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Author: John Hanno
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Bogan High School. Worked in Alaska after the earthquake. Joined U.S. Army at 17. Sergeant, B Battery, 3rd Battalion, 84th Artillery, 7th Army. Member of 12 different unions, including 4 different locals of the I.B.E.W. Worked for fortune 50, 100 and 200 companies as an industrial electrician, electrical/electronic technician.
Pritzker, in an interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, noted that “almost half” of the Republican Party’s base showed up to vote against the former president. Trump, as of early Tuesday morning, received 51% of the vote.
“I mean, this is the most famous Republican. He’s the guy who, you know, basically built the modern Republican Party, the MAGA Republican Party that the Democrats are running against, and half the people in that party didn’t vote for Donald Trump,” he said.
The Illinois governor added that the results, which show an overwhelming win by the GOP front-runner who faces 91 felony charges over four criminal cases, were “telling.”
“It tells you the weakness of Donald Trump and also the opportunity for Democrats, ’cause in the end, look, if the base doesn’t turn out for Donald Trump in the general election enthusiastically, and Democrats turn out its base, this is all about independents, and independents don’t like Donald Trump,” said Pritzker, a Biden campaign surrogate.
“So, I think we’re in a pretty good place tonight to see what’s happening on the Republican side,” he said.
Pritzker, who has knockedTrump on a number of occasions, added that the race could be “over” if the former president wins in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
“But the truth is all of these candidates are running as sort of mini-me Trump Republicans,” he said of the 2024 GOP presidential field.
“They all have exactly the position that you mentioned earlier, six-week ban on abortion, they want a national abortion ban, the Republican Party is standing against working families and Donald Trump is representative of, I think, everything that is wrong with the current environment in politics.”
After Iowa, Trump Is Back to Command the National Psyche. He Never Actually Left.
Matt Flegenheimer and Maggie Haberman – January 16, 2024
Former President Donald Trump arrives in New York on Monday. Jan. 15, 2024, after winning the Iowa caucuses by 30 percentage points. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)
DES MOINES, Iowa — There was a time, not so long ago, when those wearied and horrified by the presidency of Donald Trump could almost convince themselves that the man was gone.
He was ostensibly a movement leader in exile, simmering in Florida, his flailing election lies confined to private monologues and modest platforms. He was no longer appearing on Fox News, the most powerful media organ of the right. His screeds on Truth Social did not land with the force of their tweeted predecessors. Even as a declared presidential candidate for the past 14 months, Trump often ceded the campaign trail to his rivals (who mostly fought one another, instead of him), skipping debates and appearing only episodically at public engagements that were not matters of the courts.
But with his landslide victory in Iowa, codifying his double-fisted hold on wide swaths of the Republican electorate, two conclusions were inescapable by Tuesday morning.
Trump is back as the dominant figure in American political life — destined again to be ubiquitous, his entwined legal and electoral dramas set to shadow the nation’s consequential year.
He also never actually left.
After a White House term that often consumed the national psyche hour by hour — stirring his supporters and panicking his critics with each wayward post and norm-busting impulse, culminating in the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021 — some Trump-fatigued members of both parties and the political press seemed at times to be wishing him away, as if media oxygen alone had sustained him the last eight years.
Maybe he wouldn’t really run again, some imagined. Maybe, like a boxer, he’d punch himself out. Maybe the Republican Party, punished at the polls in several elections since his 2016 triumph, would find its way to someone else.
Instead, if Trump wins next week’s New Hampshire primary, a march to a third nomination is all but certain. His detractors own no earplugs effective enough to block that out.
“Very few Democrats — apart from the deeply paranoid or intuitive — would have told you in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection that Trump would be the Republican nominee again in 2024,” said David Axelrod, who was a top adviser to President Barack Obama. “Once again, his feral genius for shaping a story of victimhood and commanding his base was underestimated.”
Trump, of course, did not have to speak much to keep his base with him. And as a candidate over the past year, the more he talked about the 91 criminal charges against him, the more Republicans returned to him.
Democrats are keenly aware that for all the attention paid to Trump’s indictments and his voluntary visits to some of his civil trials, his plans for a new term and his incendiary statements are far less visible to the general public. Some in the media were reluctant to direct their audiences to Trump, especially shortly after he left office, for fear that it would only amplify his lies about his election loss. Privately, some on the left lament that Twitter’s suspension of Trump’s account — after the Jan. 6 attack — served only to remove him from view.
Since 2016, both Republican and Democratic leaders have often agreed that it helps Democrats to have Trump at the political fore. His failed reelection in 2020 became, in large part, a referendum on his rampaging tenure. The 2022 midterms, a disappointment for Republicans, came after a drumbeat of congressional hearings about Trump’s conduct on and around Jan. 6, a kind of rolling television series — with videos produced by a former television executive — dedicated to what House members called his crimes against democracy.
