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From Vox
Virginia Republicans’ messy, Trumpy race to pick a nominee for governor -
State Sen. Amanda Chase, seen here at a 2020 open-carry protest in Virginia, is one of the most explicitly pro-Trump candidates now running to be Republicans’ gubernatorial nominee in Virginia. | Eze Amos/Getty Images
The Republicans running for governor in Virginia signal a lot about the future of the GOP.
GALAX, Virginia — Republican gubernatorial candidate Kirk Cox was several minutes into a wonky election security answer at a diner when January 6 came up again.
Did President Joe Biden win the election? Cox avoided directly answering the question at this recent event, though he had previously acknowledged that reality, the one GOP frontrunner willing to do so.
Instead, he refocused on proposals like voter ID requirements, which are popular with lots of voters. But now, Lin, a Trump supporter who had posed the Biden question, had another one. She wanted to know whether he agreed with the Virginia Senate censuring one of its members, Amanda Chase, after she called the people who stormed the US Capitol that day in January “patriots.”
Did Cox support the “freedom of speech” of Chase, now one of Cox’s competitors for the Republican nomination?
“I’m very much for freedom of speech,” Cox answered.
“So you were against [the censure vote]?” asked Lin, who supports Chase in the race. “I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I need a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’”
This narrow line on the 2020 election and cancel culture is one Republicans have had to dance along for months in courting voters before Saturday’s Virginia GOP gubernatorial convention.
The GOP has had a tough go of it statewide in the past few years in Virginia, with demographic changes helping push the state to become reliably Democratic. The party’s response — running further and further to the right — has only exacerbated the problem. But Virginia might not be lost to the right kind of Republican. At least not yet.
Republicans will choose their nominee in an “unassembled convention”; nearly 54,000 Republicans who successfully applied to be a delegate will be able to cast ranked-choice ballots at 39 drive-up locations around Virginia. It’s a process that has had more than a fewbumps along the way, including Chase alleging the party chose a convention over a primary to prevent her from becoming the nominee. It could also take several days to know the results — candidates have already sown doubt about the race.
“It’s going to make the Iowa caucuses look like a well-oiled machine,” a Democratic operative said, with a touch of hopeful glee.
The candidates represent a few ways the GOP could go in Virginia
Virginia last chose a Republican in a statewide election in 2009. Since then, the GOP has run candidates that its own insiders say don’t appeal to the state’s growing suburban population. They’re going to have to make inroads back into those communities to have a hope of winning, says Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the Center for Politics.
“I always look at, in the 2016 primaries, places where candidates like John Kasich and Marco Rubio did well against Trump: Those are the areas that have moved more toward the Democrats since — places like Loudon County, Hanover County, Chesterfield County,” Coleman said. “Maybe those voters are still open to the right type of Republican after voting for Hillary [Clinton] and Biden.”
But can they do that while turning out the 44 percent of the state that went for Trump?
The mix of contenders has been revealing.
Chase, the self-described “Trump in heels,” has dominated headlines in national media, saying things like the Derek Chauvin verdict made her “sick” because she worried about how cops would feel about it. And she’s popular with the base, at least according to a February poll and a more recent one conducted by Democrats.
Businessman and former lieutenant governor hopeful Pete Snyder is nearly as Trumpy, railing against the “woke” liberal establishment and highlighting endorsements from figures like Ken Cuccinelli and Sheriff David Clarke.
Meanwhile, newcomer and former private equity group executive Glenn Youngkin has surged to the top of some recentstraw polls by running a well-funded campaign that ticks all the conservative culture war boxes but alsotalks about appealing to “Trump Republicans, libertarians, and Democrats” to win in November.
Cox, a delegate in the Virginia House and formerly the body’s speaker, remains the establishment favorite. He touts his know-how on implementing conservative policies, telling Vox, “it’s very important to have the experience to know how to run the state and to make good decisions.”
But regardless of how candidates are positioning themselves, there are certain issues that keep coming up on the trail: support for law enforcement, the eradication of “critical race theory” from schools, and election integrity, to name a few.
And for some voters, like Heather, who attended Cox’s event in Galax, the last on that list is most important — or, more specifically, it’s the question of whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election that matters most.
“That’s a huge one,” she said. “That’s first and foremost for this election or any election.”
