Biden pledges to undo several Trump policies on first day in office

Senior policy analyst at the Independent Women's Voice Inez Stepman on the promises the president-elect has made.

Latest Stories

  • Congress is 'laughing' at Trump's 'bizarre, embarrassing' COVID-19 relief capitulation, Politico suggests

    President Trump complained for nearly a week about a "disgraceful" $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief and 2021 spending package Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin helped negotiate, "only to sign it and get nothing in return?" Politico's Playbook editors Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer marveled Monday morning. "Trump got taken to the cleaners."After this "bizarre, embarrassing episode," all Trump proved is that "he had no discernible strategy and no hand to play," Palmer and Sherman write. "He folded, and got nothing besides a few days of attention and chaos. ... Zip. Zero. Zilch." Trump issued a statement insisting he got promises out of Congress, they note, but "he'll never get the spending rescissions he's asking for — like, zero chance" — and his support for a vote on $2,000 stimulus checks will only "split the Republican Party on the way out the door.""This is probably the most fitting coda to Trump's presidency, and a neat encapsulation of his relationship with Congress," Palmer and Sherman argue. "He never cared to understand the place and was disengaged from its work. They'll be laughing — er, scratching their heads — at your genius about this one for a while, Mr. President."Palmer also noted the terrible optics of Trump sitting on relief checks, unemployment benefits, and rental aid from his golf resort in Palm Beach, while Vice President Mike Pence is on a skiing vacation in Vail, Colorado, and Mnuchin took a private jet down to his vacation home in a Mexican resort near Cabo.> I get it's the holidays ... but Trump being in Mar-a-Lago, Pence being in Vail & Mnuchin being in Mexico is such a dramatic split screen from the pain and suffering that so many Americans are feeling right now when it comes to just being able to afford food and housing.> > — Anna Palmer (@apalmerdc) December 28, 2020Maybe there's something fitting about that, too.More stories from theweek.com Congress signals it will mostly ignore Trump's post-signing demands on $2.3 trillion spending package New York Post bluntly tells Trump to 'stop the insanity' and end his 'undemocratic coup' attempt Researchers discover the platypus isn't the only mammal that glows fluorescent