Axelrod noted that Trump, after a primary season in which his top-polling rivals have tiptoed around him, is preparing to face President Joe Biden, “an opponent far less reticent about attacking.”
Democrats are plainly hoping that Trump’s abundant legal peril will remind voters once more of the chaos that has often trailed him. Biden has signaled his plans to highlight Trump’s efforts to subvert his loss in the 2020 election, invoking the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s revisionist history of what happened.
But it is unclear whether Trump’s trial on federal charges stemming from his efforts to remain in power, which is currently scheduled to take place in March, will occur before Election Day as he challenges the validity of the indictment. And absent a trial, the Biden team’s ability to focus public attention on the events of Jan. 6 is far from assured.
Polling has captured the degree to which Trump has been speaking mostly to Republicans to date — and shaping their thinking about the violence that followed his 2020 loss. A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland survey showed that far fewer Republicans blame Trump for the Jan. 6 attack than did in 2021. More than two-thirds of Republicans said it was “time to move on.”
“The overwhelming majority of Americans are aware of Trump’s legal troubles, and a significant number say that a conviction would have some bearing on their vote,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “But absent the spectacle of a preelection trial and adjudication, it’s not clear that awareness is enough in an environment where the former president polls stronger than either of his previous elections.”
As a candidate in Iowa, Trump was often conspicuously outworked by his competitors. He showed little interest in changing or modulating. It did not come close to mattering, at least not in Iowa, and his court appearances often created their own sense of motion, despite having nothing to do with actual politicking.
And so Trump — who detests little more than being mocked, who delights in little more than doing the mocking — found on Monday an early-state validation that eluded him eight years ago, when he lost in Iowa (and insisted falsely that the caucuses were stolen from him).
But even back then, he seemed to grasp something that many others came to realize much later. In a 2016 speech in New Hampshire, just before his first primary win, he observed: “A lot of people have laughed at me over the years.
“Now,” he said, “they’re not laughing so much, I’ll tell you.”
The US is starting 2024 in its second-largest COVID surge ever, experts say
Maura Hohman – January 15,2024
The United States is in the middle of a wintertime COVID wave, driven by holiday gatherings, people spending more time inside, waning immunity from low uptake of the new COVID vaccine and a new highly infectious COVID variant, JN.1.
The U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention released an update on Jan. 5 about the prevalence of JN.1, explaining that the new variant may be “intensifying the spread of COVID-19 this winter.” Test positivity and wastewater data show that viral activity in the U.S. is higher than this time last year, with wastewater data especially rising rapidly the past several weeks. (COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations are still lower than last year, the CDC noted.)
Cases are high globally, too, an official with the World Health Organization said during a Jan. 12 media briefing. Maria Van Kerkhove, Ph.D., WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, estimated that viral levels are two to 19 times higher than what’s being reported around the world.
According to some experts and data models, the current surge in the U.S. is its second-largest since the pandemic began — after only the omicron surge from late 2021 to early 2022, which infected more people than even the early days of the pandemic.
According to Lucky Tran, Ph.D., science communicator at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, projections show as many as 1 in 3 people in the U.S. could be infected with COVID during the peak months of the current wave and up to 2 million people could be infected in a single day — data he attributed to Michael Hoerger, Ph.D., assistant professor at Tulane University School of Medicine who leads the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative’s data tracker.
Tran tells TODAY.com that “many people underestimate just how much virus is around.” But research shows that once people are aware of the real levels, “they (are) more willing to wear a mask, social distance when required, to stay home and get vaccinated and take all of those measures,” he adds.
Is the U.S. in a COVID wave in 2024?
Yes, the U.S. is in the middle of a COVID wave, multiple experts tell TODAY.com.
A CDC chart of national and regional COVID trends in wastewater shows the national viral activity rate of 12.44 from the week ending Dec. 30, 2023 is higher than anything seen since January 2022, as far back as the publicly available CDC data goes. (The national rate for the week ending Jan. 15, 2022, was 22.78.) However, the rate dipped for the week ending Jan. 6, 2023, to 11.79.
CDC spokesperson Tom Skinner tells TODAY.com via email that “COVID 19 in wastewater is currently (at) very high levels across the country.”
“Last year, the peak of infections occurred in late December, early January. We are seeing early evidence of the same timing this year, but we will continue to monitor closely,” Skinner continues.
“These levels are much lower than the Omicron wave in early 2022,” he says, adding that JN.1 is the most frequently detected variant in wastewater. Skinner did not specify if the current COVID wave is the country’s second-largest.
The CDC noted in its Jan. 5 statement that wastewater and test positivity data are both higher than the year before by about 27% and 17% respectively. It added that wastewater levels “are currently high and increasing in all regions.”
