CNN's Jake Tapper: Family hiding Biden's cognitive decline ‘appalling'
Before the announcement of Biden's cancer diagnosis, Matt Frei caught up with Jake Tapper for the latest episode of The Fourcast.
He asked Tapper about what inspired his book, Original Sin, which examines President Biden's health during the last presidential campaign.
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Scotsman
11 hours ago
- Scotsman
Something sinister about the delay in revealing Edinburgh's bridge of sighs
What's underneath the tarpaulin on the North Bridge? asks Susan Morrison For a few years now I've enjoyed playing 'Find the Number Seven Bus Stop up the Bridges'. It wanders about, depending on the No-Way-North/South-is-Shut status of North Bridge. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Sometimes it lurks on Chambers Street, which is quite nice because there's a heating vent that blasts out warm air on wintery nights. Very cosy. North Bridge may not be over the Kwai, but it is over budget, and the work has lasted way longer than expected. Of course it has. Did anyone in their right mind really think it would stick to plan? Check out the parliament, the trams and the ferries. Their original costs rocketed faster than the price of an Easyjet ticket. It's all bargain basement until you want mad luxuries like allocated seats and three extra pairs of pants in your bag. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Well, it will be lovely when it is finished, but I can't rid myself of a niggling doubt. I'm starting to suspect a replacement bridge lurks under all that flapping tarpaulin, and when the wrapping is taken away, we'll be faced with the sort of concrete horror that graces Glenrothes. The word 'graces' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I think they've sold the original, just like London Bridge, to some deranged desert-dwelling American tech bro. There doesn't seem to be a shortage of moneyed mad lads. Look at that Musk one. He bought a president. He seems to be regretting it now, though. Perhaps they've cloned it. Mr Trump claimed that Mr Biden's been cloned, so if he thinks they can clone a president, they can clone a bridge. Although I'm surprised that the sinister forces that switched to Robot Biden didn't replace him with something snappier and less likely to glitch during debates. They should have asked us. We invented cloning in Scotland. A sheep was well within our capabilities, so banging out an identical bridge isn't a challenge too far. Well, we'll just have to put up with the exasperating bus stop bingo for a while longer, but I'm telling you, there's something sinister about the delay in revealing Edinburgh's bridge of sighs.
The Independent
14 hours ago
- The Independent
Government moves to drop Sheetz discrimination case as Trump targets key civil rights tool
Federal authorities are moving to drop a racial discrimination lawsuit against the Sheetz convenience store chain, part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump 's administration to halt the use of a key tool for enforcing the country's civil rights laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws, confirmed it has begun notifying potential claimants of its intention to drop the Sheetz lawsuit, citing Trump's executive order directing federal agencies to deprioritize the use of 'disparate impact liability' in civil rights enforcement. Disparate impact liability holds that policies that are neutral on their face can violate civil rights laws if they impose artificial barriers that disadvantage different demographic groups. The concept has been used to root out practices that close off minorities, women, people with disabilities, older adults or other groups from certain jobs, or keep them from accessing credit or equal pay. Trump's executive order is part of his campaign to upend civil rights enforcement through firings and other steps that have consolidated his power over quasi-independent agencies like the EEOC, redirecting them to implement his priorities, including stamping out diversity and inclusion practices and eroding the rights of transgender people. In the Sheetz case, filed in April 2024 under the Biden administration, the EEOC had claimed that the company's policy of refusing to hire anyone who failed its criminal background checks discriminated against Black, Native American and multiracial job applicants. The lawsuit could survive even if the EEOC drops it: The law firm Outten & Golden, which represents workers in employment disputes, and the Public Interest Law Center, filed a motion Thursday to intervene and pursue its own class action lawsuit on behalf of one of the potential claimants. What is disparate impact? The Supreme Court recognized the concept of disparate impact in a landmark 1971 case, which held that a North Carolina power plant discriminated against Black employees by requiring high school diplomas and an intelligence test for certain higher paying roles, even though the requirements were irrelevant to the jobs. In 1991, bipartisan majorities in Congress voted to codify disparate impact in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The concept holds that it is illegal to impose barriers to employment if such practices have a discriminatory effect and have no relevance to the requirements of the job. What does Trump's executive order say? The April 23 order declared that it is "the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.' The order argued that disparate impact has become a 'key tool' of a 'pernicious movement' that threatens meritocracy in favor of 'racial balancing' in the workforce. Craig Leen, a former top official at the Labor Department under the first Trump administration, said while the executive order take a more aggressive approach, it reflects longstanding conservative concerns that disparate impact liability encourages the assumption that any racial imbalance in the workforce is a result of discrimination. Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, said the order reverses 'a trend of bad law and bad policy in prior administrations.' She said the Trump administration would rightfully 'focus on individual discrimination cases," which she said are "more factually sound, less susceptible to manipulation, and more closely hews to the original intent' of civil rights law. What is happening with the Sheetz case? The EEOC filed the original Sheetz lawsuit after an eight-year investigation that arose from complaints filed by two job applicants. Both Republican EEOC commissioners at the time voted against bringing the lawsuit, while the three Democrats voted in favor. In an email to The Associated Press, an EEOC spokesperson confirmed the agency has began notifying potential claimants that it would file a motion to dismiss the case but declined to comment further. One of the potential claimants, Kenni Miller, filed a motion to intervene Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. U.S. workers can pursue federal discrimination lawsuits on their own if the EEOC declines to take up their complaints but often don't because of the resources required. Miller, a Black man, was hired as a shift supervisor at a Sheetz in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 2020. After working there for a month, Miller was told he failed the background check because of a felony drug conviction and was let go, according to the motion. According to the EEOC's lawsuit, Sheetz' policy of denying jobs who anyone who failed a background check resulted in 14.5% Black job applicants being denied employment, compared to 8% of white applicants. For Native American applicants, the rate was 13%, and for multiracial applicants, it was 13.5%. In court filings, Sheetz denied the allegations. Attorneys for the company, which is being represented by the law firm Littler, declined to comment further. The EEOC has not said how many potential claimants have been identified. Christopher McNerney, an Outten & Golden attorney who is representing Miller, said the number is likely in the thousands. Sheetz has more than 20,000 employees and operate at least 700 brand-store locations in Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, according to court documents. What other cases have leveraged disparate impact liability? The Sheetz case echoes a 2018 lawsuit against Target claiming that the retailer's hiring process, which automatically rejected people with criminal backgrounds, disproportionately kept Black and Hispanic applicants from getting entry level jobs. Target agreed to pay more than $3.7 million to settle the lawsuit, and revised its policy so fewer applicants with criminal records would be disqualified. In 2020, Walmart agreed to pay $20 million and discontinue a pre-employment strength test that the EEOC had claimed in a lawsuit unfairly excluded women from jobs at grocery distribution centers. And in one of the biggest sex discrimination cases in recent years, Sterling Jewelers, the parent company of Jared and Kay Jewelers, agreed in 2022 to pay $175 million to settle a long-fought lawsuit alleging that some 68,000 women had been subjected for years to unfair pay and promotion practices. What's the potential fallout of scrapping disparate impact? The Justice Department, EEOC and other federal agencies have moved quickly to quash the use of disparate impact liability. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, for example, has moved to dismiss several Biden-era lawsuits against police departments in Kentucky and Minnesota, saying the cases claimed patterns of unconstitutional policing practices 'by wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination.' In a May memo to employers, EEOC Acting Chief Andrea Lucas said the agency would deprioritize disparate impact cases, meaning that worker complaints such as the original two that triggered the Sheetz lawsuit are unlikely to be investigated. She also warned companies against using demographic data, which large companies are required gather and submit annually to the EEOC, to justify policies that favor any employees based on race or sex, something Lucas has long argued many well-intentioned DEI policies do in violation of Title VII. Jenny Yang, a former EEOC chair now with Outten & Golden, said the pullback on federal enforcement of disparate impact risks dissuading companies from proactively examining hiring and other practices to ensure they do not discriminate. At the same time, Yang and nine other former Democratic EEOC commissioners and counsels have released a letter to employers emphasizing that the Trump's order does not change the law, and to expect private practices to redouble efforts to bring disparate impact claims. "Employers should not expect that they will have a free pass on disparate impact liability simply because the President has instructed federal agencies not to pursue enforcement of the law," wrote the former EEOC officials. ________ The Associated Press' women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