Virginia Republicans want to stay competitive — and keep conservatives on board
Here’s what it looks like: There are seven candidates running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, four in real contention (Youngkin, Chase, Cox, and Snyder). All of them tout their traditional conservative bona fides — being pro-Second Amendment, anti-abortion, pro-business, and the like. Many of them rail against Covid-related closures, praising Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for keeping schools and businesses open throughout the pandemic.
“All across Virginia on day one, we are going to get every single school open — five days a week, every single week, with a real, live, breathing teacher in every classroom,” Snyder told a crowd at a brewery in Wytheville last weekend. “And folks, getting the schools open is only the beginning. We need to break the backs of this special interest monopoly of the teachers’ unions and bring real change to our schools.”
Closing message for #VAGOV candidate Pete Snyder (R), all on education. If he’s nominated at this Saturday’s convention, expect the message to continue into the general…https://t.co/WN1YxoIRA6
Given the country’s rate of vaccination, decreased community spread, and reopening, those pandemic issues might not be as relevant come November — or in 2022 and beyond. Trump, though, still will be.
At Snyder’s event, an emcee opened the afternoon by asking, “How many of you wish Donald Trump was president right now?” and a one-time Trump operator told the crowd they had to get to work to “defeat the socialists,” who “might even be worse than socialists, they’re bordering on communists.”
Youngkin, for his part, makes sure to note in his stump speech that he’s won praise from Trump, but he was also willing to criticize the former president’s tone as “a bit harsh” at a campaign event in northern Virginia.
Loyalty to Trump isn’t the key thing, argues Peter Doran, a former think tank CEO and one of the other three candidates recognized by the state party. (The others are former Roanoke Sheriff Octavia Johnson and retired Army Col. Sergio de la Peña.)
“Most Virginia Republicans are painted as these big hard-right, hard-conservative voters who only care about Donald Trump. That’s not true,” Doran said. “They care about their job. They care about what’s happening to their kids in this past year, and their education. And they care very deeply about the Republican Party’s failure to win over the past decade.”
Wilma, a mother of four and delegate in the convention, agreed, saying the GOP’s future relies on getting young people to understand conservative values like small government, constitutional rights, and concern about the deficit.
“My kids all look at the stimulus — it might be nice to get that money, that cash,” she said. “But eventually they know in the long run, they’re the generation that’s going to have to pay it back.”
The culture wars have consumed the GOP
Still, it’s no longer enough to tick the “fiscal conservative,” “Christian,” “gun owner,” and “anti-abortion” boxes. There are new ones on the list — keywords of the culture war issues the former president helped animate.
Take “critical race theory,” which Chase says is part of the reason she decided to homeschool her children.
As Vox’s Fabiola Cineas explained, “critical race theory is a framework for grappling with racial power and white supremacy in America.” But it’s also become a catch-all term for what the Trump administration thought was an effort to “indoctrinate” American students and workers with “divisive and harmful sex- and race-based ideologies”:
“They’ve lumped everything together: critical race theory, the 1619 project, whiteness studies, talking about white privilege,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and UCLA and Columbia University law professor, told Vox. “What they have in common is they are discourses that refuse to participate in the lie that America has triumphantly overcome its racist history, that everything is behind us. None of these projects accept that it’s all behind us.”
It’s not just Chase using the term frequently: Almost all the candidates make sure to highlight their opposition to it; six have signed a pledge opposing critical race theory. As journalist Dave Weigel pointed out on Twitter, Youngkin went so far as to upload multiple video clips of him criticizing it.
One of the front-runners in the #VAGov GOP primary uploaded four videos in 24 hours about his opposition to critical race theory. pic.twitter.com/RjSuGf3Enx
Trump’s impact, though, is perhaps most evident in the obsession with election security.
On one hand, Amanda Chase’s stance on the 2020 election sets her apart from the rest of the party — so much so that she, her supporters, and some outsiders suspect the state party chose a convention rather than a primary to mitigate the risk of her ending up at the top of their ticket.
But none of the candidates can distance themselves too far from Trump’s lies and doubt-sowing about the 2020 election. They need only look to the US House to see the consequences of doing so.
This is the key here. Cheney is responding to massive movement across the party to validate 1/6, led by, but by no means limited, to Trump. She’s not the one forcing this conversation, what annoys her colleagues is she won’t ignore it. https://t.co/t6QzdKQTkn
Neither Youngkin nor Snyder will say Biden’s presidency is legitimate. Cox appears willing to do so (at least when he’s not at a diner in southwest Virginia).
