By Kate Bennett and Kate Sullivan, CNN

The White House said Wednesday it would not be hosting a traditional Halloween celebration this year due to President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden’s overseas travel.

Michael La Rosa, the first lady’s press secretary, says the annual trick-or-treating on the South Lawn, which is typically attended by White House staff and military families, would not be taking place.

But LaRosa said they would still mark the occasion and that the White House would be illuminated orange on October 31.

“The first family encourages families and children to celebrate Halloween outdoors in their neighborhoods or other outdoor venues,” La Rosa said in a statement.

The Bidens are scheduled to depart Washington on Thursday for Rome, where the President will attend the G20 Summit over the weekend. The President and first lady will also meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Friday. After Rome, the President will travel to Glasgow for COP26, a UN climate summit.

Last year, despite the coronavirus pandemic, then-President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump hosted trick-or-treating and a smaller party on the South Lawn. The children and families were required to wear masks, but Trump and Melania Trump did not.

Because of the pandemic and the spread of the Delta variant, Biden and Jill Biden haven’t held many large gatherings at the White House since taking office in January.

They hosted more than a thousand people on the South Lawn for a July 4 celebration that was meant to mark the country turning the corner from the coronavirus pandemic, but Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations again started shooting up around the country.

More than 190 million people, or 57.5% of the total US population, are fully vaccinated, but the Biden administration is still struggling to get the rest of the population vaccinated.

Just over 22% of the eligible population has not received one dose of a vaccine, and the President has repeatedly pleaded for Americans who have not gotten the shot to do so in order to protect themselves and their loved ones and to help the nation recover from the pandemic.

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Science tells us that to avoid irreversible climate change that will have a catastrophic effect on life on Earth we must limit further temperature rises to 1.5 or 2 degrees at the very most. That means achieving the emissions reduction target of net zero by no later than 2050. Time is rapidly running out. Some will feel hampered by skeptical voters, financial constraints and Covid-19-related challenges. US President Joe Biden, while painfully aware of the risk climate change poses to the US economy, is struggling to enact vital green policies because of political polarization and tensions within his own Democratic Party.

But I believe that the key reason for much of the current inaction — and the greatest threat to progress at COP26 — is a lack of empathy. It is the inability of some of the most influential leaders and of large swaths of the public on whose votes they depend, including in North America, Europe and Australia, to see the majority of the victims of climate change as fully real people, deserving of protection. And that is partly because of those victims’ skin color.

The meeting rooms of COP26 will be haunted by the (literally) toxic legacy of the empire-building days of many of the world’s wealthiest countries, when prosperous, industrializing, northern-hemisphere nations, the populations of which were mostly White, plundered the resources of poorer, pre-industrial, southern-hemisphere nations, the populations of which were mostly Black or brown. Colonialists and slave traders devised an ingenious way of justifying this exploitation while avoiding any burdensome sense of guilt — they invented the concept of race to justify declaring White people to be superior, and people of color to be inferior — not quite human. Lingering belief in and institutional reflections of this pernicious idea is still the cause of much injustice across the globe, and climate injustice is no exception.For, if the Earth continues to heat, it is the Black and brown inhabitants of the world’s poorest and most climate-vulnerable regions who will suffer the most and the soonest. People living in places such as the low-lying Pacific islands, now at risk of being wiped out by rising sea levels, and large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where extreme heat, droughts and floods can lead to famine, will pay the price. Their suffering will be closely mirrored by that of richer nations’ most disadvantaged populations, who cannot afford to protect themselves from climate-related severe weather events and are often unable to recover from such events once they have hit. This is already playing out in the southern US, where in recent years major hurricanes have left already marginalized, majority-Black communities traumatized and even poorer. The G20 countries are, according to a paper from the World Resources Institute and Climate Analytics, responsible for around 75% of global emissions. Consciously or not, some of those privileged few are in danger of using the mechanism of dehumanization as a psychological buffer between themselves and those who pollute the least yet are most threatened by climate change. If you see the climate crisis as something that mainly affects people who are, in some indefinable way, not like you — or worse, as less human than you — then you are unlikely to feel the need to take urgent, expensive steps to save them.

The only antidote to this ‘othering’, and to injustice of every kind, is a more radical empathy. If we are to succeed in fighting climate change, we need to develop deep empathy for all our fellow global citizens, and we should demand that our leaders demonstrate their ability do the same.

