The Reverend Joseph Lowery, a key ally of Martin Luther King in the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s, died late on Friday at the age of 98, his family said in a statement.“Our beloved, Rev. Dr. Joseph Echols Lowery, made his transition peacefully at home at 10 p.m., Friday, March 27, at the age of 98. He was surrounded by his daughters,” Lowery’s family said.Lowery was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama in 2009, a few months after he had given the benediction at Obama’s inauguration.Lowery co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King and other black ministers in 1957, to fight segregation across the U.S. South. He served for 20 years as its president before stepping down in 1998.He continued working for racial equality into his 90s.He spoke against South African apartheid, sought better conditions in U.S. jails, pushed for more economic opportunities for minorities, promoted AIDS education and railed against what he saw as government indifference toward the lower classes.Lowery was married to Evelyn Gibson Lowery, who shared his activism, for 63 years before her death in 2013. The Lowery Institute, now known as the Joseph and Evelyn Lowery Institute for Justice & Human Rights, was founded in his honor in 2001 and he was a member of its board.
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Top U.S. adversaries appear to be coming together, using social media and other cyber means to amplify disinformation regarding the coronavirus, with the intent of harming the United States and hindering efforts to curb the global pandemic.
 
The accusation, from senior State Department officials, focuses on efforts by Russia, China and Iran. No longer content to simply pump out their own false narratives, the three countries have now formed a sort of axis of disinformation, officials say, by echoing and magnifying each other’s information operations.
 
“We’re seeing Russian, Chinese and Iranian state information operations converging around the same disinformation narrative about COVID-19,” Lea Gabrielle, head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), told reporters in a telephone briefing Friday.
 
“We’re also seeing Russia’s [disinformation] ecosystem promoting narratives advanced by China and Iran,” she said.On the rise
 
U.S. officials declined to say whether the virtual collaboration was intentional or just opportunistic. But officials, including those in the Pentagon and in the U.S. intelligence community, have previously accused each of the countries of ramping up disinformation operations.
 
“The COVID-19 crisis has really provided an opportunity for malign actors to exploit the information space for harmful purposes and really been providing unnecessary distraction from the global community’s focus on this crisis,” Gabrielle said.
 
According to U.S. and European officials, the bulk of the disinformation has focused on blaming the U.S. or the West for the coronavirus outbreak or on the West’s alleged inability to cope with the crisis.
 
European officials say Russian-linked cyber actors have been especially active, trying to trick people into believing the pandemic is a hoax or persuade them to try bogus cures.
 
U.S. officials have also voiced growing concern that the coronavirus pandemic has emboldened China, which is using social media to launch blunt attacks on official social media accounts.More evidence suggests that the virus was not originated at the seafood market in Wuhan at all, not to mention the so called “made in China”. https://t.co/8cRxkSZB3z— Chinese Embassy in South Africa (@ChineseEmbSA) March 16, 2020 
In Iran, senior officials have also echoed false allegations that the U.S. has weaponized the coronavirus.All three countries have pushed back, rejecting the U.S. and European allegations.China, in particular, has accused the U.S. of using language to stigmatize China and discredit its efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic.Still, U.S. officials have not let up in their criticism and say they are working with private sector partners to monitor and track propaganda from all three countries “in real time.”
 
Other measures to counter the “global false narratives” include public messaging at home and overseas; diplomatic engagement; and promotion of fact-based information to local audiences through overseas U.S. embassies and consulates.
 
Social media companies such as Twitter tell VOA they have been briefed, broadly on the government’s concerns regarding disinformation.It’s not all public
 
But officials and analysts note the problems go far beyond the major social media platforms, adding that much of the disinformation is not easily visible.
 
“Not all of this disinformation goes viral on Facebook or Twitter,” said Lindsay Gorman, the fellow for emerging technologies at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “There are other [forums], which include text messages, which include Facebook groups, which include less viral and less public platforms.
 
“Stopping it on one level doesn’t necessarily mean you quell it on another,” she said.
 
A growing number of U.S. lawmakers have been pressing for stronger actions.
 
