NOT MARTIAL LAW, YET 

Trump to Declare National Emergency to Speed Virus Response

President Donald Trump plans to declare a national emergency on Friday over the coronavirus outbreak, invoking the Stafford Act to open the door to more federal aid for states and municipalities, according to two people familiar with the matter.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times via AP, Pool President Donald Trump speaks in an address to the nation from the Oval Office at the White House about the coronavirus Wednesday, March, 11, 2020, in Washington. (Doug Mills/The New York Times via AP, Pool)

The president said he will hold a news conference at 3 p.m. in Washington. Trump spoke Friday with Emmanuel Macron, the French president tweeted, about the pandemic, and agreed to organize a video conference with world leaders on Monday to coordinate research efforts on a vaccine and treatments and work on how to respond to the economic fallout.

Trump is under increasing pressure to act as governors and mayors nationwide step up actions to mitigate the spread, closing schools and canceling public events. Declaring a national emergency would allow the government to marshal additional resources to combat the virus, and also marks a symbolic turning point for the president, who has repeatedly compared the coronavirus to the seasonal flu and insisted that his administration had the outbreak under control.

U.S. stocks struggled to hold onto gains on Friday. The S&P 500 rose less than 1% in mid-day trading after climbing 6% at the open, following stocks’ worst day since 1987. Treasury yields increased as the Federal Reserve said it was buying $37 billion of bonds across maturities

Senate Democrats have urged Trump to invoke the Stafford Act and other disaster declaration requests they say would free up more than $42 billion in funding for states available in the Disaster Relief Fund.

An emergency declaration would allow a state to request a 75% federal cost-share for expenses that include emergency workers, medical tests, medical supplies, vaccinations, security for medical facilities, and more, according to a letter Democrats sent the president earlier this week.

Only a few emergency declarations for public health threats have been made since the 1960s, and only two have targeted disease outbreaks, when President Bill Clinton in 2000 declared emergencies in New York and New Jersey in response to the West Nile Virus.

Sick People Across the U.S. Say They Are Being Denied the Coronavirus Test


Farah Stockman NEW YORK TIMES



People are tested for the coronavirus on Thursday at a drive-through clinic in Denver. In some places, there aren’t enough tests available. © Chet Strange for The New York Times

BOSTON — First came the tickle in the throat. Then, a hacking cough. Then, a shortness of breath she had never experienced before. Hillary King, a 32-year-old consultant in Boston who lives down the street from a hotel where dozens of Biogen executives contracted the new coronavirus, decided that she had better get tested.

But getting tested is far easier said than done, even as testing slowly ramps up nationwide. Five days after President Trump announced that anyone who wants a test can get a test, Ms. King’s experience shows how difficult it can be in the United States to find out if you have the coronavirus.

Many who fear they have the virus have faced one roadblock after another as they try to get tested, according to interviews with dozens of people across the country.

Some have been rejected because they had no symptoms, even though they had been in proximity to someone who tested positive. Others were told no because they had not traveled to a hot spot abroad, even though they had fevers and hacking coughs and lived in cities with growing outbreaks. Still others were told a bitter truth: There simply were not enough tests to go around.

“The system is not really geared to what we need right now, what you are asking for. That is a failing,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Thursday. “It is a failing. I mean, let’s admit it.”

Dr. Fauci added: “The idea of anybody getting it easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we are not set up for that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we are not.”

In some parts of the country, demand for the tests is low. Elsewhere efforts are underway to make testing easier. States like Colorado have even instituted drive-through testing to streamline the process.

But even there, demand has far outstripped supply. By 11 a.m. at one drive-through lab in the Denver neighborhood of Lowry on Thursday, a three-hour line of cars had formed. The clinic had to stop allowing more vehicles.

The inability to test widely in the United States — which is far behind other countries in this regard — has severely hampered efforts to contain the outbreak. An early test rolled out to states by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was flawed, and delays have continued ever since. Public health experts have warned that each day people do not know whether they have the virus, they risk spreading it more widely.

In cities that have experienced serious outbreaks — Seattle; Boston; New Rochelle, N.Y. — patients who fear they have coronavirus describe Kafkaesque quests to find out their status.

“They said they do think it is possible that I have the virus,” said Ms. King, who spent five hours in the emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital on Wednesday. “They said they really want to test me.”

A doctor told her she did not meet the criteria since she had not traveled abroad or had any contact with a person who had tested positive, but because she was so sick he tried to get an exemption from the state’s Department of Public Health. When it was not granted, doctors sent her home, where she plans to stay in self-quarantine for 14 days.

The number of tests in Massachusetts were said to be so scarce that even people who were in close contact with some of the dozens who tested positive at a recent Biogen conference have not been given the test. At least one Biogen employee has been ordered to quarantine at home, but he has not been given the test because he is not showing symptoms.

Hours after Ms. King was sent home, doctors were informed that a new batch test kits was being sent to Massachusetts. Public health officials said that they expected enough kits to test 5,000 people and that two commercial labs — Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp — have started testing. On Thursday, one returned a presumptive positive case, which was included in the state’s numbers.

But many in the medical community said that far more tests were needed.

“In a large city, you should be doing at least 1,000 a week, and ideally you’d be doing 10,000,” said Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has allocated a “laughably small number of tests” to look for signs of community transmission.

Fewer than 2,000 people in total have been tested since New York State was approved to test in-state in late February, even with an escalation in testing in the last several days, according to officials.

For now it appears that a large majority of New Yorkers who end up having the coronavirus are likely to not know it during the duration of their illness because testing is so limited.