When we hear Pacific islanders explain how it feels to be facing extinction, we must be able to feel their dread. When we see climate refugees forced to leave Africa’s Sahel region, where unpredictable rainfall means they can no longer rely on their own crops to feed their children, we have to actually experience their anxiety, their despair, their hope.

Empathy requires work. It is not an easy task to really understand that a person who doesn’t look like you, talk like you or pray like you is, in fact, your brother or sister. It can be difficult, or even feel antagonistic, to be asked to glimpse the world through a stranger’s eyes, but doing it can lead us to recognize the beauty of our common humanity in ways that can transform the world.

The best way to open our minds and hearts and learn to empathize is to truly listen to others. That is perhaps the best opportunity that COP26 provides. We must give the people who have the most to lose from our climate inaction — inhabitants of the global south, members of poor and vulnerable communities and young people — an unfettered platform to express their fear and frustration and to share the solutions they know are required.

When they do, the rest of the world must pay very careful attention — at COP26 and beyond — and then act in unison to make social and racial justice a centerpiece of climate solutions, all pursued with renewed commitment.

If we can all take a leap of faith and start to perceive every current and future inhabitant of this fragile planet as being just as startlingly human as we are, then we may have a chance to avoid further climate disaster. We might also at last be able to build a new world in which racial and social injustice are things of the past. We all stand to gain from meeting that target. It seems to me that COP26 is as good a place as any to start.

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The Fox News host Neil Cavuto has “begged” viewers to toss out political talking points about Covid-19 vaccinations and get the shot.

“My God, stop the politics,” he told the network’s Media Buzz show.

“Life is too short to be an ass. Life is way too short to be ignorant of the promise of something that is helping people worldwide. Stop the deaths, stop the suffering, please get vaccinated, please.”

He also said he expected to be attacked for his appeal.

Fox News requires staff to be vaccinated or to take daily tests. Some hosts have advocated vaccinations and other Covid precautions.

But others, including the primetime star Tucker Carlson, have pushed vaccine misinformation as part of attacks on public health mandates from government agencies and businesses and the Biden administration’s attempts to contain the pandemic.

Some Fox News hosts broadcast from remote studios, thereby bypassing vaccine and testing requirements as they inveigh against vaccine mandates.

Cavuto is immunocompromised, with multiple sclerosis and after open heart surgery.

“I feel very strongly,” he said, in his first interview since testing positive himself. “I know we live in this hyper-politicised age. When people get vaccinated, I know you know a lot of people say that’s a private decision. I get that, I appreciate that, but I’d like to urge people of all sorts, please get vaccinated.”

Last week, the former secretary of state Colin Powell died from complications from Covid. He had been vaccinated but was immunocompromised, as he was being treated for cancer. In the battle over vaccines and mandates, his death became a political pawn.

“Half the cases that we’re hearing on the breakthrough front are among the immunocompromised people like me,” Cavuto said, “who’ve had multiple sclerosis or probably a heart situation or cancer.

“There are plenty of people working around you now, in all types of business environments, who are susceptible this sort of thing. You can help them out a lot, whatever your views on mandates, and I get that no one likes to be ordered to do things, but in the end if you can get vaccinated and think of someone else and think of what that could mean to them and their survivability from something like this, we will all be better off.”

“I hear from a lot of people in ongoing nasty emails, ‘You’re a Never Trumper’, or you’re this or ‘We don’t trust you, we don’t believe a word you’re saying.’ And that’s just coming from my family.

“I cannot stress this enough: it’s not about left or right. This is not about who’s conservative or liberal. Last time I checked, everyone regardless of their political persuasion is coming down with this. Cases are stabilising, but … we’ve lost 5 million globally to this. We’ve lost nearly 800,000 in the US.

“Take the political speaking points and toss them for now, I’m begging you. Toss them and think of what’s good not only for yourself but for those around you.

“I dare say people who experienced this and see loved ones who have been affected by this or have died from this are not judging the wisdom of mandates. They’re wishing they got vaccinated, and they didn’t.”

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GREAT FALLS, Mont. — In the summer of 2020, as pandemic shutdowns closed businesses and racial justice protests erupted on American streets, Rae Grulkowski, a 56-year-old businesswoman who had never been involved in politics but was alarmed about what was happening to the country, found a way to make a difference.

The connection to the turbulence of national politics might not have been immediately clear.

Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of central Montana a national heritage area, celebrating its role in the story of the American West. A small pot of federal matching money was there for the taking, to help draw more visitors and preserve underfunded local tourist attractions.