Earlier this month, two lawmakers urged Twitter, which is blocked in China, to ban all Chinese Communist Party accounts.Two Republican lawmakers -@BenSasse & @RepGallagher- pushing for @Twitter to ban #China communist party accounts“It is clear that Chinese Communist Party officials are using Twitter to disseminate propaganda in the midst of a dangerous global crisis” they write to CEO @jackhttps://t.co/jJXa4AJAUV— Jeff Seldin (@jseldin) March 20, 2020 On Thursday, U.S. Representative Michael McCaul, the lead Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, asked the State Department to launch a multilateral investigation into China’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
 
“To refute the CCP’s [Chinese Communist Party’s] dangerous disinformation campaign, [the] United States should work with like-minded democracies, including Taiwan, to produce a definitive account of the origins of the virus, the CCP’s culpability, and how their undue influence undermined the legitimacy of the WHO [World Health Organization] at this critical time,” McCaul wrote.
 
Such calls are resonating with some military officials.“I think any official, Chinese Communist Party or PRC [People’s Republic of China] official, should be banned,” U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding told VOA’s Mandarin service. “I think WeChat, Alibaba, TenCent … all of these platforms ought to be banned as well.”“Every single day, [People’s Liberation Army] and other folks that are being paid specifically by the Chinese Communist Party to do propaganda and influence are in our midst,” he said. “If we won’t allow them physically to be on our soil to coerce our citizens … then why would we ever allow them in our networks and in our data?”Letup appears unlikelySome caution, however, that no matter what Washington does, the slew of disinformation operations targeting the U.S. are unlikely to let up.
 
Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are “using cyber operations much better than they have in the past, and are using [them] in ways that take advantage of asymmetric weaknesses in the United States,” said Ben Buchanan, a fellow at the Wilson Center and author of The Hacker and the State, which looks at the role of cyber operations in global politics.“What we see as a result is this daily, grind-it-out competition between modern nations that is mostly out of view,” Buchanan said.Yuwen Cheng and Zhan Qiao of VOA’s Mandarin service contributed to this report.
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New York’s governor said Friday that he was continuing to shop “around the globe” to purchase 30,000 ventilators, despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s statement that he thought the figure was overblown. “Maybe you don’t need 30,000. Well, I don’t have a crystal ball,” Andrew Cuomo said at his daily news conference. “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion. But I don’t operate here on opinion. I operate on facts, and on data, and on numbers and on projections.” President Donald Trump talks with host Bill Hemmer during a Fox News virtual town hall with members of the coronavirus task force, at the White House, March 24, 2020, in Washington.Trump questions numbersIn a phone interview with Fox News late Thursday, Trump appeared to dismiss the New York governor’s effort to acquire the breathing machines for patients seriously sickened with COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.  “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” Trump said. ”You know, you go into major hospitals sometimes and they’ll have two ventilators, and now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’ ” New York state has 19.5 million residents. On Friday, there were nearly 45,000 confirmed cases of the respiratory virus, more by far than in any other state. Nearly 6,500 people were ill enough to be in the state’s hospitals, and nearly 1,600 were in intensive care unit beds, which are equipped with ventilators.  Patients wearing face masks and personal protective equipment wait on line for COVID-19 testing outside Elmhurst Hospital Center, March 27, 2020, in New York.Death toll on the rise Friday was the second consecutive day that the state’s death toll exceeded 100. In all, 519 New Yorkers have succumbed to the virus.   Cuomo said that projections from experts, including a major New York hospital and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, predict the peak in cases, which is expected in his state in about three weeks, could see 140,000 people hospitalized and 40,000 of them requiring breathing machines. “Those are numbers — not I feel, I think, I believe, I want to believe,” the governor said. “Make the decisions based on the data and the science. And we are following the data and the science, and that’s what the data and the science say.”   A COVID-19 testing tent is setup on a sidewalk in a predominantly Ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough of New York, March 27, 2020.Help is on the wayThe state is continuing to ramp up its hospital capacity, currently working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Guard to build four field hospitals. Cuomo said he would ask Trump to approve four additional field hospitals for New York to more evenly distribute health care coverage.  New York state is also looking at converting hotel rooms and university dormitories into care facilities. On Monday, the U.S. naval hospital ship Comfort will arrive in New York Harbor. The ship has 1,000 beds as well as 12 operating rooms and is likely to take on noncoronavirus cases to relieve the burden on overwhelmed hospitals.   “We are now doing the impossible,” Cuomo said.
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The largest relief package in U.S. history is expected to be soon signed into law by President Donald Trump, after the $2 trillion coronavirus aid legislation passed a last-minute hurdle in the U.S. House of Representatives.  The unprecedented legislation provides billions of dollars in funding to hospitals, small businesses, industries hard-hit by quarantines as well as directly sending cash to most low and middle-class Americans in an attempt to contain massive economic damage and lessen its impact.   House Speaker Nancy Pelosi aimed to pass the bill Friday using a procedural maneuver that would have prevented lawmakers from having to fly in from around the nation to vote in person on Capitol Hill.  But Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of the southern state of Kentucky objected to passage of the stimulus by a voice vote, saying he objected to how much the rescue effort would add to the U.S. debt, which already totals more than $23 trillion.  Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., talks to reporters before leaving Capitol Hill in Washington, March 27, 2020, after attempting to slow action on a rescue package.Trump tweeted a warning earlier Friday telling the House Republican to not hold up passage of the bill.  “Looks like a third rate Grandstander named Rep. Thomas Massie, a congressman from, unfortunately, a truly GREAT State, Kentucky, wants to vote against the new Save Our Workers Bill in Congress. He just wants the publicity. He can’t stop it, only delay.”  Lawmakers returned from all around the country so that Congressional leadership could establish a quorum, overcoming Massie’s objections.   Many lawmakers admitted that while they would vote for the aid, the quickly-drafted legislation was far from perfect.  “We have to go into this vote eyes wide open,” Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on the House floor Friday. “What did the Senate Majority fight for? One of the largest corporate bailouts with as few strings as possible in American history. Shameful.”   Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., walks Capitol Hill in Washington, March 27, 2020.“The option that we have is to either let them suffer with nothing or to allow this greed and billions of dollars which will be leveraged into trillions of dollars to contribute to the largest income inequality gap in our future,” Ocasio-Cortez said.The gigantic funding measure is designed to flood the U.S. economy with cash to overcome the significant downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic.  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy addressed criticism of the legislation on the House floor Friday, saying “We’re not underwriting bad business practices, we are priming the pump. Ultimately, we are laying the foundation for rapid economic recovery. This bill is not only a rescue package, it is a commitment. A commitment that your government and the people whom you elected to serve will do everything We can to limit the harm and hardship you face.”  Pelosi said the Democratic lawmakers who negotiated the pact with the majority Republican leaders in the Senate and the White House “didn’t get everything we wanted” in the measure, but that they “won the day.”  Pelosi said she did not think the rescue package would end congressional efforts to prop up the U.S. economy, the world’s biggest, as the damage from the pandemic continues to wreak havoc.She said she did not “think we’ve seen the end of direct payments” to American workers.The rescue was approved by the Senate on a 96-0 vote late Wednesday after days of at times contentious negotiations.  