Several state labs in California have been unable to use some of the state’s more than 8,000 test kits because the kits lack chemical ingredients known as reagents, Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a briefing on Thursday.

Mr. Newsom compared the problem to having a printer without ink cartridges.

“We want to test more people,” Mr. Newsom said. “This has been an issue in terms of providing more tests,” he said of the missing components, “and we hope it is resolved very quickly.”

The world is battling an outbreak of a new coronavirus called COVID-19, which started in the city of Wuhan, China and has been spreading since. The virus has claimed over 4,000 lives and infected more than 100,000 people around the world. The World Health Organization declared a global pandemic on March 11.

For days Mr. Newsom has lamented the lack of testing capabilities in the state. On Tuesday he pounded the lectern in a live television briefing and said, “The bottom line is that we need more tests.”

Some places, like Missouri, have more testing capacity than demand. The state laboratory can test about 100 specimens per day but is doing less than 20, according to Lisa Cox, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. Sixty-five people total have been tested in the state, and all but one turned out negative.

But even states that have seen few cases are preserving their tests for patients who are viewed as most at risk.

“You want to be judicious,” said Dr. Dora Mills, an epidemiologist and the chief health improvement officer for MaineHealth, the largest health system in Maine, which has seen only one patient test positive, and no sign of community spread. “Any time you have an epidemic, you have two epidemics — you have the epidemic of the disease itself, and you have the epidemic of fear.”

But in places that have seen cases spike in recent weeks, many people expressed frustration that the more likely they were to get the virus, the less likely they were to have access to a test.

In Washington State, where at least 378 people have tested positive and 31 have died, public health officials spoke of having to ration the tests and living hand-to-mouth with testing supplies. “At this time we are limiting testing to preserve availability for our most vulnerable,” said Debra Carnes, a spokeswoman for PeaceHealth Columbia Network, a nonprofit health system that operates clinics in Washington, Oregon and Alaska.

Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue, Wash., has been running low on nasal swabs to collect specimens from patients.

“We expected another shipment tomorrow,” said Morgan Brice, a public relations specialist.

One mother in Kitsap County, Wash., said her doctor told her that the state was so low on tests that only one of her children could be tested.

That left many anxious people with mild symptoms running a never-ending gantlet: primary care doctors referred them to state public health officials, who referred them to emergency rooms, who referred them back to primary care doctors. Some patients said they gave up and went into self-quarantine, and had to make peace with the idea that they will never know for sure if they had the virus.

Christy Karras of Seattle tried to get tested after some people at a party she attended came down with flu-like symptoms. But her doctor did not have the test and advised her that it did not matter whether she had the virus: Either way, she had to stay home.

“From a public policy standpoint, that’s true,” Ms. Karras said. “From an individual standpoint, you really want to know what you have. It was very frustrating to me because we were all trying to do the right thing.”

Finally, Ms. Karras contacted the Seattle Flu Study, a research project to study the spread of influenza in the region. She ordered a kit, sent her sample and heard back: She was positive for the coronavirus. (Since then, the flu study has been told by authorities to stop doing that kind of testing since it is not properly certified.)

Even those who have good reason to think they may be infected are being denied testing.

The Grand Princess cruise had 21 people on board test positive for the coronavirus. After docking in Oakland, Calif., this week, passengers have been quarantined at military bases.

Peggy Moy, 71, a retired nurse and passenger, is still waiting to be tested. She had a sore throat and stuffy nose during the cruise, which she reported, but by the time she left the ship, those symptoms had gone away.

She is worried for her husband, who has lung cancer, and assumed, as other passengers had, that she would be tested as soon as she got to the base. So far that has not happened, though medical personnel have been taking their temperature twice a day.

Not knowing is making Ms. Moy nervous, as hundreds of people from the ship, mostly older guests, are in quarantine on the base now, and many of them may have been exposed to the virus. People are wearing masks, she said, but are still mingling in common areas, like the lobby where people get coffee and water. They take off their masks to drink and eat.

“I would like to know who among us is positive,” Ms. Moy said by telephone. “I don’t know. None of us know.”

Yet for those who do manage to get tested, the experience can be byzantine. Andy Carvin, 48, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, went to the Howard County General Hospital in Maryland last Thursday with a persistent fever and cough following a meeting with foreign journalists in February.

It started well. Health workers had cleared a path for him to walk to a back room. One doctor wore a large hooded mask and helmet and “looked like an Imperial Guard in ‘Star Wars.’”

They ran several tests, including of his blood. They swabbed his nose and throat about 10 hours later. But then it took a week to get the results back.

With no clear point of contact, Mr. Carvin made multiple calls — to the hospital, the state health department and two county health departments — to try to get the result. Three days later, he was told that one of the two swabs taken had never been sent to the state. At one point, he was given the wrong result. He called it “covid19purgatory.”

On Thursday, he finally got the good news: negative.

Reporting was contributed by Sabrina Tavernise from Washington; Sean Keenan from Atlanta; Patricia Mazzei from Miami; Wudan Yan from Seattle; Kate Taylor from Cambridge, Mass.; John Eligon and Thomas Fuller from San Francisco; Christopher Dixon from Charleston, S.C.; Campbell Robertson from Pittsburgh; and Vanessa Swales and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York.

Trump Tries to Tie Obama to C.D.C.’s ‘Inadequate’ Testing System

Maggie Haberman and Noah Weiland

President Trump on Friday again claimed that his response to the coronavirus was hindered by the Obama administration, which left office three years ago.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times President Trump at the White House on Thursday.

Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Obama, who served with Mr. Trump’s likely Democratic challenger, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in two posts on Twitter.