Hoerger tells TODAY.com that based on the wastewater data collected from Biobot Analytics (which used to provide the CDC its wastewater data), the U.S. is in its second-largest COVID surge. He says his own predictive model indicates cases will continue to rise until mid-February. He estimates that mid-December 2023 to mid-February 2024 will be the peak of the current wave and that 1 in 3 Americans will be infected with COVID during this timeframe.
He says his data also show that on the highest day of the current wave, there will be 2 million new COVID cases, which would lend to many more infections than last winter, which had its highest day of about 1.7 million new infections. While CDC data suggest viral activity levels have been similar the last two Decembers, Hoerger explains that the acceleration in COVID activity in 2023 was faster than in 2022, suggesting there will be a higher peak this season.
“I think people can get a little bit too concerned about the height of the peak,” Hoerger says. “What’s really troubling is just the total number of days with a really high transmission based on my model or if you’re just looking at the wastewater.”
Dr. Albert Ko, infectious disease physician and professor of public health, epidemiology and medicine at Yale School of Public Health, agrees that focusing on peaks isn’t as helpful as stressing that COVID is spreading widely in much of the country right now.
“More important than saying this is more than the last wave or two waves or three waves ago … is that we are getting into surge, and the public should be aware about how to protect themselves,” Ko tells TODAY.com.
A surge this time of year is expected, Dr. William Schaffner, infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, tells TODAY.com, and it’s “perfectly reasonable” to call the current COVID wave the country’s second-largest, he says.
“But I don’t want to panic people,” he explains. “This winter increase is not going to be akin to the previous winter increases, which really stressed hospitals,” though it is likely to keep medical professionals “very busy,” he adds.
Tran stresses that it’s important to understand the burden of COVID beyond hospitalizations and deaths being lower than they were earlier in the pandemic.
“While we’re not seeing the same levels of hospitalizations or deaths as 2020 or 2021, it’s still a very high baseline compared with before the pandemic, and that’s something that we should still care about,” Tran says. He adds that more virus circulating can also lead to increases in long COVID and chronic illness, more people (especially health care workers) missing work and other important events, and immunocompromised people not being able to access essential services, like health care.
COVID-19 mask mandates
Amid a rise in COVID cases, as well as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), masks mandates have returned in medical settings in several states, Reuters reported:
New York
Illinois
Massachusetts
California
But even if you’re not required to mask, the experts say that now is a good time to wear your N95 or KN95.
“Get your mask out again if you’re going indoors, even to the supermarket,” Schaffner says. “Certainly if you’re traveling, going to religious services, going to that basketball game, where everybody’s close together and cheering, those are environments where the virus can spread.”
If you have some respiratory illness symptoms but not enough to stay home, wear a mask when around other, the experts say. And keep in mind that the CDC recommends wearing a mask for 10 days if you test positive for COVID. You are most contagious the day before your symptoms start and for three to five days afterward.
How bad is the new COVID variant?
The new COVID variant JN.1 is responsible for more than 61% of cases in the U.S. as of the week ending Jan. 6, 2024, according to CDC data. The variant may be more transmissible or better at evading immune protection than previous COVID variants, TODAY.com previously reported.
It also appears to be “intensifying” the spread of COVID this winter, the CDC said in a statement.
“The current strain right now seems to be packing a meaner punch than the prior strains,” Dr. Joseph Khabbaza, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, previously told TODAY.com. “Some features of the current circulating strain probably (make it) a little bit more virulent and pathogenic, making people sicker than prior (variants).”
JN.1 COVID variant symptoms
The symptoms you’ll experience if infected by the latest COVID variant, JN.1, will depend on your underlying health and immunity. But generally speaking JN.1 symptoms are similar to those caused by other variants, such as HV.1 and BA.2.86, aka “Pirola.”
The experts all agree that the current rate of new COVID cases means it’s time to take precautions to prevent further spread. This is especially important for individuals who are at high risk for severe illness, such as the elderly and immunocompromised.
But even if you or loved ones don’t fall into this category, by taking precautions, you can prevent spreading the virus to someone who may get much sicker than you and reduce your risk of long COVID.
So, the experts urge:
Wearing a mask in indoor settings with lots of people
Considering avoiding crowded settings, especially if you’re high risk
Staying home if you’re sick
COVID testing
Getting the new COVID vaccine, approved for everyone ages 6 months and older since September 2023
Seek out antivirals if you test positive for COVID, especially if you’re high risk
It’s tempting to think the pandemic is over, but Hoerger stresses that data show it isn’t. In fact, Van Kerkhove recently posted on X that we’re heading into the fifth year of the pandemic.
“The bottom line,” Ko says, “is everybody should consider themselves under risk of getting COVID.”
The ‘old American Dream died,’ Realtor details salary needed to buy a home, afford a middle class life in 2024
Kira Mautone – January 15, 2024
Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home, one expert discusses.
