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It’s true that inflation has eroded the purchasing power of wages, but new estimates indicate that despite this, real income has gone up for most adults.
Oh, and while the spread of omicron may cause a bad month or two for jobs, rapidly falling cases in New York and elsewhere suggest that the good economic news will resume soon.
Yet consumer sentiment has plunged: Americans’ assessments of the economy are worse now, on average, than they were in the early months of the pandemic recession. Why?
Regular readers know that I’ve been speculating about this issue for some time, wondering in particular why people say that the economy is bad even when they’re fairly upbeat about their personal finances. At this point, however, I think I’m closing in on an answer.
Poor assessments of the economy, I’d now argue, mainly reflect two things. First is a long-standing issue: People react more negatively to inflation than textbook economics would have predicted. Second is extreme partisanship, fed by right-wing media.
About inflation: Consider two imaginary economies. In one, the typical family’s income rises 2% a year, but consumer prices are rising at the same rate. In the other, inflation is running at 6%, but family incomes are rising 7% a year. Which economy is better?
Economists would, I’m pretty sure, overwhelmingly vote for Economy No. 2, in which real incomes are going up. But the public might disagree: People are bothered by inflation, even when their own incomes are more than keeping up. Maybe that’s because inflation conveys a sense that things are out of control.
Whatever the psychology involved, inflation aversion is simply a fact of life. It was a Democratic economist, Arthur Okun, who first suggested evaluating the economic situation using the “misery index,” the sum of unemployment and inflation. As an economic concept, this index doesn’t make much sense: The costs of unemployment are huge and real, while the costs of inflation are subtle and surprisingly elusive. But the misery index works pretty well as a predictor of economic sentiment.
And since U.S. inflation has risen a lot over the past year, it’s not surprising that economic sentiment has declined despite falling unemployment.
But my analysis of the data says that economic sentiment is considerably worse than you’d expect even given inflation; the Times’ Nate Cohn, using a more elaborate model, finds the same thing. What’s that about?
The dispiriting persistence of COVID is one possible answer. But let’s not ignore the elephant — and I do mean elephant — in the room: extreme right-wing partisanship.
These days, partisanship shapes almost everything in America. For example, you can’t talk sensibly about lagging rates of COVID vaccination without acknowledging that Republicans are four times as likely as Democrats to be unvaccinated. And the partisan gap in perceptions of the economy has exploded in recent years.
Let’s not bothsides this. Yes, Democrats may have been reluctant to acknowledge good economic news under Donald Trump. But right-wing negativity right now is absurd, with Republicans assessing the current economy as worse than the economy in June 1980, when unemployment was almost twice as high and the inflation rate was 14%. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this craziness might explain a large part of the shortfall in consumer sentiment.
But where’s the craziness coming from? Even mainstream media have accentuated the negative; one liberal think tank analysis found that CNN and MSNBC devoted 50% more screen time in November to inflation than to all other economic developments combined.
But Fox News has devoted almost three times as much screen time to inflation as CNN over the past two years, while, among other things, illustrating its reports with photos of empty shelves taken in other countries and other years. No wonder the GOP base says that the economy is in terrible shape.
What does this say about the future, in particular the political future? If and when inflation comes down, as forecasters, the bond market and even consumers expect it to do eventually, overall consumer sentiment should start to reflect the economy’s real strength. But as we’ve seen, a substantial part of the electorate has economic perceptions quite far from reality; even if things improve, they probably won’t hear about the good news or will be regaled with other negative stories.
So Democrats will need more than an improving economy to survive the midterms. They’ll need to get receptive voters to perceive that improvement and then get enough of those voters to the polls to match the sizable minority determined to believe that Joe Biden’s America is a Mad Max-type wasteland.
ALSO SEE: An Ex-Officer in Breonna Taylor's Shooting Is Going to Trial.
To Some Activists, 'It Means Nothing.'
Police identified the man on Thursday as 22-year-old Amir Locke.