“For decades the @CDCgov looked at, and studied, its testing system, but did nothing about it,” Mr. Trump wrote. “It would always be inadequate and slow for a large scale pandemic, but a pandemic would never happen, they hoped. President Obama made changes that only complicated things further.

“Their response to H1N1 Swine Flu was a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now,” he continued. “The changes have been made and testing will soon happen on a very large scale basis. All Red Tape has been cut, ready to go!” he wrote.

Mr. Trump was not specific about what changes President Barack Obama made to “complicate things further,” but at least one regulatory change previously discussed by Mr. Trump and his C.D.C. director was never put into effect. Mr. Trump had leveled that criticism last week.

A spokesman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.

In his tweet, Mr. Trump may have been referring to actions taken by the Food and Drug Administration during the Obama administration, when the agency proposed regulating a high-risk lab-developed test with a premarket review. But that idea applied outside of emergency situations and was never finalized.

The F.D.A. took the position that during a public health emergency, nongovernment labs should come to it before doing tests. But at any time, the agency was prepared to suspend that practice, as it did recently when it gave laboratories and hospitals around the country the go-ahead to conduct tests that had been limited to those analyzed by the C.D.C.

Meanwhile, an Australian official who posed with Ivanka Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr on March 6 has tested positive for the coronavirus, officials said. Peter Dutton, the home affairs minister, said in a statement that he woke up with a fever and a sore throat, and later a test confirmed the diagnosis.

Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence met over the weekend with a Brazilian official at the president’s private club, Mar-a-Lago, who later tested positive for the virus. After the revelation on Thursday, White House officials said the president would not be tested.

The White House has said that Mr. Trump barely interacted with the Brazilian man, despite a photo of them standing next to one another, and that the president has not been tested. Still, the guidelines from health officials suggest that Mr. Trump should be in a self-quarantine because of the exposure.

On Thursday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a member of the administration’s coronavirus task force, refused to say whether the president should be tested when he spoke to reporters outside the White House.

“I am not going to comment on an individual who has a very competent physician,” Dr. Fauci said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the slow testing rollout a "failing" Thursday.  President Donald Trump on Friday attempted to shift the blame for his heavily criticized response to the spread of COVID-19 to former President Barack Obama and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a federal agency which his administration has overseen for more than three years.  Responding to reports that the U.S. has by far the lowest rate of testing among virtually every developed country, Trump claimed that the delays were caused by problems which he has now fixed.Advertisement:  "For decades the [CDC] looked at, and studied, its testing system, but did nothing about it. It would always be inadequate and slow for a large scale pandemic, but a pandemic would never happen, they hoped," Trump tweeted. "President Obama made changes that only complicated things further. Their response to H1N1 Swine Flu was a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now. The changes have been made and testing will soon happen on a very large scale basis. All Red Tape has been cut, ready to go!"  Trump did not back up his allegation that Obama "complicated things further" with any supporting evident, but he previously falsely claimed that his predecessor's administration made changes to the way the Food and Drug Administration approved tests. That claim is categorically false, because a discussed policy never went into effect.  Former Obama aides also pointed out that 1 million people were tested for H1N1 within a month of the first case. The Obama administration acted months before the World Health Organization declared H1N1 a pandemic. By comparison, there have been fewer than 15,000 COVID-19 tests performed in the U.S., according to the CDC. Other countries like South Korea are testing up to 20,000 people each day. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the slow testing rollout a "failing" Thursday.Advertisement:  Though the president was eager to try to shift the blame, former Obama aides also pointed out that it was Trump who disbanded the White House pandemic team in 2018.  "We worked very well with that office," Fauci told Congress on Wednesday. "It would be nice if the office was still there."  Trump previously tried to score political points by blaming former Vice President Joe Biden, alleging that his response to the H1N1 epidemic was "one of the worst on record."Advertisement:  "Our response is one of the best, with fast action of border closings & a 78% Approval Rating, the highest on record," Trump falsely claimed Thursday. "His was lowest!"  Obama and Biden declared a public health emergency after there were just 20 confirmed cases of H1N1. By comparison, there are at least 1,660 COVID-19 cases in the U.S. (though experts believe there could be thousands more) and at least 41 d

We Are Watching the Probable Demise of Trump’s Reelection in Real Time

Jonathan Chait

Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.© Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

President Trump’s political career has consisted of a series of self-generated crises that he has improbably survived, from insinuating that John McCain was a coward for having been captured during the war that Trump himself dodged to the three-year-long high-crime (and misdemeanor) spree. Throughout these disasters, Trump has maintained a floor of support that is apparently immutable and just high enough to give him a plausible chance of reelection. Yet the pair of crises now enveloping the administration appear to be of a completely different political magnitude than anything that has faced Trump to date. It may now really, finally, truly be over for him.



The obvious factor distinguishing the coronavirus and the probable recession from the Access Hollywood tape, firing James Comey, and all the rest is that they have a tangible impact on the lives of Americans. (Or, to put it more precisely, Americans who have voting representation, unlike Puerto Ricans.) Trump’s continuous din of scandals and gaffes is unintelligible to many Americans who either do not follow the news closely, or follow Trump-controlled news organs, and who have instead judged his presidency by the direct experience of peace and prosperity. Trump has done one very big thing very well: He rebranded the economic expansion he inherited as his own creation, like the licensing deals he makes to splash the Trump name over hotels and resorts other people built. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus turns his greatest strength into perhaps his greatest liability.

