Category: Democracy

Senators urge better access to disability payments for Long COVID patients

Michigan Advance

Senators urge better access to disability payments for Long COVID patients

Casey Quinlan – August 14, 2024

People with symptoms of long COVID attend a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing on long COVID in January. A group of senators is now urging the Social Security Administration to grant greater access to disability payments for people with long COVID symptoms. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Several U.S. senators have called on the Social Security Administration to take steps to make it easier for people with long COVID to access disability benefits, actions that disability rights advocates and patients say are desperately needed.

Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Tina Smith (D-MN), Angus King (I-ME), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) signed the letter released on Monday. They said the agency should make the process more transparent, track and publish data on long COVID applications, and consider expanding the listing of impairments the SSA considers in applications for benefits.

“In some situations, these symptoms can be debilitating and prevent an individual from being able to work, take care of their family, manage their household, or participate in social activities,” the senators wrote to SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley.

Long COVID is a chronic health condition, which often includes fatigue, brain fog, and shortness of breath, following a COVID-19 infection. About three in 10 American adults have had long COVID at some point according to KFF’s April analysis of long COVID data. About 17 million people had it in March 2024. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released guidance on long COVID as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Kaine has been outspoken about his own experience with long COVID and Sanders introduced legislation this month to provide $1 billion in funding each year for 10 years to support long COVID research by the National Institutes of Health.

Lisa McCorkell, co-founder of the Patient Led Research Collaborative, a group of long COVID patients and patients with associated illnesses, told States Newsroom, “Creating a ruling or listing would be a huge improvement — having that specific guidance for how to document long COVID, its related diagnoses, and its associated impairment would assist physicians who may not be as knowledgeable about long COVID.”

The SSA administers disability benefits through Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs. The former program requires past employment payment into Social Security. The latter one does not have those restrictions and is based on financial need but to receive benefits, applicants have to prove they qualify as having a disability. The average monthly disability benefit for Social Security Disability Insurance is $1,538.

Long COVID’s economic cost

Researchers and economists are still trying to understand the full impact of COVID-19 infections and long COVID on the workforce. A 2023 study estimated that COVID-19 brought down the labor force by 500,000 people and that the average loss of labor is equivalent to $9,000 in earnings. More than 25% of people with long COVID said their condition had an impact on their employment or work hours, according to a 2022 Minneapolis Fed paper.

Long COVID is not going to go away, particularly as government protections on the federal, state, and local level to reduce the spread of COVID are “severely lacking,” said Marissa Ditkowsky, who serves as the disability economic justice counsel at the National Partnership for Women & Families, an organization focused on health, economic justice, and reproductive rights for women and families.

“While COVID continues to be a reality, we know that COVID disproportionately impacts women, disabled folks, and people of color, and the folks who are most impacted already have issues with access to appropriate health care, access to employment, and access to equitable wages,” said Ditkowsky, who has long COVID herself. “A lot of folks might be working in low-wage jobs where they’re in the service industry and constantly out there and more likely to contract COVID. It starts not just with the programs for how to deal with folks with long COVID, but how to prevent people from getting long COVID.”

In the meantime, she said people with long COVID, as well as other people with disabilities, would benefit from the changes senators are advocating, such as restoring the treating physician rule, which was repealed in 2017. The rule allowed the agency to give greater weight to medical evidence from a physician who treated a patient for years compared to, say, a doctor who examines a patient once.

“Giving your own doctor the weight [they] deserve is huge,” Ditkowsky said.

Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the disability justice initiative at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said there is an opportunity for the Biden administration or the next administration to revamp how the agency administers disability benefits. She said that given the aging population, there is more reason than ever for the agency to make significant improvements to the application process. Advocates for people with disabilities say it’s also imperative to boost funding for the agency.

“Not only are we seeing an increase in disability in younger folks, but we’re also looking at the big boomer generation getting older … We’re going to see a huge pressure on the [SSA] and we need to see real changes and funding and think of ways to manage the wide variety of experiences that people have in order to deal with differences in applying for these benefits,” she said.

The Trump Campaign Just Tweeted Something Really Racist

HuffPost

The Trump Campaign Just Tweeted Something Really Racist

Nathalie Baptiste – August 13, 2024

On Tuesday, an official social media account of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign posted a racist meme implying that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidency in November, nice suburban neighborhoods will be overrun with hordes of Black people and immigrants.

“Import the third world. Become the third world,” read the post on X, the former Twitter.

Side-by-side images ― captioned “Your Neighborhood Under Trump” and “Your Neighborhood Under Kamala,” respectively ― show a tranquil residential street and a 2023 Getty photo of recent migrants to the U.S. sitting outside New York’s Roosevelt Hotel in hopes of securing temporary housing. (The Roosevelt now serves as an intake center for homeless migrants, and has been described as a “new Ellis Island.”) Most of the migrants in the photo are people of color.

Even as Harris and the Democrats shift to the right on border security and immigration issues, the Trump campaign has doubled down on racial animus and anti-immigrant sentiment.

In a conversation with X owner Elon Musk on the platform Monday night, Trump repeatedly vilified immigrants, bringing up cases of alleged murders by undocumented migrants. “These are rough people,” Trump told Musk. “These are criminals that make our criminals look like nice people. And it’s horrible what they’re doing.”

Trump has, once again, made building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border a campaign priority, and has promised that his administration will deport every undocumented immigrant living in the U.S. At the Republican National Convention in July, attendees cheered and waved signs reading “Mass Deportations Now!”

In the three weeks since President Joe Biden announced he wouldn’t seek a second term, reports have suggested that Trump is flailing for ways to counter the swell of enthusiasm for Harris, now the Democratic nominee.

Racism is a go-to approach for Trump, as evidenced by his quest over a decade ago to “prove” that then-President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. Some of his advisers have told the media in recent weeks of their plans to rerun the “Willie Horton” playbook, referring to an infamous ad from 1988 that supporters of Republican George H.W. Bush produced for his presidential campaign against Democrat Michael Dukakis. (Trump’s current pollster and adviser Tony Fabrizio had a hand in that advertisement.)

According to The New York Times, GOP donors and Trump’s own advisers have been pleading with him to attack Harris’ policies and stay on message, instead of questioning whether she is actually Black, as he has repeatedly done in the past two weeks. The fear among conservatives is that blatant racism will drive voters away in November.

But it seems that even when attacking Harris’ immigration policies, the Trump campaign just can’t help itself.

The Founders Saw This Insane Political Moment Coming 237 Years Ago

The New York Times

By Stacy Schiff – August 1, 2024

Stacy Schiff is the author of, most recently, “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.”

A cartoon illustration depicting two of America’s founders gazing down, as if from heaven, at a landscape littered with a coconut tree, a couch, a red baseball hat, the White House, a torn flag and other detritus.
Credit…Hunter French

If you’re feeling wrung out from the last dizzying weeks of political news, just imagine how the word “unprecedented” must be faring, dragged from its recliner for daily — sometimes hourly — workouts. It needn’t have been.