Ms. Grulkowski set about blowing up that effort with everything she had.

She collected addresses from a list of voters and spent $1,300 sending a packet denouncing the proposed heritage area to 1,498 farmers and ranchers. She told them the designation would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. It would alter water rights, give tourists access to private property, create a new taxation district and prohibit new septic systems and burials on private land, she said.

None of this was true.

Yet it soon became accepted as truth by enough people to persuade Montana’s leading Republican figures and conservative organizations, including the farm bureau, Gov. Greg Gianforte and Senator Steve Daines, to oppose the proposal and enact a state law forbidding the federal government to create any heritage area in Montana. It is a ban that the state has no authority to enforce.

Which is how a humble bid for a small serving of Washington pork by a group of local civic boosters became yet another nasty skirmish in the bitter nationwide struggle between the forces of fact and fantasy.

From her point of view, the tale of Ms. Grulkowski’s one-woman crusade is a stirring reminder of the power of political activism. “I thought, ‘Here’s the world going crazy,’” she said, explaining her motivation.

From the vantage point of informed democratic decision making, it’s a haunting tale about how a sustained political campaign can succeed despite — or perhaps as a result of — being divorced from reality.

“Misinformation is the new playbook,” Bob Kelly, the mayor of Great Falls, said. “You don’t like something? Create alternative facts and figures as a way to undermine reality.”

The dispute has split communities, become a wedge issue in this fall’s political campaigns and left proponents of the heritage area flummoxed at their collective inability to refute falsehoods once they have become accepted wisdom.

“We’ve run into the uneducable,” Ellen Sievert, a retired historic preservation officer for Great Falls and surrounding Cascade County, said. “I don’t know how we get through that.”

Most of the heritage area’s key supporters are Democrats, and virtually all of its opponents are Republicans. But partisanship doesn’t explain everyone’s positions.

Steve Taylor, a former mayor of Neihart (pop. 43) whose family owns a car dealership in Great Falls, is a conservative who voted for Donald J. Trump twice, though he said he has regretted those votes since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Fellow Republicans, he said, have painted the heritage area as a liberal plot.

“They make it a political thing because if you have a Democrat involved, then they are all against it,” he said. “It’s so hard to build something and so easy to tear it down. It’s maddening. It’s so easy to destroy something with untruths.”

The proposal for the Big Sky Country National Heritage Area, encompassing most of two central Montana counties that are together roughly the size of Connecticut, was the brainchild of Jane Weber, a U.S. Forest Service retiree who spent a decade on the Cascade County Commission.

Beginning in 2013, Ms. Weber teamed up with local preservationists, formed a nonprofit, enlisted local businesses and raised $50,000 for a required feasibility study. In 2014, the Great Falls City Commission included the heritage area as part of its official growth policy.

The proposal would take in four National Historic Landmarks: Lewis and Clark’s portage route around Great Falls; Fort Benton, a pioneer town along the Missouri River that was the last stop for steamships heading west from St. Louis in the 1800s; the First Peoples Buffalo Jump, a steep cliff over which Blackfoot hunters herded buffalo to their deaths; and the home and studio of C.M. Russell, the turn-of-the-century “cowboy artist” whose paintings of the American West shaped the popular image of frontier life.

The park service requires demonstrations of public support, which Ms. Weber and her allies solicited. For six years, the process went on largely undisturbed. Ms. Weber hosted dozens of public meetings and was a regular on local radio stations. Opponents made scarcely a peep.

Then the 2020 political season arrived.

With the coronavirus ravaging the economy and protests lighting up her computer screen, Ms. Grulkowski said, she walked into a local Republican Party office one day and asked what she could do to help. Someone told her to attend a meeting. So she did.

There, she heard a presentation by Jeni Dodd, a former reporter for The Great Falls Tribune, who was running in a Republican primary for the Montana State Senate. Ms. Dodd had latched on to the heritage area as a waste of public money and a thicket of conflicts of interest for board members and elected officials. She wrote essays in local weeklies and started a Facebook group calling the proposal a “Big Sky Boondoggle.” It didn’t get much traction.

But Ms. Grulkowski’s interest was piqued.

At the time, she was becoming engrossed in the online world of far-right media. From her home on 34 acres in Stockett, a farming community of 157 people south of Great Falls, she watched videos from outlets like His Glory TV, where hosts refer to President Biden as “the so-called president.” She subscribed to the Telegram messaging channel of Seth Keshel, a prolific disinformation spreader.

