Wednesday, July 26, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.
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Joe is always busy.
The Biden Administration proposes new rules to push insurers to boost mental health coverage.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s administration on Tuesday announced new rules meant to push insurance companies to increase their coverage of mental health treatments.
The new regulations, which still need to go through a public comment period, would require insurers to study whether their customers have equal access to medical and mental health benefits and to take remedial action, if necessary. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act requires that insurers provide the same level of coverage for both mental and physical health care — though the administration and advocates argue insurers’ policies restrict patient access.
The rules, if finalized, would force insurers to study patient outcomes to ensure the benefits are administered equally, taking into account their provider network and reimbursement rates and whether prior authorization is required for care.
“Too many Americans still struggle to find and afford the care they need,” the White House said in an emailed statement.
The Democratic president’s administration said it’s aiming to address issues such as insurers enabling nutritional counseling for diabetes patients but making it more difficult for those with eating disorders.
By measuring outcomes, the White House said, it will force insurers to make modifications to come into compliance with the law. (Associated Press).
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Biden attacks curbs on teaching US racist history as he honors Emmett Till with monument.
WASHINGTON, July 25 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday honored Emmett Till, the Black teenager whose 1955 killing helped galvanize the Civil Rights movement, and his mother with a national monument spanning two states and a call for Americans to learn the country's full history.
Till, 14 and visiting from Chicago, was beaten, shot and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 28, 1955, four days after a 21-year-old white woman accused him of whistling at her. His body was dumped in a river.
The violent killing put a spotlight on the U.S. civil rights cause after his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, held an open-casket funeral and a photo of her son's badly disfigured body appeared in Black media.
The national monument designation across 5.7 acres (2.3 hectares) and three sites marks a forceful new effort by the president to memorialize the country's bloody racial history even as Republicans in some states push limits on how that past is taught in public schools.
"Darkness and denialism can hide much but they erase nothing," Biden told guests in the ornate, marble-edged Indian Treaty Room next to the White House, before signing the proclamation. "We can't just choose to learn what we want to know."
Biden, an 80-year-old Democrat, will likely need strong support from Black voters to secure a second term in the 2024 presidential election.
A Republican field led by former President Donald Trump has made conservative views on race and other contentious issues of history a part of their platform, including banning books and fighting efforts to teach school children accounts of the country's past that they regard as ideologically inflected or unpatriotic.
New education guidelines issued in Florida under Republican governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis last week ask middle school instructors to teach that enslaved Black people developed helpful "skills" in bondage, among other measures.
"Today there are those in our nation who prefer to erase or even rewrite the ugly parts of our past, those who attempt to teach that enslaved people benefited from slavery," Vice President Kamala Harris said at the event.
"As people who love our country, as patriots we know that we much remember and teach our full history even when it is painful. Especially when it is painful," she said.
Tuesday marks the 82nd anniversary of Till's birth in 1941. One of the monument sites is his funeral location, Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, in Chicago.
The other selected sites are in Mississippi: Graball Landing, close to where Till's body is believed to be have been recovered; and Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, where two white men who later confessed to Till's killing were acquitted by an all-white jury.
Signs erected at Graball Landing since 2008 to commemorate Till's killing have been repeatedly defaced by gunfire.
Now that site and the others will be considered federal property, receiving about $180,000 a year in funding from the National Park Service. Any future vandalism would be investigated by federal law enforcement rather than local police, according to Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi.
Other such monuments include the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty and inventor Thomas Edison's laboratory.
"America is changing, America is making progress," said the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., 84, a cousin of Till's who was with the boy on the night he was abducted at gunpoint from a relatives' house in Mississippi where they were staying.
"I've seen a lot of changes over the years and I try to tell young people that they happen, but they happen very slow," Parker said in a telephone interview as he traveled from Chicago to Washington to attend the ceremony as one of the White House's approximately 60 guests.
Biden screened a film recounting the killing and its aftermath, "Till," at the White House in February. Last March, he signed into law a bipartisan bill named for Till that for the first time made lynching a federal hate crime. (Reuters)
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Biden picks next Pentagon policy chief, testing Tuberville’s blockade.
State Department counselor Derek Chollet at a meeting in January with Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic in Belgrade.