Public information documents released Thursday evening confirm that Officer Mark Hanneman fatally shot him Wednesday morning, CBS Minneapolis reports, adding that police said a loaded handgun was recovered at the scene.
The Minneapolis Police Department said in a statement Wednesday that Locke pointed a loaded gun "in the direction of officers." An incident report said he had two wounds in the chest and one in the right wrist.
The body camera video shows the footage at slow speed and then at regular speed. It shows an officer using a key to unlock the door and enter, followed by at least four officers in uniform and protective vests, time-stamped at about 6:48 a.m. As they enter, they repeatedly shout, "Police, search warrant!" They also shout "Hands!" and "Get on the ground!" The video shows an officer kicking a sectional sofa, and Locke beginning to emerge from under a blanket, holding a pistol. Three shots are heard, and the video ends.
The city also included a still from the video showing Locke holding the gun, his trigger finger laid aside the barrel. The top of Locke's head is barely visible.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and prominent community activist whom the mayor appointed last year as co-chair on a community safety work group, said Locke's family told her Locke was a licensed gun owner with a concealed carry permit, that he didn't live in the apartment, that police had not been looking for him and that he wasn't one of three suspects named in the warrant.
Interim Chief Amelia Huffman said the city had both knock and no-knock warrants.
She said in a news conference after the video was released that Locke isn't named in the warrants. She said it isn't clear how or whether Locke is connected to the homicide investigation, which she said is under the control of the St. Paul Police Department. That agency has released few details so far and the warrants weren't publicly available Thursday.
Mayor Jacob Frey said the video "raises about as many questions as it does answers" and said the city was pursuing answers "as quickly as possible and in transparent fashion" through investigations including one by the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
CBS News has reached out to the Minneapolis Police Department for comment.
Huffman said at the news conference that Hanneman was in a difficult position.
"The still shot shows the image of the firearm in the subject's hands, at the best possible moment when the lighting was fully on him. That's the moment when the officer had to make a split-second decision to assess the circumstances and to determine whether he felt like there was an articulable threat, that the threat was of imminent harm, great bodily harm or death, and that he needed to take action right then to protect himself and his partners," she said.
Hanneman was hired in 2015. Records released by the city showed three complaints, all closed without discipline, but gave no details. Data on the website of the citizen group Communities United Against Police Brutality showed a fourth complaint, in 2018, that remains open. No details were given.
Levy Armstrong posted a link to the video on social media "for those who can stomach the murderous conduct of the Minneapolis Police Department." She added: "The mother in me is furious and sick to my stomach. Amir never had a chance to survive that encounter with police."
She and other activists angrily confronted the mayor and interim chief at their news conference, with Levy Armstrong calling the city's release of information "the anatomy of a cover-up." Another activist blasted the pair for a news release Wednesday that referred to Locke as a "suspect."
Locke's mother, Karen Locke, declined to comment to The Associated Press earlier Thursday, referring questions to the family's attorney, Ben Crump.
The civil rights lawyer has won huge settlements for the families of several people killed by police, including $27 million for the family of George Floyd. Crump and the family, who were shown the video before it was publicly released, planned a news conference Friday.
In a statement, Crump compared Locke's shooting to the botched raid in which officers killed Breonna Taylor in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2020, which led to calls for change nationwide.
"Like the case of Breonna Taylor, the tragic killing of Amir Locke shows a pattern of no-knock warrants having deadly consequences for Black Americans. This is yet another example of why we need to put an end to these kinds of search warrants so that one day, Black Americans will be able to sleep safely in their beds at night," Crump said.
Huffman said the city had both knock and no-knock warrants.
Several state lawmakers from Minneapolis had joined Levy Armstrong and others in calling for body camera footage to be made public. In a letter to Huffman and Frey, they insisted that "one path to establishing trust between the police department and the community is greater transparency and accountability of police actions."
The city released some reports and photographs of the gun recovered from the scene on its website Wednesday.