And she came across a vein of conspiratorial accusations that national heritage areas were a kind of Trojan horse that could open the door to future federal land grabs.

When Ms. Grulkowski, who owns a septic cleaning company, tried using Ms. Dodd’s group to push the idea that Montanans’ property rights were at risk, Ms. Dodd kicked her out for promoting lies.

“I’m not happy with people saying it will seize your property, because that is disingenuous,” Ms. Dodd said. “I said to her, ‘I think you need to be careful about the message. It isn’t actually the way that it works, what you’re saying.’”

But Ms. Grulkowski plowed ahead.

One of her letters reached Ed Bandel, the local board member for the Montana Farm Bureau Federation, a powerful lobbying force. Mr. Bandel, who grows wheat and peas for energy bars on 3,000 acres, persuaded the farm bureau to oppose the heritage area and enlisted other agriculture groups to follow suit.

The bureau printed thousands of 4-by-6-inch cards saying “Just Say No!” and listing Ms. Grulkowski’s Facebook group and other opponents, including realtors, home builders, grain growers, stock growers and wool growers. Mr. Bandel, his son and Ms. Grulkowski left the cards on tables at supportive restaurants.

By May, their campaign had reached the state capital, where Mr. Gianforte signed the bill barring any national heritage area in Montana after it passed on a near-party-line vote. A heritage area, the bill’s text asserted, would “interfere with state and private property rights.”

In two hours of talking at his farm, Mr. Bandel could offer no evidence to back up that claim. He said he distrusted assurances that there were no such designs. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to do it right. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. I think Adolf Hitler said that, too, didn’t he?” Mr. Bandel said. “The fear of the unknown is a huge fear.”

Mr. Bandel said he trusted Ms. Grulkowski with the details.

But when pressed, Ms. Grulkowski, too, was unable to identify a single instance of a property owner’s being adversely affected by a heritage area. “It’s not that there are a lot of specific instances,” she said. “There’s a lot of very wide open things that could happen.”

That somewhat amorphous fear was more the point.

Outside of a poultry coop, as her chickens and ducks squawked, Ms. Grulkowski ticked through the falsehoods she had read online and accepted as truths in the past year: The Covid vaccine is more dangerous than the coronavirus. Global child-trafficking rings control the political system. Black Lives Matter was responsible for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The United Nations is plotting to control world population and seize private land. Mr. Trump was the rightful winner of last year’s election. Even in Cascade County, where Mr. Trump won 59 percent of the vote, Ms. Grulkowski argued that 3,000 illegal votes were cast.

“We didn’t believe in any of that stuff until last July,” Ms. Grulkowski said. “Then we stumbled on something on the internet, and we watched it, and it took us two days to get over that. And it had to do with the child trafficking that leads to everything. It just didn’t seem right, and that was just over the top. And then we started seeing things that are lining up with that everywhere.”

One thing Ms. Grulkowski does not do — because she refuses to pay — is read The Great Falls Tribune, the local daily. It’s not what it once was, with just eight journalists, down from 45 in 2000, said Richard Ecke, who spent 38 years at the paper before the owner, Gannett, laid him off as opinion editor in 2016. He is vice chairman of the proposed heritage area’s board.

In the paper’s place, information and misinformation about the heritage area spread on Facebook and in local outlets that parroted Ms. Grulkowski. Last winter, a glossy magazine distributed to Montana farmers put the subject on its cover, headlined “Intrusive Raid on Private Property Rights.”

Ms. Grulkowski badgered supporters of the heritage area to withdraw financial backing. She raised the money to plaster the “Just Say No!” message on billboards along Interstate 15 and on Highway 87 into Fort Benton, and on bus-stop benches in Great Falls.

Three of the heritage area’s board members quit in frustration. Ms. Weber herself resigned from the Cascade County Commission last December after her fellow commissioners voted to oppose the heritage area.

“It’s very easy to take fear and mistrust and make it work for you. It’s very hard to fight back against all of that,” Ms. Weber said. “It’s kind of like trying to convince someone to get vaccinated.”

The issue is now roiling November’s municipal elections in Great Falls.

“It’s a legitimate concern anytime you have anybody telling you a possibility of someone telling you: You can do this or you can do that with your own property,” Fred Burow, an auctioneer challenging Mr. Kelly for the mayoralty, said.

Ms. Grulkowski now has ambitions beyond Montana. She wants to push Congress not to renew heritage areas that already exist.

