President Donald Trump on Saturday said the United States will next week begin purchasing $3 billion worth of dairy, meat and produce from farmers as unemployment soars and people are forced to food lines.”Starting early next week, at my order, the USA will be purchasing, from our Farmers, Ranchers & Specialty Crop Growers, 3 Billion Dollars worth of Dairy, Meat & Produce for Food Lines& Kitchens,” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter.It was unclear whether his statement referred to a $19 billion relief plan announced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in April. The agency said it would buy $3 billion worth of agricultural commodities as part of that program.The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.The U.S. economy lost a staggering 20.5 million jobs in April and the unemployment rate rose to 14.7 percent, government data showed on Friday.Food banks have been running short on staples as hunger soars. The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted supply chains, with farmers saying they have had to destroy their produce and euthanize pigs because processing facilities have shuttered.  
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Two cabinet-level U.S. officials were in self-quarantine on Saturday after coming into contact with someone who had tested positive for COVID-19, according to a spokesman and a media report.Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield “will be teleworking for the next two weeks” after a “low-risk exposure” on Wednesday to a person at the White House who has the disease, The Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing a spokesman.U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn is in self-quarantine for a couple of weeks after coming into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19, an FDA spokesman told Reuters late Friday.Hahn immediately took a diagnostic test for the coronavirus and the results were negative, FDA spokesman Michael Felberbaum said in an emailed statement.”As Dr. Hahn wrote in a note to staff today, he recently came into contact with an individual who has tested positive for COVID-19. Per CDC guidelines, he is now in self-quarantine for the next two weeks,” the FDA spokesman said.Politico reported that Hahn had come into contact with Katie Miller, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary.Miller, the wife of one of President Donald Trump’s senior advisers, tested positive on Friday, raising alarm about the virus’ potential spread within the White House’s innermost circle.The diagnosis of Miller, who is married to White House immigration adviser and speech writer Stephen Miller, was revealed by Trump in a meeting with Republican lawmakers on Friday. A valet for Vice President Mike Pence has also tested positive.
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Mother’s Day weekend got off to an unseasonably snowy start in the Northeast on Saturday thanks to the polar vortex bringing cold air down from the north.Some higher elevation areas in northern New York and New England reported snowfall accumulations of up to 10 inches, while traces of snow were seen along the coast from Maine to Boston to as far south as Manhattan.John Cannon, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine, said parts of northern New England saw as much as 10 inches of snow and even coastal areas of Maine and New Hampshire got a dusting. There were even reports of flurries in Boston.”We’ve had several inches in many areas in the Northeast. This is a rare May snow event,” he said.A view of a yard after snowfall in Newton, N.J., May 9, 2020, in this still image obtained from social media video. (John Ballance via Reuters)The hardest-hit areas were hill town communities like Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, which got 10.5 inches, and Carrabasset Valley in Maine, which got 9 inches, he said.Conditions at the Mount Washington Observatory, atop the highest peak in the northeast, were downright arctic Saturday afternoon, with the wind chill at minus 22 degrees (minus 30 Celsius) and winds gusting at 87 mph (140 kph).In many areas, the snowfall was one for the record books, even if it didn’t stick around. Massachusetts hadn’t seen measurable snow in May since 2002, while in Manhattan’s Central Park, the flakes tied a record set in 1977 for latest snow of the season.The wintry weather came two days after Vermont began to lift restrictions on tennis, golf and other outdoor activities that had been imposed to curb the coronavirus outbreak. Governor Phil Scott tweeted sympathy to Vermonters frustrated by the weather following weeks of being inside.”I know snow on May 9th isn’t a welcome sight for many Vermonters, just as we’re cautiously allowing outdoor recreation to get going again,” he wrote. “But this is just a snapshot in time. Just like better weather is ahead, better days will come, as well. We will get through this, together.”Usually the polar vortex is a batch of cold air that stays trapped in the Arctic all winter, but a couple times during the season, it wanders south and brings bone-chilling cold and snow to Canada and parts of the United States.A low-pressure system off the coast of southern New England helped pull cold air down from the north, said lan Dunham, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Norton, Massachusetts.Cannon said the snow would give way to strong winds upward of 40 and 50 mph (64-80 kph) in much of the Northeast for the remainder of Saturday, along with unusually cold conditions. There were freeze watches and warnings out for much of the Northeast. Temperatures were expected to dip below 30 (minus 1 degree Celsius) from midnight through Sunday morning in parts of New Jersey and New York, and a freeze warning was issued from Saturday night until Sunday morning in parts of Pennsylvania.