  • A Cheerleader's Vulgar Message Prompts a First Amendment Showdown

    WASHINGTON -- It was a Saturday in the spring of 2017, and a ninth grade student in Pennsylvania was having a bad day. She had just learned that she had failed to make the varsity cheerleading squad and would remain on junior varsity.The student expressed her frustration on social media, sending a message on Snapchat to about 250 friends. The message included an image of the student and a friend with their middle fingers raised, along with text expressing a similar sentiment. Using a curse word four times, the student expressed her dissatisfaction with "school," "softball," "cheer" and "everything."Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesThough Snapchat messages are ephemeral by design, another student took a screenshot of this one and showed it to her mother, a coach. The school suspended the student from cheerleading for a year, saying the punishment was needed to "avoid chaos" and maintain a "teamlike environment."The student sued the school district, winning a sweeping victory in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Philadelphia. The court said the First Amendment did not allow public schools to punish students for speech outside school grounds.Next month, at its first private conference after the holiday break, the Supreme Court will consider whether to hear the case, Mahanoy Area School District v. BL, No. 20-255. The 3rd Circuit's ruling is in tension with decisions from several other courts, and such splits often invite Supreme Court review.In urging the justices to hear the case, the school district said administrators around the nation needed a definitive ruling from the Supreme Court on their power to discipline students for what they say away from school."The question presented recurs constantly and has become even more urgent as COVID-19 has forced schools to operate online," a brief for the school district said. "Only this court can resolve this threshold First Amendment question bedeviling the nation's nearly 100,000 public schools."Justin Driver, a law professor at Yale and author of "The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court and the Battle for the American Mind," agreed with the school district, to a point."It is difficult to exaggerate the stakes of this constitutional question," he said. But he added that schools had no business telling students what they could say when they were not in school."In the modern era, a tremendous percentage of minors' speech occurs off campus but online," he said. "Judicial decisions that permit schools to regulate off-campus speech that criticizes public schools are antithetical to the First Amendment. Such decisions empower schools to reach into any student's home and declare critical statements verboten, something that should deeply alarm all Americans."The key precedent is from a different era. In 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court allowed students to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War but said disruptive speech, at least on school grounds, could be punished.Making distinctions between what students say on campus and off was easier in 1969, before the rise of social media. These days, most courts have allowed public schools to discipline students for social media posts so long as they are linked to school activities and threaten to disrupt them.A divided three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit took a different approach, announcing that a categorical rule would seem to limit the ability of public schools to address many kinds of disturbing speech by students on social media, including racist threats and cyberbullying.In a concurring opinion, Judge Thomas L. Ambro wrote that he would have ruled for the student on narrower grounds. It would have been enough, he said, to say that her speech was protected by the First Amendment because it did not disrupt school activities. The majority was wrong, he said, to protect all off-campus speech.In a brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the school district's appeal, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association said the line the 3rd Circuit had drawn was too crude."Whether a disruptive or harmful tweet is sent from the school cafeteria or after the student has crossed the street on her walk home, it has the same impact," the brief said. "The 3rd Circuit's formalistic rule renders schools powerless whenever a hateful message is launched from off campus."The student, represented by lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Supreme Court that the First Amendment protected her "colorful expression of frustration, made in an ephemeral Snapchat on her personal social media, on a weekend, off campus, containing no threat or harassment or mention of her school, and that did not cause or threaten any disruption of her school."The brief focused on that last point, and it did not spend much time defending the 3rd Circuit's broader approach.The Supreme Court has a reputation for being protective of First Amendment rights. Chief Justice John Roberts, in an appearance at a law school last year, described himself as "probably the most aggressive defender of the First Amendment on the court now."But the court has been methodically cutting back on students' First Amendment rights since the Tinker decision in 1969. And in the court's last major decision on students' free speech, in 2007, Roberts wrote the majority opinion, siding with a principal who had suspended a student for displaying a banner that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."Driver said that suggested a blind spot."There is at least one major area where Chief Justice Roberts' defense of the First Amendment is notably lax: student speech," he said. "I fervently hope that Roberts will regain his fondness for the First Amendment when the court finally resolves this urgent question."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

  • Nashville bomber claimed to have cancer and began giving away his possessions shortly before attack

    The man responsible for the bomb attack which ripped through Nashville on Christmas Day had told acquaintances he had cancer and began giving away his possessions shortly before the attack, according to reports. Police on Sunday night named Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, as the man responsible for the bomb. Warner was killed in the blast and identified after police used DNA found on the scene to confirm his identity. It was matched with samples found on the motorhome which exploded injuring three people and damaging dozens of businesses. The vehicle was also registered to Warner. Warner, an unmarried IT specialist, had announced his retirement three weeks before the attack, his colleagues told the New York Times. The 63-year-old had also told an ex-girlfriend that he had cancer and given her his car, according to the newspaper. Records show that Warner had also signed away his home the day before Thanksgiving on November 26.

  • Azerbaijan reports attack on its troops in Nagorno-Karabakh

    Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said Monday its army units have been attacked by “an illegal Armenian armed group" in Nagorno-Karabakh, killing one Azerbaijani serviceman and wounding another. The statement comes just hours after the Armenian Defense Ministry denied media reports of fighting in the neighboring Hadrut region and said the ethnic Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh were “strictly observing” the cease-fire. Neither Armenian or Nagorno-Karabakh officials have so far commented on Azerbaijan's statement.