And everyone has plans to improve election integrity. Youngkin promotes his “election security task force,” one plank of which is updating voter rolls monthly. He and Cox talk about making the state election commission nonpartisan. Snyder wants to “make Virginia No. 1 in ballot integrity.”
They’re all fairly anodyne-sounding proposals, but talking about things like that is a requirement for securing the nomination, says Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington.
“While they may not support what happened on January 6, they do want to offer a position that shows some sympathy to the position of Trump supporters,” Farnsworth said.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the rhetoric will dog them during the general election — Youngkin’s spokesperson said they believe election security isn’t a partisan issue, “it’s a democracy issue.”
And “Kirk Cox is an example of a candidate who accepts Biden as a legitimate president but nevertheless speaks in ways that gives some solace to Trump supporters,” Farnsworth pointed out, and moreover, it’s likely that “voters in November will not be dramatically impacted by what’s said in May.”
Still, the insistence on making America’s elections more secure helps perpetuate a world in which seven out of 10 Republican voters still say — per a recent CNN poll — that Biden didn’t win enough votes to be president.
Questioning election integrity is coming home to roost
And the continued questioning of elections has applied even to their own party’s choices. Some of those choices, admittedly, merit scrutiny from candidates extolling the importance of signatures on absentee ballots. But it also led Youngkin, Cox, and Chase to write to the party, demanding it not use “untested and unproven software that creates uncertainty, lacks openness and transparency, and is inconsistent with our calls as a party for safe and secure elections.”
Now, every ranked-choice ballot will be counted by hand, at a ballroom at the Richmond Marriott, race by race. Chair Rich Anderson detailed to the Virginia Scope’s Brandon Jarvis the lengths the Republican Party of Virginia is going to try to instill confidence in the process:
Each ballot “will be seen by several eyes at the same time” to guard against transposition of numbers.
An out-of-state independent oversight team will be present.
Each candidate can have two representatives in the counting room, a party spokesperson told Vox. And Anderson said they can “be pretty much right up on the ballots, and eyes on them,” because he wants “them to feel comfortable with the process, to understand it, and have confidence in the final outcomes.”
The news media can be on site to report, and Anderson says he’ll provide regular updates on social media as well.
They’ve also set aside money to livestream the counting process, because, Anderson said, “I just don’t want to repeat what was done in different places around the country where people were concerned about it being an opaque process.”
That’s left “no room” for any conspiracy theories about the counting to crop up, says John March, the state party communications director. Even so, there are bound to be some dissidents, and if it takes days, Coleman says he can “see the conspiracy theories now.”
“When you have a multi-candidate field in a multi-round election,” Farnsworth said, “the only sound bet is expecting that the party won’t get together and sing ‘kumbaya’ when this is all over.”
Do these Republicans even have a shot in a general election?
Virginia, once home to the capital of the Confederacy, has moved left enough in presidential races that on election night in 2020, the forecast group Decision Desk called it for Joe Biden right as polls closed. Trump ended up with just 44 percent of the vote here, Biden with 54.
But the GOP argues the state is not lost to them just yet.
In recent decades, Virginia had a peevish streak, electing a governor from the opposite party that just won the White House. The candidate to break that trend was former Gov. Terry McAuliffe — who’s running again this year.
And March points to the “unprecedented” level of interest in the convention as a sign of what’s to come: “54,000 people are getting involved on the grassroots level. … You don’t really see that, and that just shows how excited Virginia Republicans are.”
Without Trump on the ballot this year, there might be an opening — a slim one for the governorship, but a bigger one to flip competitive state House districts.The person Republicans choose on Saturday will matter a lot.
“One thing I do think that could bode well for them is even though he lost, in 2017 Ed Gillespie got more votes than any previous Republican nominee for governor,” Coleman pointed out. “So maybe if Youngkin or whoever else can get that type of Gillespie turnout, which is definitely a question mark, and Democrats can’t get that anti-Trump turnout, maybe it’s going to be closer.”
Even so, it’s going to be an uphill battle for the GOP to narrow margins in some areas, let alone retake them. Take Chesterfield County, which Republicans easily won for decades. In 2020, it went for Biden by more than 6 percentage points.
“Going forward,” Coleman says, “this may be the last potential cycle where the Republicans could win a county like Chesterfield, and that may not even be enough — it may be necessary but not sufficient.”
Democrats seem to think it won’t be.