To understand how we got here, it’s helpful to return to another sweltering summer, a summer when everything actually was without precedent. The 55 men who assembled in Philadelphia 237 years ago to hammer out an American Constitution differed on a great many things. Among the rare points on which most agreed was that the American people could not be trusted to choose a president for themselves. They were easily misled, too often “the dupes of pretend patriots.” The size of the country alone made an informed electorate impossible, given the press, the postal service and the miserable infrastructure.

Slavery (barely discussed) and the mechanics of representation (much discussed) proved vexing. But few questions so confounded the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention as those pertaining to the American presidency. The Articles of Confederation, which had held the colonies together through the Revolution, had made no provision for a chief executive. How should the president be selected and how long should he serve? By what mechanism could he be removed? Should he report to the legislature? Should Congress be empowered to impeach him? What qualified as an impeachable offense?

No subject proved more divisive or elicited such a staggering array of options. It befuddled the delegates in June. They wrangled with it still in September.

King George III loomed large over the proceedings; a single executive seemed a high-risk proposition. Several Southerners favored a three-person executive, a committee that would represent each region of the fledgling Republic. From the start there was concern that rural voices would be drowned out. Some delegates worried that multiple officeholders would dilute the power of the presidency. Others feared the authority of an American president might come even to exceed that of the king. Would a president not do all in his power to retain his hold on the office? What if he committed crimes? “Will not the immense difference between being master of everything and being ignominiously tried and punished” move him to cling to the office, Patrick Henry would later ask. (He had refused to attend the convention because, he claimed, he “smelt a rat.”)

The doctrine of separation of powers asserted itself only slowly. It dogged the delegates as they argued back and forth, attempting to deliver an American presidency that was both insulated from and accountable to Congress. The initial idea was for Congress to elect the chief executive, an idea that met with early, unanimous agreement. The more it was discussed, the muddier the matter grew. Perhaps state legislatures should do the electing? One term seemed sufficient in June but wrongheaded by July. It had not yet occurred to the delegates that the president would sit at the head of a political party. In the original conception he was to transcend factions, like a British sovereign.

A presidential term, it was initially agreed, should be seven years. The convention went on to entertain options of six, 11, 12, 15 and 20 years. Early on, the delegates converged upon a single term, though some had a different definition of what one term constituted. The most ardent proponent of executive authority, Alexander Hamilton, believed a president should serve for life. “It may be said, this constitutes an elective monarchy,” he conceded. But the president best able to resist popular pressures, corruption and foreign influence was the president with life tenure. “An executive is less dangerous to the liberties of the people when in office during life, than for seven years,” argued Hamilton.

Benjamin Franklin — at 81, older than everyone in the room, in most cases by decades — demurred. Even if that executive were a man of unerring, incorruptible instincts, what would happen if he were to grow frail? A man’s life often outlasted his prime, observed Franklin, who strayed from his chair only with visible difficulty. He meandered freely from his point. He entrusted most of his speeches to a colleague.

Weeks of heated inconclusiveness followed. How to remove an unfit executive, whether to allow him a veto and the extent of his powers occupied days. So did the question of salary. At one point it was suggested that anyone elected to the presidency be in possession of a “clear unencumbered estate” of at least $100,000, an amount equivalent to roughly $3.5 million today. Franklin objected, generally opposing the idea that rights be restricted to property owners. “Some of the greatest rogues he was ever acquainted with,” he was said to have quipped, “were the richest rogues.” He strongly urged that the president be reimbursed only for his expenses.

Having spent years in London, having observed the British court at close hand, he knew that men made outlandish efforts to grasp and retain lucrative, powerful offices. He warned against a natural inclination to embrace kings. (He may or may not have known that nearly half his colleagues seemed to prefer some form of royal government.) “I am apprehensive, therefore — perhaps too apprehensive,” he warned, “that the government of these states may in future times end in a monarchy.” An awkward moment followed. In the room, after all, stood General Washington, who had served his country for eight years with honor and without profit. Franklin’s motion found a respectful second. It seems never to have returned to the table.

Some parts of that summer sound deeply familiar. There were long weeks of acrimony and about-faces, personal attacks and pouting. There were deadlocks, diatribes and tantrums. Consensus remained elusive for months and arrived grudgingly in the end. Ultimately it was James Madison who crafted the bare bones of the Electoral College, a system born of confusion and bruising exasperation. (When finally it came time for individual states to ratify the Constitution, some Pennsylvania delegates hid themselves away in their boardinghouses, from which they had to be bodily dragged.) Six days a week the delegates suffocated together for hours, practically seated atop each other in a stifling forty-by-forty-foot room. They took no daily breaks. It was not always possible to follow the debate.

In cutting a Constitution from whole cloth, the delegates met with infinitely more negative examples than appealing models. They had reviewed the republics of antiquity. They had examined the modern states of Europe. They had read their Hume, Montesquieu and Blackstone. They found no single formula that suited their purposes. They had agreed on secrecy — the room felt particularly airless as, for security, the windows were locked tight — an oath that has hampered historians ever since but did nothing to stanch the misinformation that flew from Philadelphia. Toward late July a rumor flew around New England that the delegates had resolved to invite George III’s second son to be crowned king of America.

Then, in mid-convention, came something wholly startling. During a particularly bitter June impasse, Franklin ventured to observe that five weeks’ work had yielded lamentably little. At that same Philadelphia address the Continental Congress had appealed for divine illumination. Should this new assembly do the same? The full Congress consisted of 53 Protestants, the majority of them Episcopalians. Two Catholics rounded out the ranks. Many of them were men of deep piety. If they were founding an American Christian nation when they wrote the Constitution it was not obvious: Franklin’s proposal met with a deafening silence. Hamilton gamely weighed in, to comment that an appeal to heaven would likely alarm the country. It reeked of desperation. A North Carolinian objected that Congress was without the funds to pay a cleric. Only three or four delegates, Franklin noted with what sounds like astonishment, thought prayer essential!

Much of what was said in that room suggests that the founders guessed we would sooner or later wind up injecting coconuts and couches into our political discourse. When they were not attempting to craft a viable American presidency, the delegates worried about how to protect a fledgling government from the worst instincts of its constituents. Those, too, were on full display that July, when the unprecedented collided with the immemorial.

Already once that spring a Philadelphia mob had attacked in the street an elderly German woman named Korbmacher. Long suspected of witchcraft, she was rumored to have poisoned a child with a magic charm. On July 10, a week during which the convention wrangled with the three-fifths clause, a formula that struck even its proposer as abhorrent, the widow Korbmacher was again attacked. This time her assailants armed themselves with stones and knives. She died from her injuries a week later while inside the State House the best minds in America designed — for citizens they felt might not best be trusted with their own political choices — the most enlightened government they could imagine. “Prejudices, worm-eaten prejudices, as our old companions, are hard to be parted with,” The Pennsylvania Packet opined about the attack.