  • 15 of the Most Popular Products Purchased by Clever Readers in 2020

    Unsurprisingly, you invested in sleeping, cleaning, and organizingOriginally Appeared on Architectural Digest

  • British PM sold out fish in Brexit trade deal, fishermen say

    British fishermen said on Saturday that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had sold out fish stocks to the European Union with a Brexit trade deal that gives EU boats significant access to the United Kingdom's rich fishing waters. Some British politicians also said the deal added up to a sell-out. The United Kingdom will leave the EU's Common Fisheries Policy on Dec. 31, but under the trade deal agreed on Christmas Eve the current rules will remain largely in place during a 5-1/2-year transition period.

  • The Coming Global Backlash against China

    The following is an adapted excerpt from Helen Raleigh’s new book, Backlash: How China’s Aggression Has Backfired.The Chinese Communist Party’s leader, Xi Jinping, is the most powerful leader in Communist China since Chairman Mao. Yet, Xi’s outward strongman image is a veneer over his inner insecurity. When he came into power in late 2012, China’s economy had slowed down from double-digit growth to single-digit growth; the mass working-age population, which had been the engine of China’s economic growth, has begun to decline. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, projects that by 2030, “China will round out its thinning labor force by hiring workers from abroad.” At the same time, according to Mark Haas, a political-science professor at Duquesne University, “China alone in 2050 will have more than 329 million people over 65.” Consequently, China is expected to be the first major economy that will grow older before it achieves widespread prosperity.Without its demographic dividend and with an aging population, China’s economic growth will further slow down at the time when the government needs to keep its growing middle class from demanding a level of political freedom matching their newfound wealth. An aging population would also force the government to allocate more national resources for elder care and social services, which means there will be fewer resources to compete against the U.S. This is probably one of the most important reasons why Xi feels that he has to abandon the so-called strategic-patience guidance issued by Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader of China from 1978 to 1997, who instructed his comrades to bide their time and avoid any confrontation with powerful external forces until China was in a much stronger position both economically and militarily.Xi, however, believes that China can’t afford to bide its time any longer. It must replace the liberal world order with a Sino-centric world order before China’s population becomes too old and the Chinese economy becomes too stagnant. However, rather than furthering economic reform and opening up more sectors to foreign investment and competition to strengthen its economy, Xi chose to hide China’s weaknesses and exaggerate China’s economic strengths. He emphasizes self-reliance and utilizing China’s resources to pump up “national champions,” or state-owned enterprises that could compete against global leaders in strategic sectors. Xi feels that nationalism is his new trump card, something he can use to motivate, excite, and unite a billion people all the while strengthening the CCP’s rule over them. Others say that his inward-looking nationalist policies are leading China to the very middle-income trap -- in which China’s level of development stalls out before reaching the heights of other modern industrial nations -- that Xi and his predecessors tried very hard to avoid.Yet the more the Chinese economy slows down, the more Xi feels the need to project a strongman image both abroad and, especially, at home. As Wang Gungwu and Zheng Yongnian, two Chinese scholars, wrote in China and the New International Order, this dynamic has deep roots in Chinese history: “China’s internal order was so closely related to her international order that one could not long survive without the other; when the barbarians were not submissive abroad, rebels might more easily arise within. Most dynasties collapsed under the twin blows of inside disorder and outside calamity, nei luan wai huang, that is, domestic rebellion and foreign invasion.”Xi is keenly aware that he is vulnerable to internal rebellion. He has purged more than 1.5 million government officials, military leaders, and party elites. His trade war with the U.S. is deeply unpopular inside China because it has caused economic pains such as rising unemployment, closing of factories, and the shifting of the global supply chain out of China. Xi knows very well that if he shows any signs of weakness, he may end up like his political rival, Bo Xilai -- a princeling who is currently languishing in a notorious Chinese prison for high-level party officials.In addition, Xi saw former U.S. President Obama as a “weak” leader who led a nation that was on its way to inevitable decline, which opened up an unprecedented opportunity for China. Xi also has certain milestones he wants to reach: In 2021, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, and in 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of Communist China. Xi wants to do something big to cement his place in history when he reaches these milestones. Therefore, in his mind, the era of hiding strength and biding time is over. He wants to show the world a new set of policies, actions, and attitudes that match China’s powerful status.For a while, Xi was succeeding. Internally, he ruthlessly cracked down on religious believers, political dissenters, party officials, and business elites. He also built a mass surveillance state that turned the dystopian nightmare imagined by George Orwell’s 1984 into a reality. Internationally, he imposed his strong will on businesses and nations big and small through his signature project “One Belt and One Road.” The way Xi sees it, the more other countries become economically dependent on China, the more he can dominate them peacefully without having to use force. One commentator has observed that Xi “resembles a clenched fist. At home, he is clenching hard to assert his control. To the outside world, he is a hard-thrusting force determined to get his way.” Xi’s fist has conditioned many nations including the Western democracies to believe that China is stronger than it actually is and that China’s global dominance is inevitable. Therefore, few are willing to challenge China’s human-rights violations at home and its assertive behavior abroad.But even the most powerful emperor can fly too close to the sun. The dissenting voices inside China are getting louder, while global backlash against China reached new heights in 2019. Then the 2020 coronavirus outbreak stripped the facade of Xi’s powerful image, revealed deep flaws within the CCP’s dictatorial political system, caused immense anger and frustration among Chinese people, brought serious detriments to China’s prestigious international image, and brought China’s seemingly unstoppable rise to a halt. As the prominent Hong Kong entrepreneur Jimmy Lai has written, “The more Mr. Xi pursues his authoritarian agenda, the more distrust he will sow at home and abroad. Far from transforming Beijing into the world’s leading superpower, his policies will instead keep China from taking its rightful place of honor in a peaceful, modern and integrated world.” Xi has misread the situation, overplayed his hand, and his aggressive policies at home and abroad have backfired, proving the saying: Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

