Trump tries to claim victory even as ballots are being counted in several states — NBC has not made a call
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump falsely claimed early Wednesday that he had won the presidential election, even though millions of legitimate votes had yet to be counted and a half-dozen battleground states were still not called.“A very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise [people who voted for me] and we won’t stand for this,” Trump said from the East Room of the White House. – Advertisement – “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country,” Trump said in a rambling press statement. “It’s a very sad moment to me, a very sad moment, and we are going to win this,” he said to a room filled with more than 100 well-heeled aides and supporters. “As far as I’m concerned we already have won this, so I want to thank all of our supporters and I want to thank everybody that worked with us.” – Advertisement – “We were getting ready for a big celebration. We were winning everything, and all of a sudden it was just called off,” Trump said. “We’ll be going to the US Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop,” Trump continued. “We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”It was unclear what Trump meant by “going to the Supreme Court,” given that the nation’s highest court is rarely the first judicial venue for a case, but rather reviews previous rulings. – Advertisement – Trump’s election night claim of victory is not a spontaneous response to good results in key states, as he would have people believe. Instead, it has been months in the making. As Trump has trailed Democrat Joe Biden in polls, he has sought to undermine faith in the multi-day process of vote tallying, and to lay the groundwork for insisting that the only valid election results were those tallied on election night.Ever since the coronavirus pandemic necessitated that millions of Americans vote by mail this year, Trump has also worked to sow doubts in the integrity of mail-in voting, baselessly claiming that votes cast by mail are rife with “fraud.” He has shared outlandish conspiracies about mail-in ballots being altered somewhere on the path from the voter to the local election board. He has also amplified isolated reports of misplaced or discarded ballots, claiming that these tiny anecdotal events are symptomatic of something much bigger than a few votes. In September, Trump seized upon a report of nine ballots found discarded along a highway in Pennsylvania, claiming they were evidence of Democrats trying to “steal” the election from him. “They throw them out if they have the name Trump on it, I guess,” Trump said of the ballots, some of which were blank and some of which were filled out for Trump. In reality, voters in Pennsylvania this year are on track to cast more than 5 million votes, making the fate of just 9 of them statistically insignificant. But it’s not just Trump alone, making wild claims with no follow through. On the contrary, Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee have spent millions of dollars this year challenging individual states’ efforts to expand mail-in voting in response to the pandemic. Pennsylvania, Iowa, Nevada, New Jersey and Montana are just some of the states where Trump’s lawyers have gone to court to try and prevent the expansion of mail-in voting. Their arguments often boil down to the same baseless claims of fraud that Trump himself has pushed, and as a result, they’ve seen their lawsuits tossed out by judges at both the state and federal levels.The president’s willingness to undermine a cornerstone of democracy — the integrity of the individual vote — stretches back much farther than this year. During his first campaign for president, Trump amplified and spread false claims that the election would be “rigged” in favor of his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. Back then, it wasn’t mail-in ballots that Trump claimed would be the culprits. Instead, it was undocumented immigrants somehow casting millions of illegal ballots for Clinton. Even after Trump won the electoral college tally in November, he continued to insist that the 2016 election had been marred by fraud. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted in late November of 2016. For the past four years, professional fact checkers have regularly disproved Trump’s claims of rigged elections. But so far, that hasn’t stopped Trump. – Advertisement –
“So that gives us a lot of confidence that they have come in, they are enjoying their experience and they’re coming back,” Mr. Lynch said.But there are winners and losers even within industries. Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden and other brands that are more reliant on in-restaurant dining, reported a 28 percent decline in sales in the three months through the end of August. Its stock price is down 6 percent this year. – Advertisement – This has been a boon for companies that initially feared a deep recession. General Motors and Ford Motor, for example, rushed to borrow billions of dollars early in the year, expecting that car sales would tumble and stay low for a while. The auto business did struggle and automakers had to close their factories for about two months, but sales started picking up this summer. For the third quarter, G.M., Ford and other automakers reported big profits.Some large restaurant chains, after pressing for a federal bailout, have done much better than expected as drive-through customers, delivery and takeout orders bolstered sales. On Thursday, Papa John’s, whose stock is up 32 percent this year, reported surging sales, profits and cash flow and announced a new stock buyback program. Its chief executive, Rob Lynch, said the company had added “over eight million” customers this year.Asked on a call with financial analysts Thursday if the company can hold on to such gains, Mr. Lynch said that many of the new customers were dining more frequently and that the average spending per order was larger than before the pandemic.- Advertisement –
Mr. Cooper, a mortgage company, believed that it might face a financial squeeze in the spring when some homeowners were unable to make monthly payments. But a federal regulator provided relief to mortgage lenders, and then business was helped by a surge in refinancing. Mr. Cooper’s revenue in the first nine months of the year was up 40 percent, and its stock has climbed 341 percent from its low in April.During recessions, consumers often decide to pull back and avoid large outlays. But this year, something different happened. Many Americans who did not lose jobs but were also not spending on travel and entertainment found themselves with more disposable income. The $1,200 stimulus payments from the government also helped.- Advertisement –