“I think most of us in America would define the middle class as somebody who can work a 40-hour-a-week career and can have the income to purchase the average home in America,” Freddie Smith, an Orlando realtor and TikTok creator, told Fox News Digital.
The TikToker, whose videos explore millennial and Gen Z struggles to afford a home and the general cost of living in today’s economic climate, dissected the common factors of living a middle-class existence.
“A lot of us grew up middle class, and we watched what middle class was in the 80s and 90s as millennials. And nowadays, what has moved the goalpost more than anything is the housing market,” the relator said.
Home in Summerville listed for $765,000.
Smith explained how, just a few years ago, $60-$70K a year would have been sufficient to qualify for a home.
With the average cost of a house being around $400K-$420K in 2024, people’s salaries would need to be around $120K a year for people to even qualify, Smith explained.
The realtor highlights how this wage-to-housing gap has forced many people to rent for a longer period.
“Rent prices are taking up 30-40% of people’s income, making it harder for them to save for a house. So it’s this perpetual cycle that is keeping people out of the middle class,” he explains, noting this trend has been continuing at a rapid pace over the last few years.
Smith also explained how a $120K salary, even without children, becomes a far lower number when confronted with the crippling debt most Americans are facing today.
“Most people are carrying student loan debt, which is at an all-time high, and the average payment in the country is $500 a month for your college degree. [There are] some people I’m seeing in my comment section saying ‘$500, I wish, it was $1,200 a month for me’,” said Smith.
Credit card debt is also at a record high in America, and while Smith acknowledges that reckless spending could be a factor, he has learned from many Americans commenting on his posts that many are forced to use their cards for groceries because they ran out of money.
According to DQYDJ, the average American income in 2023 was roughly $69K a year, with only 18.8% percent of Americans reaching $100K or more a year. According to the same source, the top 10 percent of individual earnings started at $135,605 a year.
The middle class is in a segmented state, Smith argues, largely determined by how much debt one finds themselves in.
“If you are someone who bought a house before 2020 and you have it paid off or you have a 3% interest rate, you are not burdened by the housing costs like the 2024 adults are now,” the relator said, explaining how debt, especially college debt, housing costs and childcare are burdening millennials and Gen Zers starting their lives.
A sign outside a home for sale in Atlanta, Georgia, on Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2023. Home prices in the US climbed for a fifth month as buyers competed for deals in the least affordable market in decades.
“People are spending about $1,200 to $1,500 a month on daycare, and I’ve even heard it as much as $3,000-$4,000. So when you add in somebody who’s renting for $2,500, $2,000 for daycare, $1,000 for two college loans, just that alone, you need $100,000 as an income just for that,” said Smith.
For slightly older individuals who had a chance to pay off their debt and have grown-up children, $70K remains a comfortable middle-class wage to them.
“‘These millennials are whining. These Gen Zers just work harder.’ If you bought your house before and don’t have those other payments, that’s really the three-layered cake. Housing, college [debt] and daycare” explained Smith, highlighting these three factors greatly determine your middle-class placement.
As a result of high housing costs, many young people are choosing to stay at home with their families to save funds. Smith explains how he is seeing communal living go even further in Florida, where separate families are choosing to live under one roof.
“Many families [with] 3 or 4 adults and [say] five children, they all split a big house, and they all take care of each other. You can see that they have a lot of toys and they’re pooling their money,” Smith detailed.
A house is for sale in Arlington, Virginia, July 13, 2023.
The TikToker enumerates how millennials and older Gen Zers had a “difficult” hand dealt to them. Younger Gen Zers, however, have a lot of “opportunity” to “crush in today’s economy” if they plan carefully to avoid debt and make smart financial choices.
“The millennials, they’re the pinched generation where college essentially stopped working for most. The debt piled up, and the old American dream died, and we got left holding the bag,” he said.
The creator said that through posting on TikTok, he has learned a tremendous amount about the everyday struggles real Americans are facing through his comment section.
“People in America, real society, are sharing all this with me. And I’m learning at a rapid pace from all different individuals. It’s not just googling it, or asking 100 college students what they think. It’s thousands and thousands of people sharing what’s going on,” said Smith.
The realtor discussed how there is a “bigger conversation” around an evolving American Dream that we’re likely to see take place over the next few years.
“We’re basically redefining the American dream from top to bottom, like the way that we see work and work-life balance,” said the creator, explaining how the idea of owning a home might grow old alongside past generations.
“I don’t even know if millennials and Gen Zers want to follow that path of buying a house and living in it for 40 years and staying at the same job for 40 years. I don’t think creatively, work-life balance wise, is also what our long-term play is,” he said.
A Ukrainian floating drone that is devastating Russia’s Black Sea fleet can now fire missiles
Tom Porter – January 15, 2024
Scroll back up to restore default view.
Ukraine has used sea drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
It’s now able to fit them with missiles enabling them to fire at ships, it says.