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Concern is growing that the COVID-19 pandemic may be putting some Native American families at increased risk for violence and sexual assault.“Our town’s pretty small, and you can hear cops running from one end to the other,” said T.J. Whirlwind Soldier, a member of the Sicangu Oyate, one of seven tribes of the Lakota Nation.He was speaking about Mission, a small town on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, where the population hovers around 1,200 and where unemployment and poverty rates are high.“I’m hearing more police sirens these days,” he said. “I think that the coronavirus is really affecting people. You see a lot of people being aggressive, and it’s causing an increase of drinking and drug abuse.”Whirlwind Soldier works for Sicangu MVP, a community-based program helping young males and their families recover from violence and other trauma.“Just today, the ambulance service on our reservation contacted our women’s shelter while they were responding to a domestic violence case,” Whirlwind Soldier said. “And that was at only eight o’clock in the morning.”   Sicangu MVP is one arm of the White Buffalo Calf Women’s Society (WBCWS), a nonprofit organization that serves victims of domestic violence and sexual assault and boasts the oldest shelter in Indian Country.“There are other systems that we work with and deal with,” said WBCWS Director Lindsey Compton. “The Indian Health Service, law enforcement and first responders, even our sexual assault response team for our service area, they’ve all seen increased calls specifically for sexual assault and domestic violence.”Triggers historic traumaVOA heard similar reports from other reservations, including Crow Creek, about 180 kilometers northeast of Rosebud.  “You may be talking about two or three families living in a single household,” said Lisa Hope Heth, director of Wiconi Wawokiya (“Helping Families”), a nonprofit in Fort Thompson, South Dakota. “And since they can’t leave the home or go anywhere, there tend to be more opportunities to get into arguments over little things.”Especially, she added, if there is not enough food to go around. For many Native Americans, the current pandemic and its economic effects recall the anguish of their ancestors, who were forced into confinement on reservations during the 19th century to face starvation and worse.“I’ve been seeing a lot of Facebook posts about historical trauma,” Heth said. “Even about the way people have to wear a mask now. Sometimes that triggers them. I even have a hard time with it.”Lockdowns and stay-at-home orders mean many victims of violence have nowhere to turn, she said, “because the offenders are in the homes with them and can keep a close eye on them.”Heth also worries about reservation youth.“We’re seeing teenagers going out and drinking because there are no adults out to supervise, no one to report them,” Heth said, and these behaviors could not only encourage the spread of COVID-19 but make youth vulnerable to victimization.Violence, natural disasters linkedVOA reached out to the StrongHearts Native Helpline, a confidential, culturally appropriate domestic violence helpline for Native Americans across the United States.“We are seeing a decrease in the number of calls that we usually receive,” said Elizabeth Carr, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians who serves as StrongHeart’s senior Native affairs advisor. “But the way we are looking at it is that our victims and survivors probably don’t have the opportunity to make that call, given that they are socially distancing with their abusive partners.”At the same time, Carr said she has seen an increase in visits to StrongHeart’s website and social media pages, which may represent only the tip of the iceberg, as many Native Americans lack internet access.“It’s hard to say what will happen in the future when social distancing ends. Evidence from previous situations like hurricanes indicates we can anticipate seeing a larger number of folks calling in when they have some safe time and safe space to make those calls,” she said.Researchers have noted the prevalence of intimate partner violence, child and elder abuse and sexual violence in the wake of natural disasters. A study of couples in southern Mississippi in the months before and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, showed a 35% increase in psychological aggression toward women and a 98% increase in their physical abuse, blaming severe disruptions in home and social environments, shortages of food and other provisions and failures by government bureaucracy and law enforcement.In a virtual news briefing April 6, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres noted a sharp rise in domestic violence in the weeks since COVID-19 restrictions were put in place.“In some countries, the number of women calling support services has doubled,” Guterres said. “Meanwhile, healthcare providers and police are overwhelmed and understaffed. Local support groups are paralyzed or short of funds. Some domestic violence shelters are closed; others are full.”Guterres called on governments to address the issue as part of their response to the coronavirus pandemic.