“We’re ready for a fight; we expect a fight. We expect a tough race,” said David Turner, the communications director for the Democratic Governors Association. “But what I would say is you can’t report accurately on the state of Virginia without acknowledging there’s pre-Trump and there’s post-Trump, and we’re still post-Trump.”
Why Democrats’ ambitions for health care are shrinking rapidly -
President Joe Biden seems to be scaling down his health care ambitions as he runs into the problem of how to pay for them. | Melina Mara/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
The Biden agenda has run into the hardest roadblock in health care: How do you pay for it?
As Joe Biden closed in on the Democratic Party’s nomination, with only Bernie Sanders still running against him, part of his pitch was that he knew how he’d pay for his proposals.
“The fact of the matter is, everything I call for I pay for,” Biden said in his final debate with Sanders on March 15, 2020.
But in practice, an $800 billion plan may be almost as politically daunting as a $32 trillion one.
“It’s still a monumental lift,” Kim Monk, who follows Congress for investment clients at Capital Alpha Partners, told me.
And that is forcing Biden to aim lower still.
Right now, in his proposed American Families Plan, Biden is asking Congress for $200 billion to expand the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies for health insurance premiums. The expansion already passed in the American Rescue Plan but expires after two years; the new proposal would make them permanent. The public option is nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile, the payment plan Biden proposed during his campaign and in his debate with Sanders — an increased tax on capital gains — will probably be used to pay for other parts of the Biden agenda, while a $450 billion savings proposal, favored by most Democrats in Congress, that would allow Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies was also left out of the Families Plan. Congressional Democrats were urging Biden to include the drug price idea and use the savings to pay for coverage expansions, such as lowering Medicare’s eligibility age.
It’s hard not to see one as related to the other. Biden’s plans for expanding health coverage — earlier Medicare eligibility, a public option — were modest compared to Sanders’s. But their fate, even as Biden proposes trillions in other new spending, shows that health care programs still have to pass a difficult test: They need to at least partially pay for themselves.
For decades, the norm has been that when Congress wants to pass a new expansion of health coverage, it will find the money to pay for at least some of that expansion from the health care industry, whether in the form of new taxes or spending cuts. Health care funds health care.
But that creates a huge political problem: The health care industry can block new reforms not by opposing the reforms themselves but by campaigning against the cuts or taxes used to pay for them. Doctors, hospitals, and health care companies retain a lot of influence in Congress; every congressional district has a hospital, as lobbyists happily point out.
So even as their ambitions for health care grow, as demonstrated by Biden’s embrace of the public option, Democrats find themselves caught in this trap.
Biden’s health care proposals still cost a lot of money — and that money has to come from somewhere
Nobody knows for sure why Biden dropped the Medicare negotiations proposal from the American Families Plan, even as he called for lawmakers to pass it this year on a bipartisan basis — an unlikely prospect — in his first address to Congress. The reporting has been circumspect.
But we do know the pharma industry has a massive war chest, refilled every year by member fees, and has promised to deploy it if any major drug pricing reform started moving through Congress. Drug manufacturers also enjoy their best public approval in years after delivering Covid-19 vaccines in record time.
“Why go after the very industry that basically is our lifeline out of the pandemic?” Monk said.
This is how the trap closes: When health care must pay for health care, the health care industry must take a hit in order to cover more people. That is something the industry’s immense lobbying apparatus usually wants to stop, and given its influence in the halls of Congress and in the White House, that can make anybody’s health care plan — whether it costs $800 billion or $32 trillion — a nonstarter.
Biden avoided this problem with the initial two-year expansion of the ACA subsidies in the American Rescue Plan by mostly not paying for it. But even in this age of deficit doves, the $200 billion to make that expansion, or any other major health care expansion, permanent would need to be paid for. That presents a massive political problem, even for Biden’s more modest (compared with Sanders’s) proposals.
“It was quite easy to get the health care industry on board for temporarily increasing ACA premium help without any budgetary offset to pay for it, as was the case in the American Rescue Plan,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for the Kaiser Family Foundation. Levitt framed that bill’s health care provisions as “all winners, no losers.”
“As soon as there starts being pressure to pay for health care enhancements,” he continued, “it becomes a zero-sum game with losers as well as winners.”
If Democrats are serious about expanding public programs, they can’t count on the health care industry as allies
The health care industry can be persuaded that the trade-off is worth it. It’s happened before.