The case went to court in October. It is unclear if the presiding judge handed down any convictions, though he did allow himself a comment from the bench. How had a wrinkled old crone caused such a commotion? Now if some of the luscious damsels he had noticed around town, “animated with the bloom of youth and equipped with all the grace of beauty” had been charged, the accusation would merit attention. Those women, he declared, were created to befuddle and bewitch.

The record is silent as to whether old Korbmacher was childless or owned even a single cat.

Stacy Schiff is the author of six books, including, most recently, “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.”

How Hungary’s Orbán uses control of the media to escape scrutiny and keep the public in the dark

Associated Press

How Hungary’s Orbán uses control of the media to escape scrutiny and keep the public in the dark

Justin Spike – July 31, 2024

FILE – Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban delivers a speech at Tusvanyos Summer University, in Baile Tusnad, Harghita county, Romania, on July 27, 2024. In Hungary, Orbán has extended his party’s control over the media, directly affecting informed democratic participation. (AP Photo/Alexandru Dobre, File)
Members of the media work during the government’s press conference on Thursday, Jan 18, 2024. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has extended his party’s control over the media, directly affecting informed democratic participation. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
A headphone of a cameraman is seen in the press room during the government’s press conference on Thursday, Jan 18, 2024. Polarization has created “an almost Orwellian environment” in Hungarian media, where the government weaponizes control of a majority of outlets to limit Hungarians’ access to information. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — In the months leading up to elections for the European Parliament, Hungarians were warned that casting a ballot against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán would be a vote for all-out war.

The right-wing Fidesz party cast the June 9 election as an existential struggle, one that could preserve peace in Europe if Orbán won — or fuel widespread instability if he didn’t. To sell that bold claim, Orbán used a sprawling pro-government media empire that’s dominated the country’s political discourse for more than a decade.

The tactic worked, as it has since Orbán returned to power in 2010, and his party came first in the elections — though not by the margins it was used to. An upstart party, led by a former Fidesz insider, attracted disaffected voters and took 29% of the vote to Fidesz’s 44%.

“Everything has fallen apart in Hungary. The state essentially does not function, there’s only propaganda and lies,” said Péter Magyar, the leader of that new party who has emerged in recent months as perhaps the most formidable challenge yet to Orbán’s rule.

This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series covering threats to democracy in Europe.

Magyar’s Respect and Freedom, or TISZA, party campaigned on promises to root out deep-seated corruption in the government. He has also been outspoken about what he sees as the damage Orbán’s “propaganda factory” has done to Hungary’s democracy.

“It might be very difficult to imagine from America or Western Europe what the propaganda and the state machinery is like here,” Magyar said in an interview before elections with The Associated Press. “This parallel reality is like the Truman Show. People believe that it’s reality.”

Since 2010, Orbán’s government has promoted hostility to migrants and LGBTQ+ rights, distrust of the European Union, and a belief that Hungarian-American financier George Soros — who is Jewish and one of Orbán’s enduring foes — is engaged in secret plots to destabilize Hungary, a classic antisemitic trope.

Such messaging has delivered Orbán’s party four consecutive two-thirds majorities in parliament and, most recently, the most Hungarian delegates in the EU legislature.

But according to Péter Krekó, an analyst and head of the Political Capital think tank in Budapest, Orbán has created “an almost Orwellian environment” where the government weaponizes control of a majority of news outlets to limit Hungarians’ decisions.

“Hungary has become a quite successful informational autocracy, or spin dictatorship,” Krekó said.

The restriction of Hungary’s free press directly affects informed democratic participation. Opposition politicians have long complained that they only get five minutes of air time every four years on public television, the legal minimum, to present their platforms before elections.

In contrast, public television and radio channels consistently echo talking points communicated both by Fidesz and a network of think tanks and pollsters that receive funding from the government and the party. Their analysts routinely appear in affiliated media to bolster government narratives, while independent commentators rarely, if ever, appear.

During the campaign in May, Hungary’s electoral commission issued a warning to the public broadcaster for repeatedly airing Fidesz campaign videos during news segments, a violation of impartiality rules. The broadcaster carried on regardless.

Magyar, who won a seat in the European Parliament, credits his new party’s success partly to its ability to sidestep Orbán’s dominance by meeting directly with voters and developing a large following on social media.

But in Hungary, even those with a strong online presence struggle to compete with Fidesz’s control of traditional outlets.

According to press watchdog Reporters Without Borders, Orbán has used media buyouts by government-connected “oligarchs” to build “a true media empire subject to his party’s orders.” The group estimates that such buyouts have given Orbán’s party control of some 80% of Hungary’s media market resources. In 2021, it put Orbán on its list of media “predators,” the first EU leader to earn the distinction.

The title didn’t come out of nowhere: in 2016, Hungary’s oldest daily newspaper was suddenly shuttered after being bought by a businessman with links to Orbán. In 2018, nearly 500 pro-government outlets were simultaneously donated by their owners to a foundation headed by Orbán loyalists, creating a sprawling right-wing media conglomerate. And in 2020, nearly the entire staff of Hungary’s largest online news portal, Index, resigned en masse after its lead editor was fired under political pressure.

A network of independent journalists and online outlets that continue to function in Hungary struggles to remain competitive, said Gábor Polyák, head of the Media and Communication Department at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

The government is the largest advertiser in Hungary, he said. A study by watchdog Mérték Media Monitor showed up to 90% of state advertising revenue is awarded to pro-Fidesz media outlets, keeping them afloat.

The government’s efforts to control media have moved beyond television, radio and newspapers, shifting into social media posts that are boosted by paid advertisements.

Hungary spent the most in the entire 27-member EU — nearly $4.8 million — on political ads on platforms owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, in a 30-day period in May and June, outspending Germany, which has more than eight times the population, according to a recent report based on publicly available data compiled by Political Capital, Mérték Media Monitor and fact-checking site Lakmusz.

The vast majority of that spending came from Fidesz or its proxies, the report found.

One major spender is Megafon, a self-declared training center for aspiring conservative influencers. In the same 30-day period, the group spent $800,000 on boosting its pro-government content on Meta platforms, more than what was spent in total by 16 EU countries in the same period.

With government narratives so pervasive across mediums, a level of political polarization has emerged that can reach deep into the private lives of Hungarians. In recent years, the views of Andrea Simon, a 55-year-old entrepreneur from a suburb of Budapest, and her husband Attila Kohári began to drift apart — fed, according to Simon, by Kohári’s steady diet of pro-government media.

“He listened to these radio stations where they pushed those simple talking points, it completely changed his personality,” Simon said. “I felt sometimes he’d been kidnapped, and his brain was replaced with a Fidesz brain.”

In December, after 33 years of marriage, they agreed to divorce.

“I said to him several times, ‘You have to choose: me or Fidesz,’” she said. “He said Fidesz.”

