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By BY EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS, MATTHEW HAAG AND JEFFERY C. MAYS from NYT New York https://ift.tt/2tgjTeQ
People want to pay respects to Kobe Bryant and eight others who died in Sunday's helicopter crash. But the crash site can't handle the crowds.
It’s Friday, January 31. The United Kingdom officially exited the European Union on Friday. How will Brits remember Brexit Day?
In the rest of today’s newsletter: The Senate votes against more witness testimony. Plus: The publication that wants to be the anti-Breitbart.
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« TODAY IN POLITICS »
(JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS)
Impeachment is nearing its end.
After nearly five months, countless hours of congressional hearings, and enough last-minute plot twists to last a lifetime, just about all the suspense to impeachment seems to be fully gone. On Friday, the Senate voted to not move forward with more witnesses testimony—after revelations from John Bolton had seemed to add a layer of new intrigue to the trial earlier in the week. Two GOP senators, Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander, had flirted with voting yes before ultimately siding with the rest of their party. The whole affair was a damning indictment of the Mitch McConnell-led Senate, writes Todd Purdum.
Murkowski, who is routinely one of the handful of GOP senators who offer the slightest challenge to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s iron rule, lashed the impeachment articles from the Democratic House as “rushed and flawed.” … But even if her tears were crocodilian, it was the harshness of Murkowski’s criticism of the Senate itself that stood out. Her condemnation came at a moment when McConnell’s years-long legacy of hyper-partisanship, unremitting obstruction of Barack Obama, and unswerving loyalty to Donald Trump crystallized into a profound upending of the norms and procedures of the body he purports to revere.
—Saahil Desai
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« SNAPSHOT »
(Michelle Rohn)
Impeachment has turned Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel overseeing the president’s defense, into a household name. Read our profile of him from the fall.
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« IDEAS AND ARGUMENTS »
(ROBERT GALBRAITH / REUTERS)
1. “If Californians aren’t moving more than in previous years, why are so many places suddenly freaking out about the influx of Golden Staters?"
Derek Thompson writes about why California migrants are making other states very anxious.
2. “ To make it any easier to remove a president would be to make it far too easy, introducing great instability to the system as a whole.”
The Founders knew what they were doing when they designed impeachment, argues Margaret Taylor.
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« WEEKEND READ »
(JUSTIN GELLERSON)
The Conservatives Trying to Ditch Fake News
The Dispatch, a new conservative publication, wants to be something of the anti-Breitbart.
McKay Coppins writes:
Instead of chasing cheap clicks, the company is courting paid subscribers with a portfolio of email newsletters, podcasts, and a soon-to-be-paywalled website. Original reporting will be emphasized and petty internet squabbles downplayed, with editors pledging to ignore what they call “the daily race to be wrong first on Twitter.” Their target audience is not MAGA Kool-Aid drinkers or Beltway obsessives, but ordinary “center-right” people who want information and context from their news, not catharsis.
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Today’s newsletter was written by Saahil Desai, an associate editor on the Politics desk.
You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments, or send a note to politicsdaily@theatlantic.com.
Your support makes our journalism possible. Subscribe here.
One of 195 Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, to a U.S. air base in California to begin 72 hours of voluntary observation for signs of coronavirus infection was placed under mandatory quarantine after trying to leave the facility, public health officials said on Thursday. The individual, whose identity was not disclosed, was presented the quarantine order on Wednesday night, hours after arriving at March Air Reserve Base near Los Angeles on a government-chartered flight from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, officials from the Riverside County Public Health Department said.
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A few Union Jack flags will be lowered from European Union buildings in Brussels, more will be waved in jubilation by Brexiteers in London at the moment of Britain's departure — at 11 p.m. in the U.K., midnight in much of the EU (2300 GMT). Britain and the bloc fought tooth and nail for the best part of four years — with insults flying across the English Channel — over the terms of their divorce. Now, on the eve of one of the most significant events in European Union history, the political eruptions have ceased and an uneasy quiet reigns: the calm before the next storm.