Ukraine has had to improvise to offset Russia’s naval superiority.
Ukraine claims it has fitted the floating drones it is using to devastate Russia’s Black Sea fleet with missile launchers, making them even more deadly.
Ukraine’s intelligence service, the SBU, in early January released grainy video footage which it claimed showed its “Sea Baby” drones firing missiles at Russian vessels.
According to the Ukrainska Pravda, Russian ships had left a port near Sevastopol in occupied Crimea to sink the drones after an attack — but instead of seeking to outpace them, the drones turned back and fired missiles at the Russian vessels.
It’s unclear exactly when the incident took place, or what kind of rockets were used.
The SBU confirmed the authenticity of the video to Business Insider.
It’s not the only enhancement Ukraine has made to the devices, the report said, with the drones now fitted with up to 850 kilograms of explosives, flamethrowers, $300,000 worth of communications equipment, and material designed to evade radars.
Throughout its two-year-long battle to repel the Russian invasion, Ukraine has had to resort to improvisation and ingenuity to offset Russia’s military and manpower advantages.
The sea drones, or unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), it’s developed have been vital to the success of the attacks, with the remote-controlled devices used to surveil Russian naval bases and launch attacks on ships by being fitted with explosives.
The drones “have provided Ukraine’s nearly non-existent navy with an asymmetric capability to challenge Russia’s larger and more capable Black Sea Fleet,” Nicholas Johnson, a naval warfare expert with the RAND Corporation, told Business Insider.
“Ukraine’s employment of these small explosive vessels has imposed Russian losses and shown operational impacts on their ability to wage war.”
The drones are built using components that are readily available, are much cheaper than missiles, and don’t need a crew to operate them, notes security expert Wes O’Donnell.
Their capacity to strike Russia’s fleet in its own naval bases has challenged Russia’s dominance of the Black Sea, forcing it to move ships away from Sevastopol to evade attacks, said Johnson.
Vasyl Maliuk, who leads the SBU, told CNN last year that the drones are built without private sector involvement in a secret underground base and are continually being modified and improved on.
Johnson said that fitting the vessels with rocket launchers massively increased the type of targets they could attack.
“This modification would also allow USVs to hold a wider range of assets at risk, potentially including targets ashore, small boats, or even employing surface-to-air missiles to target aircraft,” he said. “By utilizing joint salvos of missiles from USVs in addition to aircraft and ground launchers, Ukraine could leverage multiple axis of attack further complicating Russia’s air defense picture.”
However, they come with some drawbacks. Interruptions to the camera feed can make them difficult to control, and they can go off course, with a drone found washed up ashore near Sevastopol in September 2022 and seized by Russia, reports say.
Johnson told BI that the vessels are vulnerable to air or boat attacks, and their signals can be scrambled by electronic-warfare units, meaning they can be cut off from their controllers.
And recent adaptations, such as fitting them with expensive missiles, mean they are no longer just a relatively cheap way of launching mass attacks on Russian ships, but would have to be used more carefully, he said.
“We are on the brink of an autocratic government, someone who is blatantly saying, If I’m president again, I’m going to be a dictator:” Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong fears for America’s future
Paul Brannigan – January 15, 2024
Billie Joe Armstrong.
Green Day‘s Billie Joe Armstrong has spoken about his fears for the direction American politics is taking, and warns that the prospect of an autocratic government in the US is “at our doorstep”.
Armstrong’s band will release their 14th studio album ‘SAVIORS’ on Friday, June 19, and, in a new interview with Vulture, the 51-year-old vocalist/guitarist talks about how the album’s first single, The American Dream Is Killing Me, released back in October last year, deals with the “overwhelming” anxieties that come with being “an over-stressed American”.
“Our politics are so divided and polarized right now,” says Armstrong. “We had an insurrection. We have homeless people in the street. We have so many issues, and they come onto your algorithm feed at such a pace. It just stresses you out, the anxiety of being an American and how it becomes so overwhelming.”
Reflecting on how his band’s new record shares some of the DNA of 2004’s American Idiot album, Armstrong notes, “I think it was easier to satirize George Bush because we didn’t have social media. It was before all the tech bros came in. Now you have these billionaires who would rather shoot a rocket into space than deal with the infrastructure we have here.”
Looking ahead, Armstrong admits that he is concerned by the current political landscape in America.
“We are on the brink of an autocratic government, or someone who is blatantly saying ‘If I’m president again, I’m going to be a dictator’,” he says. “What’s that Maya Angelou quote? When people tell you who they are, believe them. [Actually, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time’] It’s this exaggeration that became what can actually happen. It’s based on a cult of personality. America is not supposed to be about the cult of personality; we’re supposed to be about a group of people who are making laws that would make the American people’s lives easier and affordable. Getting good jobs, getting good health care, protecting people from corporations taking advantage of them. I feel like we are completely lost on that, the real American ideal.