 
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The reverend approached the makeshift pulpit and asked the Lord to help him make some sense of the scene before him: two caskets, side by side, in a small-town cemetery busier now than ever before.The Rev. Willard O. Weston had already eulogized other neighbors lost to COVID-19, and he would do more. But this one stood as a symbol to him of all they had lost. The pair of caskets, one powder blue, one white and gold, contained a couple married 30 years who died two days apart, at separate hospitals hours from each other, unaware of the other’s fate.The day was dark. There was no wind, not even a breeze. It felt to some like the earth had paused for this.Eddie Keith, 65, of Dawson, Ga., locks the church doors as he leaves on April 19, 2020, in Dawson, Ga. He visits his pastor’s church a couple times a week.As the world’s attention was fixated on the horrors in Italy and New York City, the per capita death rates in counties in the impoverished southwest corner of Georgia climbed to among the worst in the country. The devastation here is a cautionary tale of what happens when the virus seeps into communities that have for generations remained on the losing end of the nation’s most intractable inequalities: these counties are rural, mostly African American and poor.More than a quarter of people in Terrell County live in poverty, the local hospital shuttered decades ago, and businesses have been closing for years, sending many young and able fleeing for cities. Those left behind are sicker and more vulnerable; even before the virus arrived, the life expectancy for men here was six years shorter than the American average.Rural people, African Americans and the poor are more likely to work in jobs not conducive to social distancing, like the food processing plant in nearby Mitchell County where four employees died of COVID-19. They have less access to health care and so more often delay treatment for chronic conditions; in southwest Georgia, the diabetes rate of 16 percent is twice as high as in Atlanta. Transportation alone can be a challenge, so that by the time they make it to the hospital, they’re harder to save.A tattered U.S. flag whips in a heavy wind on April 19, 2020, in Dawson, Ga.At least 21 people have died from COVID-19 in this county, and dozens more in the neighboring rural communities. For weeks, Weston’s phone would not stop ringing: another person in the hospital, another person dead. An hour before this funeral, Weston’s phone rang again, and this time it was news that another had succumbed to the virus—his own first cousin, as close to him as a brother.Some here had thought that their isolation might spare them, but instead it made the pandemic particularly cruel. In Terrell County, population 8,500, everyone knows everyone and every death is personal. As the mourners arrived at the cemetery, just the handful allowed, each knew others suffering and dying.The couple’s son, Desmond Tolbert, sat stunned. After caring for his parents, he’d also rushed his aunt, his mother’s sister, to a hospital an hour away, and there she remained on a ventilator. Her daughter, Latasha Taylor, wept thinking that if her mother survived, she would have to find a way to tell her that her sister was dead and buried.”It’s just gone haywire, I mean haywire,” thought Eddie Keith, a 65-year-old funeral home attendant standing in the back who was familiar with all the faces on the funeral programs piling up. “People dying left and right.”Usually, on hard days like this, he would call his friend of 30 years, who was a pastor at a country church and could always convince him that God would not give more than he could endure.But a couple weeks earlier, that pastor had started coughing, too.An illuminated cross stands in front of a residence near downtown Dawson, Ga., on April 17, 2020.As Georgia and other states rush to reopen, some out-of-the way places might believe that the virus won’t find them. Many here thought that, too. But it arrived, quietly at first then with breathtaking savagery.The cemetery on the edge of town staggered graveside services, one an hour, all day. The county coroner typically works between 38 and 50 deaths a year; they reached No. 41 by mid-April. They ordered an emergency morgue.Of the 10 counties with the highest death rate per capita in America, half are in rural southwest Georgia, where there are no packed skyscraper apartment buildings or subways. Ambulances rush along country roads, just fields and farms in either direction, carrying COVID-19 patients to the nearest hospital, for some an hour away. The small county seats are mostly quiet, the storefronts shuttered, some long ago because of the struggling economy, and some only now because owners are too afraid to reopen.These counties circle the city of Albany, which is where authorities believe the outbreak began at a pair of funerals in February. Albany is also home to the main hospital in the region, Phoebe Putney Memorial, which serves an area of 800,000 people spanning more than 50 miles in every direction, many of them with little other access to care.The hospital saw its first known coronavirus patient on March 10; within a few days, it had 60 and the ICU was full. Two weeks later, patients began flooding in from farther-flung rural communities. Helicopters buzzed from the top of the parking garage, flying patients to other hospitals that still had room to take them. They burned through six months of masks and gowns in six days, said Phoebe