Minneapolis city leaders and law enforcement officials typically withhold police body camera and dashboard camera videos for weeks or even months, citing ongoing investigations as justification.
But not always.
In December 2020, after an officer shot Dolal Idd at a gas station on Minneapolis' south side, the city released video the next day, saying it showed that the man had fired at officers first. And last April, police in suburban Brooklyn Center released video the day after the shooting of Daunte Wright, saying it showed that Officer Kim Potter apparently intended to use her Taser but drew her gun by accident. Potter was convicted of manslaughter in December.
"It's absolutely staggering," said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, which has tracked the number of COVID-19 deaths during the pandemic. "It's unreal, frankly. And what makes it an even ... greater heartbreak — as if the loss of 900,000 souls weren't enough of a heartbreak — is the fact that it's probably an undercount of the number of people that we've lost."
University of Texas at Austin professor and epidemiologist Lauren Ancel Meyers said the "horrible milestone" didn't have to happen.
"It was not inevitable. There are things that we could have done and should have done ... to protect those who were most vulnerable," she said. "It's a very sad day."
President Joe Biden marked the "tragic milestone," recognizing the "emotional, physical and psychological weight of this pandemic" and urged Americans to do their part.
I urge all Americans: get vaccinated, get your kids vaccinated, and get your booster shot if you are eligible," Biden said in a statement. "It's free, easy, and effective — and it can save your life, and the lives of those you love."
Daily deaths remain high even as overall case numbers dip
The rolling seven-day average for daily COVID-19 deaths has been above 2,000 since Jan. 23, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's nearly three times higher than in November, when the agency was reporting a seven-day average of 700 daily deaths.
Vaccines are preventing most severe disease and death
As COVID-19 vaccines have become widely available for Americans, the number of those who have received at least one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine continues to increase.
However, the percentage of fully vaccinated Americans is still relatively low at approximately 64%. Amid the most recent surge of the now dominant omicron variant, unvaccinated people were 97 times more likely to die compared with those who were boosted, according to data cited this week by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.
Public health experts note that broader vaccination and boosting would have reduced the number of deaths. "We would have at least 300,000 fewer deaths. Probably more ... than that," if the early pace of vaccination had been sustained, said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. "But at least 300,000 Americans who have perished would still be with us. It's tragic."
According to the latest CDC data, 42% of eligible Americans have received a booster.
Facing backlash for her comments on the Holocaust, Whoopi Goldberg said her interpretation of race is skin deep, and as a Black person, her perspective of racism is different, leading to a misrepresentation of her intentions.
“It upset a lot of people, which was never ever, ever my intention,” Goldberg said during an interview on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” late Monday. “I feel, being Black when we talk about race, it’s a very different thing to me. So I said I thought the Holocaust wasn’t about race.”
Goldberg made the comments on “The View” in response to a Tennessee school district vote to remove a book about the Holocaust from shelves because of “inappropriate language” and nudity.
“The View” co-host Ana Navarro argued that the Holocaust was “about white supremacists going after Jews.”
However, Goldberg did not back down, adding that Nazis and Jews are “two white groups of people.”
“The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other,” Goldberg said Monday. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Black or white, Jews. It’s each other.”
Several Jewish organizations slammed Goldberg’s comments on Twitter and accused the TV host of minimizing their suffering.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted: “No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – who they deemed to be an inferior race. They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous. #ENOUGH.”
Greenblatt also suggested that a Jewish co-host be added to the show’s cast.
Goldberg issued an apology with a statement on Twitter Monday night.
“I stand corrected. I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.”
Goldberg told Colbert in the interview, which aired later that night, that she didn’t intend to upset anyone. As a Black person, Goldberg said she thought race is “something” that can be seen, and she never considered Jews a race but instead an ethnic group. Colbert agreed that racism in America tends to be centered around skin color.
According to Britannica, the modern meaning of the term “race” is based on the categorization of people “primarily by their physical differences.” Britannica said in the United States, the term “generally refers to a group of people who have in common some visible physical traits, such as skin color, hair texture, facial features, and eye formation.”
