Tag Archives : Build House

Stacey Abrams tests positive for COVID-19

Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (D) said on Wednesday that she has tested positive for COVID-19. 

Abrams’s campaign spokesperson confirmed to The Hill that the politician tested positive for the virus during routine testing Wednesday morning, adding that she tested negative two days straight before giving her ‘Georgia Thrives’ economic speech. 

Abrams delivered her speech at Atlanta-based Atlantucky Brewing on Tuesday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, where she highlighted her latest initiatives such as plans to legalize casino gambling. 

“She is fully vaccinated and boosted and experiencing mild symptoms,” Abrams campaign spokesperson told The Hill. “Consistent with CDC guidelines, she will isolate at home and looks forward to traveling across the state to meet Georgians as soon as possible.” 

The newspaper also reported that many in attendance wore facemasks during the event, as Abrams herself delivered her speech without using a face mask. 

An AJC poll from last month shows that Abrams is trailing incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp (R) by 5 points, 48 percent to 43 percent respectively, as seven percent of those surveyed are still undecided on their vote. 

Abrams is facing off against Kemp for the second time, narrowly defeating her in the state’s gubernatorial election in 2018. 

Abrams recently said in an interview that she is  “deeply concerned” about hip-hop lyrics being used as criminal evidence in court cases, referring to the criminal cases of popular Atlanta-based rappers Jeffery “Young Thug” Williams and Sergio “Gunna” Kitchens, who were arrested in May on racketeering charges. 

“I do not know enough about these particular cases having not been in the courtroom and having not read the pleadings,” Abrams told Yahoo! News.  “But I will say that … as someone who believes very staunchly in the First Amendment, I am deeply concerned about any movement towards using a person’s word and their music or their writing as an indictment of who they are and as a proof point without additional supports.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Student loan freeze 'dramatically' boosted credit scores: study

Student loan borrowers “dramatically” improved their credit scores during the pandemic-related pause on student loan payments beginning in 2020, according to a new study.  

For the study, researchers from the Center for Microeconomic Data at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York placed borrowers into three categories: subprime borrowers, those whose credit scores fall below 620, borrowers with credit scores from 620-719, and super-prime borrowers who boast scores above 720.   

They found “significant flows” of loan borrowers moving into a higher credit score group, with more than 21 percent changing groups. 

Overall, 79 percent, or 30 million borrowers, saw improvements to their credit scores. 

Borrowers who were delinquent in their loan payments prior to the pandemic saw the largest increase in credit risk scores, with a median increase of more than 100 points. 

The Biden administration previously announced that all borrowers currently in default would be granted a “fresh start” once payments resume – a move experts say would cut off penalties imposed on borrowers that could help them pay their bills and lift their credit scores. 

America is changing faster than ever! Add Changing America to your Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news. 

The federal moratorium on student loan payments, first enacted during the Trump administration and extended throughout Biden’s first term, is currently set to expire at the end of August.  

Biden has previously signaled he is considering forgiving up to $10,000 for all federal student borrowers but has yet to make a formal announcement on either debt cancellation or extending the pause.  

“The Department of Education will continue to assess the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy on student loan borrowers. We will communicate directly with borrowers about the end of the payment pause when a decision is made,” a department spokesperson told The Hill late last month. 

Source: TEST FEED1

GOP poll finds tie in New England target race between Hayes, Logan

Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.) and former Connecticut state Sen. George Logan are in a dead heat in Connecticut’s fifth congressional district, an internal Republican poll found, stoking GOP hopes of making gains in New England.

A Tarrance Group poll commissioned last month by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC aligned with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), found Logan and Hayes each with 45 percent support among registered voters in the district, according to a poll memo shared with The Hill. Another 9 percent of voters were undecided.

While Hayes had a net positive approval among voters, with 40 percent favorable and 32 percent unfavorable, Logan led independents by 20 points with 53 percent, the memo said.

The poll also found that a majority of voters in the district disapprove of the job that President Joe Biden is doing.

“There is significant intensity behind this, with 49% indicating they strongly disapprove (58% disapprove – 36% approve). The generic Republican candidate holds a 6-point lead over the generic Democrat (48% Republican – 42% Democrat),” the poll memo said.