Canadians worry US democracy cannot survive Trump’s return to White House, poll finds
Steve Scherer – January 15, 2024
Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump campaigns, in Indianola Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes a speech, in Vancouver
OTTAWA (Reuters) – About two-thirds of Canadians surveyed this month said American democracy cannot survive another four years of Donald Trump in the White House, and about half said the United States is on the way to becoming an authoritarian state, a poll released on Monday said.
The November U.S. election is likely to pit President Joe Biden against Trump, who is the clear frontrunner to win the Republican nomination as voting in the presidential primary race kicks off in Iowa on Monday.
Sixty-four percent of respondents in the Angus Reid Institute poll of 1,510 Canadians said they agreed with the statement: “U.S. democracy cannot survive another four years of Donald Trump.” Twenty-eight percent disagreed.
The Jan. 6, 2021 attack on Capitol Hill by Trump supporters seeking to block certification of Biden’s 2020 election win shocked many Canadians, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly blamed Trump for inciting the mob.
Trump has vowed if elected again to punish his political enemies, and he has drawn criticism for using increasingly authoritarian language.
Three times as many Canadians say a Biden victory would be better for Canada’s economy (53%) than a Trump win (18%), according to the poll which was seen exclusively by Reuters. The poll, taken between Jan. 9-11, had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points
Forty-nine percent of people said the United States is on the way to becoming an authoritarian state and 71% of Canadians say the concept that the rule of law applies equally to everyone is weakening in the United States.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment
about the poll.
“What we’re seeing is people quite alarmed about the prospect of a return of Donald Trump,” said Shachi Kurl, president of Angus Reid Institute.
The polling is also “an indictment” of “how poorly Canadians now view the democratic institutions and the checks and balances that in the past people on both sides of the border took for granted,” she added.
American allies around the world and financial markets are watching the election with unease given the isolationism and the protectionist trade policies of Trump’s presidency. Because of their proximity and economic ties, Canadians have more at stake than most countries.
Two-thirds of Canada’s 40 million people live within 100 km (62 miles) of the U.S. border, and the trade relationship with the United States is of existential importance to Canada.
Three-quarters of all exports go to the southern neighbor, and half of its imports come from the United States, including 60% of all imported fresh vegetables.
“One can make the argument that there’s no country that would be more negatively affected by a Trump win than Canada,” said Kim Nossal, a professor of political studies at Queen’s University in Kingston and author of “Canada Alone: Navigating the Post-American World”.
In his first term, Trump forced the renegotiation of the North American trade pact and clashed with Trudeau, who he once called “very dishonest and weak”.
Trump’s “mercantilist view involves thinking of Canada and every other so-called friend of the United States as no friend at all, but just a bunch of free-riders sucking off the wealth of the United States,” Nossal said. “He is the ultimate protectionist.”
There is a provision in the new North American trade pact that requires it to be reviewed for renewal after six years, or during the next American president’s term in 2026.
(Reporting by Steve Scherer; Editing by Alistair Bell)
Media: Russia receiving military-linked goods from Finnish companies
Dinara Khalilova – January 15, 2024
Over 20 Finnish companies managed or owned by Russians have been exporting high technology and other goods that can be used in the military industry to Russia, according to an investigation by Finland’s public broadcaster YLE Published on January 15th.
The investigation revealed that at least nine customers of the Finnish companies have direct links to the Russian military sector and intelligence agencies such as Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
These are small logistics firms operating mostly in southeastern Finland, near major logistics hubs, YLE wrote. At least four of them are already subjects of criminal investigations.
A Russian-linked company operating in Lappeenranta has sent to Russia “numerous packages” with sensors, diesel engines, fuel pumps, and transmission equipment, which experts have classified as critical supplies in warfare, according to the investigation.
According to Russian public procurement data, two of the firm’s clients have ties to the FSB, with one of the clients posting a letter on their website thanking the FSB for good cooperation.
Similar components were reportedly found in destroyed Russian weapons and vehicles in Ukraine, but not all of them were subjected to Western sanctions, which has made it easier to export them to Russia.
Other products exported to Russia by the Finnish companies include equipment for military research, product development, and intelligence activities, as well as engine parts and electronics, the media outlet wrote.
It is not clear, though, whether the Russian military has specifically used the goods exported from the Finnish companies covered in the investigation.
According to YLE, some goods were exported from Finland to Russia through Uzbekistan, which Russia has reportedly used to evade Western sanctions.
Following the outbreak of the full-scale war against Ukraine, Western countries imposed extensive sanctions against Russia, banning imports of electronics and other goods critical for the production of high-tech weapons like missiles or drones.
In spite of these restrictions, Moscow continues to acquire dual-use goods via third-party countries like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, or China.
