U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday he thinks the spread of a new coronavirus in the United States is avoidable and expressed confidence his administration is ready to respond.“I don’t think it’s inevitable,” he told reporters at the White House. “It probably will. It possibly will. It could be at a very small level or could be at a larger level. Whatever happens, we’re totally prepared.”He added that “the risk to the American people remains very low.”Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies before a House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee hearing on oversight of the coronavirus outbreak, Feb. 26, 2020.Dr. Anthony Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at the White House news conference that while work to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus is ongoing, the process of testing to make sure it works and is safe will take months to a year to complete. That means a vaccine could be effective if there is another outbreak in a year, but for this one, Fauci said public health measures are the way to contain it.Dr. Anne Schuchat, the principle deputy director of the CDC, said containment efforts have thus far been working in the United States, but that the agency expects more cases and that it is a good time for the American public to prepare.“The coronavirus that we’re talking about is a respiratory virus. It’s spread in a similar way to the common cold or to influenza. It’s spread through coughs and sneezes, so those everyday, sensible measures that we tell people to do with the flu are important here: covering your cough, staying home when you’re sick and washing your hands,” she said.Trump lauded his administration’s decision to restrict entry to non-U.S. citizens traveling from China as a measure that has helped keep U.S. exposure low. When asked if he would do the same for Italy and South Korea, two of the hardest-hit areas outside of China, Trump said he may take that step but that now is not the right time.The president has asked Congress for $2.5 billion to meet the coronavirus challenge. Earlier Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proposed $8.5 billion for the effort after criticizing Trump’s request as too little, too late to meet the challenge.President Donald Trump listens as Vice President Mike Pence speaks during a news conference about coronavirus in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Feb. 26, 2020, in Washington.Trump named Vice President Mike Pence as the so-called coronavirus czar. Pence will lead a task force of federal and private health experts, saying the American people can be confident the government has their health and safety as a top priority.“In recent days, the White House met with over 40 state, county and city health officials from over 30 states and territories to discuss how to respond to this, to the potential threat of the coronavirus,” Pence said. “We’ll be working with them in renewed ways to make sure they have the resources to be able to respond.”The choice of Pence to lead the response was met with criticism by Democrats and others who pointed to Pence’s time as the governor of Indiana in 2015. The state faced a surge in cases of HIV, and state law at the time prohibited needle exchanges, a policy that health experts said exacerbated the outbreak. Pence, who opposed the exchanges, eventually signed a new law allowing them in some cases.
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U.S. authorities on Wednesday arrested five figures linked to the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, variously accusing them of conspiring to intimidate journalists and harass churches and a cabinet official with whom they disagreed. John Denton of Montgomery, Texas, a former leader of the group, was charged with making a series of phony bomb threats in the mid-Atlantic state of Virginia, including one a year ago believed to have targeted former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Authorities said Atomwaffen has been trying to incite a race war in the U.S., often targeting journalists whose stories have exposed the group’s activities. A federal prosecutor in the western state of Washington, Brian Moran, said four other suspects who were arrested “sought to spread fear and terror with threats delivered to the doorstep of those who are critical of their activities.” The four suspects, all in their early 20s, were identified as Cameron Brandon Shea of Redmond, Washington; Kaleb Cole of Montgomery, Texas; Taylor Ashley Parker-Dipeppe of Spring Hill, Florida; and Johnny Roman Garza of Queen Creek, Arizona. The Justice Department accused the four of conspiring through an encrypted online chat group to identify journalists and others they wanted to intimidate, focusing primarily on those who were Jewish or journalists of color. 