The White House said Tuesday that President Biden will nominate a new Pentagon policy chief, a position the administration deems central to navigating challenges posed by China and Russia but one at risk of encountering the same standoff with congressional Republicans that has stymied the confirmation of other defense nominees.
Officials said the administration would send the Senate Biden’s selection of Derek Chollet, who now serves as counselor to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to become undersecretary of defense for policy.
Biden’s nomination of Chollet to replace Colin Kahl, who stepped down this month, comes amid a feud over abortion policy that has resulted in the stalling of hundreds of nominees for military and defense positions, including Biden’s pick to head the Marine Corps. If the impasse continues, it could result in other high-level vacancies in coming months, including the military’s most senior position, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, imposed the hold in protest of an administration policy that enables the Pentagon to reimburse service members for travel expenses required to access abortions and other reproductive care if they are stationed in states where, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, such procedures are difficult or impossible to obtain.
Tuberville has said the agency’s “radical” policy exceeds administration authority. “We are here to make the law, not the Pentagon,” he said last week.
While many Republicans sympathize with Tuberville’s views on abortion, influential lawmakers including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have said they do not back delaying military nominees. Tuberville has said the Senate could hold individual votes for nominees, which critics reject as onerous and time-consuming.
While Biden and other Democrats have warned that the hold could damage U.S. security and further politicize the military, Tuberville has refused to abandon his position despite administration officials’ defense of the policy and appeals from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The dispute casts a shadow over the largely bipartisan cooperation that characterizes support for defense spending and many military initiatives.
It’s not clear whether the impasse can be resolved before it affects Chollet, whose résumé includes a host of key national security roles including assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs; senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council; principal deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning office; and speechwriter to then-U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard C. Holbrooke. Chollet is expected to remain in his State Department role until he is confirmed. As the department’s counselor, he has advised Blinken on issues including China’s projection into the South China Sea and attempts to deepen Israel’s normalization with Arab states.
When Chollet served as a senior Pentagon policy official under then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel during the Obama administration, he often traveled as part of Hagel’s entourage on foreign trips, providing input on the U.S. response to issues including China’s military rise and the violent ascent of the Islamic State.
Hagel, a onetime Republican senator from Nebraska, said that he saw in Chollet — a fellow Nebraskan — a combination of expertise and modesty. “That’s one of the things I’ve always appreciated about him, because he does have a lot of ability but he can handle that very well,” Hagel said. “He gets along with people.”
Eric Edelman, who was undersecretary of defense for policy during the Republican George W. Bush administration, said that while Chollet had served under Democratic presidents, they both understood that “there’s much more continuity than difference between administrations because they’re all wrestling with the same problems.
” Current and former officials stress the centrality of the undersecretary for policy position, often described as the Pentagon’s No. 3 job, which oversees a sprawling network of regional and topical offices and several agencies. It is known for being a particularly grueling position given the urgency and unpredictability of military operations and global security threats.
“There’s nothing that doesn’t eventually land, or initially come out of, that office that DOD does,” Hagel said, using an acronym for the Department of Defense. “That’s strategy, that’s implementation, that’s everything … And that’s why every secretary really relies on that undersecretary and his or her team.”
In his previous Pentagon policy role, Chollet also worked extensively with Austin, who at that time was a four-star Army general serving as the head of U.S. Central Command.
As Austin has done repeatedly, Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh urged Tuberville to end his hold on nominees, which administration officials say has plunged hundreds of officers and their families into a state of uncertainty. A group of Democratic senators appealed to McConnell on Monday to increase Republican pressure on Tuberville to soften his position.
“It is essential that the Department of Defense have a Senate-confirmed undersecretary for policy as this role is the key policy adviser to Secretary Austin and provides vital strategic guidance in support of U.S. national security interests worldwide,” Singh said.
Edelman said that having a Senate-confirmed individual in the job would provide additional heft at a moment when the Pentagon is seeking to navigate tensions with Russia over the war in Ukraine and with China amid that country’s rapid military development, in addition to threats posed by North Korea and Iran.
Following Kahl’s departure this month, his onetime deputy, Sasha Baker, is serving in the role on an interim basis.
“The United States arguably is now facing perhaps the most complex set of national security challenges it’s ever faced,” Edelman said. “The idea that you would go for some long period of time without the third-ranking policy person in the Pentagon confirmed is, I think, highly irresponsible.”