– Advertisement –
The American Medical Association sued over the rule, and in a scathing 2019 decision, a federal district judge said, “The gag rule prevents doctors from behaving like informed professionals. At the heart of this rule is the arrogant assumption that government is better suited to direct the health care of women than their medical providers.” Since that ruling in Oregon, two circuit courts of appeal have split over the matter, with the 9th Circuit Court saying it’s not a problem and the 4th Circuit Court saying it is. The AMA said imposition of the rule meant 800,000 fewer people received care through Title X in 2019, or 3.1 million compared with 3.9 million in 2018. Amy Moy, chief external affairs officer for Essential Access Health, the largest Title X grantee in California and the country, told Hellmann, “The Trump regulations have devastated the Title X network. It’s our hope and expectation that very early in the new administration, there will be swift action to reverse the Trump era regulations and start to reset and address the harm that’s been done.”Said Jessica Marcella, vice president of advocacy and communications for National Family Planning and Reproductive Health, a membership organization for Title X providers, “It is essential a Biden administration act as expeditiously as possible, on day one or within 100 days, to get money flowing back to providers, particularly to jurisdictions that don’t have Title X services right now.”- Advertisement – Early on, Biden is likely to take on the global gag rule that bars the federal government from funding foreign NGOS that provide abortions or even discusses them with patients. That rule, originally known as the Mexico City Policy, was first imposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, rescinded by President Bill Clinton, reimposed by President George W. Bush, rescinded by President Barack Obama, and reinstated on the first day Donald Trump began squatting in the White House. In his 1993 memorandum on his rescission, Clinton wrote a gentle admonition that the gag rule “undermined efforts to promote safe and efficacious family planning programs in foreign nations.” True enough. But more to the point, the rule maims and kills women. It is also counterproductive in that it increases the number of abortions. The Guttmacher Institute reported that U.S. aid for overseas family planning in 2015 alone prevented 2.4 million abortions by averting 6 million unintended pregnancies. When Trump imposed the rule, a major family planning operation, Marie Stopes International, said it would lead to an additional 2.2 million abortions globally each year, 2.1 million of which would be unsafe. The World Health Organization estimates that unsafe abortions cause 13% of maternal deaths globally. – Advertisement – On the home front, Biden could return to Obama-era rules that provide narrow religious and moral exemptions for healthcare workers and employers, exemptions that the Trump regime expanded. He could go back to an Obama-era guidance that Trump rescinded barring states from defunding Planned Parenthood from Medicaid programs that serve low-income people, who are disproportionately people of color. He could also get rid of the 2011 requirement that abortion pills must be prescribed in person at a healthcare facility, something doctors and health experts say is medically unnecessary.Dumping the Trump changes made to the Title X family planning program would arguably make the biggest immediate difference. With heavy bipartisan backing, Congress initiated Title X half a century ago to give low-income women and men contraception, cancer screenings and other health services they would otherwise not be able to access.As it stands, the Trump rule bars recipients of Title X funds from performing abortions and restricts what they can say to patients about the procedure. Planned Parenthood, a long-standing target of forced-birthers, reluctantly opted out of Title X because of this. Although federal funds cannot be spent for abortions except under limited circumstances, forced-birthers argue that healthcare organizations shouldn’t get any federal funds if they provide abortions or information about the procedure, even if they don’t use Title X money for that purpose.- Advertisement – The Title X rule is no small restriction on reproductive rights. For some women it’s a matter of life and death. That makes it a prime choice for Biden to include in his Day One actions. – Advertisement –
The show, which went online for the first time earlier this year, will take place from Sunday, May 16th until Wednesday, May 19th at the Dubai World Trade Centre.
The storm is strengthening as it is forecast to hit Nicaragua and Honduras later on Monday.- Advertisement –
Assemblywoman Cathleen Galgiani, a Democrat from Tracy, said lawmakers should give the industry’s marketing agreement a chance to improve food safety before passing any legislation, the AP report said. Two months before those episodes, another high-profile E coli outbreak was caused by contaminated spinach from California’s Salinas Valley. That outbreak involved 204 cases and 3 deaths in 26 states and one Canadian province. The committee’s actions prompted a sharp exchange between Florez and Assemblywoman Nicole Parra, a Democrat whose district also includes part of the Central Valley growing area, according to several media reports. Florez called the Assembly Agriculture Committee “cowards” and charged that their inaction on the bills signaled that they were “willing to wait for another death, another injury, another sickness,” the AP reported. See also: The voluntary marketing agreement is administered by the state of California but was drafted by food producers, according to previous media reports. Florez has claimed that self-regulation has done little to improve food safety. Even if the bills had passed, it’s unclear if they would have become law, because California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has indicated that he prefers the voluntary approach, the Visalia Times-Delta reported today. Jun 28, 2007 (CIDRAP News) Blocking proposals stemming from notorious foodborne-disease outbreaks last year, a California State Assembly committee yesterday rejected one bill aimed at reducing contamination in leafy greens and stalled voting on two others, despite the State Senate’s earlier approval of all three. Parra countered that Florez was misinterpreting the committee’s actions, according to the AP report. She said the reason for blocking the bills was that the committee instead supported a new, voluntary marketing agreemennt that allows food products to carry an official seal if they come from producers and processors that have followed good food safety procedures.