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Federal officials declared a public health emergency and will be restricting entry into the United States in light of the 2019 novel coronavirus that has killed at least 200 people and infected nearly 10,000 more worldwide. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters Friday that President Trump would sign a proclamation temporarily suspending entry to foreign nationals deemed to pose a transmission risk.Azar also said any U.S. citizen who traveled to China's Hubei province within the past 14 days before arriving home would be subjected two weeks of mandatory quarantine. And citizens who traveled to any other regions in China would undergo a “proactive entry health screen” and 14 days of monitored self-quarantine.“The risk for infections for Americans remains low,” Azar said, adding that these steps were “measured” reactions that would help officials deal with “unknowns” surrounding the virus.Earlier Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said they were putting 195 people who recently returned from China under quarantine for two weeks, dubbing it an “unprecedented” step that was now warranted.“We are preparing as this is the next pandemic, but hopeful this is not and will not be the case,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on a call with reporters. “We would rather be remembered for overreacting to under-reacting.”The move came after one of those recently-returned travelers reportedly attempted to leave the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California, after arriving from Wuhan, China. The CDC declined to provide more information on the individual. There are currently over 9,800 cases of coronavirus in China, while the number of confirmed cases in the United States remained steady at six. Only one, the husband of a woman who recently traveled abroad, had been spread in-country, the CDC said previously. No one had died as a result of infection in the United States by the CDC's latest count.But Messonnier pointed to the most recent number of cases in China, which she said represented a 26 percent increase over Thursday's numbers, as a cause for growing vigilance. She also mentioned an increasing number of reports of person-to-person spread, including growing evidence that the 2019 novel coronavirus can be spread by people who have not yet experienced symptoms. The New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday released a study describing a case in Germany that appeared to show the spread of the virus from a person who traveled to China to several others.“The current scenario is a cause for concern,” Messonnier said.WHO Calls Coronavirus ‘Emergency’ as Person-to-Person Spread Confirmed in U.S.When asked if the coronavirus were more dangerous than the flu, Messonnier said there appeared to be “significant mortality related with this disease” based on cases coming out of China. However, she still didn't recommend face masks for the general public and urged people to stay calm.“Please do not let fear guide your actions,” she said, adding that the public shouldn't assume Asian Americans have the virus amid reports of surging xenophobia against people of Chinese descent worldwide. “There are about 4 million Chinese-Americans in this country.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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Former vice president Joe Biden argued Friday that President Trump was not subject to “a partisan impeachment” even if no Republicans vote to remove him from office, while simultaneously defending his resistance to “a partisan impeachment” during Bill Clinton’s 1998 trial.Biden, speaking from Iowa, was challenged in an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos over comments he had made in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. “No president should be removed from office, merely because one party enjoys a commanding lead in either house of Congress,” Biden said at the time.Stephanopoulos then asked the former vice president why a partisan impeachment was no longer wrong, to which Biden replied “it’s not partisan impeachment.” After Stephanopoulos pushed back and pointed out that no Republicans in the House had voted to impeach the president, Biden insisted that the Constitution had been violated, and that those voting against impeachment were denying the facts.“That’s the issue — was the Constitution violated? Period,” Biden stated. “Even if it’s a party-line vote, it just reflects on those who know, in fact, in their heart and in their head, that it’s in fact a violation of the Constitution to do what he did, and in fact vote no.”> Joe Biden on doing a 180 on opposing “a partisan impeachment”: “This is not a partisan impeachment” pic.twitter.com/iaSRDloVWu> > -- Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 31, 2020Biden then attempted to clarify why a party-line vote in impeachment did not count as partisan.“That’s a party-line vote, but that doesn’t make it right,” Biden said of lack of Republican support for Trump’s impeachment. “A party-line vote that is based upon something that doesn’t relate to a Constitutional violation is a different thing.”Several key Republican Senators announced their intentions on the vote for further witnesses and documents late Thursday night, with Senator Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) saying that Trump’s actions were “inappropriate,” but that “the Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.”
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China sent two planes to Malaysia and Thailand on Friday to bring "stranded" Hubei province residents back to the virus-stricken city of Wuhan, authorities said. The Xiamen Airlines flights will pick up the Chinese nationals from Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia and the Thai capital Bangkok, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).