(The Washington Post).
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In Ohio, Abortion Rights will be on November’s ballot.
Ohio Voters will decide on abortion access in November.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio voters will have the opportunity this fall to decide whether to guarantee access to abortion in the state, setting up a volatile fight rife with emotional messaging and competing factual claims.
State officials said Tuesday that a ballot measure to change the state constitution had enough signatures. It would establish “a fundamental right to reproductive freedom” with “reasonable limits.” In language similar to a constitutional amendment that Michigan voters approved last November, it would require restrictions imposed past a fetus’ viability outside the womb, which is typically around the 24th week of pregnancy and was the standard under Roe v. Wade, to be based on evidence of patient health and safety benefits.
“Every person deserves respect, dignity, and the right to make reproductive health care decisions, including those related to their own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion free from government interference,” Lauren Blauvelt and Dr. Lauren Beene, executive committee members for Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement.
Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose determined that Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights submitted nearly 496,000 valid signatures, more than the 413,446 needed to put the question before voters on Nov. 7. The coalition submitted more than 700,000 signatures in total.
It remains to be seen what percentage of the Ohio electorate needs to support the amendment for it to pass. That will depend on the outcome of an Aug. 8 special election called by Statehouse Republicans to determine whether to raise the threshold for passing future constitutional changes from a simple majority in place since 1912 to a 60% supermajority. AP VoteCast polling last year found 59% of Ohio voters say abortion should generally be legal.
The August ballot measure also would eliminate the 10-day curing period when citizen-led campaigns may submit additional signatures if they fall short the first time, and increase the number of counties where signatures must be collected from 44 to all 88. But those provisions would come too late to impact the abortion issue, which has already faced both legal and administrative hurdles to now be poised for a vote.
Abortion remains legal in the state up to 20 weeks’ gestation, under a judge’s orderissued in a lawsuit challenging a ban once cardiac activity can be detected, or around six weeks into pregnancy, which is before many women even know they are pregnant. The Republican attorney general has asked the Ohio Supreme Court to overturn the stay.
Ohio’s anti-abortion network has signaled it is ready to fight the November proposal, vowing a vehement and well-funded opposition campaign.
Opponents of the measure have advanced an argument that, because the amendment protects “individuals,” it has the potential to trump Ohio’s parental consent laws around abortion. The proposal’s authors reject that legal theory. Opponents have also suggested in advertisements that the measure would open the door to gender transitioning surgeries for all ages, matching national political messaging that experts deem misleading.
Amy Natoce, press secretary for Protect Ohio Women, the official opposition campaign, said the group will “continue to shine a light on the ACLU’s disastrous agenda until it is defeated in November.” The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio is on the November campaign’s executive committee and serves as part of Ohioans United For Reproductive Rights’ legal team.
“Ohioans are waking up to the dangers of the ACLU’s anti-parent amendment and they are terrified — and rightfully so,” she said in a statement.
The proposal joins others around the nation that have been motivated by last summer’s U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and the nationwide right to abortion it once protected, leaving abortion policy to individual states.
In the first statewide test following that decision, Kansas voters resoundingly protected abortion rights last August. In November, five other states — California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont — either enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions or rejected constitutional restrictions on the procedure. (Associated Press).
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You will get your packages.
Special delivery: UPS and Teamsters Union reach tentative agreement, averting strike.
After weeks of uncertainty, UPS and the Teamsters Union have successfully agreed on a 5-year labor contract. The move effectively defuses the threat of approximately 340,000 workers going on strike.
“Together we reached a win-win-win agreement on the issues that are important to Teamsters leadership, our employees and to UPS and our customers,” UPS CEO Carol Tomé wrote in a statement.
According to the Associated Press, this contract is the largest collective bargaining agreement ever negotiated with a private company in North America. If a strike had occurred this year, millions of people across the U.S. would’ve faced significant disruptions in package deliveries, and it would’ve cost the economy $7 billion.
Among other measures, the tentative agreement establishes a new minimum wage of $21 per hour for part-time UPS workers, with full-time workers receiving an average top rate of $49 per hour, according to the Teamsters.