Hayes, who grew up in public housing and was named the 2016 National Teacher of the Year, is seeking a third term in Congress. Logan, an engineer, was in the Connecticut State Senate for four years after defeating a 12-term incumbent Democrat in 2016.

The district covers a western part of Connecticut that borders New York and Massachusetts.

Election analysts have shifted their race ratings for the district in Republicans’ favor in recent months, with the Cook Political Report saying the race leans Democratic. Both Hayes and Logan easily won their party nominations for the seat in uncontested primaries on Tuesday.

A previous internal Republican poll from the Logan campaign and the National Republican Congressional Committee conducted June 29-30 found him five points behind Hayes among likely voters, 41 percent to 46 percent.

Hayes has a significant cash advantage over Logan, according to the most recent Federal Election Commission filings available, with nearly $1.7 million in the bank to Logan’s $204,826 as of June 30.

Republicans have sought to tie Hayes to President Biden. In a statement on Logan’s primary on Tuesday night, National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Tom Emmer called Hayes “a rubber stamp for the failed Biden-Pelosi agenda in Congress.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, meanwhile, has criticized Logan for embracing endorsements from “ultra-MAGA” House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and other members of the Republican party it says are “radical.”

The poll consisted of phone interviews with 400 registered voters in the district contacted by telephone interviews from July 16-24. The margin of error is 4.9 percent.

Source: TEST FEED1

Biden to name first woman to lead National Cancer Institute

President Biden on Wednesday will appoint Monica Bertagnolli to lead the National Cancer Institute, making her the first woman to lead the organization as the White House puts a renewed focus on fighting cancer.

Bertagnolli is currently a professor of surgery in the field of surgical oncology at Harvard Medical School. She previously served as the chief of the division of Surgical Oncology for the Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center. 

The White House announced Bertagnolli’s appointment on the same day Biden is signing legislation expanding care for veterans who suffer from illnesses because of exposure to toxins during their military service.

The issue of fighting cancer and supporting cancer research is personal to the president, whose son, Beau, died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46. Biden has talked about ending cancer throughout his campaign and presidency to date, saying it would be a priority for him.

The president and first lady in February hosted a relaunch of the “cancer moonshot” project that Biden oversaw during the Obama administration.

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide each year, according to the National Cancer Institute, and more than 1 million people each year are diagnosed with the disease in the United States.

“I look forward to working with Dr. Bertagnolli to advance the President’s call to end cancer as we know it. Dr. Bertagnolli’s decades of cancer research expertise around patient-centered care and her work to create more inclusive clinical trials will be instrumental as we accelerate the rate of research and innovation to fight cancer,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement.

Source: TEST FEED1

How academic, COVID-19 stress is affecting students differently

Both academic and COVID-19 stressors are impacting students’ mental well-being across the board, but new research finds the stress affects some groups more than others.  

For a study published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers looked at the relationship between perceived academic stress and mental well-being, how different groups experience stress, and how COVID-19 is impacting stress levels. 

They found that perceived academic stress is felt intensely by non-binary and female students as well as by those in their second year of a four-year program. 

Rutgers University researchers surveyed 843 college students between the ages of 18 and 30, with participants representing each year of traditional study.  

Questions were drawn from the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (SWEMWBS), which measures mental well-being alongside questions from the Perception of Academic Stress Scale (PAS). 

“This study shows that college students are not uniformly impacted by academic stress or pandemic-related stress and that certain groups should be offered additional resources and support,” study author Xue Ming, a professor of Neurology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, said in a media release. 

“The findings support prior studies that have shown that nonbinary adults face adverse mental health outcomes when compared to male- and female-identifying adults.” 

America is changing faster than ever! Add Changing America to your Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news. 

Researchers noted that second-year students were likely impacted by the dual stressors as they take on more rigorous course loads and might be shifting majors.  

Ming said the study results might instruct colleges to target resources for these particularly affected groups while destigmatizing mental health issues.  

“Colleges should consider offering tailored mental health resources to these groups to improve students’ stress levels and psychological well-being,” Ming said. 