A somewhat less obvious factor is that Trump’s own mismanagement has demonstrably contributed to these disasters. The entire crisis has grown out of Trump’s constitutional aversion to long-term planning. In his autobiography, Trump boasted that he does not even plan his days, but simply reacts to events as they happen. That process is now dominated by cable news, and especially the stock market, which is Trump’s narrow and highly distorted prism for understanding the entire economy. He dissolved the skilled team of pandemic experts he inherited from Obama on the overt calculation that it wasn’t a priority. “Who would have thought … we’d be having this subject?” he mused.

At some point Trump may retreat to the defense that the coronavirus is an external disaster for which he can’t be blamed. But a series of leaks have documented his direct responsibility.

In January, the Washington Post reports, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar “was having trouble focusing Trump’s full attention on his coronavirus briefing … Why did you push me to insert myself into a controversial political issue? Trump demanded.” Another Post story notes that, while health officials warned not to say the virus had been “contained,” people like Lawrence Kudlow insisted on saying this anyway.

Politico’s reporting implicates Trump’s aides, who apparently shared the broad right-wing belief that the virus was overblown, in trying to keep the issue off the president’s agenda. “It always ladders to the top,” a person involved in the administration’s response says, “Trump’s created an atmosphere where the judgment of his staff is that he shouldn’t need to know these things.”

“Trump is simply not on the same wavelength as the rest of his team, but they said there isn’t much they can do to change his public tone,” reports NBC. “Trump has been advised by some close to him to let public health officials, rather than the politicians, take a more forward-facing role, according to a person familiar with the conversation. But a person close to the White House said Trump thinks it helps him politically to keep doing what he has been doing.”

White House health experts wanted to advise old and vulnerable people to avoid commercial flights, but were overruled by Trump, who feared the impact on the economy. Trump even resisted the mild and extremely obvious advice that old people should avoid booking cruises, for fear of the impact to the cruise industry, before eventually relenting. Even sycophantic sources like the Federalist are begging Trump to keep his mouth shut.

But Trump is incapable of such patience. He keeps repeating that the coronavirus will blow over without much hassle. He believes the conspiracy theories that it’s a hoax designed to bring him down, and he also believes any messaging problem he has can be solved by more messaging from Trump.

Trump seemed totally oblivious to the danger of hardening his public image as the national-level equivalent of the mayor in Jaws, blithely ignoring reports of a gigantic shark because he didn’t want to hurt the tourism season.

Enough of the debacle has played out in public to supply Democrats with a campaign’s worth of damning video clips. Trump appeared in public insisting that the virus was “contained,” and that the number of cases “within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero.” Trump and his surrogates kept advising people to buy stocks after every dip. The strategy made no sense except as a desperation gambit to prop up the stock market on an hour-to-hour basis with dumb money from Trump’s marks.

For all the apparent durability of Trump’s personality cult, it is worth recalling that George W. Bush was once a figure of nearly equal stature on the right. He was the swaggering, flight-suit-wearing alpha male who had conquered Afghanistan and Iraq. The conservative media slathered over him in almost erotic terms. When things went south for Bush, after his failed attempt to privatize Social Security was followed by Hurricane Katrina and the unraveling of the Iraq occupation, they went south very fast.

It is possible that the public-health and economic catastrophes that loom so large at the moment will be gone by autumn. It is even possible that they will remain and Trump will somehow survive anyway. (After all, the mayor in Jaws had somehow retained his position in Jaws 2. And he was still minimizing shark risks!)

But it seems more likely that Trump has finally made his unfitness for office so blatant that even his own supporters will notice. The American economy, its health infrastructure, and perhaps more are plunging into foreseeable crisis. And every step Trump has taken along the way seems almost calculated to expose him to maximal blame. Trump is now quite likely to lose his reelection, and we will look back at the last few weeks as the time when he sealed his own fate.

FRIDAY THE 13TH TATTOO

The real story of the birth of immigration controls in the UK is eerily familiar

David Glover,The Independent•March 13, 2020

Poor Jewish children playing in London's east end, 1900: Heritage Images/Getty Images

In our near-Brexit condition, it seems almost impossible to think of Britain as a nation-state without confronting the question of who has the authority to control its borders and how this can best be done.

Yet the modern practice of policing immigration is little more than a century old and can be dated very precisely: 1 January 1906. On that day, a new law was brought into operation which laid down the conditions of entry for any foreigner wishing to live and work in the UK and put the power to decide into the hands of an immigration officer, a state functionary that had never existed before.

According to the 1905 Aliens Act, those seeking admission could only apply at one of 14 named ports and an “alien immigrant” was legally defined as a person who travelled on a steerage-class ticket, someone unable to afford a cabin. As soon as they stepped ashore, migrants were required to queue for a complex assessment that determined whether they were entitled stay, sifting out “decent” from “undesirable aliens” according to the results of health checks (including signs of insanity or criminality), proof of financial support, the likelihood of finding a job, and access to accommodation.

Then, as now, the government could arrange for the deportation of “aliens” who committed crimes while in Britain. But, unlike today, it was first necessary for a judge to recommend this course of action during sentencing and the Home Office would only endorse his advice after having carefully considered such factors as the amount of time the guilty person had lived in the country and the hardship that expulsion might cause in each individual case.

Passed into law during the final days of a Conservative administration, but attacked and amended by the Liberal opposition, the 1905 Aliens Act satisfied no-one. Among those who were most disappointed were those on the far right of the Tory party who had championed immigration control and who saw their “anti-alien crusade” in starkly racial terms.