Putney president Scott Steiner. Then they were competing for supplies against wealthier, more politically powerful places; they paid $1 each for surgical masks that typically cost a nickel and were losing about $1 million each day.Cousins Latasha Taylor, left, and Desmond Tolbert sit during an interview on April 18, 2020 in Dawson, Ga.The patients were very sick. Some died within hours. Some died on the way, in the back of ambulances. The region is predominantly black, but still African Americans died disproportionately, Steiner said. African Americans accounted for about 80% of the hospital’s deaths.Black people have been dying at alarming rates across the country: the latest Associated Press analysis of available data shows that African Americans represent about 14 percent of the population in the areas covered but nearly one-third of those who have died.By nearly every measure, coronavirus patients are faring worse in rural Georgia than almost anywhere else in America, according to researchers at Emory University in Atlanta. Although New York City had thousands more deaths, the per capita death rate in these Georgia counties is just as high.”They are vulnerable people living in vulnerable places, people who are marginalized on a variety of measures, whether we’re talking about race, whether we’re talking about education or employment, in places that have fewer resources,” said Shivani Patel, an epidemiologist at Emory. Then COVID-19 arrived: “It’s like our worst nightmare coming true.”Dr. James Black, the medical director of emergency services at Phoebe Putney, was born in this hospital, grew up in this region and is proud of how they’ve managed with the odds stacked against them. He hasn’t had a day off in two months. The question now, he believes, is whether society decides, in the wake of the virus, to continue neglecting its most vulnerable people and places.”I think that history is going to judge us not only on how well we prepared, it’s not going to just judge us on how well we responded,” he said, “but what we learned from it, and what we change.”Georgia has lost seven rural hospitals in the last decade. Nine counties in rural Georgia don’t even have a doctor, according to the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals; 18 have no family practitioner, 60 have no pediatrician, 77 without a psychiatrist.Ezekiel Holley, the longtime leader of Terrell County’s NAACP, said health care is what has left him “banging his head against a wall.”At first Holley thought a virus would be one thing that did not discriminate. He opened the newspaper, scanned the faces in the obituaries and knew every one of them.”Then I thought, why are low income people and people of color dying more than anyone else? This is the richest nation in the world, why doesn’t it have a level playing field?” he said. “Tell me that.”Eddie Keith, 65, of Dawson, Ga., poses for a portrait outside of his church on April 19, 2020, in Dawson, Ga.At first, Benjamin Tolbert just felt a malaise; he had no appetite. Within a couple days, he could barely stand.His son, Desmond, took him to the hospital in Albany. By then it was full, and he was sent to another hospital an hour south. Benjamin’s wife, Nellie Mae, who everyone called Pollye Ann, got sick the next day. She was routed from the Albany hospital to another an hour north.Everyone in town knew Benjamin, 58, as a hard worker. He had worked for 28 years at a Tyson Foods plant, and yet he always found more work to do, washing his car, tending the lawn. He and his wife had been together 30 years. He was mild-mannered, but she found a joke in everything. She was a minister, she played the organ, sang gospel and danced, wildly, joyfully.”Oh my goodness, she was a dancer, and the dances were so hilarious, you would just fall out laughing watching her dance and laugh at herself,” said their niece, Latasha Taylor, whom they loved like a daughter. Benjamin would hang back, but Pollye Ann would pull him up and he’d dance along with her.Both were diabetic, Pollye Ann had had heart valve surgery, Benjamin had been on dialysis. Pollye Ann’s sister, Katherine Taylor Peters, often got dialysis treatments with him. They were a close-knit family: Peters lived just blocks away.Shortly after the Tolberts got sick, Peters called her daughter and said she too had an incessant cough and was struggling to breathe. Latasha was working hours away, so she called her cousin, Desmond, and asked him to check on her.He put her in his car and drove her to another hospital an hour from home. They soon sedated her and put her on a ventilator.Much of the rest is a blur for Desmond and Latasha: calls from doctors and nurses, driving hours among three hospitals, begging to see their parents but being told it was far too dangerous.”I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t talk to them,” said Desmond, 29, who had lived with his parents all this life. Suddenly he was alone.And all around them, neighbors were getting sick.”So many people, it’s a feeling you can’t even explain. It’s like a churning in your stomach,” said Taylor. “People you’re normally waving at, speaking to in passing, at the pharmacy, you’re never going to see them again.”Desmond was on the phone with a nurse as his mother took her last breath. Two days later, the call came from his father’s caregivers. Benjamin never knew that his wife got sick. She didn’t know her husband was on his death bed. They were apart, far from home, without their son at their sides.The only solace he can find is imagining