It also incorporates safety and health protections to shield drivers from extreme heat conditions. By the beginning of 2024, all larger delivery vehicles, sprinter vans, and package cars purchased after January 1, 2024, must be equipped with air conditioning. Incidents of UPS drivers collapsing on the job in sweltering temperatures with no A/C have been the source of extensive media coverage in recent months.
“This contract sets a new standard in the labor movement and raises the bar for all workers,” The Teamsters Union General President Sean O’Brien said in a statement. The contract will now undergo a voting process for ratification, which runs from August 3 to August 22.
⭢ KnowThis
Another potential winner from this deal? President Joe Biden, who can now continue to tout his argument for “Bidenomics” on the 2024 campaign trail without significant disruption to the country’s package delivery systems. In a tweet today, Washington Post economics reporter Jeff Stein mentioned the UPS deal as one of several economic wins for Biden, along with cooling inflation and a strong labor market. (Now This. Know This).
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Israel. The fight against Netanyahu continues.
Israeli doctors walk off the job, more strikes may be looming after a law weakening courts passed.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Thousands of Israeli doctors walked off their jobs, labor leaders threatened a general strike and senior justices rushed home from a trip abroad on Tuesday, a day after the government’s approval of a law that weakens the country’s Supreme Court. Critics say the legislation will erode the system of checks and balances.
Four leading Israeli newspapers covered their front pages in black ink — an ominous image paid for by an alliance of high-tech companies. The only words on the pages were in a line at the bottom: “A black day for Israeli democracy.”
Monday’s vote — on the first of a series of measures that make up Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s divisive judicial overhaul — reverberated across the country. It came despite seven months of fierce popular resistance, Netanyahu’s promises of an eventual compromise and a rare warning against the overhaul from Israel’s closest ally, the United States.
The bill was unanimously passed by the governing coalition, which includes ultra-nationalist and ultra-religious parties, after the opposition stormed out of the house shouting “Shame!”
Opponents say they are not done fighting and civil rights groups submitted petitions to the Supreme Court, calling for the new law to be overturned. Protests again roiled the country’s streets.
“These protests are not going anywhere, especially because the government has clearly stated that this is just phase one,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. “This is the most widespread and significant democratic awakening in the history of the country. Clearly, it won’t end.”
Hundreds of thousands of people fanned out in Tel Aviv overnight, burning tires, setting off fireworks and waving Israeli flags. In Jerusalem, mounted police and water cannons spraying foul-smelling liquid cleared protesters from a main highway. At least 40 people were arrested by police in protests around the country.
Videos showed police officers dragging protesters by the hair and neck, beating people until they bled and violently pushing them back with batons. At least 10 officers were assaulted and injured, police said.
Israel is now hurtling into uncharted territory against the specter of further social and political unrest. Thousands of officers in the military reserves have announced they will no longer turn up for voluntary service — a blow that could undermine the country’s operational readiness. High-tech business leaders are considering relocation.
On Tuesday, Moody’s issued a report warning of “significant risk” if divisions within the country continue as Netanyahu’s government presses ahead with the overhaul, “with negative consequences for Israel’s economy and security situation.”
Netanyahu said the credit rating company’s assessment was “a momentary response, when the dust clears, it will be clear that the Israeli economy is very strong.”
The overhaul also threatens to strain ties with the Biden administration, jeopardize Israel’s new alliances with Arab states and deepen the conflict with the Palestinians, analysts say.
“I think this country is going to either split into two countries or be finished altogether,” said Yossi Nissimov, a protester in a tent city set up by demonstrators outside of the Knesset, or parliament, in Jerusalem.
The vote on the law came just hours after Netanyahu was released from the hospital, where he had a pacemaker implanted, adding another dizzying twist to an already dramatic series of events.
The Israeli Medical Association, which represents nearly all of the country’s doctors, said they would strike en masse Tuesday across the country, with only emergencies and critical care in operation.
The vast majority of physicians know they will not be able to fulfill their oath to patients under a regime that does not accept the role of reason,” said Hagai Levine, chairman of the Israeli Association of Public Health. He was referring to the law passed Monday, which prevents the Supreme Court from using the standard of “reasonableness” to strike down government decisions.
“This overhaul will damage the public health and the health care system in Israel,” Levine said, adding that already over 1,000 physician members have asked to be transferred abroad since the law passed.