Conservative politicians like Major William Evans-Gordon, the then Stepney MP, had few qualms about joining with the grass-roots extra-parliamentary British Brothers’ League in January 1902 when it held its “Great Public Demonstration” against alien immigration at the People’s Palace on Mile End Road, where the air was thick with cries of “Down with them”, “Wipe them out”, and “Jews!”

These voices are a brutal reminder that the call to restrict “alien immigration” was never a neutral, racially-blind plea for fairness. And that xenophobic groups like the British Brothers’ League can be seen as precursors of a long tradition in British politics in which race and nationalism have served as the mainspring of a populist appeal to the interests of “real people.”

This was one of the Act’s most enduring, if unintended legacies – unintended, because its original supporters had thought to remove the question of race from the domestic political arena altogether by bringing immigration to an end.

In the language of contemporary populism, “real people” constantly see themselves as ignored, overlooked or, worse still, as subject to “betrayal” by the political establishment. And thus it was with the 1905 Aliens Act, which campaigners saw as a travesty of the law for which they had fought so hard.

The chief concession that the Liberal opposition had managed to snatch from the jaws of defeat was the inclusion of a clause that specifically allowed those fleeing persecution “on religious or political grounds” to remain in the UK, even if they lacked the means to support themselves or were likely to become a burden on the state.

In making this exception, the law was implicitly harking back to the 19th-century when, for over 80 years, no-one who came to Britain seeking sanctuary was ever refused entry or sent back, effectively setting new standards in freedom of speech and tolerance towards others. Nevertheless, the 1905 Act marked one crucial difference: if asylum had been granted a political safeguard, that protection was not identified as a right. For, after 1905, asylum was in reality dependent upon the discretion of the officer on the quay.

The bitter struggle to control immigration in the years before 1905 cast a long shadow over the very idea of asylum, a cloud that still hangs over us. To refer to someone as an “immigrant” or an “asylum-seeker” always carries a bad after-taste, the mark of the putatively undeserving pseudo-citizen, the intruder who deserves to be expelled from the body politic. When, in the 1930s, German Jews tried to escape from Nazi Germany, the British government insisted that they were to be classed as “immigrants”, not “refugees”, and could only enter the country on a temporary basis, before being moved on, driven elsewhere. The “hostile environments” we create for others might begin with words, shored up by legal definitions, but they rarely end there.

David Glover is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southampton. His book: Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England explores the roots of the first modern immigration law in Britain​

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Journalist goes undercover at "wet markets",

where the Coronavirus started | 60 Minutes Australia

MK-ULTRA
Did the CIA's notorious mind control program create an infamous killer? (SHORT ANSWER, YES)

Michael Isikoff Chief Investigative Correspondent,
 Yahoo News•March 2, 2020

Sidney Gottlieb. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photo: AP)

SKULLDUGGERY PODCAST http://aca.st/f26c27

MK-Ultra was the code name for a notorious government mind control program conducted in the 1950s and 1960s in which the CIA directed scientists to dose unsuspecting human guinea pigs with LSD and other drugs. The program was recently back in the news when a juror in the case of one of those guinea pigs — the late Boston mobster Whitey Bulger, whom the CIA had injected with LSD when he was a young prison inmate — said she wouldn’t have voted to convict him of 11 murders had she known what the U.S. government had done to him. Bulger, who was given LSD over 50 times, would go on to terrorize South Boston as the notoriously violent leader of the Winter Hill Gang.

In a new episode of “Buried Treasure,” a regular feature of the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,” Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman interview historian and journalist Stephen Kinzer, the author of the new book “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.” It’s a biography of the man behind MK-Ultra, a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, who also devised poisons the agency used to try to assassinate foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.Yahoo News: Let’s just start out by telling our listeners about Sidney Gottlieb. Who was he?

Stephen Kinzer: I’ve devoted a lot of my career to try to find out what happens behind the facade of public politics and public diplomacy that we can see. I’ve discovered a lot of things in the course of that research. ... This is the first time I’ve been shocked. I still can’t believe that this happened, that there was such a thing as MK-Ultra and that there was such a person as Sidney Gottlieb. He lived in total invisibility. So in a sense, my book is the biography of a man who wasn’t there.

You approached a former director of the CIA, who professed not to know who Sidney Gottlieb was.

Gottlieb has faded away almost entirely, and that was his desire. He was conducting the most extreme experiments on human beings that have ever been conducted by any agency or officer of the U.S. government. He had what was, in effect, a license to kill. ... Gottlieb was probably the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century.

Is it possible that one reason Sidney Gottlieb has escaped attention is because the CIA never confronted ... the awful things he was doing?

They ultimately have said, essentially, that Gottlieb was some kind of wacko. He was not supervised well, things got off the rails, the project got out of control, there were problems with supervision. ... It was all Sidney’s fault. This is a way of eliminating all institutional responsibility on the part of the CIA.
How did he fit in at the CIA?

Sidney Gottlieb joined the CIA in its early years, in 1951. ... Almost all of the senior officers of the CIA came from a particular social class. They were silver spoon products of the American aristocracy, who knew each other from prep school, and the same colleges, and investment banks, and law firms. Sidney Gottlieb was completely different ... from the rest of them. He was the son of Jewish immigrants. He grew up in the Bronx. He stuttered. He had a limp. So he was very much of an outsider. ... [Agency officials] knew that what he was doing was brutal, was bloody, and was causing an unknown number of deaths. They didn’t want to put somebody from their own social class in the position of having to oversee this project that they knew was very horrific.

What Sidney Gottlieb was running was a covert program aimed at mind control [and] experimenting with LSD on some of the most vulnerable Americans with no consent at all.

