Saturday, February 29, 2020

In Trump’s Words: Praise for the Taliban and Optimism About the Coronavirus


By BY THE NEW YORK TIMES from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/39fGV5e

Joe Biden Wins Decisive Victory in South Carolina


By BY AINARA TIEFENTHÄLER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/38hgWtb

A delegate math silver lining for Sanders.


By BY NICK CORASANITI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3cmd7WM

Steyer drops out: ‘I honestly don’t see a path.’


By BY STEPHANIE SAUL from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/39bpK53

Buttigieg, in Raleigh, reacts to fourth-place finish.


By BY REID J. EPSTEIN from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2I9RZVE

Tom Steyer Drops Out of 2020 Presidential Race


By BY STEPHANIE SAUL AND MATT STEVENS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2Tp7Rc8

Biden declares victory and swipes at Sanders.


By BY KATIE GLUECK from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3cmcEUk

Warren, speaking in Houston, picks up an endorsement and looks to Super Tuesday.


By BY MICHAEL HARDY from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2wfeiGQ

Sanders congratulates Biden, and looks ahead.


By BY SYDNEY EMBER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2TbCl2l

For Buttigieg, a Search for Black Support That Never Arrived


By BY REID J. EPSTEIN AND TRIP GABRIEL from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2T8UTjV

Joe Biden Has Less Than 72 Hours to Savor His Big Night


By BY MATT FLEGENHEIMER AND KATIE GLUECK from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/32EfgbL

Mother and Daughter Attacked for Speaking Spanish, Prosecutor Says


By BY MICHAEL LEVENSON from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2vqEVbG

Trump Moves to Calm Fears as First U.S. Death From Coronavirus Is Reported


By BY MICHAEL CROWLEY, MIKE BAKER AND NICHOLAS BOGEL-BURROUGHS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/38cDQ4P

This is how a race is called the moment polls close.


By BY REID J. EPSTEIN from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/38bjHfp

Clyburn says the Biden campaign needs ‘retooling.’


By BY THOMAS KAPLAN AND KATIE GLUECK from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2Tuf4rg

The Islanders Are Saying Goodbye to Brooklyn


By BY ALLAN KREDA from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/399PJK8

At CPAC, Trump Takes Aim at Rivals


By BY ANNIE KARNI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2wkvvhX

Biden Wins in South Carolina, Adding New Life to His Candidacy


By BY JONATHAN MARTIN AND ALEXANDER BURNS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2I7NCdQ

Joe Biden wins South Carolina primary with overwhelming support.


By BY NICK CORASANITI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2I5QPKK

After 12 hours, the polls in South Carolina have closed.


By BY LISA LERER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/388KTeQ

A crowd waits for Warren in Houston: ‘I just love her energy.’


By BY MICHAEL HARDY from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/32ER890

Looking to Super Tuesday, Buttigieg campaigns in Nashville.


By BY DANIEL JACKSON from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/32FTaWd

F.D.A. Expands Coronavirus Testing in the United States


By BY KNVUL SHEIKH from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3ascSYz

Friday, February 28, 2020

New top story from Time: How The Invisible Man Based Its Gaslighting Thriller on Real-Life Stories of Abuse



It’s hard to believe that the newest version of The Invisible Man, in theaters Feb. 28, hasn’t been made before. The first adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel premiered in 1933, during the heyday of Universal Studios’ monster movie boom, and the Invisible Man stood as a scary specter alongside Frankenstein and Dracula. The very R-rated Paul Verhoeven version starring Kevin Bacon, Hollow Man (2000), similarly framed the titular Invisible Man as the protagonist.

But writer-director Leigh Whannell’s new movie turns the camera, for the first time, on the Invisible Man’s victim. It’s such an obvious setup for a great thriller — the Invisible Man wreaking havoc on his victim’s life as a metaphor for gaslighting and abuse — but perhaps one the male-dominated film industry wasn’t ready to take on before the #MeToo era.