One of the stalled bills would have required quality standards for irrigation water, prohibited the use of untreated manure as fertilizer, and banned portable toilets from farm fields, according to the AP. The other would have established a state inspection program for leafy vegetables and a recall procedure for contaminated produce. The Western Growers Association, an agricultural group, applauded the Agriculture Committee’s actions, according to a press release yesterday. “We are very pleased with the committee’s decision to stop these pieces of legislation and allow our industry an opportunity to show that the Leafy Greens Handler Marketing Agreement is the most effective approach to ensuring the leafy greens grown, harvested, packed, and shipped to our dinner tables is as safe as scientifically possible,” said Tom Nassif, Western Growers president and chief executive officer, in the press release. Jan 26 CIDRAP News story “California debates produce safety measures” The three bills never progressed past the Assembly’s Agriculture Committee, according to an Associated Press (AP) report today. The committee rejected a bill that would have made it easier for officials to trace contaminated produce and decided not to vote on two other bills, the AP reported. The three bills were proposed by Dean Florez, a Democratic state senator whose district includes part of the Central Valley, the area implicated in the late 2006 Escherichia coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to lettuce from Taco John’s restaurants in Iowa and Minnesota. The US Food and Drug Administration said lettuce probably caused a nearly simultaneous E coli outbreak linked to Taco Bell restaurants on the East Coast, though the growing area was never identified. California leafy greens marketing agreement Web sitehttp://www.caleafygreens.ca.gov/
May 28, 2009WHO confirms H5N1 infections in pair of Egyptian 4-year-oldsThe World Health Organization (WHO) today confirmed two recently reported H5N1 avian influenza infections in Egyptian children. One of the patients is a 4-year-old boy from Hehia City in Sharkia governorate. He got sick with a fever on May 24. The other case-patient is a 4-year-old girl from Abo Hammad district, also in Sharkia governorate, who became ill with a fever on May 23. Both children were admitted to Zagazig Fever Hospital, where they are receiving oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and are in stable condition. Both had close contact with sick and dead poultry. The cases raise Egypt’s number of WHO-confirmed H5N1 cases to 76, of which 27 have been fatal. The WHO’s global case count now stands at 431 cases and 262 deaths.[May 28 WHO statement]WHO offers new H5N1 recombinant vaccine strainThe WHO today announced that its collaborating center at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has developed a new H5N1 recombinant vaccine virus based on specimens provided by Egypt’s health ministry. The A/Egypt/2321-NAMRU3/2007 (clade 2.2.1) virus is available to institutions, companies, and other pandemic vaccine developers under a material transfer agreement through the WHO’s Global Influenza Program or through the CDC.US donates avian flu gear to VietnamThe US Embassy in Hanoi announced yesterday that it is donating avian influenza preparedness supplies to Vietnam, which includes 4,000 sets of personal protective equipment and 100 boxes of biodegradable powder than can produce more than 20,000 liters of disinfectant to help public health workers respond to new outbreaks of avian or H1N1 influenza. Vietnam’s agriculture ministry requested the supplies, which will be distributed to veterinary departments in 10 provinces that are at high risk for avian flu. The supplies are worth more than $57,000.[May 27 US Embassy statement]
After the great news from the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, which takes place from 2 to 12 July 2017 in Krakow, Poland, where it was officially confirmed that Zadar and Šibenik are included in the UNESCO World Heritage List, Croatia can boast that beech forests in the national parks of Northern Velebit and Paklenica are on the UNESCO World Heritage List as of today.At the 41st session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, on 7 July 2017, the Republic of Croatia, together with 9 countries, Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Spain and Ukraine, registered the extension of the serial nomination “Primitive Beeches forests of the Carpathians and other regions of Europe ”on the UNESCO World Heritage List.The expansion of the serial cross-border nomination included 63 areas of beech forests, of which the Republic of Croatia participated with three areas, in the national parks Northern Velebit and Paklenica. These are 1.289,11 hectares of beech forest located in the Northern Velebit National Park in the Strict Reserve “Hajdučki and Rožanski kukovi” and 2.031,87 hectares of forest at the locations Suva draga-Klimenta and Oglavinovac-Javornik in the Paklenica National Park. The uniqueness of the proposed pristine beech forests in the Northern Velebit and Paklenica National Parks is based on their originality, geographical position, age and size.The inscription on the World Heritage List is a confirmation that the natural beauties of Croatia are managed in the best possible way with the aim of protection for future generations and that Croatia is among the richest European countries in terms of biodiversity and natural beauties.Related news: ZADAR AND ŠIBENIK LISTED ON THE UNESCO WORLD CULTURAL HERITAGE LIST!