The idea behind MK-Ultra was to find a substance that would allow the CIA to control people’s minds and manipulate them and make them do things that they would never otherwise do. And then, if you were lucky, just forget that they had ever done them. … [Gottlieb] decided that before you could find a way to insert a new mind into somebody’s brain, you first had to find a way to blast away the mind that was in there.

... He used every kind of drug combination he could imagine, plus sensory deprivation, hypnosis, electroshock and all kinds of other techniques, all aimed at trying to find a way to destroy a human mind. ... Behind him, he left a trail of wounded and dead in numbers that nobody can even estimate because records were all destroyed as Gottlieb left the CIA.

Gottlieb, left, a former CIA scientific chief, talks with his attorney, Terry Lenzner, before testifying to a Senate health subcommittee on Sept. 21, 1977. (AP)

So this was a Cold War program started in the early 1950s. And like much else from the Cold War era, it arose out of fears that the Soviets and international communism were doing something like this, and therefore we couldn’t have a mind control gap, as it were. What do we know about what the Soviets were up to and what U.S. intelligence thought the Soviets were up to?

Now those are two very different things: what the Soviets were doing and what we thought the Soviets were doing. So I asked myself the same question. ... What led the early directors of the CIA, and in particular, Allen Dulles, and then the person he hired to run this MK-Ultra project, Sidney Gottlieb, to believe that there was such a thing as mind control? In the end, after 10 years, Sidney Gottlieb finally concluded that there is no such thing as mind control. ... But what made them think that it was possible? ... I think it has to do with the cultural conditioning with which they were brought up. Think of all the books, and the stories, and the movies, about mind control. ... There are Edgar Allan Poe stories, and Sherlock Holmes stories, and movies like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “Gaslight.” Those guys grew up watching those movies, and reading those stories, and I think they believed that since fiction could imagine it, there probably was an element of truth to it. That also fed their desire to plunge into this project.

There was “The Manchurian Candidate,” a novel and then a movie, that came out in the early 1960s, which was about Korean mind control programming an American to assassinate a presidential candidate. And ironically, it was the book “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,” by John Marks, in the 1970s, that I believe first revealed the existence of MK-Ultra?

You’re right. When Sidney Gottlieb left the CIA in 1973, along with his longtime mentor, Richard Helms, who was at that time the director of the CIA, the two of them sat down and quickly decided that all the files from MK-Ultra should be destroyed. Gottlieb actually had to go out to the CIA records center in Wharton, Va., and oversee the destruction of seven crates of documents. ... A priceless archive was lost.

Later on, in the mid-1970s, this researcher, John Marks, decided to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA, asking if there were any other documents. ... This request landed at a time when the CIA was under orders from a new president, Jimmy Carter, to open up and be more honest. … [A] search turned up ... a set of records that listed expense accounts for many of the people involved in MK-Ultra. From those records, we have been able to develop an idea of what were these 149 sub-projects. ... “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate” is the foundation for later research that has deepened our understanding of this project.

The CIA and Sidney Gottlieb’s experiments using LSD on unsuspecting people, in a way, that seeped in and helped ... is it overstated to say helped create the counterculture in the 1960s, particularly in San Francisco? [Were] people like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey ... experimenting and using LSD because of this program?

Sidney Gottlieb was fascinated by LSD. It was a newly discovered drug. It had only been discovered in the 1940s. It was colorless, odorless, and had amazing effects in very small quantities. Gottlieb himself used LSD, by his own estimate, at least 200 times.

He and the people around him began to feel that perhaps this drug could be what one of them called “the key that could unlock the universe.” In other words, it might be the answer to what’s the substance that can open up people’s minds to outside control? So in 1953, Gottlieb persuaded the CIA to buy the entire world supply of LSD. It was then being manufactured ... by one company in Switzerland, the Sandoz company. All of that LSD came to the United States, and came to the CIA. Gottlieb used it for two kinds of experiments. Some were horrifically brutal, carried out in prisons in the United States and in safe houses around Europe and East Asia. Many people were fed overdoses without being told what they were being given.

... One experiment at the federal prison in Lexington, Ky. ... Seven African-American inmates were given triple doses of LSD every day for 77 days while locked in a padded room. So if the object of that experiment was to find out whether such an overdose could destroy a human mind. The answer is obviously yes.

... [But] who were among the first people who signed up to take LSD in those benign LSD experiments? Well, one of them was Ken Kesey, who went on to write “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” that became a great bible of the counterculture. Another was the poet Allen Ginsberg, who listened to “Tristan and Isolde” on his headphones while taking LSD. Another was Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. These guys all took LSD home with them. They turned on all their friends. This is how the Grateful Dead got its LSD.

It sounds like we have a lot to be thankful to Sidney Gottlieb for…

Later in life, all these people came to realize that their LSD had come from the CIA. I found an interview with John Lennon in which he was asked about LSD, and he said, “We must always remember to thank the CIA.” ... And of course, the irony is ... the drug that Gottlieb hoped would give the CIA the tool to control people’s minds actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was aimed at destroying everything the CIA believed in.

One of the most fascinating stories from your book is that of Whitey Bulger. Tell us how he became a subject of MK-Ultra.

Whitey Bulger fits very much into the category that I was just discussing. So under Gottlieb’s supervision, a number of federal prisons began experiments with LSD using inmates. And, of course, that’s an ideal population because those people are totally dependent on the prison doctor and the prison warden.