  • Man charged in Illinois bowling alley shooting that killed 3

    A U.S. serviceman has been charged in a shooting at an Illinois bowling alley that left three people dead and three wounded, authorities said on Sunday.

  • Doctor uses autoinjector, stems his allergic reaction to vaccine

    A physician with a severe shellfish allergy felt symptoms after his shot and was allowed to self-administer epinephrine, Boston Medical Center says.

  • Saudi women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul sentenced to five and a half years in prison

    A prominent Saudi Arabian activist who campaigned for the right to drive was sentenced to nearly six years in jail today, despite international criticism of her trial and claims she had been tortured. Loujain al-Hathloul, 31, was arrested with a dozen other women’s rights campaigners in 2018, even as the Gulf kingdom lifted the ban on women driving and pledged to relax patriarchal male guardianship laws. A judge in a Saudi terrorism court in Riyadh on Monday sentenced her to five years and eight months on charges related to her activism, including seeking to change the Saudi political system conspiring with foreign governments and harming national security. The judge insisted that she had confessed to the allegations and rejected Ms Hathloul’s claims that she was tortured with water-boarding, electric shocks and had been threatened with rape after her arrest. She spent eight months in solitary confinement last year and in October went on hunger strike in protest at her treatment. However, the court suspended two years and 10 months of her sentence, which Ms Hathloul’s sister Lina said could see her released early next year, due to time already spent behind bars.

  • After naming bombing suspect, focus turns to motive

    With federal officials having identified the man believed to be behind Nashville's Christmas Day bombing, authorities now turn to the monumental task of piecing together the motive behind the explosion that severely damaged dozens of downtown buildings and injured three people. While officials on Sunday named Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, as the man behind the mysterious explosion in which he was killed, the motive has remained elusive. “These answers won't come quickly and will still require a lot of our team's efforts," FBI Special Agent Doug Korneski said at a Sunday news conference.