Chicago scrambles to shelter migrants in dangerous cold as Texas’ governor refuses to stop drop-offs
Alisha Ebrahimji, CNN – January 15, 2024
Hoping to halt migrant drop-offs as extreme weather plagues Chicago, Illinois’ Democratic governor warned in a letter Friday to his GOP counterpart in Texas that sending migrants now to the Windy City could cost lives, adding to the already deadly toll of the migrant crisis.
“While action is pending at the federal level, I plead with you for mercy for the thousands of people who are powerless to speak for themselves,” Gov. J.B. Pritzker wrote. “Please, while winter is threatening vulnerable people’s lives, suspend your transports and do not send more people to our state.”
“Your callousness, sending buses and planes full of migrants in this weather, is now life-threatening to every one of the arrivals,” he continued. “Hundreds of children’s and families’ health and survival are at risk due to your actions.”
Instead, however, Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration has doubled down on its mission since 2022 to dispatch migrants north from Texas via bus and plane to cities led by Democrats, including Chicago, New York and Denver, to “provide support to our overrun and overwhelmed border communities,” his spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris told CNN Friday, noting, “Governor Pritzker was all too proud to call Illinois ’the most welcoming state in the nation’ until Governor Abbott began transporting migrants to Chicago.”
Chicago’s wind chill is forecast to plummet by Tuesday morning to 32 below zero – cold so extreme it could cause frostbite on exposed skin in as few as 10 minutes, according to CNN Weather. For those unaccustomed to such bone-chilling cold – including migrants who often arrive with only the clothes on their back – it can be a life-or-death challenge.
Chicago shelters lately have been so full, incoming migrants were kept at a designated “landing zone,” with minimal access to food and sanitation and only parked Chicago Transit Authority buses for temporary heat.
There had been about 140 migrants on those buses, Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said Friday, down from a high of more than 300, though as of Sunday, there were no longer any migrants awaiting placement in shelters at the landing zone location, according to the city.
As to whether conditions at the landing zone were acceptable, Johnson said, “Look, that’s a good question, you know. It’s certainly not acceptable for the (Texas) governor to send people to the city of Chicago, but we’re meeting the moment.”
Over the last few weeks, mayors of New York, Chicago and Denver have been irked by “rogue buses” from Texas dropping off migrants by the thousands and tried in their own jurisdictions to slow the surge by enacting mandates and requirements for bus operators to coordinate arrivals under the threat of impound, fines and even jail time.
Meanwhile in New York, homeless migrants starting Tuesday will be subject to a new 11 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew at four respite centers managed by the city’s Emergency Management Department, a spokesperson for City Hall told CNN on Monday.
Migrants get food Friday outside Chicago’s migrant landing zone. – Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images
In November, Chicago implemented a 60-day shelter stay policy based on migrants’ arrival dates so as not overcrowd the shelter system and to provide asylum-seekers services while they set up long-term housing. But due to the harsh weather, city officials suspended that limit and made some exceptions to the policy, Johnson said Friday.
‘Do his job and secure the border’
As for Abbott’s position, “instead of complaining about migrants sent from Texas, where we are also preparing to experience severe winter weather across the state, Governor Pritzker should call on his party leader to finally do his job and secure the border – something he continues refusing to do,” his spokesperson Mahaleris told CNN in the Friday statement.
“Until President Biden steps up and does his job to secure the border, Texas will continue transporting migrants to sanctuary cities to help our local partners respond to this Biden-made crisis,” he added.
Chicago Transit Authority warming buses sit at the migrant landing zone during extreme, cold temperatures on Friday. – Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images
Over the weekend, the bodies of three migrants – a woman and two children – were recovered by Mexican authorities after they drowned in the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, Texas, very recently the epicenter of the migrant crisis and an area where state authorities have blocked the US Border Patrol from accessing miles of the US-Mexico divide, officials said.
The Biden administration on Friday complained to the US Supreme Court about the state blocking Border Patrol from a city park along the river and asked the high court to quickly intervene. The state on Saturday told the high court it was “working promptly” to ensure Border Patrol has access to a boat ramp at Shelby Park.
The White House called the recent migrant deaths “tragic” and characterized Abbott’s directives on the border as “political stunts,” Angelo Fernández Hernández, White House assistant press secretary said Sunday.
“While we continue to gather facts about the circumstances of these tragic deaths, one thing is clear: Gov. Abbott’s political stunts are cruel, inhumane, and dangerous. US Border Patrol must have access to the border to enforce our laws,” Fernández Hernández told CNN in a statement.
CNN’s Andy Rose, Rosa Flores, Gloria Pazmino, Whitney Wild and meteorologist Allison Chinchar contributed to this report.
Toy manufacturers’ shift from China is no child’s play
Richa Naidu – January 15, 2024
An undated handout photo of the Aequs toy manufacturing facility in Belgaum
LONDON (Reuters) – Toy makers grappling with surging costs in China are finding no easy options when it comes to shifting production to cheaper centres elsewhere.