Reuters
a day ago
- Reuters
US finds no currency manipulators, adds Ireland, Switzerland to monitoring
June 5 (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury Department said on Thursday that no major U.S. trading partners manipulated their currencies in the four quarters through to the end of December but it has expanded its monitoring list to nine countries. The release is the first semi-annual currency report since Donald Trump's return to the White House and the last one pertaining to Joe Biden's time as president. Two countries, Ireland and Switzerland, joined Germany, China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam, which were already being monitored at the time of the November report from the Biden administration. The November report had found that no major U.S. trading partners manipulated their currencies in the 12 months ending June 2024 and during Biden's full four-year term there were no currency manipulation declarations. Under former President Barack Obama, the U.S. had started a foreign exchange "monitoring list" of countries with high external surpluses or currency market interventions in April 2016 after the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015. The Treasury uses three criteria to determine currency manipulation and countries meeting two of the thresholds are automatically added to the monitoring list. The three items are: 1) a trade surplus with the U.S. of at least $15 billion, 2) a global account surplus above 3% of GDP, 3) persistent, one-way net foreign exchange purchases. Countries currently being monitored: ** CHINA - The biggest U.S. trading partner was listed for monitoring in the latest report, which said it stands out among trading partners for lack of transparency on exchange rate practices and policies. The Treasury Department said that a lack of transparency will not preclude it from designating China in the future if evidence suggests it is intervening through formal or informal channels to resist yuan appreciation. A lack of transparency was also noted in the November 2024 report. China has been in every report since 2016. While Trump had told the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator in August 2019, the designation was dropped in January 2020 as Chinese officials arrived in Washington to sign a trade agreement with the U.S. ** SWITZERLAND - Due to a large bilateral trade surplus with the U.S. and a large global current account surplus, Switzerland was added back in as a country that needed monitoring in the latest report. The U.S. had removed Switzerland from its list in November 2023. In 2022, the U.S. had found Switzerland continued to exceed all three thresholds for possible manipulation, but stopped short of calling it a manipulator. The U.S. had said at that time that it would continue an engagement with Switzerland, which began in early 2021 to discuss options for addressing its external imbalances. This was after the Treasury in December 2020, the final full month of Trump's first term, had labeled Switzerland as a currency manipulator. ** IRELAND - Ireland was added to monitoring due to a large bilateral trade surplus with the U.S. and its large global current account surplus. It has been on and off the monitoring list in recent years. It was included on the watch list in both 2021 reports after being removed in December 2020. It was put on the list of countries being watched in May 2019. ** VIETNAM - Vietnam was kept on the U.S. list of countries for monitoring in the latest report. In December 2021 the U.S. had said Vietnam continued to exceed its thresholds for possible currency manipulation but refrained from branding it as a manipulator. In December 2020, the U.S., under Trump, had labeled Vietnam as a currency manipulator. ** SOUTH KOREA - South Korea was kept on the U.S. list of countries for monitoring in the latest report. In November 2024 South Korea was added to the U.S. monitoring list due to its large global current account surplus and its sizable goods and services trade deficit with the U.S. In November 2023, South Korea was removed from monitoring for the first time since 2016. ** TAIWAN - Taiwan was kept on the list for monitoring. In December 2021 the U.S. had said Taiwan continued to exceed its criteria for possible currency manipulation but did not formally label it a manipulator. Taiwan was first added to the monitoring list in 2016. ** JAPAN - In the latest report, Japan was kept on the monitoring list. In November, it was already being watched because of its trade surplus with the U.S. and an increase in its global current account surplus to 4.2% of GDP. Japan intervened three times since April 2024 to shore up the yen's value. The Treasury report said Japan was transparent but that intervention should only happen in "exceptional circumstances without prior consultations." It had been added to the list of countries monitored in 2016. ** GERMANY - It was on the list of countries being monitored in the latest report. Germany was also under monitoring in 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021 reports. ** SINGAPORE - Singapore was already on the monitoring list in both 2024 reports. It was also on the watch list in 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020. In the December 2020 report the U.S. said Singapore had intervened in the forex market in a "sustained, asymmetric manner" but did not meet other requirements to be labeled a manipulator.