Goldberg said she is upset that people misunderstood her, and she has been labeled anti-Semitic and a Holocaust denier when she was making a point about skin color.
The actress said the issue the Nazis had was with ethnicity. She said Nazis were white and most of the people they targeted were white people.
“When you talk about being a racist, you can’t call this racism. This was evil. This wasn’t based on skin,” she told Colbert “You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. You had to delve deeply and figure it out.”
When the [Ku Klux] Klan is coming down the street, and I’m standing with a Jewish friend — I’m going to run. But if my friend decides not to run, they’ll get passed by most times because you can’t tell most times. … That’s what I was trying to explain,” Goldberg also said. “I understand not everybody sees it that way, and I did a lot of harm to myself and people decided I was all these other things that I’m not. I get it, folks are angry, I accept that, and I did it to myself, and I’ll work hard to not think that way again.”
The Daily Beast reported some of the other co-hosts are “furious” over ABC’s decision to suspend Goldberg. Navarro defended Goldberg in an interview with the Daily Beast on Tuesday.
“I love Whoopi Goldberg. I love ‘The View,’” Navarro said on Tuesday evening. “This was an incredibly unfortunate incident. Whoopi is a lifelong ally to the Jewish community. She is not an antisemite. Period. I am sad. And I have nothing else to say.”
There are only a few places on the planet where polar bears can be found in large numbers. One of them is Russia’s Wrangel Island, a nature reserve under Unesco protection that is often called a polar bear maternity ward. The place is very inaccessible, which may be bad for tourists but is great for the animals.
Polar bears living in an abandoned weather station in Kolyuchin, in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug of the Russian Federation
Preparations for the expedition to Wrangel took nearly two years, and last August we finally set off for the north of Chukotka on a small ice-class sailing yacht. We proceeded about 2,000km (1,200 miles) along the coast, stopping in deserted bays and photographing grey and humpback whales. We met an incredible number of different birds, several brown bears, sea lions and seals. We went scuba diving in the waters of the Chukchi Sea, which turned out to be full of life. I felt as if I was in a parallel universe. Days and weeks passed. Landscapes changed dozens of times: sunny pebble beaches, steep cliffs, mountains and tundra. Finally, after passing Cape Dezhnev and heading for Wrangel Island, we began to encounter floating sea ice, which was unusual for the time of year. It had been assumed that the ice edge would be much farther north.
One day, bad weather was expected and the captain approached a small island, Kolyuchin, to take shelter from the storm. Kolyuchin is known for the polar weather station that operated on it in Soviet times. Though the station was closed in 1992, the abandoned village still stands on the island.
The stormy wind and rain and the neglected buildings on the rocky shores all served to make everything happening seem surreal. Suddenly we noticed movement in the windows of the houses.
Someone took out some binoculars and we saw the heads of polar bears. Fog, a place long deserted by people, polar bears – it was the perfect setting.
The bears walked around the houses and among barrels left on the island a long time ago. There were about 20 animals in sight at the same time, mostly males. The females kept to the side with their cubs, closer to the shores of the island. Barrels are a well-known problem in the Russian Arctic. Back in the days of the USSR, fuel was delivered to the station in them, but it was very expensive to take the barrels back, so they were simply discarded.
It was too dangerous to land on the island that day, so I took pictures from a drone equipped with special low-noise propellers. I also used certain tricks of the trade that allowed me to shoot the animals without disturbing them. After a while, the bears practically ignored the unusual buzzing.
Later I asked one of Russia’s top polar bear experts, Anatoly Kochnev, what causes the animals’ behaviour – why do they love to sit in the buildings? The biologist, who worked in Chukotka and on the island of Kolyuchin for many years, told me that, first of all, polar bears are very curious by nature, so they always attempt to get through any unlocked window or door. And secondly, unfortunately, these animals were traditionally hunted, and so they use these houses as a form of protection from humans.