Israel’s largest labor union, the Histadrut, which represents some 800,000 workers, said Tuesday that it would convene in the coming days to plan a nationwide general strike.
The chief justice of the Supreme Court, Esther Hayut, along with five other senior justices, cut short a trip to Germany in order to deal with the crisis, the court said. The justices were expected to land home on Tuesday night, a day earlier than expected, to discuss petitions against the overhaul.
But any move by the court to strike down Netanyahu’s new law could lead to a constitutional crisis and put the justices on an unprecedented collision course with the government.
Supporters of the judicial overhaul say the powers of unelected judges should be curbed to boost the powers of elected officials.
Opponents say it will undermine Israeli democracy and erode the country’s only check on majority rule in a system where the prime minister governs through a coalition in parliament — in effect giving him control over the executive and legislative branches of government.
As a result, the Supreme Court plays a critical oversight role. On Tuesday, for instance, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara appealed to the top court to scrap a law passed earlier this year that strips her of the power to remove the prime minister from office.
Netanyahu responded to the court, saying it shouldn’t intervene in the matter.
Protesters also fear that the overhaul is fueled by the personal grievances of Netanyahu, who is currently on trial on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
While protesters represent a wide cross section of society, they come largely from the country’s secular middle class. Netanyahu’s supporters tend to be poorer, more religious and live in West Bank settlements or outlying rural areas.
The judicial overhaul has laid bare Israel’s social and religious divisions, said Israeli historian Tom Segev.
“This is the beginning of a whole plan to change the basic values of society,” he said. (Associated Press)
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Times Square. The SAG-AFTRA Strike continues.
Bryan Cranston Tells Bob Iger ‘Our Jobs Will Not Be Taken Away’ by AI in Rousing Speech: You Will Not ‘Take Away Our Dignity.’
Bryan Cranston delivered a fiery speech at a SAG-AFTRA strike rally in Times Square on Tuesday, which included a message directed at Disney head Bob Iger.
“We’ve got a message for Mr. Iger,” Cranston said from the stage of the “Rock the City for a Fair Contract” rally. “I know, sir, that you look [at] things through a different lens. We don’t expect you to understand who we are. But we ask you to hear us, and beyond that to listen to us when we tell you we will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots. We will not have you take away our right to work and earn a decent living. And lastly, and most importantly, we will not allow you to take away our dignity! We are union through and through, all the way to the end!”
Cranston began his remarks by saying that there is one thing that all the guilds and the AMPTP fundamentally agree on: “Our industry has changed exponentially.”
“We are not in the same business model we were even 10 years ago,” he said. “And yet, even though they admit that is the truth in today’s economy, they are fighting us tooth and nail to stick to the same economic system that is outmoded, outdated! They want us to step back in time. We cannot and we will not do that.”
Bryan Cranston Has a Message for Bob Iger: We Won’t Have Our Jobs ‘Given to Robots' - YouTube
From the SAG-AFTRA Times Square Rally - July 25, 2023#sagaftra #strike #bryancranston #bobiger Subscribe to TheWrap's YouTube: https://bit.ly/TheWrapYTSubSub...
Cranston was one of a number of stars who took the stage to address a crowd of hundreds of SAG-AFTRA members and union supporters at the rally, with others including Steve Buscemi, Wendell Pierce, Christian Slater, Christine Baranski, Stephen Lang, and Titus Burgess. They were joined onstage by fellow actors Michael Shannon, BD Wong, Brendan Fraser, Jessica Chastain, Matt Bomer, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Corey Stoll, and more.
Burgess decided to forego a speech, instead singing a section of the song “Take Me to the World” from “Sondheim On Sondheim.”
Baranski told the crowd “We will not live under corporate feudalism” while also praising the background actors on shows like “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” saying that she attended the rally to speak for them and demand they get fair treatment under any new contract. Slater then spoke about how his father, a fellow SAG member, received support from the union after mental illness and later cancer left him unable to work.
Later on in the rally, “The Bear” star Liza Colón-Zayas told the audience that she has been a union member since 1994 and “struggled for 30 years to finally get here, only to find that my residuals have dwindled exponentially.” She then paraphrased Snoop Dogg by saying “We the artists, our gripe is that we deliver in high numbers, in major numbers. And yet, where the f— is my money?” (Variety)
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