We meet Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) on the night she decides to flee her abusive tech tycoon boyfriends’ fortress-like mansion. We learn later that he has manipulated her, isolated her, physically abused her and — it’s later strongly insinuated — repeatedly raped her. After the soon-to-be Invisible Man (his name is Adrian Griffin, a nod to the Griffin of Wells’ novel) fakes his own death and dons a suit that renders him invisible (he made his millions in the field of optics, convenient for a sociopathic stalker), he deploys the same methods to try to bring Cecilia under his control again. Invisibility suit aside, these aren’t the arbitrary actions of a fictional madman but rather very real strategies that abusers use to control their victims, ones that Whannell incorporated into the script after conducting interviews on the topic of domestic abuse with experts and with women in his life.

Whannell was well aware that he needed to tell this story from a woman’s point of view, one which he’d need to seek outside of his own life experience. He interviewed two domestic violence counselors at Peace Over Violence, a domestic violence prevention center headquartered in Los Angeles. “In one story, a woman’s partner put a lock on the fridge to control when she could eat,” he says. “Only he had the combination to the lock. I was so shocked by that. It started to dovetail neatly into this character I was creating.”

He then spoke with female friends about their experiences with sexism and finally enlisted Moss to sit down with him over the course of several three-to-four-hour sessions and review the script with him. “He fully recognized that there was a female perspective that needed to be listened to, and I could help in providing that,” Moss says. “That’s of course exactly what he should have done, but not every director creates that open space.”

Whannell was shocked when the women in his life all separately shared the same anecdote of walking to their cars with their keys between their fingers, to use as a weapon if needed. It’s a common practice for women, and its revelation to Whannell serves as a reminder that while men can make excellent films about the topic of domestic abuse (last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary Minding the Gap is perhaps the gold standard), men who tell women’s stories must commit to listening to women in order to adequately capture the female experience.

Recent depictions of domestic abuse have faced criticism: Big Little Lies portrayed a husband (Alexander Skårsgard) beating his wife (Nicole Kidman) as a sort of sexual kink — until it wasn’t — and the casual brutality in Margot Robbie’s Tonya Harding movie I, Tonya felt jarring in the context of an otherwise comical film. Filmmakers often feel the need to maximize the drama of violence rather than trust the audience to understand that it existed and caused significant damage.

In The Invisible Man, Whannell has restraint enough not to show this physical abuse onscreen, focusing instead on the psychological consequences it has on its protagonist, Elisabeth Moss’ Cecilia, after she leaves her relationship. “In movies and TV shows, we’ve seen physical violence depicted many times before,” says Whannell. “But I felt I had not seen the emotional abuse and manipulation as much.”

Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss, back to camera) and Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in "The Invisible Man," written and directed by Leigh Whannell.
Mark Rogers/Universal Pictures. Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) and Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in “The Invisible Man,” written and directed by Leigh Whannell.

Those emotional abuses at the center of Invisible Man may be harder to render in cinema, but they are equally as real. The film finds ways to illustrate this manipulation, beginning with the titular abuser driving Cecilia’s friends and family away. Isolating someone from their social network — whether physically or emotionally — is a way to keep the abused person from fleeing the relationship. And, according to the counselors with whom Whannell spoke, without a support network victims tend to blame themselves for their situation. “They emphasized to me how the most important part of their jobs is to tell people they’re not alone, and that it’s not their fault,” he says.

Cecilia’s ex also tries to leverage the promise of millions left to her in his will (much of which Cecilia promised use to pay for a friend’s education) into yet another means of control. Some 99% of all domestic abuse cases involve financial abuse, which includes restricting a woman’s daily spending, stealing money from her, preventing financial account access and sabotaging employment and education opportunities, according to the Purple Purse, a foundation dedicated to empowering women financially to escape abusive homes. It’s the top reason women stay in abusive relationships and why they return even if they’ve left. Such financial manipulation can block a victim from leaving her abuser or leave her homeless, jobless or unable to pay her bills if she does manage to escape, according to a study by Angela Littwin, who conducted the first major study on what she calls “coerced debt” in 2011.