But then he told me something even more interesting. It turns out that bears very rarely appear on the island in such numbers. No one knows why, but once every nine years the floating ice remains near the shore in summer. Consequently, the bears do not travel far to the north with the ice, as usual, and take up residence in the abandoned polar station. We saw proof of this later on when we met almost no bears on Wrangel Island to the north.
Though several months have passed since the expedition, I still sometimes see polar bears in decaying windows before my eyes when falling asleep. And looking at the main photo in my life at the moment, the one named House of Bears, I think that sooner or later all human-made things on Earth will cease to exist – buildings, cars and computers will all meet their end. But life is eternal. These bears will continue to hunt, swim among ice floes and explore islands even when civilization ceases to exist. But life will remain eternal only if we humans finally begin to take care of the planet and the living creatures that need our protection.
Four journalists were killed in January, highlighting a dangerous culture of impunity in the country, rights groups say.
On January 31, three armed men reportedly shot Robert Toledo, a videographer for Monitor Michoacan, as he prepared to film an interview west of Mexico City.
Days earlier, reporter Lourdes Maldonado Lopez was shot dead in Tijuana – the same city where freelance photographer Margarito Martinez, who documented crime scenes, was fatally shot on January 17.
And earlier last month, Jose Luis Gamboa Arenas, director of the news site Inforegio in Veracruz, a notoriously violent and corrupt region, died from stab wounds.
Two more journalists in Mexico had close calls in January: One reporter was shot at and escaped, and another was wounded in a knife attack, according to Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“We’ve seen what’s very likely the most violent month in terms of violence against journalists in a decade,” Hootsen told Al Jazeera.
And media freedom groups warn the violence shows no sign of abating: “Every year, it’s getting worse and worse,” Paula Maria Saucedo Ruiz of Article 19, a group that defends freedom of expression, told Al Jazeera.
No consequences
While there is little data on the history of violence against journalists before the 1980s, Hootsen said, the current trend can be traced back to 2006, when the Mexican government declared war on organised crime and deployed the military. This led to an explosion in violence across the country, including against journalists who dared to report on the conflict.
With organised criminal groups fighting each other and the Mexican state, the country’s justice system has eroded, while corruption has proliferated at the local and state levels, resulting in near-total impunity.
About 99 percent of crimes against journalists are not prosecuted, Ruiz said, “Anyone can decide, ‘I’m just going to silence this journalist, because there are not going to be consequences.’”
Hootsen visited Tijuana last week after Martinez and Lopez were killed. He called the city “the murder capital of Mexico”, as it now averages about five homicides a day.
According to a GoFundMe set up by Martinez’s colleagues on behalf of his wife and teenage daughter, he knew the risks, but still continued to cover the rising violence in the border city.
Criminal groups are at war across Tijuana, willing to go to extreme lengths to defend their interests, while the local government is unwilling or unable to act, Hootsen said: “It creates an extremely dangerous, toxic environment for journalists to work.”
Manuel Ayala, a freelance journalist who covers missing persons, human trafficking, migration and organised crime in Tijuana, says he is careful who he talks to, as sources can also be informants for criminal organisations. After publishing, he keeps a low profile.
While no one has directly threatened him on the job, Ayala has heard warnings. In one case, a local police patrol recorded his personal information and told him to stay away from a certain area, he said; another time, a source suggested he stop investigating a trafficking story.
“Our bosses do not protect us. We protect ourselves,” Ayala told Al Jazeera in Spanish over WhatsApp, noting that Tijuana journalists are in constant communication about where they are going and whether there’s a risk.
In this tight-knit community, Ayala and Martinez were friends: “Since I arrived in Tijuana, he always welcomed me. I saw him as an older brother, because he used to guide me on the dynamics of the city, on how to make things easier for me when doing my job. Margarito used to do that a lot with everyone.”
Security ‘woefully insufficient’
About 500 journalists are enrolled in a federal mechanism to protect journalists, with protections ranging from home surveillance systems to bodyguards. Similar programmes exist in some states, but members of the media are highly sceptical of their efficacy.