 
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Politics in the mid-Atlantic Coast state of Virginia have turned toward moderate Democrats in recent years after years of conservative Republican dominance. But how its Super Tuesday Democratic presidential primary will play out is at best a guessing game. Virginia is one of 14 U.S. states voting in Democratic presidential nominating contests March 3, when a third of all delegates to July’s national convention will be picked in one day of balloting. Virginia, with 99 pledged delegates at stake, has the fourth-biggest haul of national delegates up for grabs after California with 415, Texas with 228 and North Carolina with 110. Ultimately, Democrats will pick a nominee to oppose Republican President Donald Trump in November’s national election. The extent of Virginia’s influence in selecting that nominee remains to be seen. Monmouth pollA mid-February poll by Monmouth University showed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Vice President Joe Biden locked in a tight race at the top in Virginia, with ex-South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts further back. But the survey was taken before Bloomberg’s first national debate recently, in which the billionaire stumbled against other challengers after spending more than $400 million of his own money on national television ads to introduce himself to the American electorate. And it was before Sanders decisively won the Nevada caucuses last Saturday, with Biden a distant second. FILE – Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders addresses airline food workers and representatives from UNITE HERE during a rally for better wages and health insurance coverage at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Va., July 23, 2019.Edge to SandersThe fivethirtyeight.com polling analysis site on Wednesday showed Sanders with an edge in Virginia over Bloomberg, with Biden running third. Fivethirtyeight election analyst Geoffrey Skelley said, “It would be crazy to say who is going to win.” He predicted that Sanders, Bloomberg and Biden would split most of the pledged Virginia delegates. “Virginia is something of a microcosm” of the U.S., where Sanders has won pluralities in the first three nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, not majorities, Skelley said. In Virginia, as in the contests in all states in the Democratic nominating process, the national convention delegates will be apportioned according to the candidates’ proportional share of the March 3 vote, not winner take all. Kyle Kondik, an analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, also said the Virginia vote could lead to a split of its national delegates, not a decisive win for any of the Democrats. “It’s probably pretty close,” Kondik said. “Virginia seems competitive to me, which helps Sanders if he just prevents another candidate from dominating. That would help him, because his chances are better elsewhere” in the Super Tuesday voting for the large haul of national convention delegates, especially in California with its large number of pledged delegates at stake. The northern part of Virginia, just outside Washington where thousands of highly educated federal workers live and in recent years have decisively voted for Democrats, played a key role in giving the party control this year of the Virginia Legislature after decades of Republican dominance. Areas of support for SandersBut Kondik said Northern Virginia may not be Sanders territory, with his appeal in the state more likely in downstate working-class communities or university towns with college-age voters. Kondik suggested that the vote-rich suburbs outside Washington could split their ballots among several of the challengers to Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist who has become the clear front-runner in national polls of Democrats to oppose Trump. FILE – Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden takes selfies with supporters at a “Get out the Vote” event in Sterling, Va., Nov. 3, 2019.Biden, long popular among African American voters, could benefit from the fact that 20% or more of the Virginia electorate is black. In Virginia, Bloomberg, just as in other Super Tuesday states, has opened his checkbook to create a presence for his candidacy. He has hired 80 paid staffers to promote his candidacy in Virginia and has opened seven field offices, far more than the other candidates. But Bloomberg’s standing in the state and nationally is somewhat unknown after his faltering first debate and a more forceful second debate performance this week in South Carolina, which votes Saturday, three days ahead of Super Tuesday. Status unknown”If Bloomberg was hurt by the [first] debate, we don’t know that yet,” Kondik said.  “It’s possible he’s in a fall we don’t know yet.” State Democratic Party Chairwoman Susan Swecker, who has not endorsed any of the presidential challengers, called the primary outcome “fluid in Virginia. The Democratic voters are smart and taking their time to consider” the candidates. “It’s continuing to evolve.” But she said she was sure of state Democratic voters’ most important consideration: beating Donald Trump. “We have to get him out of office,” she said. 
 
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Antebellum Southern plantations were built on the backs of enslaved people, and many of those plantations hold places of honor on the National Register of Historic Places — but don’t look for many mentions of slavery in the government’s official record of places with historic significance.The register’s written entries on the plantations tend to say almost nothing about the enslaved people who picked the cotton and tobacco or cut the sugar cane that paid for ornate homes that today serve as wedding venues, bed-and-breakfast inns, tourist attractions and private homes — some of which tout their inclusion on the National Register like a gold star.The National Register of Historic Places lists more than 95,000 sites that are important to the story of the United States. From some of the most famous places — such as George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate — to scores of lesser-known plantation homes in the rural South, register entries often ignore the topic of slavery or mention it only in passing, an Associated Press review found.FILE – The home of the first U.S. president, George Washington, in Mount Vernon, Va., April 23, 2018.Experts blame a generational lack of concern for the stories of black people and, in many cases, a shortage of records. While some narratives