 “To raise awareness and destigmatize mental health, colleges can distribute confidential validated assessments, such as the PAS and SWEMWBS, in class and teach students to self-score so they can monitor their stress and mental well-being.” 

Source: TEST FEED1

One man’s struggle to save Russia’s honor

On April 11, Vladimir Kara-Murza, one of the last nationally recognized opposition leaders to Vladimir Putin still at liberty in Russia, was arrested in Moscow. Any day now, an inevitable conviction by a kangaroo court is almost certain to send him to prison for years. 

The Kremlin tried to finish Kara-Murza off twice before. In 2015 he nearly died in Moscow, saved only by emergency doctors at Moscow’s First City Hospital as his vital organs were shutting down. “A victim of poisoning,” concluded a team of U.S. doctors cited in an FBI report. In more cautious terms, the FBI’s own lab pointed in the same direction: Kara-Murza’s “symptoms and health effects could not have been brought about without a toxin introduced to his system.” A year and a half later, he was at death’s door again, with the same symptoms.

Kara-Murza’s close friend and mentor, Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the pro-democracy opposition, was gunned down in 2015 a few hundred meters from the Kremlin three months and a day before Kara-Murza’s near-fatal illness. Yet Kara-Murza continued to go back, crisscrossing the country for the Open Russia nongovernmental organization, meeting with pro-democracy activists and screening a terrific documentary he made about Nemtsov. This past April, he returned to Moscow less than a month after another leading critic of the Kremlin, Alexei Navalny, began serving his nine-year sentence.  

Why risk his life again and again, going to Putin’s Russia and leaving behind his wife Zhenya and their three young children in Centerville in Northern Virginia? His answer to me in private was the same as the one I recall him giving publicly: ‘Why should I be afraid?” he said. “It is they, Putin and his henchmen, who should be afraid. Why should I leave Russia? It is they who should leave while the going is good.” As he told CNN on the day of his arrest: “I have absolutely no doubt the Putin regime will end this war in Ukraine and there will be a democratic Russia after Putin.”

Kara-Murza is steadfast in this belief. His faith in the Russian people’s ability to self-govern in liberty is unshakable. A Cambridge-educated historian, he detests the trope of Russians’ alleged love for “a strongarm,” or their backs’ longing for a lash. He is convinced that in free elections unmarred by terror and propaganda, the Russian people would choose wisely.

Over my 20-year friendship with Kara-Murza, he has never tired of reminding me of the 1917 election to the Constituent Assembly. Likely the most democratic and freest anywhere in the world at the time, the poll was, as he put it in an essay, “universal, equal, and direct.” Every Russian citizen aged 20 or older could vote by secret ballot, regardless of gender, religion or ethnicity. (Women’s suffrage came to Russia three years before the 19th Amendment was passed in the United States.) Even under the radicalizing pressures of a disintegrating state, economic hardships, a string of defeats in World War I, and after the overthrow of the Provisional Government by the Bolsheviks, the Russian people elected over twice as many Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik moderate socialists as they did Bolsheviks.  

“Just arrived in DC for meetings in Congress …” Kara-Murza wrote to me a month before his arrest. “I will be going back [to Russia] soon but it is important to communicate with leaders here.” One of his engagements was a speech to the Arizona House of Representatives.

That was his alleged offense. He was brought up by the Investigative Committee, Russia’s Star Chamber, on a charge of “publicly spreading admittedly false information about the utilization of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” Article 207.3 had been added to the criminal code by the rubber-stamping Duma after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Along with other amendments to the code, it sealed Russia’s transition from an electoral autocracy to a military dictatorship.

“Motivated by political hatred,” read the charge, “in his remarks to the members of the House of Representatives of the state of Arizona, Kara-Murza presented as true facts the obviously false information about the bombing by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation of residential neighborhoods, objects of social infrastructure, including maternity wards, hospitals, and schools, as well as the utilization of other banned means and methods in the course of the special military operation on the territory of Ukraine, thus having done considerable harm to the interests of the Russian Federation.” The charge carries a sentence of between five and 10 years. If the “considerable harm” is seen as entailing “grave consequences,” he could be put away for 15 years.