During the mid-1950s when MK-Ultra was at its peak, Whitey Bulger, the famous Boston gangster, was in prison as a truck hijacker in Atlanta, Ga. He was approached by the prison doctor, who told him that the prison was going to be participating in a major project aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. And if Bulger would agree to take a certain drug that they were investigating, he might have some considerations [such as] shorter time in prison and better conditions.

So he was given LSD for months, at least 50 times, without being told what it was. He later wrote what a nightmarish experience this was and how ... for his whole life, he never recovered from it. Years later, when he found out that this doctor was actually working on a CIA project and not trying to cure schizophrenia, he told other members of his gang, “I’m going back to Atlanta. I’m going to find that guy, and I’m going to kill him.”

He didn’t find that doctor, who died of apparently natural causes soon thereafter, but definitely Bulger is interesting because he’s one of the few MK-Ultra subjects who later came out and explained what had happened to him.

Gottlieb was involved in another very high priority operation of the CIA’s in the 1960s and that was the plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Tell us that story.

MK-Ultra didn’t have a firm ending, but it kind of petered out towards end of the late ’50s and into the early ’60s. Gottlieb, as I said earlier, had come to realize ... these drugs like LSD were too unreliable to be used as tools for mind control. ... But then Gottlieb went on to a completely new phase in his career. He was the CIA’s chief chemist. So when President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Fidel Castro in the summer of 1960 and the CIA decided to use poison, it was quite logical that Sidney Gottlieb would get the assignment. He knew more about poisons than anyone in the CIA, anyone in the United States, and I’m going to guess more than anybody in the world. He was obsessed with finding all sorts of natural poisons, and he was getting the gallbladders of crocodiles from Africa and poison barks from Southeast Asia and shrubs from Central America. Anything that could be seen as poison he assembled.

So it was Gottlieb who concocted all the poisons that were intended to kill Fidel Castro. One that was supposed to make his beard fall out, and one that would make him seem disoriented in public, but also ones that were supposed to be fatal. It was Gottlieb who made the L-pills — I learned a whole new vocabulary while writing this book— that means lethal. Those other fatal pills, when you drop it into someone’s tea they die. Gottlieb made those, and they were delivered to Cuba for use in killing Castro. Gottlieb made a poison wet suit, which was tainted with a virus inside that would eat away Castro’s skin if he put it on. Gottlieb made a poison pen with a hypodermic needle that was superthin so that if it was stuck into Castro’s thigh from behind, he wouldn’t even feel it.

Is there any indication at all that Gottlieb was held accountable?

Towards the end of his life, Gottlieb was facing two different situations. One was internal, the people around him in his final years have all said that he was obviously haunted by something that he wouldn’t talk about. One person who visited him in that period said he was haunted by guilt. Uh, he was a destroyed man, if he had been Catholic, he would have gone to a monastery. So he was obviously deeply troubled, but he would never speak about it. Then another factor that added to his anxiety was that after many, many years, a couple of lawsuits seemed to be getting closer to him.

What were these lawsuits?

One involved a case that stemmed from the poisoning by LSD of a young American who had met a guy with a limp in a bar in Paris and whose life was destroyed thereafter. So evidently this guy had been poisoned by Gottlieb. It took 20 years for this case to begin working its way through the judicial system. And finally, a trial date was set for the beginning of 1999. ... Just as the case was about to come to trial, Gottlieb died. The cause of death was never announced. ... I did find a few people who truly suspect that he might have killed himself to avoid having to testify, that he basically fell on his sword rather than be put in a position where he’d have to betray secrets that he had sworn to keep. Nobody knows if that’s true, but it’s a very intriguing footnote to Gottlieb’s death in 1999.

Brown University professor Stephen Kinzer in his office in Providence, R.I., on Jan. 30. (David Goldman/AP)


SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=MKULTRA

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=LSD


SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CIA

WHAT IS WAGE SLAVERY

GRETA WAS RIGHT
Climate emergency: global action is ‘way off track’ says UN head

Deadly heatwaves, floods and rising hunger far greater threat to world than coronavirus, scientists say

Damian Carrington Environment editor THE GUARDIAN Tue 10 Mar 2020 

 

Fire and rescue personal run to move their truck as a bushfire burns next to a major road and homes on the outskirts of the town of Bilpin in Sydney, Australia, December 2019. Photograph: David Gray/Getty Images

The world is “way off track” in dealing with the climate emergency and time is fast running out, the UN secretary general has said.

António Guterres sounded the alarm at the launch of the UN’s assessment of the global climate in 2019. The report concludes it was a record-breaking year for heat, and there was rising hunger, displacement and loss of life owing to extreme temperatures and floods around the world.

Scientists said the threat was greater than that from the coronavirus, and world leaders must not be diverted away from climate action.

The climate assessment is led by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), with input from the UN’s agencies for environment, food, health, disasters, migration and refugees, as well as scientific centres.

In 2019 the oceans were at the hottest on record, with at least 84% of the seas experiencing one or more marine heatwaves. Surface air temperatures around the world were the hottest ever recorded, after a natural El Niño event boosted figures in 2016.

The report says results from the World Glacier Monitoring Service indicate 2018-19 was the 32nd year in a row in which more ice was lost than gained. The melting of land ice combined with thermal expansion of water pushed sea levels up to the highest mark since records began.

The long-term decline of Arctic sea ice also continued in 2019, with the September average extent – usually the lowest of the year – the third worst on record.

“Climate change is the defining challenge of our time. We are currently way off track to meeting either the 1.5C or 2C targets that the Paris agreement calls for,” said Guterres. 2019 ended with a global average temperature of 1.1C above pre-industrial levels. “Time is fast running out for us to avert the worst impacts of climate disruption and protect our societies.”