Finally, the Invisible Man threatens to sabotage Cecilia’s reproductive choices in an attempt to have a baby and effectively tether them together forever. Abusers routinely use children in order to manipulate their partners and force them to stay in the relationship. A 2007 study out of Michigan State University, the first of its kind, found 88% of women who had faced domestic abuse reported their assailant using custody battles over children to keep in touch with their victims, interrogating children about their mothers’ whereabouts in order to stalk or manipulate them or even using visitation with the children in order to continue the physical and emotional abuse of the mother. The victims surveyed said that the fathers of their children often threatened to harm or abduct the offspring in order to coerce the mother, who tended to prioritized the children’s safety over her own, into doing their bidding.

As her ex taunts her, Cecilia begs her family and friends to believe that he is still alive. Nobody believes her, a resonant notion in the #MeToo era when claims of abuse are still dismissed as “he said, she said” cases. If you can’t see it, the logic goes, then it must not be real.

“Even as women, we can be quick to judge and go, ‘Why is she staying?’” says Moss. “‘If he’s hitting her or emotionally abusing her or the relationship is toxic, why doesn’t she get out?’ And as the victim, that makes you feel like you can’t talk about it, like you don’t have a safe place to go.”

Ultimately, the movie cannot resist transitioning into a revenge fantasy, which, while emotionally satisfying, is not true to life. Cecilia’s initial escape from her abuser signals the exceptionalism of this story. As is often the case with Hollywood depictions of domestic violence, the victim is a privileged white woman with the economic means to leave her abuser, an unrealistic outcome for most women who find themselves in a similar position.

The movie also builds to an inevitable physical confrontation between Cecilia and her husband, as these kinds of films so often do (think: Jennifer Lopez’s Enough or Julia Roberts’ Sleeping With the Enemy). But confronting one’s abuser often puts women’s lives in danger. Abusive relationships can be life-or-death: 2017 saw 2,237 homicides by intimate partners, according to the New York Times, a 19% increase since 2014. And as a recent headline-making case proved, women can also suffer legal consequences for defending themselves.

Art may be the one realm where we can conjure stories of vengeance and justice that simply do not exist in the real world. “It’s interesting doing these interviews with the [conviction of Harvey] Weinstein in the news this week,” says Moss. “You just hope that offers something, some closure, to the victims. But you can’t make it go away.”

When an Epidemic Looms, Gagging Scientists Is a Terrible Idea


By BY DONALD G. MCNEIL JR. from NYT Health https://ift.tt/2I21y9h

When an Epidemic Looms, Gagging Scientists Is a Terrible Idea


By BY DONALD G. MCNEIL JR. from NYT Health https://ift.tt/2I21y9h

Joe Biden says if he wins S.C., ‘I think I’m going to be the next nominee.’


By BY KATIE GLUECK from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2VvN616

Making Pitch to Voters, Bloomberg Peddles His Experience in a Crisis


By BY JEREMY W. PETERS AND MAGGIE HABERMAN from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/32Hvz7J

Closer to Home. But Maybe Not Close Enough.


By BY RAÚL VILCHIS from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/3aclzpA

Warren supporter in S.C. says: ‘I can hear me in that speech.’


By BY JOHN JETER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2PzXzET

Coronavirus Fears Reverberate Across Global Economy


By BY MICHAEL CORKERY from NYT Business https://ift.tt/2TmJ4FL

M.I.T. Researchers Cast Doubt on Bolivian Election Fraud


By BY JULIE TURKEWITZ from NYT World https://ift.tt/2PtFgkT

L.G.B.T.Q. group seeks apology following report of Bloomberg staffer’s remark.


By BY MATT STEVENS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2wdV18Q

At CPAC, It’s Now an All-Trump Show


By BY ANNIE KARNI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2uFQ5cr

New top story from Time: Take Two: Trump Re-Nominates Rep. Ratcliffe as Top Intelligence Official



(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Friday picked Rep. John Ratcliffe again to be the nation’s top intelligence official, just months after abruptly ending an earlier effort to install him in the post amid bipartisan criticism that the Texas Republican was unqualified for the job.

Trump’s decision meant that once again the GOP-led Senate would have to decide whether to put the three-term lawmaker in charge of overseeing the 17 U.S. spy agencies that Trump has repeatedly scorned.