them meeting again on the other side, and that neither had to live without the other one.Nellie ‘Pollye Ann’ Mae and Benjamin Tolbert, a couple married for 30 years, are buried at Cedar Hill Cemetery on April 18, 2020, in Dawson, Ga. Both They died two days apart.Eddie Keith had known this couple all his life, he knew their phone number by heart, where they lived, where they worked, their mothers and fathers.”They knew me real well,” he said, “as well as I knew them.”He has worked for the funeral home for 35 years, and part of his job is to pick up the bodies. He got a call about Pollye Ann’s passing, and when a hometown person dies someplace else, he considers it his duty to bring them home to Dawson.Sometimes he talks to them as he drives, sometimes he sings.When the second call came about her husband, two days later, he wondered if what was happening in his city might be too much to bear. He’s used to death. But now people were dying one right after the next, too quickly to reckon with each in real time.Keith is a deacon at a country church down a dirt road just outside of town. His pastor, Rev. Alfred Starling, always told him that God doesn’t make mistakes, and Keith wanted to be reminded of that now, because Dawson’s people kept dying, and Keith kept retrieving them. But the next morning he was picking up a body in Tallahassee when the pastor’s wife called. He’d gone to the hospital with a bad cough, and he hadn’t made it.They’d known each other 30 years. Once, years ago, he’d complimented his pastor’s necktie. After that, every time the pastor bought himself a tie, he bought Keith one too. It became a symbol of their love for each other. “He would always look out for me,” he said.Keith pulled off the road and sat there a half an hour.”Why God? Why God? Why God?” he thought, and he caught himself. He was always taught not to question God, so he asked for forgiveness.There were three funerals the next day, and he left just after to pick up his pastor’s body.He talked to him: “I didn’t think you’d leave me so early; I thought we were going to grow old together.”He thought of his pastor’s favorite spiritual. “Good news, good news,” the pastor would sing and walk from behind the pulpit, a little strut in his step. “I’m going to lay down my burden, store up my cross. And I’m going home to live with Jesus, ain’t that good news.”He sang it to his pastor as he drove him home.Horace Bell, 60, of Americus, Ga., controls an excavator while digging a grave at the Cedar Hill Cemetery on April 18, 2020, in Dawson, Ga.By time the Tolberts’ funeral arrived, so many had been lost to COVID-19 that Rev. Willard Weston had gotten used to delivering his eulogies through a mask. Gloves. Hand sanitizer. Don’t touch, don’t embrace, no matter how much you want to.”At this pace, you don’t get a chance to really take a deep breath from the previous death, and then you’re getting a call about another,” he said. He’d found himself on his knees in his bathroom, trying to scream out the sadness so he could keep going.He put on his suit and tie.He walked outside, looked up to the sky and pleaded with God to find the strength to deliver a double funeral.”Lord, how can I go and do this?”In normal times, the Tolbert family’s funeral would have drawn a packed house. Pollye Ann was a minister at Weston’s church. She could deliver testimony like no one he’d ever seen: she was like a freight train, he recalled, slow at first then faster, faster, faster. People were drawn to her.Instead it was just him and a handful of mourners in the cemetery, staring at the two caskets. He read from scripture and told their son, Desmond, that he’d never walk alone.He worried his instinct to comfort with an embrace would overtake his knowledge that he couldn’t, so he walked away and got in his car. He felt guilty. He prayed for God to take that guilt away. Because there was more to do. The next Saturday, he would have three funerals, back to back.A couple weeks later, on a Friday afternoon, he was preparing to leave his empty church and head home for the weekend without a single funeral planned for the first time in weeks. It felt hopeful. Then his phone rang again.”Man, no. Oh, wow,” he said, and his shoulders slumped.”Some more bad news. Somebody else has passed.”Willie Johnson, 66, left, Horace Bell, 60, center, and Eugene Davis, 58, right, lower a burial vault into a grave at Cedar Hill Cemetery on April 18, 2020, in Dawson, Ga.There was some good news too.Pollye Ann Tolbert’s sister survived weeks on a ventilator. She still tested positive for coronavirus and remained in isolation, so her daughter Latasha could only talk to her by phone.The first thing she asked when she woke was how her sister and brother-in-law were doing. Latasha paused. Her mother repeated the question. It felt unreal. Mail still arrived in the mailbox for them. Their house was just as it was the day they left for the hospital. She and her cousin had washed the linens and wiped the surfaces to rid it of virus, but were otherwise too paralyzed to move a thing.”I had to tell her that while she was sleeping, her sister and brother-in-law left us forever,” Latasha said. “They’re already buried, they’re in the ground.”Peters told her daughter that the last thing she remembered was a doctor on the phone, telling her that her sister wasn’t going to make it. She thought she would die too, if not from COVID-19, then from grief.She had hoped it was all a bad dream.Then she woke up.This story was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. 