He added: “We need more ambition on [emission cuts], adaptation and finance in time for the climate conference, Cop26, in Glasgow, UK, in November. That is the only way to ensure a safer, more prosperous and sustainable future for all people on a healthy planet.”

Prof Brian Hoskins, of Imperial College London, said: “The report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it. It points to a threat that is greater to our species than any known virus – we must not be diverted from the urgency of tackling it by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to zero as soon as possible.”

Half a century of dither and denial – a climate crisis timeline

The WMO said its report provided authoritative information for policymakers on the need for climate action and showed the impacts of extreme weather.

A heatwave in Europe was made five times more likely by global heating, and the scorching summer led to 20,000 emergency hospital admissions and 1,462 premature deaths in France alone. India and Japan also sweltered and Australia started and ended the year with severe heat and had its driest year on record. Australia had “an exceptionally prolonged and severe fire season”, the WMO noted.

Floods and storms contributed most to displacing people from their homes, particularly Cyclone Idai in Mozambique and its neighbours, Cyclone Fani in south Asia, Hurricane Dorian in the Caribbean, and flooding in Iran, the Philippines and Ethiopia. The number of internal displacements from such disasters is estimated to have been close to 22 million people in 2019, up from 17 million in 2018.
The US saw heavy rains, with the total from July 2018 to June 2019 being the highest on record. Total economic losses in the US for the year were estimated at $20bn, the WMO said.

Unpredictable climate and extreme weather was a factor in 26 of the 33 nations that were hit by food crises in 2019, and was the main driver in 12 of the countries. “After a decade of steady decline, hunger is on the rise again – over 820 million suffered from hunger in 2018, the latest global data available,” the report says.

The WMO said unusually heavy precipitation in late 2019 was also a factor in the severe desert locust outbreak in the Horn of Africa, which is the worst for decades and expected to spread further by June 2020 in a severe threat to food security.

Prof Dave Reay, of the University of Edinburgh, said: “This annual litany of climate change impacts and inadequate global responses makes for a gut-wrenching read. Writ large is the ‘threat multiplier’ effect that is climate change on the biggest challenges faced by humanity and the world’s ecosystems in the 21st century.”

Timeline

Half a century of dither and denial – a climate crisis timelineHide

Fossil fuel companies have been aware of their impact on the planet since at least the 1950s

1959

The physicist Edward Teller tells the American Petroleum Institute (API) a 10% increase in CO2 will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. “I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”

1965

Lyndon Johnson’s President’s Science Advisory Committee states that “pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air”, with effects that “could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings”. Summarising the findings, the head of the API warned the industry: “Time is running out.”

1970

Shell and BP begin funding scientific research in Britain this decade to examine climate impacts from greenhouse gases.

1977

A recently filed lawsuit claims Exxon scientists told management in 1977 there was an “overwhelming” consensus that fossil fuels were responsible for atmospheric carbon dioxide increases.

1981

An internal Exxon memo warns “it is distinctly possible” that CO2 emissions from the company’s 50-year plan “will later produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the Earth’s population)”.

1988

The Nasa scientist James Hansen testifies to the US Senate that “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now”. In the US presidential campaign, George Bush Sr says: “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the White House effect … As president, I intend to do something about it.”

2 January 1988

A confidential report prepared for Shell’s environmental conservation committee finds CO2 could raise temperatures by 1C to 2C over the next 40 years with changes that may be “the greatest in recorded history”. It urges rapid action by the energy industry. “By the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even stabilise the situation,” it states.

1989

Exxon, Shell, BP and other fossil fuel companies establish the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a lobbying group that challenges the science on global warming and delays action to reduce emissions.

1990

Exxon funds two researchers, Dr Fred Seitz and Dr Fred Singer, who dispute the mainstream consensus on climate science. Seitz and Singer were previously paid by the tobacco industry and questioned the hazards of smoking. Singer, who has denied being on the payroll of the tobacco or energy industry, has said his financial relationships do not influence his research.

1991

Shell’s public information film Climate of Concern acknowledges there is a “possibility of change faster than at any time since the end of the ice age, change too fast, perhaps, for life to adapt without severe dislocation”.

1992

At the Rio Earth summit, countries sign up to the world’s first international agreement to stabilise greenhouse gases and prevent dangerous manmade interference with the climate system. This establishes the UN framework convention on climate change. Bush Sr says: “The US fully intends to be the pre-eminent world leader in protecting the global environment.”

1997

Two month’s before the Kyoto climate conference, Mobil (later merged with Exxon) takes out an ad in The New York Times titled Reset the Alarm, which says: “Let’s face it: the science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil.”

1998

The US refuses to ratify the Kyoto protocol after intense opposition from oil companies and the GCC.

2009

The US senator Jim Inhofe, whose main donors are in the oil and gas industry, leads the “Climategate” misinformation attack on scientists on the opening day of the crucial UN climate conference in Copenhagen, which ends in disarray.

1 January 2013

A study by Richard Heede, published in the journal Climatic Change, reveals 90 companies are responsible for producing two-thirds of the carbon that has entered the atmosphere since the start of the industrial age in the mid-18th century.

1 January 2016

The API removes a claim on its website that the human contribution to climate change is “uncertain”, after an outcry.

1 January 2017

Exxon, Chevron and BP each donate at least $500,000 for the inauguration of Donald Trump as president.

2019

Mohammed Barkindo, secretary general of Opec, which represents Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria, Iran and several other oil states, says climate campaigners are the biggest threat to the industry and claims they are misleading the public with unscientific warnings about global warming.

Jonathan Watts