Six years ago, monopoly maker Hasbro approached Indian durable goods and aerospace supplier Aequs to sub-contract.
“They said if you can get into toy manufacturing, now we’re looking to shift millions of dollars worth of product from China to India,” Rohit Hegde, Aequs’ head of consumer verticals, told Reuters. “We said: as long as we can get at least about $100 million of business in the next few years, we can definitely invest in it.”
Fast forward to today and Aequs makes dozens of types of toys for Hasbro and others including Spin Master in two 350,000-square-foot facilities in Belgaum, India.
But Hegde and other manufacturers acknowledge that India and other countries cannot match China for efficiency, limiting companies’ efforts to shift to lower cost bases and raising the risk of higher toy prices in future if the bulk of production remains in China.
“We don’t have the port facilities (in India) that China does. We don’t have the road facilities that China does. They have been doing this for the last 30 years, their efficiency levels are much better than ours,” Hedge said.
Still, for toy manufacturers including Hasbro and Barbie doll maker Mattel, the risks of relying on China for most of their production were highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Chinese ports struggled to export goods and were periodically shut down, leaving shipments stranded.
Soaring labour costs in China had already been driving manufacturers across industries to diversify production geographically.
A report by Rhodium Group last September showed that total announced U.S. and European greenfield investment into India shot up by $65 billion or 400% between 2021 and 2022, while investment into China dropped to less than $20 billion in 2022, from a peak of $120 billion in 2018. Mexico, Vietnam and Malaysia also drew some of this redirected capital.
Yet toymakers are struggling to shift production even as other industries succeed.
As of the first seven months of last year, mainland China still made 79% of toys sold in the United States and Europe, versus 82% in 2019, according to U.S. and European Union import data provided to Reuters by S&P Global Market Intelligence’s trade data service Panjiva.
In comparison, mainland China in 2019 accounted for 35% of U.S. and EU apparel imports. This reduced to just 30% in the year to July 31, with India and Mexico the biggest beneficiaries.
“Is it easy to re-shore away from mainland China? No, it isn’t. That goes double for toys,” S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Chris Rogers said. “It’s more complicated because they’re highly seasonal — you’re asking a partner to sit on inventory for most of the year. Toy makers also have to be doubly rigorous on safety, sourcing and making sure workers are treated well.”
While China’s minimum wage varies from between 1,420 yuan per month to 2,690 yuan per month ($198.52-$376.08), in India unskilled and semi-skilled workers can be secured for between 9,000 Indian rupees and 15,000 Indian rupees a month ($108.04- $180.06), according to central bank estimates.
But setting up to source from other countries can take 18 months if a company is buying product from a contract manufacturer, and up to three years if a firm is building a new factory from scratch, Rogers said.
Toys to be sold in the autumn go into production starting in May and are then stored or shipped.
‘MORE REASONABLE COST’
Hasbro began addressing its outsized dependence on China as an operational risk in its annual report in 2018, while Mattel has reportedly been shifting away from China since 2007, when it had to recall millions of toys tainted with lead paint. Efforts across the industry have ramped up since the pandemic.
Hasbro did not respond to a request for comment, while Mattel declined to comment for this story.
Spiralling Chinese wages are helping push up toy prices. In the UK, for instance, prices rose by about 8% in the first six months of 2022, according to Circana, formerly known as NPD. The risk for consumers is that prices will keep on rising sharply if manufacturers can’t cut costs by moving to cheaper production centres.
Though U.S. duties on Chinese toys are currently negligible, that could also change as some Republican politicians have called for revoking China’s “permanent normal trade relations” status. Such a move could raise the price of toys in the United States by more than a fifth, according to the National Retail Federation.
“We are all looking at derisking China,” said Nic Aldridge, managing director at Bandai UK, the maker of Tamagotchi virtual pets. “Raw materials costs have gone up a lot in China, we’re looking for places where we could get a more reasonable cost.”
Bandai still mostly manufactures in mainland China but some of its products are made in Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam. It is looking at India and Thailand as additional locations, Aldridge said.
MGA Entertainment, maker of LOL Surprise and Bratz dolls, has found infrastructure outside China to be a road-block to diversifying sourcing to countries like India and Vietnam, even as its exports from China last holiday season dropped versus the year before.
India accounted for only 1% of U.S. and EU toy imports over the past five years, according to Panjiva’s data.
“The issue in India is really the gridlock of moving even from one state to another. There are so many crazy regulations,” MGA Entertainment CEO Isaac Larian told Reuters.
“(But) the infrastructure is getting better and better as these countries realize the opportunity they have to take business away from China and they are investing,” he said.
(Reporting by Richa Naidu. Additional reporting by Manoj Kumar and Casey Hall; Editing by Susan Fenton)
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