Trump initially named Ratcliffe last year, but in August withdrew his name before the Senate formally considered him. The president bowed to questions about Ratcliffe’s qualifications and bipartisan concerns that he had little experience in the field of intelligence.

Read more: Top GOP Senator Warned the White House About Trump’s Choice for National Intelligence Director

Since then, Ratcliffe’s visibility has risen as an ardent defender of Trump during the House’s impeachment proceedings against him. “John is an outstanding man of great talent!” Trump said in announcing his choice in a tweet.

If confirmed by the Senate, Ratcliffe would replace Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist who is currently serving as acting national intelligence director while keeping his title as U.S. ambassador to Germany.

Trump’s choice drew swift criticism from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Replacing one highly partisan operative with another does nothing to keep our country safe,” Schumer said in a statement. “At a time when the Russians are interfering in our elections, we need a nonpartisan leader at the helm of the Intelligence Community who sees the world objectively and speaks truth to power.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has been in upheaval since Dan Coats, who had a fraught relationship with Trump, announced in July 2019 that he was stepping down. Sue Gordon, the principal deputy national intelligence director under Coats, left with him. Democrats accused Trump of pushing out two senior, dedicated intelligence professionals.

After withdrawing Ratcliffe’s name, Trump in August named Joseph Maguire, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, as acting national intelligence director. But earlier this month, Trump moved Maguire aside — before his tenure as acting director was set to expire on March 11 — and named Grenell as acting director.

Trump’s decision to bring in Grenell came amid controversy over a classified briefing on election security that intelligence officials gave members of the House intelligence committee.

That panel is chaired by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who led the House impeachment inquiry against Trump. There were conflicting accounts about what the U.S. election security officials told committee members during the closed-door briefing about Russian meddling in this year’s presidential election.

People familiar with the congressional briefing said election security officials indicated that the Kremlin was looking to help Trump win re-election, as it did in 2016. But a senior official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said lawmakers were not told that Russia was actively aiding Trump’s campaign to boost his chances of a second term. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive information.

When asked if Maguire was moved out as part of an effort to purge administration officials seen as disloyal to Trump, the president said only that Maguire’s tenure as acting director was ending. He called Maguire an “excellent guy” and said he chose Grenell to replace him as acting director until he can announce a new nominee for the job.

Grenell said he would hold the post for just a few months until Trump nominated a replacement for Maguire. If Ratcliffe is not confirmed by the Senate, it’s possible that Grenell could serve in the post for a while.

Ratcliffe, who sits on the House intelligence, judiciary and ethics committees, is a fierce defender of the president. He was a member of Trump’s impeachment advisory team and strenuously questioned witnesses during the House impeachment hearings.

He also forcefully questioned former special counsel Robert Mueller when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

After the Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Trump, Ratcliffe said: “This is the thinnest, fastest and weakest impeachment our country has ever seen. … When voters go to the polls next November, I hope they’ll hold Democrats accountable for wasting countless hours and taxpayer dollars on this disgraceful impeachment hoax that was designed to control the outcome of the 2020 election.”

Before being elected to Congress in 2014, Ratcliffe was mayor of Health, Texas, and a U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Texas. Ratcliffe is the son of two school teachers and the youngest of six children. He attended the University of Notre Dame and earned a law degree from Southern Methodist University. He and his wife, Michele, have two daughters.

Klobuchar kicks off a Southern swing without South Carolina.


By BY NICK CORASANITI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/38djaJH

Amid Protests, Roman Polanski Wins Best Director at France’s Oscars


By BY ALEX MARSHALL from NYT Movies https://ift.tt/2uIxWuw

Photo: Bernie Sanders high fives tiny supporter.


By Unknown Author from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2VDbXQu

Why Bernie Scares Me


By BY BRET STEPHENS from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/399yGrj

Gerald Krone, a Negro Ensemble Company Founder, Dies at 86


By BY NEIL GENZLINGER from NYT Theater https://ift.tt/3aeeJjh

Who Will Care For Society’s Forgotten?


By BY THERESA BROWN AND LEAH NASH from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/2weKSc1

Joe Biden Needs a Win in South Carolina. Will He Get It?