Still, like many Hungarians who hold fast to traditional values in a changing world, Kohári remains a faithful supporter of Orbán and his policies, despite the personal cost.

His love of his country and belief that Orbán has led Hungary in the right direction have him “clearly convinced that my position is the right one,” he said. “But it ruined my marriage.”

The media divide also has consequences for Hungary’s finances, says independent lawmaker Ákos Hadházy, who has uncovered dozens of suspected cases of graft involving EU funds.

Such abuses, he said, go largely unaddressed because the majority of voters are unaware of them.

“Following the Russian model, (the government) controls state media by hand and spends about 50 billion forints ($135 million) a year on advertisements … that sustain their own TV networks and websites,” he said. “The people that consume those media simply don’t hear about these things.”

On a recent day in Mezőcsát, a small village on the Hungarian Great Plain, Hadházy inspected the site of an industrial park that was built with 290 million forints ($795,000) in EU funds. The problem, he said, is that since the site was completed in 2017, it has never been active, and the money used to build it has disappeared.

Hadházy said that Hungarians “who consciously seek out the real news hear about these cases and don’t understand how it’s possible that there are no consequences when I present such things almost daily.”

He continued: “But it’s not important for the government that nobody hears about them, it’s important that more people hear their lies, and that’s the way it is now. Far more people hear their messages than the facts.”

This story has been corrected to show that the building of the industrial park in the village of Mezőcsát involved EU funds in the amount of 290 million forints, not 290 million euros.

This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series covering threats to democracy in Europe.

5 ways Kamala Harris is attacking Trump

Yahoo! News

5 ways Kamala Harris is attacking Trump

Andrew Romano, Reporter – August 1, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris
Vice President Kamala Harris boards Air Force Two in Westfield, Mass., on July 27. (Stephanie Scarbrough/AP)

Ever since Vice President Kamala Harris took the baton last Sunday from her boss, President Biden, and instantly became the Democratic Party’s new de facto presidential nominee, she has enjoyed one of the most significant “honeymoons” in recent U.S. campaign history.

As a result, the latest polls show Harris closing the gap with Donald Trump in key swing states; pulling even nationally; and surpassing him in terms of favorability and enthusiasm.

Yet all honeymoons come to an end. If Harris hopes to win in November, she will have to differentiate herself from Biden — and convince a decisive number of voters to reject four more years of Trump.

In an attempt to do just that, Harris and her allies have been testing out five main lines of attack: that Trump is “weird”; that he is old; that he is scared to debate; that he is a felon; and that his “Project 2025” agenda is extreme.

Harris has been so committed to these themes that even when Trump questioned her race Wednesday — falsely claiming that she suddenly “made a turn” and “became a Black person” after “only promoting [her] Indian heritage” — she refused to get sucked into a culture war.

“The American people deserve better,” is all Harris said in response.

Meanwhile, Harris’s relentlessly on-message campaign used “Trump’s tirade” as an opportunity to ding his “harmful Project 2025 agenda” and challenge him to “actually show up for the debate on September 10.”

More on the strategic contrasts Harris is trying to draw:

Trump is ‘weird’

When Biden was running, he constantly called Trump a “threat to democracy.”

Harris hasn’t left that line of attack entirely behind. “Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion and rule of law, or a country of chaos, fear and hate?” the vice president asked at a recent rally.

But for the most part, Harris and her allies have pivoted to a different anti-Trump message — one that comes across as a lot less alarmist and a lot more … dismissive.

“Some of what [Trump] and his running mate [JD Vance] are saying, it is just plain weird,” Harris said Saturday at her first fundraiser. “I mean that’s the box you put that in, right?”

The new term caught on after Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — who has been using it for months — called Trump, Vance and their policies “weird” a few times last week.

“Listen to the guy,” Walz told CNN, referring to Trump. “He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter, and shocking sharks, and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought we just give him way too much credit.”

Now other Harris surrogates are using it too, especially in reference to some of Vance’s recent remarks — and Walz has reportedly become one of Harris’s VP finalists.

So far, the “weird” attack has frustrated Republicans, “leading them to further amplify it through off-balance responses,” David Karpf, a strategic communication professor at George Washington University, told the Associated Press.

It “makes voters feel like Trump is out of touch,” added Brian Ott, a professor of communications at Missouri State University, in an interview with Newsweek. And “it’s hard to claim that it is in any way out of bounds politically, which makes any response to it seem like an overreaction and, well, weird.”

Trump is old

The first time the Harris campaign officially referred to Trump as “weird” was in a press release put out just days after the vice president announced her candidacy. But there was another, more familiar adjective alongside it.

“Trump is old and quite weird,” the statement said. “After watching Fox News this morning, we have only one question, is Donald Trump OK?”

As everyone knows, Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history; at 81, he was also on track to become the oldest presidential nominee in U.S. history until he ended his campaign last Sunday.

Now Trump, 78, has taken his place.

And so Harris, 59, has turned the tables and started describing the former president as someone who is “focused on the past” — while she, in contrast, is “focused on the future.”

For its part, the Harris campaign has been less euphemistic about the nearly two-decade age gap between the two candidates.

“Tonight, Donald Trump couldn’t pronounce words … went on and on and on, and generally sounded like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant, let alone be president of the United States,” Harris spokesperson James Singer said after a recent Trump speech. “America can do better than [Trump’s] bitter, bizarre and backward-looking delusions.”

Trump is scared to debate

On Sept. 10, Trump and Biden were scheduled to debate for the second time this year. But after the president withdrew from the race — and Harris emerged as the new, de facto Democratic nominee — Trump started to backtrack.

“I haven’t agreed to anything,” Trump said on a press call last week. “I agreed to a debate with Joe Biden.” Around the same time, the former president suggested that ABC News should no longer host, calling the outlet “fake news.”

Harris immediately snapped back. “What happened to ‘any time, any place’?” she said in a post on X.

Since then, Trump has said “The answer is yes, I’ll probably end up debating” — while adding that he “can also make a case for not doing it.”

In response, Harris has seized on Trump’s waffling as evidence that “the momentum in this race is shifting” and that “Trump is feeling it,” as she put it Tuesday during a rally in Atlanta — effectively weaponizing the whole situation to question Trump’s confidence.

“Well, Donald,” Harris said in Atlanta, addressing Trump directly. “I do hope you’ll reconsider. Meet me on the debate stage … because as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”

Trump is a felon

Harris debuted as a 2024 presidential candidate last Monday with an appearance at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del. She spoke for about 20 minutes — but one passage in particular got the lion’s share of attention.

“As many of you know, before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as United States senator, I was the elected attorney general, as I’ve mentioned, of California,” Harris said. “And before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor.”

“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” the candidate continued, as laughing, applauding staffers began to realize what was coming next. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Since then, Harris has used the same lines in every stump speech she’s delivered.

