I’ve been here! There a truck stop and a diner. In the women’s bathroom there’s a fully clothed statue and if you try to pull down the pants, an alarm sounds in the whole diner.
Officials were giving Trump classified briefings on the matter at the same time that the president was publicly downplaying the risk of the novel coronavirus and insisting the US was well prepared to handle the outbreak.
The Post reported that intelligence documents closely tracked the virus’ spread in Wuhan, China, where it originated and as it later progressed through mainland China, but they did not specify when the disease would make it to the US.
“The system was blinking red,” one US official with access to the intelligence told The Post. Agencies “have been warning on this since January.”
“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” the official added.
The intelligence documents were disseminated to White House officials as well as congressional lawmakers and their staff. Congress also began receiving daily briefings on the virus earlier this year as it rapidly spread across the globe.
By the end of January and beginning of February, a majority of the intelligence contained in Trump’s daily briefings was about the coronavirus, according to The Post.
The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11. To date, 271,629 people around the world have become infected and 11,282 have died.
Trump declared a national emergency last week but has since been criticized for misrepresenting information about when a vaccine may become available, and blaming the mainstream media and his critics for the continued escalation of the crisis.
In the absence of strong federal guidance, various states and cities have had to take matters into their own hands and introduced sweeping measures to restrict public gatherings and stop the spread of the virus.
The governors of New York and California issued statewide orders mandating that residents stay inside as much as possible and limit their outdoor activity. Across the country, millions of people have been forced to work from home or lost their jobs altogether as nonessential businesses have been ordered to shut down.
Trump on Friday evening approved a major disaster declaration for the state of New York, which has been the hardest hit by the disease’s outbreak in the US.
Desperate scenes have unfolded in the north of
the country, particularly the hard-hit Lombardy region where infections first
exploded last month, as hospitals struggle to treat thousands of cases.
And Chinese medical experts helping Italy deal
with the crisis have said the restrictions imposed in Lombardy are “not
strict enough.”
The government has now agreed that the
military can be used to help enforce the lockdown, the president of the
Lombardy region, Attilio Fontana, told a news conference on Friday.
“(The request to use the army) has been
accepted… and 114 soldiers will be on the ground throughout Lombardy… it is
still too little, but it is positive,” Fontana said. “Unfortunately
we are not seeing a change of trend in the numbers, which are rising.”
The soldiers had until now been deployed in
the region to ensure general security in the streets.
More than 4,000 people have now died from the
disease in Italy, the country’s civil protection agency said Friday –
more than any other nation – and nearly 6,000 new infections were confirmed in
the past day, bringing the total to more than 47,000 cases.
Daniela Confalonieri, an Italian nurse in
Milan, the region’s capital, said the situation was so dire that the dead were
no longer being counted.
“We’re working in a state of very high
stress and tension,” Confalonieri told Reuters. “Unfortunately we
can’t contain the situation in Lombardy, there’s a high level of contagion and
we’re not even counting the dead any more.
“Look at the news that’s coming out of
Italy and take note of what the situation really is like. It’s
unimaginable.”
A hospital doctor in Bergamo, another Lombardy
city, told CNN it had been hit so hard by the coronavirus that it is now
sending patients who need intensive care to other parts of the country.
“Bergamo is sending ICU patients to other
regions because we ran out (of space),” Dr. Stefano Magnone told CNN on
Friday, adding that intensive care units in hospitals in nearby Brescia were
also full. Brescia is the second-worst affected province, according to the
civil protection agency.
A Texas appeals court on Thursday upheld a five-year prison sentence for a woman who was convicted of illegally voting even though she didn’t know she was ineligible when she went to the polls in 2016. The punishment for the Fort Worth woman, Crystal Mason, stirred national outrage because of its severity, prompting accusations that prosecutors were trying to intimidate Texans from voting.
Four years ago, Mason was on supervised release, similar to probation, for a federal felony conviction related to tax fraud. She didn’t know that Texas prohibits felons from voting until they finish their sentence entirely. Mason voted in the last presidential election at the urging of her mother and cast a provisional ballot when poll workers couldn’t find her name on the voter registration rolls. The ballot was never counted because Mason was not an eligible voter.
During her 2018 trial probation officials testified that they never told Mason she could not vote, but the appeals court said that didn’t matter. Mason was guilty, the court said, because she knew she was on supervised release. “Contrary to Mason’s assertion, the fact that she did not know she was legally ineligible to vote was irrelevant to her prosecution,” Justice Wade Birdwell wrote for a three-judge panel on Texas’ second court of appeals.
“These are difficult times for me, but I have faith that with the help of my family and God, right will prevail,” Mason said in a statement on Friday. “A punishment of five years in jail for doing what I thought was my civic duty, and just as I was getting my family’s life together, is not simply unfair, it’s a tragedy.”
The case has already taken a significant toll on Mason, who turns 45 on Saturday. After she was arrested in 2017, the life she had been working to rebuild since getting out of federal prison in 2015 crumbled. She lost her job, which provided the main source of income for her family, which includes three children, four of her brother’s children who she raised, and her grandchildren.
Because she was convicted of illegal voting while on supervised release, a federal judge had also sent her back to federal prison in late 2018, where she served several months. Her teenage daughter Taylor put off going to college to come home and run the household. The family depended in part on donations from a GoFundMe account. Since her conviction, Mason has become more politically active – she hosted a voter registration drive ahead of Texas’s primary.
Thomas Buser-Clancy, an attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union who helped represent Mason, said Mason’s legal team will appeal. “Crystal submitted a provisional ballot that was not counted, she did not vote illegally,” he said. Mason will remain out of prison on bond while the appeal is pending.
