win over Bernie Sanders in Michigan and she is included in the speculation about Biden’s choice of a running mate. While Whitmer won’t be on the ballot in Michigan this year (unless Biden picks her), she’s in much better position to sway swing voters up and down the ballot than Trump or any Republican is.
As COVID-19 spread across the globe, why was the U.S. caught so unprepared? An investigation of how America’s leaders failed to prepare and protect us — and who is accountable.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-six. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 13.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified District’s Policy Review Committee meets at via Zoom Online at 9:30 AM.
On this day in 1673, Marquette and Jolliet reach the Mississippi.
As of June 12th, the S.B.A., which is administrating the P.P.P., had approved about 4.6 million loans. The average size of the loans was about a hundred and twelve thousand dollars. The total amount committed was $512.3 billion, equivalent to about 2.4 per cent of G.D.P.
That’s a large sum to spend on what are effectively grants. (As long as a business participating in the P.P.P. maintains its payroll, most or all of its loan will be eligible to be forgiven.) And yet, with a few exceptions, taxpayers don’t know who has received all this money. Despite pressure from Congress and the filing of a Freedom of Information lawsuit by a number of media companies, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has refused to publish a list of P.P.P.-loan recipients and the sizes of their loans. The Trump Administration has not yet provided such data to the Government Accountability Office.
Appearing before the Senate Small Business Committee last week, Mnuchin said the secrecy was necessary to protect the “proprietary information” of loan recipients. The Administration’s argument is that if it publishes how much a certain business has received its competitors will be able to figure out its revenues, because the size of a P.P.P. loan is linked to a firm’s total outlays on payroll. But this argument flies in the face of at least two realities. In April, the S.B.A., which has routinely published the names of the businesses it has lent to, indicated that it would do the same for loans issued under the P.P.P. Moreover, the application form that borrowers have to fill out for a P.P.P. loan says that, under the Freedom of Information Act, “subject to certain exceptions,” the S.B.A. is obliged to supply information including “the names of the borrowers (and their officers, directors, stockholders or partners), the collateral pledged to secure the loan, the amount of the loan, its purpose in general terms and the maturity.” It’s all there in black and white.
Well attended protests have occurred in small American towns like Alpine, TX, Lodi, CA, Hagerstown, MD and Taylorville, IL. The name George Floyd is echoing through the consciousness of white America, putting uncomfortable conversations front-and-center.
The subject of racism and anti-racism has shown little sign of slowing down. Even weeks after Floyd’s death, a small protest popped up in Parachute, a Colorado town of 1,100 people on the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains. Twenty people, mostly, if not all, white, gathered outside the police station with signs, candles and words of support for Black Lives Matter. Nearly all five of the town’s police officers observed, offering water to the protesters.