Then, last week, the Investigative Committee accused Kara-Murza of another crime: participating in the activity of a “foreign undesirable” organization. The organization in question is the Free Russia Foundation, based in Washington, D.C. Kara-Murza’s “participation” was a conference in support of Russian political prisoners, which he organized in Moscow’s Sakharov Center last October, allegedly using the foundation’s money. The maximum sentence for this offense is six years.      

The CNN interview evidently was the last straw. Putin’s regime, Kara-Murza said, is not just corrupt and kleptocratic, not just authoritarian — it is “a regime of murderers.” He was arrested a few hours later.

Kara-Murza admires Soviet dissidents, whose story he told in a profound and moving documentary titled “Oni vybirali svobodu” (“They Chose Freedom”). He likes to quote Natalia Gorbanevskaya, who, along with six men, went to Red Square on Aug. 25, 1968, to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, pushing her 3-month-old baby in a carriage: “A nation minus me is not an entire nation,” she said to Kara-Murza in his documentary. “So they could no longer say that there was a nationwide approval in the Soviet Union for the invasion of Czechoslovakia.” He added recently: “Every voice in opposition is precious. And even seven people can sometimes save the honor of an entire nation.”

That is what Vladimir Kara-Murza has been up to: trying to save Russia’s honor.

Leon Aron is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and the author of “Roads to the Temple” and other books.

Source: TEST FEED1

Republican Finstad wins Minnesota special election for Hagedorn's seat

Former state Rep. Brad Finstad on Tuesday was projected to defeat Democrat Jeff Ettinger in the special election to replace the late Rep. Jim Hagedorn (R-Minn.) in Minnesota’s 1st congressional district.

The Associated Press called the race at 9:25 a.m. ET.

Heading into the Tuesday special election, Finstad was heavily favored to win given the district’s strong Republican tilt.

Special elections are often seen as a bellwether for which party has the momentum heading into the November general election.

But Finstad’s victory on Tuesday only guarantees him the seat until early next year. Voters in Minnesota’s 1st District are also set to choose their nominees on Tuesday for the regularly scheduled November election.

Ettinger, the former CEO of Hormel Foods, faces no serious opposition in that primary, while Finstad is locked in a rematch with state Rep. Jeremy Munson.

Munson previously sought the GOP nomination for the special election, but ultimately lost to Ettinger by just 1 percentage point.

Source: TEST FEED1

Watch live: Biden delivers remarks, signs burn pits bill

President Biden will deliver remarks Wednesday morning and sign into law the PACT Act of 2022.

The event is scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m. ET.

Watch the video above.

Source: TEST FEED1

Information justice offers stronger clean air protections to fenceline communities

“Data drives policy, and the lack of data drives policy,” according to former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) environmental justice official Mustafa Santiago Ali. This crucial insight succinctly encapsulates one of the fundamental disconnects between the Clean Air Act and environmental justice.

A bill pending in Congress called the Public Health Air Quality Act aims to bridge that divide by significantly enhancing our nation’s air pollution monitoring infrastructure and improving community access to monitoring data.

Lying at the core of the legislation is a concept called “information justice.” Information justice starts from the recognition that policy-relevant uncertainty is an inescapable feature of environmental decision-making. Agencies like the EPA simply will never have perfect information when deciding whether and how to address a particular pollution risk.

Critically, such uncertainty entails certain costs in the form of suboptimal regulatory policies. While the EPA cannot fully eliminate those costs, it can determine how they are distributed by how it chooses to act in the face of such uncertainty. Information justice seeks to ensure that these costs are distributed as fairly as possible. In practice, that means adopting a default rule that shifts these costs to corporate polluters — both because they benefit from harmful actions (in the form of profits) and they are in a better position to reduce uncertainty by obtaining new information about the potential harms of their pollution.

The essential problem that information justice seeks to address is that, as currently designed and implemented, many of our regulatory institutions are oriented against the fair distribution of uncertainty-related costs. And this, in turn, incentivizes polluters and their political allies to obstruct efforts to do things like obtain new information about a particular air pollutant’s exposure routes and health impacts.