  • India's Punjab looking into whether protesting farmers sabotaged telecom infrastructure

    Authorities in India's northern state of Punjab are investigating whether protesting farmers were disrupting power supply to hundreds of telecom towers, a state official said on Monday, amid protests over new farm laws. "We have told the police to track all those involved in sabotaging the infrastructure," a senior official in the Punjab state government told Reuters on condition of anonymity. A senior Punjab state police official said the power supply was disrupted to several telecom towers in the state, mainly ones owned by Jio, the telecommunications arm of Reliance Industries.

  • Trump reportedly wants to 'inflict as much pain on Congress as possible'

    President Trump still hasn't signed the $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief and omnibus spending bill passed last week, and the clock is ticking. Indeed, it's looking more likely that he'll veto it, or simply sit on it, unless lawmakers find a way to increase direct stimulus payments and cut some other items, like foreign aid, out of the package before a potential government shut down on Tuesday.While Trump may genuinely want more significant individual payments, he's faced criticism for waiting until after a bipartisan agreement was reached to make his opinion clear, surprising Congress and his own negotiating team led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in the process. One source briefed by White House officials on the matter told The Washington Post that Trump — who has been frustrated by his election loss and the fallout from the coronavirus during his final year in office — is "just angry at everybody and wants to inflict as much pain on Congress as possible."Even Mnuchin, one of the few Cabinet members to make it all four years with Trump, seems to be on the outs with his boss. Mnuchin was excited about the agreement and believed the president would sign it, the Post reports, and he was reportedly blindsided by Trump posting a video last week in which he bashed the deal and its $600 checks."Loyalty and assistance to President Trump generally gets rewarded with humiliation," Brian Reidl, a conservative policy expert at right-leaning think tank the Manhattan Institute, told the Post. Read more at The Washington Post.More stories from theweek.com Congress signals it will mostly ignore Trump's post-signing demands on $2.3 trillion spending package New York Post bluntly tells Trump to 'stop the insanity' and end his 'undemocratic coup' attempt Researchers discover the platypus isn't the only mammal that glows fluorescent

  • Florida coronavirus death toll: Latest Covid-19 figures

    State’s Trump-supporting governor refused to introduce mask mandate

  • China lowers age of criminal responsibility to 12 after high-profile offences committed by children

    China has lowered the age of criminal responsibility for murder and some other serious crimes from 14 to 12 after some high-profile killings by children. The change means that children aged between 12 and 14 who commit crimes such as intentional homicide, or intentional injury that leads to death or severe disability, will now be held criminally liable. Before, they were exempt from criminal punishment, but could be ordered to undergo correctional education. Currently, the age of criminal liability in China is 16, but teenagers aged 14 to 16 can be charged and punished as criminals for serious crimes including intentional homicide, rape and robbery. The issue of whether to lower the criminal age of responsibility came to the fore after a case last year in which a 13-year-old boy confessed to police that he had killed a 10-year-old girl. State media reported that the girl failed to return home from a painting class one Sunday afternoon. The girl’s father said that the boy had tricked the girl into entering his home, sexually assaulted her, stabbed her to death and then dumped her body on the side of a road. Following the killing in Dalian city in northeastern China, the boy was sent to a juvenile rehabilitation centre for three years. There was public outrage over what was perceived to be his lenient treatment. In another case, a 13-year-old boy was allegedly beaten to death in August in Shaanxi province by six juveniles, including one who was under the age of 14, according to reports last month. The youngest has been placed under the supervision of a guardian, while the other five have been arrested on suspicion of intentional injury causing death. Authorities have previously announced an increase in the number of juvenile cases being handled by prosecutors. Last year, there was a 5 per cent increase year-on-year in the number of prosecutions of juveniles, with the most common crimes being theft, robbery, intentional injury, affray, creating disturbances and rape, according to a white paper released by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate in June.