Biden, of course, would mention Trump’s civil and criminal cases on the campaign trail. But Harris’s résumé lends itself to a novel “prosecutor vs. felon” dynamic — one she could further emphasize by picking any of the former state attorneys general on her vice presidential shortlist when she reveals her running mate next week.

Trump’s Project 2025 agenda is extreme

For months, the Democratic Party has sought to tie Trump to Project 2025, a voluminous blueprint for a second Trump term that was created by the Heritage Foundation (a right-wing think tank) with input from at least 140 people who worked for Trump during his first term.

The reason is obvious. Democrats believe Project 2025 policies — deporting millions of immigrants, eliminating the Department of Education, installing loyalists throughout the federal bureaucracy, reversing federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone — will be unpopular with the public.

Trump, meanwhile, seems to have come to the same conclusion. After Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently said America was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Trump took to his Truth Social network to distance himself.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” the former president claimed. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

Earlier this week, the group announced that it was winding down its policy operations and letting go of its director amid pressure from the Trump campaign.

But Harris — who has called Project 2025 a “plan to return America to a dark past” — is not moving on.

“This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country,” Harris spokesperson Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Tuesday. “Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real — in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.”

Trump splits with GOP lawmakers on national security, raising alarm

The Hill

Trump splits with GOP lawmakers on national security, raising alarm

Alexander Bolton – August 1, 2024

National security-minded Republican lawmakers are alarmed by what they see as a growing split between themselves and former President Trump on key issues, including the war in Ukraine, preserving the NATO alliance and protecting Taiwan from Chinese aggression.

Trump’s actions over the past three weeks have stirred confusion and concern among Republican senators who voted earlier this year to approve tens of billions of dollars to contain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to deter China from attacking Taiwan, an important U.S. ally and trading partner.

Defense-minded GOP senators viewed Trump’s invitation to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to visit him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after the NATO summit in Washington as a worrisome development, given Orbán’s close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his efforts to undermine NATO’s support for the defense of Ukraine.

GOP senators who support U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine were dismayed when Trump selected Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who led the opposition to the Ukrainian assistance package, as his running mate.

And Senate Republicans are feeling uneasy about Trump’s assertion that Taiwan should pay more for its defense and refusal to commit to defending the island.

One Republican senator, who requested anonymity, said “it’s a big question” whether Trump will support the war in Ukraine or would come to Taiwan’s defense if attacked by China.

“I don’t think he desires to be in conflict or to pay for conflicts around the world,” the senator observed.

“There’s no question where JD Vance is,” the lawmaker said of Trump’s selection of the Ohio senator as his running mate.

And the senator called Trump’s meeting with Orbán at Mar-a-Lago “concerning.”

“I can’t tell you why he’s doing it,” the lawmaker remarked.

‘Turned the corner’

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) argued earlier this year that the Republican Party has “turned the corner on the isolationist movement” within its ranks when a majority of GOP senators voted for a $95 billion foreign aid package, which included $61 billion for Ukraine.

But that’s now in doubt after Trump picked Vance to join him on the GOP ticket.

Opponents of continued funding for the war in Ukraine cheered the selection and touted it as a sign Trump would change course if elected in November.

“JD is probably one of the most outspoken individuals about continuing to fuel the flames of that bloody stalemate. I happen to agree with him. I think President Trump does as well,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who opposes sending more funding to Ukraine.

Johnson said Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate “kind of confirms the position of, hopefully, the next administration.”

“The president said he’d end that thing in 24 hours,” Johnson said, referring to Trump’s comments on the war.

Vance told The Hill in April that the $61 billion approved for Ukraine would be the last major assistance package of its kind to get through Congress.

“If Ukraine thinks that it’s getting another $60 billion supplemental out of the United States Congress, there’s no way,” Vance said.

McConnell told reporters he will support the GOP ticket with Vance on it but insisted he’s going to keep arguing for the importance of stopping Russia’s invasion.

“I support the ticket. I also support Ukraine, and I’m going to be arguing, no matter who gets elected president” for deterring Russian aggression, McConnell said. “It’s not just Ukraine, we’ve got worldwide organized authoritarian regimes talking to each other — China, North Korea, Russia, Iran and Iran’s proxies.

“This is a serious challenge,” he warned. “This is the single largest problem facing the democratic world, no matter who wins the election. And that’s what I’m going to be working on the next couple years.”

McConnell didn’t explicitly criticize Trump for meeting with Orbán in Florida but made it clear he views the Hungarian strongman as NATO’s “weakest” member and someone who has undermined U.S. security interests in Europe.

“He’s the one member of NATO who’s essentially turned his country over to the Chinese and the Russians. [He’s] been looking for ways to undermine NATO’s efforts to defeat the Russians in Ukraine. So Viktor Orbán, I think, has now made Hungary the most recent problem in NATO,” McConnell said.

McConnell also spoke out about the need to stand with Taiwan and other Far East allies when asked about Trump’s reluctance to commit to defending the island nation, which is a major source of semiconductors for U.S. industry.

“We don’t know yet who’s going to be the new administration. But it’s pretty clear that our allies in Asia, and now you can add the Philippines to the group, are all concerned about Chinese aggression. They are watching what happens to Russia in Ukraine carefully,” he said.

“This is the clearest example of the democratic world needing to stand up to these authoritarians,” he said. “Reagan had it right. There’s one thing that works. Peace you get through strength.”

Blame for Carlson

Other Republican senators are balking at Trump’s pick of Vance as his running mate and outreach to Orbán.

A second GOP senator who requested anonymity voiced hope that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served under Trump, would serve as Defense secretary in a new Trump administration and convince him to stay the course in supporting Ukraine.

The lawmaker blamed the influence of conservative media personality Tucker Carlson in pushing Trump toward Vance and Orbán.

“Not the way I would do it,” the senator said.

A third Republican senator said McConnell and other GOP colleagues aren’t happy with how Trump’s recent moves telegraph how he might run foreign policy out of the White House if he’s elected in November.

“I think Trump goes in and tries to negotiate a deal [to end the war in Ukraine] where they cede certain territory to Putin knowing that Putin can’t walk away a loser. Putin’s only graceful exit from this is Zelensky and company ceding some territory, the Russian-speaking parks of Ukraine,” the senator said, predicting that Trump will lean on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“My guess is that doesn’t sit well with McConnell, at all. But Trump and McConnell have had a pretty rocky relationship,” the source said.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), an outspoken advocate for supporting the war in Ukraine and a McConnell ally, told reporters Wednesday he thinks Trump is open to continued U.S. support for Ukraine.

“If you take a look at the fact that we passed a $60 billion-plus supplemental package [for Ukraine], the House passed it, I’ve got to believe there was some tacit support from Trump … or he could have blocked it,” Tillis said. “It’s on us to convince President Trump why it’s in our best national interest to support Ukraine.”

But other GOP senators are skeptical that Trump will support sending tens of billions of dollars in additional military aid to Ukraine if he returns to the White House.