Chief among these problematic regulatory institutions is cost-benefit analysis and the manner in which it dominates how regulatory decisions are made. Cost-benefit analysis purports to evaluate regulations by directly comparing the monetary value of their costs against the monetary value of their benefits. But, while the compliance costs of new rules (for example, pollution control equipment) are relatively easy to calculate, the benefits (for example, preventing rare cancers or preserving the integrity of ecosystems) are not — particularly when scientific uncertainty limits our understanding of those benefits.

Cost-benefit analysis “punishes” this uncertainty by assigning those benefits a monetary value of $0, thereby eliminating them from the analyses’ final results. Polluters have every incentive to exploit this dynamic, both by exaggerating existing uncertainties — and by thwarting any scientific research or monitoring actions that might enable the EPA’s analysts to assign a big dollar figure to regulatory benefits.

The Public Health Air Quality Act has the potential to break through this destructive dynamic. The bill requires several different comprehensive air pollution monitoring programs, both for hazardous air pollutants (for example, cancer-causing benzene) and more conventional “criteria” pollutants (for example, fine particulate matter that can cause lung and cardiovascular harms). Crucially, the bill lays out detailed instructions on where monitors should be located so they accurately reflect the exposures experienced by overburdened communities. To ensure that the monitoring data are as useful as possible to the public, the bill requires they be publicized in a timely manner and are easily accessible.

The most direct effect of this bill would be to reduce policy uncertainty regarding common types of air pollution so they might be better controlled to protect the public and the environment. Ideally, the legislation could even trigger a virtuous cycle upward, as corporate polluters will face strong incentives to learn more about the health effects of their emissions in the hopes of finding evidence that they are not as harmful as potentially feared.

Of course, information alone will not protect fenceline communities that border the largest polluting facilities in the country. So, as part of its program on community hazardous air pollutant monitoring, the bill would establish an emissions threshold for harmful pollutants called a “corrective action level.” When fenceline monitors detect emissions above this threshold, the bill would require the facility to take “full remedial action” to “protect the most exposed or most vulnerable individuals.”

To be sure, the EPA lacks sufficient scientific information to set the thresholds for most pollutants of concern at levels that will be protective of human health. Significantly, the bill would overcome this challenge by directing the EPA to follow the “precautionary principle” when establishing specific corrective actions levels. The precautionary principle is another key building block to achieving information justice in practice. Unlike cost-benefit analysis, it holds that uncertainty should not be used as an excuse for inaction, and instead calls for public-interest agencies like the EPA to institute reasonable protections in the face of likely harm.

After more than 50 years, the Clean Air Act is due for an upgrade to account for changing circumstances. We can now recognize how the law is insufficiently attentive to the realities of structural racism and systemic disparities in environmental protections. Polluters have exacerbated these problems by weaponizing uncertainty to oppose stronger protections for those who need them most.

In speaking to both challenges, the Public Health Air Quality Act would help ensure that the Clean Air Act is well positioned to continue serving the American people for the next 50 years.

James Goodwin is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform and a widely known expert in regulatory reform.

Source: TEST FEED1

The Hill launches The Hill TV, the nation's newest streaming channel

At The Hill, our objective is to ensure that our trusted, non-partisan news and reporting remains free and accessible to you whenever and wherever you want it.  

With that in mind, we are pleased to announce that we have launched The Hill TV, a new streaming channel for the growing number of Americans who are digitally streaming television programming.

Providing yet another way to access our content, The Hill TV programming includes:  

• Signature shows like Rising, The Hill’s groundbreaking morning program  
• Extended exclusives and interviews with lawmakers, policy influencers,  
  and business leaders about hot-button issues and pending legislation 
• Summits and policy roundtables from The Hill’s 70+ thought leadership events per year, convening expert voices on the biggest challenges facing our country
• Thematic series such as Changing America, which uniquely explores timely topics including respect, sustainability, resilience, and well-being  
• Local political programs and highlights from Sunday talk shows  
  produced by Nexstar stations in top markets 

The Hill TV has debuted on Plex, the global streaming media platform available in over 180 countries.

You can watch The Hill TV for FREE by downloading the Plex app for your favorite device (iPhone/iPad, Android, Roku, Apple TV, etc.) here or watch now in a web browser here.

Enjoy! 

Bob Cusack 
Editor in Chief 

Source: TEST FEED1