By BY NU WEXLER from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/2weKQAV

We Don’t Really Know How Many People Have Coronavirus


By BY ELISABETH ROSENTHAL from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/2Tcnghj

Tom Steyer showered South Carolina in political spending. Will it pay off?


By BY STEPHANIE SAUL AND KIM BARKER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2TcmYHf

Celine: Fall 2020


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New top story from Time: Second Case of Coronavirus Confirmed in Northern California



(VACAVILLE, Calif.) — Health officials on Friday confirmed another case of the novel coronavirus in Northern California, raising the tally a day after health officials revealed the first case in the U.S. believed to have been transmitted to a person who didn’t travel internationally or come in close contact with anyone who had it.

Santa Clara County Public Health Department spokesman Maury Kendall said the person is isolated at home and that other details would be provided later Friday.

A day earlier, state health officials had pegged the number of people in California with the virus at 33 after investigators announced that a woman hospitalized in Sacramento contracted it.

Residents of the community where the woman first went to the hospital, in Vacaville, are at the epicenter of what officials are calling a turning point in the spread of the highly contagious coronavirus.

Read more: The Trump Administration’s Many Vacancies Could Complicate its Coronavirus Response

As infectious disease experts fanned out in Vacaville, some residents in the city of 100,000 stocked up on supplies amid fears things could get worse despite official reassurances, while others took the news in stride.

Vacaville lies between San Francisco and Sacramento in Solano County, in the agricultural central valley and near California’s famous wine region.

It is about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from Travis Air Force Base, which has been used as a virus quarantine location. Public health officials said they can find no connection between the infected woman and passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship who were evacuated to the base when the ship was docked in Japan.

The case of the infected woman marks an escalation of the worldwide outbreak in the U.S. because it means the virus could spread beyond the reach of preventative measures like quarantines, though state health officials said that was inevitable and that the risk of widespread transmission remains low.

Solano County Public Health Officer Dr. Bela Matyas said public health officials have identified dozens of people — but less than 100 — who had close contact with the woman. They are quarantined in their homes and a few who have shown symptoms are in isolation, Matyas said.

Officials are not too worried, for now, about casual contact, because federal officials think the coronavirus is spread only through “close contact, being within six feet of somebody for what they’re calling a prolonged period of time,” said Dr. James Watt, interim state epidemiologist at the California Department of Public Health.

The virus can cause fever, coughing, wheezing and pneumonia. Health officials think it spreads mainly from droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes, similar to how the flu spreads.

Read more: Will Warmer Weather Stop the Spread of the Coronavirus? Don’t Count on It, Say Experts

Several Vacaville residents said they will try to avoid crowded places for now, while taking other routine and recommended precautions like frequent and thorough hand-washing. But others plan to do more.

“I’m definitely going to wear my mask and gloves at work, because I’m a server,” said bowling alley worker Denise Arriaga, who said she doesn’t care if she’s criticized for the extra precautions. “At the end of the day, it’s my life,” she said.

The case raised questions about how quickly public health officials are moving to diagnose and treat new cases. State and federal health officials disagreed about when doctors first requested the woman be tested.

Doctors at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento said they asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to test the woman for the virus on Feb. 19. But they said the CDC did not approve the testing until Sunday “since the patient did not fit the existing CDC criteria” for the virus, according to a memo posted to the hospital’s website.

The woman first sought treatment at NorthBay VacaValley Hospital in Vacaville, before her condition worsened and she was transferred to the medical center.

CDC spokesman Richard Quartarone said a preliminary review of agency records indicates the agency did not know about the woman until Sunday, the same day she was first tested.

That’s the kind of confusion that concerns McKinsey Paz, who works at a private security firm in Vacaville. The company has already stockpiled 450 face masks and is scrambling for more “since they’re hard to come by.” The company’s owner bought enough cleaning and disinfectant supplies to both scrub down the office and send home with employees.

But they appeared to be at the extreme for preparations.

Virus Outbreak California
Don Thompson—APEugenia Kendall wears a mask outside of the Vacaville City Hall while standing with her husband Ivan on Feb. 27, 2020, in Vacaville, Calif. Eugenia Kendall says she wears a mask because her immune system has been weakened from the chemotherapy she receives for ovarian cancer. Ivan Kendall says the they are not paranoid, just being practical.