The platonic ideal of this framework is the ACA itself, the 2010 law Biden says he wants to build on with this subsidy expansion and (eventually) a public option. About 80 percent of the ACA was covered by spending cuts (for Medicare payments to providers, for example) or new taxes (various new levies on pharma and health insurers and medical devices) targeted to the industry.
The industry bought into the law and didn’t oppose its passage. It took the deal that is at the heart of this long-held tradition: The coverage expansion would mean more paying customers. It might take a trim in payment rates or on new taxes, but it’d make up for it with more volume. And, as it turned out, more than 20 million people were covered by the law.
But the industry may not be willing to make the same kind of bargain with Biden because his proposals don’t have the same appeal. The Medicare expansion is opposed by many hospitals and doctors — Medicare pays lower rates than private health insurers; more people on Medicare means less reimbursement for them.
The industry opposes the public option, which would presumably set rates lower than private insurance so it could charge cheaper premiums, for the same reason. Considering more than half of America’s uninsured already qualify for Medicaid or the ACA, the public option is less a device for expanding coverage than a way to drive down health care costs. And that is exactly why the health care industry would fight fiercely to stop it.
The Biden administration still can, and has, taken steps to expand health coverage. An additional 4 million people qualify for ACA subsidies since Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law. Nearly 1 million people have signed up for insurance during a special open enrollment period Biden started shortly after taking office.
The administration is also bound by the rules and politics of the Senate. A public option may not be permissible under the “budget reconciliation” rules that allowed Democrats to move some legislation without any Republican votes. Some moderate Senate Democrats may be less enthused about the public option or even a Medicare expansion than some of their peers who are more progressive.
But America still has the highest uninsured rate in the developed world and the highest health care costs. So long as the health care industry wields a veto pen over any plan that would cut into its profits to address those problems, little is going to change.
Democrats will have to find a way to escape this trap.
How to stop the next falling space rocket -
A Long March 5B rocket, carrying China’s Tianhe space station, lifts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in China’s Hainan province on April 29. | STR/AFP via Getty Images
International law governing rocket reentry is too lax.
“A satellite is crashing to Earth, and NASA sent us a fax?” Donna Moss says, clearly concerned. But few in the show shared her fear, because debris in space often falls out of orbit and is either burned up upon reentry or lands harmlessly somewhere on the planet.
The US government estimates around 200 to 400 tracked objects enter Earth’s atmosphere every year — roughly one a day — out of the 170 million pieces of space debris floating above our heads. The fallen items rarely make news, though, since they usually crash into the ocean, which covers about 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, or sparsely populated areas.
A section of the Long March 5B rocket, which launched China’s new space station into orbit last week, is expected to hit somewhere on the planet either on Saturday or Sunday, experts say. At 10 stories and 18 tons (36,000 pounds), it’s one of the largest items in decades to spiral in an undirected dive toward the Earth.
Our latest prediction for CZ-5B rocket body reentry is: 09 May 2021 03:53 UTC ± 11 hours Reentry will be along one of the ground tracks shown here. It is still too early to determine a meaningful debris footprint. Follow this page for updates: https://t.co/p2AU9zE3y2pic.twitter.com/1depRKMk6f
— The Aerospace Corporation (@AerospaceCorp) May 7, 2021
It could cause serious damage if it hits a major population zone, but so far few governments — especially the one in Beijing — seem overly concerned.
“The probability of this process causing harm on the ground is extremely low,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Friday. The White House and Pentagon, meanwhile, say they’re tracking the rocket and have no plans to shoot it out of the sky.
After speaking with experts, two things have become clear about this episode.
The first is that the idea of a large rocket hurtling toward Earth is understandably scary. It conjures up images of a city devastated by the impact, potentially injuring thousands.
Importantly, the chance of anything like that happening is infinitesimally small — like 1 in a 196.9 million chance small. While there have been a few bad incidents in the past, nothing on that scale has ever happened, and very likely won’t now.
The second is that it’s troubling this scenario could happen in the first place. Why is it possible for China, or any other space-faring nation, to launch massive rockets and let them fall to earth willy-nilly?
The answer to that is policy failure: Despite regulations on space flight and conduct, the issue of rocket reentry is loosely and poorly regulated, so countries cut corners and take their chances that a falling rocket won’t hit anything major.
“We’re in the realm of risk management, and states are willing to swallow the risk,” said Christopher Newman, a professor of space law and policy at Northumbria University in Britain.