Of the four journalists killed in January, only Lopez was enrolled for protection, Hootsen said.
“The security she received from the Baja California authorities was woefully insufficient,” he said.
While Martinez was in the process of being enrolled in the federal scheme, at the time of his death he had no protection, Hootsen added.
Days before she was killed, Lopez called out state corruption, dedicated her broadcast to Martinez, and said she was under state protection.
“They take good care of you, but no one can avoid – not even under police supervision – getting killed outside your house in a cowardly manner,” she said, according to a report from the AP news agency.
Ayala, who is not enrolled in a protection mechanism, said journalists do not trust the state apparatus, “There are many flaws and it needs to be improved.”
Such systems are reactive instead of preventive, Ruiz said, noting that in order to get protection, a journalist must have experienced a direct threat or attack.
The mechanisms are also under-resourced, she added.
While Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador regularly berates journalists, he told a news conference after Lopez’s killing, “We are obliged to investigate this crime and prevent the murders of journalists and citizens from continuing.”
Yet, despite coming to power on promises of peace, Obrador has shown no inclination towards solving the problem, Hootsen said, while Mexican states have “an almost unreal indifference” to the plight of their own citizens.
While it is hard to find hope, Ruiz and Hootsen say they are encouraged by the solidarity among Mexican journalists, who held demonstrations across 65 cities in response to the deaths of their colleagues.
Ruiz also pointed to groups of reporters collaborating across borders to reveal corruption in Mexico. By co-publishing, local journalists face less risk of being singled out.
Every significant change in human rights in Mexico is a direct result of activists, academics and journalists speaking out and placing pressure on authorities, Hootsen said, “That’s where I get my optimism from.”
The 100-acre nature preserve in Mission, Texas has been in an ongoing legal battle with the former Trump administration and non-profit We Build a Wall in order to prevent wall construction on its doorstep, as HuffPost reported. Because of this, it has been targeted by right-wing groups that have falsely accused the center of being involved in human trafficking.
“The safety of our staff and visitors is our primary concern,” North American Butterfly Association president and founder Dr. Jeffrey Glassberg said in a statement announcing the closure. “We look forward to reopening, soon, when the authorities and professionals who are helping us navigate this situation give us the green light.”
The center’s current plight began in 2017, when it sued the Trump administration over its proposed border wall, according to HuffPost. The center argued that wall construction would destroy habitat for birds and butterflies and cut off migration routes for low-flying species. It also said that the Trump administration began cutting down trees on center property without permission, according to NPR. If the wall were completed, it would divide the property and threaten endangered species.
The center later sued We Build the Wall, a nonprofit that supports border wall construction, saying it had defamed the center, leading to “targeted harassment,” according to HuffPost.
This harrassment already prompted the center to shut down from January 28 to January 30 of this year because of “credible threats” connected to the Pro-Trump We Stand America event that weekend, as the center said in an earlier statement.
Before the event, Virginia congressional candidate Kimberly Lowe attempted to film the Rio Grande to find proof of illegal border crossings, as My RGV News reported. She attempted to access the river via a private road on National Butterfly Center property. When center executive director Marianna Treviño Wright asked her to leave, an altercation took place during which Lowe allegedly assaulted Treviño Wright. Lowe denied Treviño Wright’s account, but video and audio recordings support the latter’s version of events.
The center said that Lowe also attempted to run over Treviño Wright’s son when leaving the property. Treviño Wright was then advised by a former state official to be either out of town or armed for the duration of the We Stand America event, prompting the center’s decision to close.
“We still cannot believe we are at the center of this maelstrom of malevolence rising in the United States,” the center wrote in its statement.
Most center employees are hourly workers, and they were paid both during the three-day closure and now during the indefinite closure.
“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may cause to members and visitors, many of whom plan trips months in advance, to experience this truly exceptional place,” Treviño Wright said in the most recent statement.
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