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After a historic foray into digital technology brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, the United States Supreme Court moves to a string of high-profile, end-of-term cases next week.From Monday to Wednesday, the justices will hear oral arguments in cases centered on three broad issues: religious liberty, subpoenas for President Donald Trump’s financial records, and whether members of the U.S. Electoral College must vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote in their states.Typically, the court hears about 70 cases a year, most involving disagreements between lower courts. But with several cases postponed until the fall, the justices will have heard 57 cases this term. That is the fewest in more than a century.In a break from tradition, this week the court conducted oral arguments by telephone — and live video stream — in half a dozen cases. The decision to conduct arguments remotely came after the pandemic forced most government buildings to close.Here is a look at three major issues that will be heard over the phone and livestreamed next week.Religious freedomNearly every term the Supreme Court considers religious liberty and freedom of conscience issues.On Monday, the justices will hear arguments in two consolidated cases known as Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and St. James School v. Biel.The cases involve two former fifth-grade teachers at two Catholic elementary schools in California. The teachers sued the schools for discrimination after the schools refused to renew their contracts.The schools argue immunity from employment discrimination suits, citing a doctrine known as “ministerial exception” that bars “ministerial” employees of religious institutions from suing their employers. But the two teachers claim they were employees, not “ministers.”The Justice Department has filed a friend of the court brief in support of the schools.Trump financial recordsThe Supreme Court often shuns political disputes between the other two branches of government. But last year, the justices agreed to hear three separate cases involving Trump’s financial records, including two subpoenas issued by Democrats in the House of Representatives.The first two cases – Trump v. Mazars USA and Trump v. Deutsche Bank – involve subpoenas issued by two congressional committees investigating Trump’s finances.The two cases have been consolidated into one and will be heard during one hour of oral argument.The third case – Trump v. Vance – involves a grand jury subpoena issued by New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance to Trump’s accountants seeking tax returns going back to 2011, as well as other financial records. Vance is investigating the Trump Organization, a real estate company.Trump’s lawyers asked federal courts in New York and Washington to bar his accounts and banks from releasing his financial records. But the courts, with one exception, rejected his request, sending the cases to the Supreme Court.The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, expected in the coming weeks, will determine whether Trump will release his financial records ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Unlikely other presidential candidates, Trump refused to release his taxes during the 2016 election and has continued to do so, saying he is under IRS audit.But it is not clear whether the court will rule one way or another. Last week, the high court asked the parties to the cases, as well as the Justice Department, to file briefs stating whether courts should stay out of the fight because fundamentally it is a “political dispute” between the two branches of government.‘Faithless elector’ lawsTwo consolidated cases slated for oral argument on the final day of the term will examine whether states can require presidential “electors” to vote for the winning ticket in their states.The United States has a unique system of electing presidents. Instead of voting directly for a presidential candidate, voters elect members of the “Electoral College,” who meet several weeks later to cast their ballots for the president.Most states require electors to take a pledge to vote for the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote. “Faithless electors” who do not honor their pledge are sometimes punished.The case before the Supreme Court arose from the 2016 election.In Washington state, which was won by Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, three Democratic electors were fined after they cast their ballots for Colin Powell.  In Colorado, another state won by Clinton, a Democratic elector was ousted from his position after he voted for a Republican politician.The case landed before the Supreme Court after courts in Washington and Colorado reached different conclusions over whether states could punish faithless electors.In Washington, the state Supreme Court upheld the fine against the faithless elector, but in the Colorado case, a federal appeals court ruled that the state’s faithless electoral law violates the U.S. Constitution.The justice’s decision could have direct bearing on the November election and beyond.