But there’s always the more-than-zero chance that their luck runs out and a falling rocket sparks a catastrophe. Experts are unanimous that the falling Chinese rocket is a symptom of a much larger problem that needs solving sooner rather than later.
“If you don’t want any more of this kind of thing to happen, we need the big powers to step up,” said Bleddyn Bowen, a professor of space warfare and policy at the University of Leicester in the UK.
How to stop the next falling rocket
There’s a trope about space that it’s the “Wild West,” a phrase I often catch myself using. But the truth is that there have been rules governing operations in space for decades.
In the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and Liability Convention of 1972 are guidelines for how to punish a country that lets one of its rockets cause damage on Earth. Basically, those rules say that the offending state can be held liable by the victim nation. So, in this case, if the Chinese rocket were to land in the middle of New York City (which, again, is extremely unlikely to happen), the Biden administration could ask China to pay for damages and demand other recourse.
In other words, this is a state-to-state issue. “If the rocket lands on my house, I can’t go and sue China,” Northumbria’s Newman told me. That’d be UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s job to call up Chinese President Xi Jinping.
But that’s really it. There’s nothing in international law to stop any nation from letting any of the 900 rockets currently in orbit from falling in an unplanned way. “This isn’t illegal,” Newman said about the current saga of the Chinese rocket. “There is no sort of regulation on an international level on reentry.”
Individual countries essentially govern themselves when they make plans to launch a rocket into space. If the Chinese government is fine with the plan of an unplanned reentry, then that’s what’ll happen at the end of the mission.
Naturally, such plans cause frustration among space experts. “I think it’s negligent of them,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in the US, told the New York Times on Thursday. “I think it’s irresponsible.” Last year, in fact, another Chinese Long March 5B rocket burned up and pieces of metal fell onto a few buildings in the Ivory Coast.
But it’s important to remember two things.
First, China — and other leading space-faring nations like the US, Russia, Japan, and the European Union — know that the chance of hitting people or infrastructure is so small that they don’t feel the need to spend extra money and time to plan for a controlled reentry.
Ensuring a rocket splashes into, say, the Pacific Ocean, requires more fuel and staff work, which increases the cost of missions. For most space agencies grappling with small budgets, cutting costs on that part of the operation is worth the risk.
Second, and relatedly, China isn’t the only country taking their chances here; others, including the US, have as well, leading to some scary scenes.
In 1978, a Soviet satellite carrying a nuclear reactor crash-landed in northern Canada and spewed radioactive waste. The next year, the NASA-launched Skylab space station — America’s first one — fell out of orbit, with parts landing in the Indian Ocean and in Western Australia, though luckily hurting no one.
“Bad behavior was quite typical by the Americans and Soviets during the space race,” said Leicester’s Bowen. “Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones,” he said of current complaints about the Chinese rocket.
While there are more safety measures now and technology has improved, experts say the main problem is still that space law is too lax on this issue. They point to the Ivory Coast incident last year, where the country decided not to seek recourse from China, potentially out of the desire not to anger a key economic partner.
So what has to change?
Experts say countries like China, the US, and others should leverage this moment and work through the United Nations to regulate rocket reentry. They should compel space programs to spend more to ensure their rockets land far away from people, and even wildlife, when possible. Even if the risk of a calamity is extremely low today, the fact that it’s more than zero is already too high.
“If this is good for anything, it’s an opportunity for everyone to take ownership of space as a domain of human activity and to want a say in how it’s governed,” said Northumbria’s Newman. “We’re now at the stage where this is generating concern.”
But until there’s political will for such action — and governments take the rocket reentry problem seriously — we’ll have more Chinese-rocket-type scares.
From The Hindu: Sports
Rishabh Pant donates undisclosed amount to procure oxygen cylinders and COVID-related kits - Several cricketers have already made contributions to help India’s fight against the unprecedented health crisis.
Coronavirus | Fast bowler Prasidh Krishna tests positive - The BCCI is hoping that by the time the UK-bound players enter the bio-bubble in India on May 25, Krishna will test negative.