Members of the House of Representatives walk down the steps of Capitol Hill in Washington, March 27, 2020, after passing a coronavirus rescue package.Trump told reporters Wednesday evening at the White House that he would act quickly after congressional approval, saying the signing would mark “a great day for the American worker and for American families and, frankly, for American companies.”  “I encourage the House to pass this vital legislation and send the bill to my desk for signature,” he said. “Without delay, I will sign it immediately.”  The bill provides $500 billion in assistance to the hardest-hit major U.S. companies, another $367 billion to small businesses with fewer than 500 employees, and $250 billion to bolster state-run unemployment compensation funds, as the ranks of the jobless have ballooned in the last two weeks.   Nearly 3.3 million furloughed workers filed for unemployment compensation claims last week, a U.S. record.  About $150 billion would go to help hospitals suddenly under the strain of caring for the flood of coronavirus patients.Another major plank of the aid package is aimed at helping most American families, with the government set to send about $3,400 to families of four — two parents and two children. The payouts could cover about 90% of U.S. households.   Officials said some checks could be deposited in bank accounts within three weeks.    Individual taxpayers would get $1,200, and couples $2,400, with aid ending for individuals earning more than $99,000 annually and $198,000 a year for couples.   Trump says he wants to restart the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, as lockdown orders in many states have kept workers home and closed such businesses as restaurants, bars and movie theaters, as well as factories employing thousands of workers.   On Tuesday, he said he hopes the country is “raring to go” by Easter Sunday, April 12.  But medical experts have voiced skepticism, with the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths rising by the hour.   The United States has more than 90,000 confirmed coronavirus cases with more than 1,300 deaths.   
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U.S. Representative Thomas Massie enraged President Donald Trump on Friday as he has leaders of Congress worried he will delay a planned Friday voice vote on a $2.2 trillion coronavirus economic rescue plan, drawing calls from the White House to throw him out of the Republican Party.Even before the 49-year-old drew Trump’s ire on Twitter, he had been a thorn in the side of both parties so long that he’s nicknamed “Mr. No.””Throw Massie out of the Republican Party!” Trump tweeted on Friday.Looks like a third rate Grandstander named @RepThomasMassie, a Congressman from, unfortunately, a truly GREAT State, Kentucky, wants to vote against the new Save Our Workers Bill in Congress. He just wants the publicity. He can’t stop it, only delay, which is both dangerous……— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 27, 2020…& costly. Workers & small businesses need money now in order to survive. Virus wasn’t their fault. It is “HELL” dealing with the Dems, had to give up some stupid things in order to get the “big picture” done. 90% GREAT! WIN BACK HOUSE, but throw Massie out of Republican Party!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 27, 2020Here are some facts about Massie:- Massie was first elected in 2012 with an assist from the conservative tea party movement, from a solidly Republican district in northern Kentucky along the Ohio River. An engineer by training who had built his own company on inventions he made, he beat two establishment Republicans in a primary election along the way.- In his first House vote in 2013, Massie opposed the re-election of John Boehner as speaker. Massie aligned with conservative and libertarian Republicans who formed the Freedom Caucus in 2015, but did not join the caucus.- By 2014, Massie had voted “no” so many times on legislation that Politico dubbed him “Mr. No.” He opposed about a third of measures that came up in his first year, voting against large and small bills sponsored by both parties, from defense spending legislation to a bill to award a gold medal to golf star Jack Nicklaus.- Massie opposed many bills on a cost basis. He joked once that the buttons lawmakers push to register their votes on the House floor – which are labeled “yea” and “nay” – should be relabeled “spend” and “don’t spend,” USA Today reported.- Massie voted twice against the election of former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a fellow Republican. Last year he was one of six Republicans to vote against his party’s candidate, Kevin McCarthy for Speaker; Massie voted instead for Republican Jim Jordan, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus. (Democrat Nancy Pelosi won)- Sometimes Massie has worked across party lines on civil liberties issues, such as by opposing bulk data collection by the government. He favors loosening gun laws. He was one of three House Republicans to vote against relief for Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and one of two to vote against additional sanctions on North Korea.
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COVID-19 has forced people all over the world to stay at home on strict quarantine, but some folks manage to find a way to stay positive. While Italians sing from their balconies, and the French applaud their doctors, neighbors in Bethesda, Maryland, are dancing and singing together — while keeping their distance.  Ann Johnson, a retired artist, and Michael Fetchko, a biologist, are doing their best to lift spirits at their apartment complex. They organize daily “drive the virus away“ performances to distract people from everyday worries, if only for a little while.  “We are trying to raise people’s spirits, that’s what we’re doing,” says Johnson. “It started with my neighbor in the other building. She called me and she said, ‘Come out to the balcony. We’ll wave because we hadn’t seen each other for a while.’ We did that a few times and we thought maybe other people would like to do it, so we passed the word.”   She’s joined by Fetchko, her neighbor.“Part of it is just to make sure that everyone has some outlet each day where they get to see their neighbors,” he says. “You feel very isolated when you are inside. You are doing the right thing, but you want to remind yourself that you are not alone in this. So it’s just a matter of getting people to know that everyone is in this together.” Otherwise, the neighborly singers spend the rest of their day like most Americans — staying at home following the guidelines of local and state authorities.  “My husband and I are trying to keep a schedule,” Fetchko says. “We have a dog, so she keeps us up and out when she needs to go. So that helps.”Johnson says she looks forward to her daily musical time-out from self-isolation. “It’s so nice to be with my buddies, too, even if it’s at a distance,” she says. “It lifts me for the whole rest of the day.” The song-and-dance enthusiasts intend to continue their performances, doing their best to help cheer up their friends and neighbors. Because, in a time like this, they believe even 15 minutes of dancing can make a difference.  
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