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ROME—More than 7,000 people were quarantined on an Italian cruise ship in the Mediterranean port of Civitavecchia outside of Rome after a Chinese woman from Hong Kong came down with a fever and symptoms that mimic the coronavirus. Initial tests seemed to exclude the deadly virus, according to Italian media, but passengers were expected to be kept onboard overnight as a precaution. A second round of tests late Thursday completely excluded contagion, and Italy’s health authorities gave the green light for passengers to disembark. But as of Thursday evening, the mayor of Civitavecchia refused to authorize any passengers to get off the ship. Tourism operators, suddenly confronted with a new nightmare scenario tied to the virus, scrambled to address fears of an outbreak on a cruise ship. “We have no information, the internet inside the ship isn’t working, and we can’t get news. But above all we take meals together in the common areas, and we don’t know if someone is infected,” Liborio Iervolino, a cruise passenger from Puglia said. ‘There are no disposable dishes and in the rooms, the televisions only broadcast advertisements. We would like to see the news and understand what is happening.”The Costa Smerelda, the fifth-largest cruise ship in the world and the flagship of an Italian company best known for the 2011 crash of the Costa Concordia on Tuscan island of Giglio, departed from Savona, Italy, on Jan. 25 with 6,000 passengers and 1,000 crew onboard. The massive, 19-deck vessel made stops in Marseilles, Barcelona, and Palma de Mallorca before docking in Civitavecchia on Thursday. It was scheduled to return to Savona for the Feb. 1 end of the cruise. But passengers who had lined up for a Rome excursion or to disembark at its penultimate stop were told to stay on the ship after medics in full hazmat suits boarded the vessel Thursday morning to check on a female Chinese patient in her fifties who was in the ship’s hospital. The woman, along with her asymptomatic husband and the medical team who treated her during the voyage, are being held in isolation on the ship. Samples from the woman were sent to the Lazzaro Spallanzani infectious disease hospital in Rome to be tested. Citizens of the port town of Civitavecchia have gone to the port to protest the disembarkation of 1,143 passengers whose voyage was scheduled to end in their town. “All the protocols are being followed and we will keep the case constantly monitored,” Civitavecchia’s mayor, Ernesto Tedesco, told worried citizens as he threatened to sue the cruise company if they disembarked before the full test results were back.The Costa company confirmed to The Daily Beast that the couple were among more than 750 Chinese or Hong Kong passengers on the voyage. Of those, 351 embarked on Jan. 25 in Savona along with the sick passenger, while others got on at the ship’s various ports of call in Spain and France. The couple arrived in Italy for the Jan. 25 embarkation on a flight from Hong Kong to Milan’s Malpensa airport, which means if the woman is confirmed to have the virus, health officials will then begin tracing anyone who flew with her, since the virus can be contagious even before symptoms show. A Costa representative would not confirm when the woman first reported being sick.“The situation is under control and at the moment there are no reasons for concern on board,” Italian Coast Guard Commander Vincenzo Leone said in a statement Thursday.Passengers reached by The Daily Beast via social media say they were not told directly that the woman was suspected of carrying the virus, but were told to alert crew members if they were sick with fever or respiratory conditions. Several passengers have tweeted that they should have been told earlier in the voyage that they might be at risk. Many complained that they were not given face masks or rubber gloves to prevent infection.Teens Are Now Claiming They Have Coronavirus for Tik Tok CloutRead more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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In the wake of the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash, a Los Angeles congressman is calling on the Federal Aviation Administration to beef up chopper safety regulations by requiring a terrain alarm system.
Mayor Eric Garcetti said he would support a law requiring safety improvements at high-rise apartment buildings in Los Angeles
Prosecutors charged the man with at least three hate-crime attacks in Culver City, Inglewood and West L.A., and detectives believe there may be more victims.
(Bloomberg) -- The coronavirus has been in the news for only a few weeks, but Elizabeth Warren already has a plan to fight it.With Hong Kong announcing restrictions on travel from mainland China as part of an effort to contain the SARS-like virus that has claimed more than 100 lives, Warren released a proposal Tuesday morning aimed at containing and treating infectious diseases.“Diseases like coronavirus remind us why we need robust international institutions, strong investments in public health, and a government that is prepared to jump into action at a moment’s notice,” she wrote in a Medium post announcing the plan.Warren criticized President Donald Trump’s response to the outbreak, calling it “a mess.” and assailed the administration’s proposed funding cuts for feeral health agencies.She said her administration would prioritize developing a universal flu vaccine and replenish funding for the Public Health Emergency Fund, with the goal of speeding outbreak response. She proposed restoring an Obama-era White House position for health security that Trump eliminated in 2018. Warren also cited outbreaks as a reason to move towards Medicare For All, a policy proposal that she has espoused, saying it would give infected people access necessary care.This post is part of Campaign Update, our live coverage from the 2020 campaign trail.To contact the author of this story: Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou in Washington at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Kathleen HunterFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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Barrington Plaza lacks an internal sprinkler system, fire officials said, and some are questioning why sprinklers weren't installed after 2013 blaze.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is investigating a hit-and-run case in which an assistant chief for the Los Angeles Fire Department allegedly crashed into a parked car in Santa Clarita and fled to his nearby home.