Moscow Olympic gold medallist Ravinder Pal Singh succumbs to COVID-19 - Singh had also represented India in the Champions Trophy in Karachi (1980, 1983), Silver Jubilee 10-nation Cup in Hong Kong in 1983, 1982 World Cup in Mumbai and 1982 Asia Cup in Karachi, among other tournaments
Zim vs Pak | Alis put Pakistan in strong position - Abid and Azhar notch up hundreds after the early dismissal of Imran Butt
Table tennis | Sathiyan preparing in right earnest - Is working on small details of his game along with sparring partner Anirban
From The Hindu: National News
Hassan administration has reduced number of tests: MP - Prajwal Revanna, MP, has alleged that the Hassan district administration reduced the number of COVID-19 tests, considering the shortage of beds in the
Canteens, training centres turn into COVID care centres - Corporates repurpose unused office space into temporary quarantine facilities
Excise sleuths seize over 650 kg of ganja in Thiruvananthapuram city within two days - The consignment worth ₹3.25 crore, which is suspected to have been sourced from Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh, was intended to be supplied among drug peddlers in the city
No coronavirus cases in 180 districts in a week: Harsh Vardhan - The cumulative number of COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in the country has crossed 16.73 crore on Saturday, says the Health Minister
Anurag Thakur says nations will remain grateful to 229 taxmen died of COVID-19 - The Finance Ministry was one of the hardest hit Ministries during the pandemic, Mr. Thakur said.
From BBC: Europe
German call to ban ‘Jewish star’ at Covid demos - The anti-Semitism commissioner urges officials to stop protesters “relativising” the Holocaust.
European Super League: Real Madrid, Barcelona & Juventus defend plans in face of Uefa ‘threat’ - Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus defend their plans for a European Super League in the face of “threats” from Uefa.
France launches campaign to end selfies on rail tracks as incidents rise - Rail operator SNCF says incidents of people taking serious risks have increased during the pandemic.
#MeToo Serbia: ‘I thought I was the only one’ - Balkan women are sharing their sexual assault stories after Serbian actress Milena Radulovic went public with hers.
Spy row revs up Czech-Russian tensions - The Czechs and Russians, ex-communist bloc allies, are in a new diplomatic Cold War.
From Ars Technica
It began as an AI-fueled dungeon game. Then it got much darker - AI algorithm created disturbing stories, including sex scenes involving children. - link
Windows 10 “Sun Valley” will do away with Windows 95 era icons - The results are more subtle than you might expect from a 25+ year visual update. - link
Sony faces lawsuit over alleged “monopoly pricing” of PlayStation downloads - Proposed class action says Sony’s moves have increased prices for PlayStation games. - link
96% of US users opt out of app tracking in iOS 14.5, analytics find - Some of the first data on user behavior exceeds advertisers’ worst fears. - link
Ajit Pai promised cheaper Internet—real prices rose 19 percent instead - Home-Internet prices rose four times faster than inflation in Trump era. - link
Two billionaire friends meet. After a casual conversation, one of them finally asks: So, how’s your home life?
The other answers: Couldn’t be better! I bought an elephant!
The other guy looks at him astonished: An elephant? Have you gone mad?
The guy replies, smiling: Oh, man, let me tell you, it’s the best purchase in my life! He’s grazing on the lawn, making it nice and even. Kids love him! Always riding his back and sliding down his trunk, keeps them outside instead of in front of the screen all day. My wife loves him too! He’s super strong, helps her with moving things around when I’m not home. And let me tell you, the best thing is: it’s kind and smart - the best pet I’ve ever had!
The other billionaire scratches his chin. ‘Yeah, that sounds… Kind of amazing actually! How much did you pay for him?’
The guy replies: ‘A million bucks! Worth every penny, it’s a steal at this price.’
The other billionaire says: ‘Sell him to me for two million?’
‘No, what are you saying? Sell him? His like family!’
‘Three million!’
‘I don’t know, man… You really can’t put a price on this kind of friendship and usefulness!’
‘Alright, five million!’
‘Five million?.. Well, okay man, I’ll sell him to you, but only because we’re friends’.
In a few weeks the two billionaires meet up again. The guy who bought the elephant is angry as hell. As soon as he sees the other guy, he starts yelling:
‘What THE HELL did you sell to me?? Not only does he NOT graze the lawn, he completely destroyed all my greenery and trees! There’s elephant dung EVERYWHERE, it smells even inside the house! And what was that about kids? They are TERRIFIED of the thing, it’s aggressive and massive, and scary! I cannot sleep because he trumpets ALL THE TIME. My wife has been having nightmares, and now I won’t hear the end of her bickering until I die! IT’S AWFUL, worst purchase in my life!’
The other billionaire looks at him and says:
‘Well, man, I don’t know what to say, with that attitude, you’ll never sell an elephant!’