“His instinct is always toward nonintervention, caution. I don’t know that there’s well-formed philosophy about this is. It’s just his gut. He kind of does this by gut, and his gut is nonintervention,” said a fifth GOP senator who requested anonymity.

Experts say nuclear energy bill is proof of bipartisan consensus

The Hill

Experts say nuclear energy bill is proof of bipartisan consensus

Zack Budryk – August 1, 2024

The recent passage of major legislation to boost the deployment of nuclear reactors is evidence of a bipartisan consensus on nuclear power as an opportunity to keep pace with China on renewable energy, experts said Thursday at a panel discussion with The Hill.

The ADVANCE Act, which President Biden signed into law in July, passed the Senate 88-2. It directs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to explore methods of quickening the licensing process for new nuclear technology, as well as streamlining the Energy Department’s technology export process.

The bipartisan vote on the legislation indicates “members of both parties are looking to build on decades of innovation and … create this new opportunity to build new gigawatt-scale clean energy facilities in the United States,” said Lesley Jantarasami, managing director of energy programs at the Bipartisan Policy Center

Jantarasami made the remarks at “The Nuclear Frontier: Securing America’s Energy Future,” which was hosted by The Hill and sponsored by The Nuclear Company. The discussion was moderated by Rafael Bernal, a staff writer at The Hill. Bob Cusack, The Hill’s editor in chief, moderated a separate conversation during the event.

“There’s a lot going on today in recognition of the fact that we are moving toward modernizing our economy, towards building a new energy economy that needs to be centered around clean energy and that nuclear is a foundational piece of that portfolio,” Jantarasami said.

Jantarasami added that widespread interest exists within industry and utilities in deploying new nuclear technology, but the process has been stymied by anxiety about the pressure of being “first out of the gate.”

Panelists also emphasized that there is not a binary choice between a more efficient licensing and approval process and cutting corners on safety. Former Deputy Energy Secretary Mark W. Menezes, president and CEO of the U.S. Energy Association, pointed to reforms at the Food and Drug Administration that reduced the approval timeline as an example of how a balance could be struck.

“This is not about cutting corners [or] creating a process that isn’t diligent,” Jantarasami added, saying there have been “misconceptions around speeding up a process and not doing as much due diligence—we can do both those things.”

Maria Korsnick, CEO at the Nuclear Energy Institute, added that it “isn’t the conversation we had in the 70s and 80s anymore,” when incidents like the Chernobyl disaster and the Three-Mile Island accident led to widespread fears around nuclear power.

Spain, France, Germany: Heatwaves sweep across Europe with devastating consequences

Euro News

Spain, France, Germany: Heatwaves sweep across Europe with devastating consequences

Angela Symons – August 1, 2024

Spain, France, Germany: Heatwaves sweep across Europe with devastating consequences

There’s no end in sight for Europe’s searingly hot summer, as heatwave warnings have been issued from Spain to Germany.

In Paris, too, Olympians have been forced to compete in searing heat – extremes that would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, according to climatologist group World Weather Attribution (WWA).

Droughts and wildfires have broken out across the Mediterranean as a result of the hot weather, which looks set to continue throughout August and beyond in some parts.

Extreme heat currently claims more than 175,000 lives annually in Europe, with numbers set to soar, according to a report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) today.

Spain: Temperatures could surpass 43C

Yellow, orange and extreme red heatwave warnings have been issued by Spain’s Meteorological Agency (AEMET) as temperatures threaten to reach 43C in the southeast.

Sweltering highs are forecast across the country’s east coast, south and centre for the majority of August, reaching peak intensity on Thursday – with one in nine of AEMET’s weather stations reaching 40C or higher.

Baza in Grenada and northwest Murcia will be the hardest hit.

The temperature in Barcelona broke records on Tuesday, racing 40C – the hottest day the Catalan capital has seen in at least 110 years, when records began.

According to AEMET, temperatures are likely to be higher than normal until October across much of Spain.

Italy: Rome under maximum heat warning

Helicopters and fire engines tackled a large fire in north-west Rome on Wednesday as a heatwave gripped the Italian capital.

The city has been placed under a maximum heat warning, with temperatures in the high 30s expected on Thursday and Friday.

Florence, Bologna, Milan and Turin are among the other cities also under a red weather warning.

While the blaze on Monte Mario is now under control, Rome and the surrounding areas remain on high alert for wildfires.

The south of the country is facing persistent drought, with farmers in Sicily forced to slaughter or sell off livestock due to severe water shortages.

Germany: Heat warning issued as temperatures creep over 35C

It’s not only southern Europe facing the heat: German Weather Service DWD has issued a warning as parts of the country face 35C-plus temperatures.

Wednesday was expected to be the hottest day of the year – particularly southwest Germany, which will today be hit with thunderstorms and heavy rain as the warm air moves north.

Campaign groups have warned that the country is ill prepared for heatwaves, with Frankfurt’s Senckenberg Society for Nature Research urging the development of early warning systems as the threat of wildfires ramps up.

Environmental non-profit Deutsche Umwelthilfe, meanwhile, released a ‘heat check’ revealing that less than half of the 190 German cities analysed are adequately protecting their citizens against hot weather.

They say more unsealed surfaces and green spaces are needed in cities like Frankfurt and Stuttgart to make them liveable.

France: Extreme heat hits Paris Olympics

Temperatures in Paris reached 35C this week as the city continues to host the Olympic Games.

WWA has warned the high temperatures could impact athletes’ performance and lead to an increase in heat related illness.

Southeastern France is also facing extreme weather, with temperatures of up to 40C expected until at least 4 August. Orange heatwave warnings have been issued by weather service Météo-France in Corsica, Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes and the Occitanie region.

“Extreme heat events like July 2024 in the Mediterranean are no longer rare events,” says WWA. “Similar heatwaves affecting Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Morocco are now expected to occur on average about once every 10 years in today’s climate.”

Russia vs Ukraine: the biggest war of the fake news era

Reuters

Russia vs Ukraine: the biggest war of the fake news era

Max Hunder – July 31, 2024

KHARKIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – In early April, some residents of Kharkiv received a series of chilling text messages from government officials telling them to flee the city before Russian forces surrounded it.

“Due to the threat of enemy encirclement, we urge the civilian population of Kharkiv leave the city by April 22,” said one alert, which bore the logo of the State Emergencies Service of Ukraine and mapped out safe escape routes on a slick infographic.

It was fake. Volodymyr Tymoshko knew immediately. He’s the police chief of Kharkiv region and would have been one of the first to find out about any official evacuation plans.

“Residents started getting these notifications en masse,” the 50-year-old told Reuters as he shared a screenshot of the alert, sent as Russian troops were massing at the border 30 km away.

“This is a psychological operation, it triggers panic. What would an average citizen think when they receive such a message?”