Eugenia Kendall was wearing a face mask, but in fear of anything including the common cold. Her immune system is impaired because she is undergoing chemotherapy, and she has long been taking such precautions.

“We’re not paranoid. We’re just trying to be practical,” said her husband of 31 years, Ivan Kendall. “We wipe the shopping carts if they have them, and when I get back in the car I wipe my hands — and just hope for the best.”

Read more: How to Manage Your Anxiety About Coronavirus

In their investigation of the movements of the hospitalized woman, officials were trying to figure out how she got it and who else she may have unwittingly infected.

They are interviewing immediate family members and expanding their net to include more distant family members who may have been in contact, social gatherings like church that the patient may have attended and any possible time spent at work or events like a concert.

Besides the woman, all the 59 other cases in the U.S. have been for people who traveled abroad or had close contact with others who traveled.

Earlier U.S. cases included 14 in people who returned from outbreak areas in China, or their spouses; three people who were evacuated from the central China city of Wuhan; and 42 American passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship.

The global count of those sickened by the virus hovered Friday around 83,000 and caused more than 2,800 deaths, most of them in China.

Thursday, February 27, 2020

New top story from Time: Federal Workers Were Sent to Help U.S. Coronavirus Evacuees Without Proper Protection, Whistleblower Says



ºWASHINGTON) — A government whistleblower has filed a complaint alleging that some federal workers did not have the necessary protective gear or training when they were deployed to help Americans evacuated from China during the coronavirus outbreak.

The complaint deals with Health and Human Services Department employees sent to Travis and March Air Force bases in California to assist the quarantined evacuees. The Office of Special Counsel, a federal agency that investigates personnel issues, confirmed Thursday it has received the unnamed whistleblower’s complaint and has opened a case.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., said the whistleblower recently contacted his office, also alleging retaliation by higher-ups for having flagged safety issues.

“My concern from the moment I heard it is that individuals at HHS are not taking the complaints of HHS employees seriously,” Gomez said in an interview. “Their superiors are not supposed to brush them off. By retaliating against people if they do call out a problem, that only discourages other people from ever reporting violations.”

Gomez’s office said the complaint was filed by a high-ranking official at the Administration for Children and Families, an HHS social service agency.

The whistleblower was among a team of about a dozen employees from the agency who had been deployed to help connect the evacuees with government assistance that they might qualify for to ease their return. The team was there from mid-January until earlier this month.

Although team members had gloves at times and at other times masks, they lacked full protective gear and received no training on how to protect themselves in a viral hot zone, according to a description provided by the congressional office. They had no respirators. While helping the evacuees, team members noticed that workers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were in full gear to protect them from getting sick.

Gomez’s office said the high-ranking whistleblower complained to superiors and was given the choice of being reassigned or being fired.

Gomez said as far as he knows none of the workers from the agency has become infected with the virus.

Without referring directly to the complaint, Gomez questioned HHS Secretary Alex Azar about the situation during a congressional hearing Thursday.

“Were any of these ACF employees exposed to high-risk evacuees?” asked Gomez, adding it was his understanding that “it was kind of chaotic on the ground” when the team was sent to California.

Azar responded that he was not aware of any violation of protective practices. “Urgency does not compensate for violating isolation and quarantine protocols,” he said.

“I’d want to know the full facts and would take appropriate remedial measures,” Azar added. If one of the HHS workers had become infected, that person could then have unwittingly infected others, Gomez said.

Ari Wilkenfeld, a lawyer representing the unidentified whistleblower, said in a statement: “This matter concerns HHS’ response to the coronavirus, and its failure to protect its employees and potentially the public. The retaliatory efforts to intimidate and silence our client must be opposed.”

HHS did not respond to requests for comment.

The whistleblower complaint was first reported by The Washington Post.

___

Associated Press writer Carole Feldman contributed to this report.

Klobuchar notes the possibility of brokered convention.


By BY NICK CORASANITI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3a5XaBY