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California on Friday became the first state to commit to sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters for the November election as a result of the coronavirus pandemic to safeguard voter access and public safety.Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order for the mail-in ballots but said they were no substitute for safe places for in-person voting that the state was also working on.”It’s great for public health, it’s great for voting rights, it’s going to be great for participation because this November’s election is still slated to be the consequential election of our lifetime,” said California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who joined Newsom by phone during his daily briefing.Democrats across the United States have said mail-in ballots are necessary to maintain turnout in November. Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have claimed mail-in voting is susceptible to fraud.Newsom announced the ballots as California’s economy gradually reopened, with retail curbside pickup, manufacturing and other lower-risk activities allowed to resume on Friday.”Roughly 70 percent of the economy in California can open with modifications,” Newsom said.’Confident and comfortable’But businesses are unlikely to go back to their former levels of employees or customers in this phase of reopening, Newsom said.”Just because we announce we have a variation on an opening and people can do curbside pickup, there’s a sense that things are moving again, doesn’t mean that customers are confident and comfortable yet,” he said.Speaking from a reopened florist shop, Newsom encouraged Californians to shop at small, independently owned stores that were forced to close as “big box” competitors stayed open.He said California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, was suffering higher unemployment than the 14.7 percent national average announced on Friday, based on the 4.3 million people who applied for jobless benefits in the state since March 12.”We’re not a 14.7 percent, the state of California is north of 20 percent right now,” Newsom said.
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If DNA is destiny, it took an unexpected turn when the grandson of legendary World War II commander General Claire Lee Chennault was growing up.General Claire Lee Chennault (1890-1958), who commanded the legendary Flying Tigers and later the 14th Air Force in China, landed on the covers of Time and Life magazines during WWII. (U.S. Air Force)New York-based jazz musician Paul Sikivie says he was brought up with “a sense of awe” regarding his grandfather, one of the most storied commanders in the Asia theater during that war. But “he belonged to the world at large and not so much to me.” Sikivie is one of two grandsons of Chennault and his second wife, Anna. His mother is a noted medieval Chinese literature specialist, his father a Belgian-American physicist. “I wanted to be a geneticist for a while after ‘Jurassic Park’ was made into a movie; I never thought about Chinese language and literature as something for me,” Sikivie, now 37, recalled as he looked back on his childhood aspirations. By age 14, Sikivie knew he wanted to be a musician. Four years later, he knew his calling was jazz. “St. Thomas by Sonny Rollins came on NPR and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” he said of jazz’s enduring appeal. Paul Sikivie plays the bass alongside vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant at a memorial concert for Lawrence Leathers held on Feb. 3, 2020, at Dizzy’s Club at Lincoln Center. (Frank. Stewart/Jazz at Lincoln Center)Would that have made sense to his grandfather, who landed on the covers of Life and Paul Sikivie, right, in a family photo with his parents, Pierre Sikivie and Cynthia Chennault, brother Michael, and grandmother Anna Chennault, in an undated photo. (Photo provided by Cynthia L. Chennault)Perhaps his grandfather would also understand the notion of the “band of brothers” that has also been central to Sikivie’s journey as a musician. Lawrence Leathers, a noted drummer on the New York jazz scene, was one of them.  Leathers, who died last year, “was like a brother to me. I learned a lot about being present and always reaching for the next level from being around him and playing music with him,” Sikivie said. Sikivie, Leathers and pianist Aaron Diehl often played as a band, traveling both in the United States and other parts of the world — including China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, where General Chennault had once set foot. Looking toward the future, the jazz bassist said, “I am continuing to learn how to organize my thoughts, feelings, values into music; there’s really no limit to the ways [in which] this can be accomplished.” 
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