Disinformation and propaganda, long mainstays of war, have been digitally supercharged in the battle for Ukraine, the biggest conflict the world has seen since the advent of smartphones and social media.

Tymoshko said he received about 10 similar messages via SMS and Telegram messenger in April and early May, the weeks leading up to Russia’s offensive in northeastern Ukraine that began on May 10 and opened up a new front in the war.

A Ukrainian security official, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said the Russians frequently sent large numbers of text messages from devices attached to an Orlan-10 long-range reconnaissance drone which can penetrate dozens of kilometres into Ukrainian airspace.

The devices, known as Leer-3 systems, imitate cellular base stations that phones automatically connect to in search of coverage, he added.

The phone barrage was accompanied by a social media blitz as Russian troops advanced on Kharkiv, according Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation (CCD), a branch of the national security council.

The average number of social media posts classed as disinformation about the war by Ukrainian authorities spiked to over 2,500 a day when the Kharkiv offensive began in May, up from 200 a day in March, data compiled by the CCD shows.

The CCD chief told Reuters that Ukrainian intelligence had assessed that disinformation campaigns were primarily carried out by Russia’s FSB security service and military intelligence agency, commonly known as the GRU.

Russia’s foreign ministry and the FSB didn’t respond to a request for comment on the Ukrainian assertions, while Reuters was unable to contact the GRU.

Moscow has accused Ukraine and the West of unleashing a sophisticated information war against Russia, using the West’s major media, public relations and technology assets to sow false and biased narratives about Russia and the war.

The Ukrainian security official acknowledged his country used online campaigns in an attempt to boost anti-war sentiment among Russia’s population, although he characterised this effort as “strategic communications” to spread accurate information about the conflict.

BOTS AND MICROTARGETING

Reuters interviewed nine people with knowledge of the information and disinformation war being waged in parallel with battlefield operations, including Ukrainian officials, disinformation trackers and security analysts.

The Ukrainian security official who requested anonymity said that since the full-scale invasion of 2022, intelligence agencies had shut down 86 Russian bot farms located in Ukraine which controlled a collective 3 million social media accounts with an estimated audience reach of 12 million people.

Such facilities are rooms filled with banks of specialised computing equipment that can register hundreds of fake accounts daily on social media networks to pump out false information, the official added, citing one farm that was found by security services in the city of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine last year.

Kovalenko said that at present, the most significant sources of online Russian disinformation were TikTok in Ukraine and Telegram in Europe. Both are widely used in Ukraine.

He said that earlier this year, TikTok had shut down about 30 of the 90 accounts that Ukraine had flagged as Russia-affiliated disinformation spreaders, adding that new accounts often popped up to replace those taken down.

TikTok told Reuters its guidelines prohibited false or misleading content, adding that it had closed down 13 covert influence networks operating from Russia in recent years.

“We prohibit and constantly work to disrupt attempts to engage in covert influence operations by manipulating our platform and/or harmfully misleading our community,” a spokesperson said.

Disinformation networks are groups of accounts controlled by the same entity, and often used to push a coordinated narrative.

Telegram said it was developing a tool to add verified information to posts.

“It is Telegram’s belief that the best way to combat misinformation is not with censorship but with easy access to verified information,” a spokesperson added.

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov told Reuters that the Russians were trying to sow panic and distrust, citing an example of social media posts claiming the main road to Kyiv was being resurfaced so that the mayor could flee faster when the Russians came – something he dismissed as a lie.

“They are trying to frighten the population so that people feel uncomfortable and leave the city,” he said in an interview in Kharkiv in late May.

By that time, the frontlines of the conflict in the northeast had stabilised about 20 km from the edge of the city after the Russian offensive had initially gained territory to the north before being blunted by Ukrainian reinforcements.

Maria Avdeeva, a Kharkiv-based security analyst who focuses on Russian disinformation, showed Reuters an infographic map, bearing Ukraine’s state emblem of a trident, posted on Facebook in early April – around the same time as police chief Tymoshko was sent a different evacuation map in a direct Telegram message.

Unperturbed by a loud explosion from a glide bomb a few kilometres away, she explained how the map and accompanying text included fake road closures and claims that missile strikes were expected in specified areas around the city soon.

Microtargeting – which analyses people’s online data to target particular individuals and audiences with specific messages, much like targeted advertising – is complicating the CCD’s task of tracking influence campaigns and countering false narratives, Kovalenko said.

“This activity is notably very tactical,” said John Hultquist, chief analyst at U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant, referring to Russian disinformation campaigns in Ukraine.

“We’ve seen targeting all the way down to the Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches.”

AIRSTRIKE TAKES OUT TV TOWER

Ukrainians are particularly vulnerable to digital disinformation; more than three-quarters of the population get their news from social media, far more than any other source of information, according to a study commissioned by USAid in 2023.

That is considerably higher than in any of the 24 European countries surveyed by a 2024 Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report, which averaged a rate of 44%.

In late April, as Moscow’s forces massed on the border near Kharkiv, a Russian airstrike took out Kharkiv’s main television tower, hindering the city’s access to information.

Dramatic footage obtained by Reuters showed the main mast of the television tower breaking off and falling to the ground.

While the Kharkiv offensive led to a significant spike in disinformation activity, there have been similar Russian campaigns over the course of the war, according to the people interviewed.

The head of the CCD highlighted a Russian campaign in October 2023 aimed at driving home the idea that Ukraine was facing a tough winter and defeat in the war.

Osavul, a Ukrainian disinformation tracking company, showed Reuters its data for this campaign, which it called “black winter”. It counted 914 messages posted by 549 actors which collectively received nearly 25 million views.

Nonetheless, according to Kovalenko, the sheer scale and frequency of Russian influence operations meant Ukrainians were becoming more suspicious of the information they receive, blunting their impact.

The disinformation push during Russia’s initial advance towards Kharkiv at the start of the invasion in 2022 – when they got much closer to the city – contributed to the panic and shock that led to hundreds of thousands of residents fleeing, several officials and experts said.

This time around, only a small number left Kharkiv, even though the amount of disinformation messaging aimed at the city was double the level in March 2022, according to CCD data.

Despite the near-daily missiles and bombs falling on the city – attacks that intensified this May – 1.3 million people remain, according to Kharkiv Mayor Terekhov, roughly the same as before Russia’s latest military incursion in the region.

The comparative lack of panic also reflects Ukrainians’ increasing familiarity with living under attack.

Reuters spoke to nearly two dozen Kharkiv residents in the second half of May, when the city was being hit by several bombs or missiles a day.

Most said they felt no desire to leave and shrugged off the danger, saying they had become used to it. Several said they had stopped following the news.

“This is a psychological mechanism, we get used to danger,” Kharkiv-based psychologist Iryna Markevych said.

In late May, Reuters correspondents dived to the ground for cover when they heard the whistle of a guided bomb piercing the air. Seemingly unfazed, mothers with pushchairs continued to stroll through the park and people bathed at a public fountain.