have been updated to include information about enslavement, such changes aren’t mandatory.The National Register’s entry for Mount Vernon, approved in 1977, doesn’t use the word “slave,” although more than 300 enslaved black people worked the first president’s fields, cooked his food and cleaned the house where tourists now roam.The entry for Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop home, Monticello, notes that the third president owned as many as 200 slaves. Yet it generally avoids discussing them or the details of their ownership by the author of the Declaration of Independence.The same is true for plantation after plantation across the former Confederate states.Those omissions likely contributed to the loss of slave housing and other structures linked to the economy of enslavement because no one deemed them important, preservationist Ashley Rogers said.”The problem is, the damage has been done,” said Rogers, executive director of the Whitney Plantation Museum near New Orleans.FILE – Visitors walk through the Whitney Plantation in Edgard, La., July 14, 2017.The Whitney, which documents slavery at a pre-Civil War plantation near New Orleans, draws tens of thousands of visitors annually and is known for discussing topics that other tourist plantations ignore. Yet even its entry in the National Register, completed in 1992 before the current owner purchased it, doesn’t mention the slaves who toiled there.Similarly, visitors to Mount Vernon or Monticello in Virginia can now hear stories and see exhibits about slave life — but those features were added long after the landmarks became some of the first sites listed in the National Register.The National Register’s incomplete stories reflect the way the public ignores the topic of enslaved people, said Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an associate professor at Ohio State University who specializes in areas including African American history.”It’s telling us what we have been valuing as a society and how we understand slavery,” Jeffries said.Congress established the National Register of Historic Places under a 1966 historic preservation act aimed at coordinating preservation work and highlighting the nation’s most historic sites.Along with bragging rights, a listing on the National Register can help property owners financially. More than $160 billion has been invested in preserving 44,000 historic places nationwide under a tax credit program approved in 1976, according to the National Park Service, which oversees the program.Property owners, local groups and government agencies nominate sites for inclusion on the National Register, noting architectural features, historic significance and other information. State preservation offices review the nominations and submit them to the Park Service for a final decision.Those nomination forms, available on government websites, make up the bulk of information that’s publicly available about places listed on the register, the Park Service said. And they often ignore the enslaved people who provided the labor on antebellum plantations.FILE – Magnolia Grove, an antebellum plantation house in Greensboro, Ala., is seen Jan. 30, 2020.Magnolia Grove, a state-owned antebellum plantation home dating to 1835 in Greensboro, Alabama, has a slave cabin that tourists can visit, plus displays about enslaved people, yet its 1972 entry on the National Register doesn’t mention slaves.The state-operated Kingsley Plantation near Jacksonville, Florida, was home to slaves, yet its National Register entry doesn’t say who they were or how they were forced to work in the Southern heat. Instead, it describes tabby — a kind of concrete made of oyster shells — and the “colorful” slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley, who gets credit for having “carefully trained” enslaved people to farm his cotton.A historian who has researched the antebellum South, Clifton Ellis, said many National Register entries reflect a time when neither African American history nor the cultural importance of buildings were emphasized.”You might see that there’s a relation between lack of information and when they were written,” said Ellis, of Texas Tech University. “It was only during the ’70s that historians were beginning to look at slavery more closely. That took time to work its way through the academy.”Many plantation owners also kept poor records of slave life and did little to preserve reminders of it — another reason for the information void.The civil rights movement drew attention to the need for inclusive history, Ellis said, and nominations have improved with time. Property owners and historical groups are allowed to update National Register entries with new information. Some have done so with information about slaves.Today, any new nomination of an antebellum site that doesn’t discuss its ties to slavery would be rejected for more work, said Sarah David, who oversees the National Register program for North Carolina.”You can’t talk about something that was built before the Civil War without talking about enslaved people,” she said. “They were just in it. They may have built it.”The historical blindness about slavery and enslaved people isn’t limited to plantations in the National Register.The entry for Alabama’s white-domed Capitol details its role as the place where delegates established the Confederate States of America in 1861, but doesn’t cite slavery’s role in the rebellion or Horace King, a onetime slave credited with building the elegant, curved stairways in the building’s main entrance.FILE – Joe McGill, who works with the National Trust For Historic Preservation, sits outside one of the slave cabins at McLeod Plantation in Charleston, S.C., Aug. 14, 2013.Joe McGill routinely sleeps in old slave homes as part of The Slave Dwelling Project, which seeks to tell the forgotten stories of enslaved people. Sketchy accounts of slavery are a product of a decades-long period when white male historians primarily told the stories of white males, he said.”It needs to be corrected because it coincides with an incomplete narrative,” said McGill, who has slept in about 150 slave dwellings in 25 states in the South and the North.But updating all that outdated history would be daunting, historians said.With hundreds of old plantations listed on the National Register and many preservationists focused on saving endangered sites rather than updating information about existing ones, rounding out the history of antebellum farms could take years.”It would take a massive effort,” said Ellis.
 
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