  • Pope formally strips Vatican secretariat of state of assets

    Pope Francis has formally stripped the Vatican secretariat of state of its financial assets and real estate holdings following its bungled management of hundreds of millions of euros in donations and investments that are now the subject of a corruption investigation. Francis signed a new law over the weekend ordering the secretariat of state to complete the transfer of all its holdings to another Vatican office by Feb. 4. The law also calls for all donations to the pope — the Peter’s Pence collections from the faithful as well as other donations that had been managed by the secretariat of state — to be held and managed by the Vatican’s treasury office as separate funds that are accounted for in the Holy See’s consolidated budget.

  • Ex-minister dies of COVID as Japan closes to foreigners

    A 53-year-old former Japanese minister has died of COVID-19, his party said on Monday, becoming the first incumbent lawmaker to succumb to the disease in a nation scrambling to shut its doors to foreign travellers. Yuichiro Hata, who was transport minister in 2012 and is the son of former Prime Minister Tsutomu Hatawho, died on Sunday, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan said. Japan on Monday started banning non-resident foreign nationals from entering following the detection of a new, highly infectious coronavirus variant linked to a rapid rise in infections in Britain.

  • Trump signs COVID-19 relief bill, calls on Congress to remove 'wasteful items'

    President Trump on Sunday signed into law the $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill and $1.4 trillion omnibus spending legislation that were packaged together and passed with bipartisan, bicameral support in Congress last week.It was unclear whether Trump would sign the package before a looming government shutdown on Tuesday. He had expressed his displeasure with the relief bill primarily because it included just $600 stimulus checks rather than the $2,000 he preferred, but he had also complained about elements of the spending bill like foreign aid. In his statement announcing the signing, Trump called for Congress to remove what he described as "wasteful items." He added that the House will vote on $2,000 checks Monday, while the Senate will begin the process of setting up a vote on the issue.> BREAKING: President Trump has signed the coronavirus relief/government spending bill, restoring benefits and averting a government shutdown. pic.twitter.com/sVPR6liHkV> > — Sara Cook (@saraecook) December 28, 2020The president's opposition appeared to blindside lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, as well his own negotiating team led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and it looked like he might veto the bill, or simply sit on it, but after reportedly changing his mind repeatedly over the last few days he relented.Democratic and some Republican lawmakers agreed the direct payments should be heftier, but many still criticized Trump for holding off, since it put other measures like enhanced unemployment benefits and eviction moratoriums in jeopardy. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for example, said Sunday that Trump should quickly approve the bill and let Congress work on increasing the individual payments separately this week. Read more at The Associated Press and The Washington Post.More stories from theweek.com Congress signals it will mostly ignore Trump's post-signing demands on $2.3 trillion spending package New York Post bluntly tells Trump to 'stop the insanity' and end his 'undemocratic coup' attempt Researchers discover the platypus isn't the only mammal that glows fluorescent

  • FBI investigating whether man linked to Nashville bombing was paranoid about 5G networks

    Steve Fridrich said he was asked by FBI agents whether Anthony Warner ever mentioned being concerned about 5G networks

  • Three cases of 'UK variant' of coronavirus detected in South Korea

    Three cases of a particularly infectious coronavirus variant that recently emerged in Britain have been confirmed in South Korea, health authorities said on Monday. The three individuals are members of a London-based family who arrived in the country on December 22, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency. They have been placed in isolation since testing positive for Covid-19 on arrival, the KDCA statement said. The new strain of the virus emerged earlier this month in Britain and has already reached several European countries, as well as Canada, Jordan and Japan. The new strain, which experts fear is more contagious, prompted more than 50 countries to impose travel restrictions on Britain. South Korea was among them and has barred flights from Britain until the end of the year. South Korean authorities are also looking into the case of an elderly South Korean man who posthumously tested positive for Covid-19 after returning from Britain earlier this month. The announcement came as a third wave of the virus grips the country, with a resurgence centred on the greater Seoul area seeing daily cases climb to over 1,000 several times this month despite stricter distancing measures.