Yulia Oleshko, 55, a nanny pushing a buggy in a central Kharkiv park, said the best way to get through the nightmare was to simply focus on getting on with everyday life.

“Yesterday I was thinking: walking around Kharkiv is walking around a minefield … but I try not to dwell on these thoughts of fear, otherwise one might fall into depression,” she said.

“We abstract ourselves, otherwise we won’t survive.”

(Reporting by Max Hunder; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Pravin Char)

As Republicans Attack Harris on Immigration, Here’s What Her Record Shows

The New York Times

As Republicans Attack Harris on Immigration, Here’s What Her Record Shows

Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Jazmine Ulloa – July 31, 2024

Robert Rivas, speaker of the California Assembly, in Hollister, Calif., on July 25, 2024, who is backing Vice President Kamala HarrisÕs presidential campaign even though in 2021 he helped draft a statement that opposed her comments on immigration.(Nic Coury/The New York Times)
Robert Rivas, speaker of the California Assembly, in Hollister, Calif., on July 25, 2024, who is backing Vice President Kamala HarrisÕs presidential campaign even though in 2021 he helped draft a statement that opposed her comments on immigration.(Nic Coury/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — As they seek effective attack lines against Vice President Kamala Harris, Republicans are focusing on her role in the Biden administration’s border and immigration policies, seeking to blame her for the surge of migrants into the United States over the past several years.

A review of her involvement in the issue shows a more nuanced record.

President Joe Biden did not assign her the job title of “border czar” or the responsibility of overseeing the enforcement policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, as the Trump campaign suggested Tuesday in its first ad against her. But she did have a prominent role in trying to ensure that a record surge of global migration did not become worse.

After the number of migrants crossing the southern border hit record levels at times during the administration’s first three years, crossings have now dropped to their lowest levels since Biden and Harris took office.

Her early efforts at handling her role and the administration’s policies were widely panned, even by some Democrats, as clumsy and counterproductive, especially in displaying defensiveness over why she had not visited the border. Some of her allies felt she had been handed a no-win portfolio.

Early in the administration, Harris was given a role that came to be defined as a combination of chief fundraiser and conduit between business leaders and the economies of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Her attempt to convince companies across the world to invest in Central America and create jobs for would-be migrants had some success, according to immigration experts and current and former government officials.

But those successes only underlined the scale of the gulf in economic opportunity between the United States and Central America, and how policies to narrow that gulf could take years or even generations to show results.

Rather than develop ways to turn away or detain migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Harris’ work included encouraging a Japan-based auto parts plant, Yazaki, to build a $10 million plant in a western Guatemalan region that sees high rates of migration and pushing a Swiss-based coffee company to increase procurement by more than $100 million in a region rich with coffee beans.

She convened leaders from dozens of companies, helping to raise more than $5 billion in private and public funds.

“Not a huge amount, but it ain’t chicken feed and that links to jobs,” said Mark Schneider, who worked with Latin American and Caribbean nations as a senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration.

Jonathan Fantini-Porter, the chief executive of the Partnership for Central America, the public-private partnership Harris helped lead, said the money had led to 30,000 jobs, with another 60,000 on the way as factories are constructed.

She also pushed Central American governments to work with the United States to create a program where refugees could apply for protection within the region.

Still, some of Harris’ critics said her focus on the “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador was a mistake.

Most migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border during the Obama and Trump administrations did come from those countries. But as migration from that region stabilized during the Biden administration, it exploded from countries such as Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba.

The Northern Triangle countries accounted for roughly 500,700 of the 2.5 million crossings at the southwest border in the fiscal year of 2023, a 36% drop from the 2021 fiscal year, according to the Wilson Center.

“They didn’t care to do a good diagnosis of the issue, and they have just focused on a very small part of the topic,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a political science professor at George Mason University who has studied Latin American relations and their impact on migration. Correa-Cabrera said Harris had “failed completely” in her mission by following an outdated approach to tackling the root causes of migration.

Biden had a similar portfolio to Harris’ when he was vice president. He was in charge of addressing the economic problems in Central America by rallying hundreds of millions of dollars of aid for a region where the United States has a complicated legacy.

After helping fuel violent civil wars in the 1980s, the United States retreated before seeing peace reforms through, a move that partly set the stage for the corrupt politicians and criminal groups who would exploit the countries’ lack of economic opportunities, overwhelm regional police forces and eventually spur hundreds of thousands of migrants — many of them unaccompanied minors — to make the dangerous trek north.

But U.S. foreign aid initiatives have not always worked to deter migration. Over the years, some investments have been mismanaged and prioritized training programs over actual jobs that would keep would-be migrants in their home countries. Former President Donald Trump froze the foreign aid programs in 2019.

When Biden gave Harris the assignment to look into the root causes of migration, some of her allies worried she was being set up to fail. During her first trip to Guatemala City in 2021, she faced outrage from progressives and immigration advocates when she delivered a blunt message to migrants: “Do not come.”

Republicans criticized her when she brushed aside questions about why she had not yet visited the border.

“I’ve never been to Europe,” Harris said during an NBC News interview with Lester Holt. “I don’t understand the point you’re making.”

Her staffers aggressively sought to distance the vice president from the rising number of crossings at the border — a top concern for voters of both parties.

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, who worked with Biden when he had the assignment as vice president, said her task was inherently connected to the record numbers of crossings at the border, even though he agreed she was not a “border czar” in charge of enforcement.

“I think she was supposed to be looking at the diplomatic root issues,” said Cuellar, who signed a resolution proposed by House Republicans criticizing Harris’ work on migration. “But again, you can’t talk about what happens in Central America without coming to the border itself. The focus is the border.”

“I think she did try to distance herself from that,” Cuellar added.

Ricardo Zúñiga, who served as State Department’s special envoy for Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, said Harris was essential in bringing together Latin American and American business leaders to drive investment in Central America.

Less than a week into her role, Zúñiga recalled, Harris sat with members of the national security team and economists from the Treasury Department. After a round of introductions, she quickly got into probing the personalities of the Latin American leaders with whom she would be interacting.

Zúñiga said he later watched her put the information she had collected into practice. In Mexico City, she connected with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador by expressing interest in the artwork at his presidential palace.

In Guatemala, she took a much more direct approach to President Alejandro Giammattei. She warned him last year about attempts to disrupt the handover of power of the newly elected president, Bernardo Arévalo, while also pushing him to help form programs that migrants could use to apply for refuge in the United States closer to their home countries.

“She was curious and asked many questions,” Zúñiga said. “She very quickly realized that we weren’t going to solve 500 years of problematic history in a single term.”

On Tuesday, Harris tried to hit back against Trump’s attacks. During a campaign rally in Georgia, she highlighted his effort to tank legislation that had bipartisan support that would have curbed illegal immigration. “Donald Trump,” she said, “has been talking a big game about securing our border. But he does not walk the walk.”