Buoyed by the trust her neighbors have placed in her, she has begun campaigning for Ms. Weber’s old seat on the county commission, in part to avenge the way she feels: mistreated by those in power.

She doesn’t feel she’s been told the whole truth.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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WASHINGTON — Joe Biden’s pitch during the 2020 campaign to unseat President Donald J. Trump was simple: Trade in a stubborn, immovable leader for one with a proven record of taking half a loaf when a full one is out of reach.

That approach appears to have brought Mr. Biden to the precipice of victory on a $2 trillion deal that could begin to define his legacy as a successful Oval Office legislative architect, one who is reshaping government spending and doing so by the narrowest of margins in a country with deep partisan and ideological chasms.

But the bill is certain to be far smaller than what he originally proposed, and far less ambitious than he and many of his allies had hoped. It won’t make him the one who finally secured free community college for everyone. Seniors won’t get free dental, hearing and vision coverage from Medicare. And there won’t be a new system of penalties for the worst polluters.

“Look — hey, look, it’s all about compromise,” Mr. Biden said at a CNN town hall meeting on Thursday, shrugging off the doubters as he sought to close the deal with lawmakers and the public.

But accepting less and calling it a win has its limits — and consequences.

By spending the last several months pushing for an even larger and more ambitious agenda, knowing that he would most likely have to pare it back, Mr. Biden has let down some supporters who believed he could deliver on his soaring rhetoric about the need for better higher education, expanded Medicare services and bold advances in the fight against climate change.

“In order to make real progress, you have to inspire people about the importance of the work,” said Doug Elmendorf, the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School and the former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “And then any compromise is a disappointment.”

Negotiations are continuing on the package’s final framework. But after pushing for months for a $3.5 trillion bill, the president is likely now to end up with a measure that includes less than $2 trillion in spending on various social programs and anti-climate-change initiatives.

Once the spending bills are behind him, Mr. Biden still faces challenges that are not so easily solved by compromise. On Thursday, he appeared to acknowledge that reality by hinting that he was open to altering the Senate’s longstanding filibuster rules if that is what it takes to break through Republican opposition to protecting voting rights and passing other parts of the Democratic agenda.

“We’re going to have to move to the point where we fundamentally alter the filibuster,” he told the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.

That is a dramatic concession for a politician like Mr. Biden, who embraced the often arcane rules of the Senate during the three decades he served there. Like other institutionalists in the chamber, Mr. Biden has resisted demands from liberal activists to shatter those rules, fearful of the consequences the next time Republicans are in charge.

But the Washington that Mr. Biden often reminisces about — the one in which Democrats and Republicans work together toward common goals — is largely a distant memory. If he wants to make progress on voting rights, climate change, prison reform, an immigration overhaul and more, he most likely won’t be able to lean on the same instincts that have animated most of his political life and defined the brand that helped him win the White House.

The political differences are stark: Republicans argue the president’s spending program would burden future generations with more debt and serve as a drag on the economy. They insist the voting rights legislation is intended to benefit Democrats, and they oppose many of the president’s climate policies because they say they will be bad for jobs and business.

John Podesta, who served as former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, said Mr. Biden “has done a pretty good job of pushing as far as he could in the style that he was a champion of.” But he said that beyond the spending bills, “it’s hard to see how he gets that same spirit of collaboration, good will, honorable compromise.” The issue of voting rights may be the clearest example in the months to come.

Just this week, Republicans used the filibuster to block an already watered-down Democratic voting rights bill for the third time since Mr. Biden took office. The takeaway? If Democrats want federal legislation to stop what they view as an assault on voting in Republican-controlled states, they will need to play hardball.

That very likely means persuading all 50 Democrats and independents in the chamber to vote for changing the filibuster rule — if he can.

“President Biden and Senate Democrats need to fulfill campaign promises and defend our democracy — there’s too much at stake,” leaders of Fix Our Senate, a group that favors eliminating the filibuster, said in a statement on Friday. “After three Republican filibusters of common sense voter protection laws, it’s time to end the filibuster and protect the right to vote for all Americans.”

Advocates for immigrants’ rights are poised to make a similar argument on behalf of fixing what most agree is a broken system. The idea of a bipartisan immigration overhaul, which Mr. Biden proposed on his first day in office, has stalled amid opposition from Republican lawmakers.

An attempt to use the spending bill to provide a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented people was blocked by special Senate rules on the budget. If Mr. Biden wants to make good on his promised immigration overhaul, it would require a separate bill, and he may have no choice but to change the filibuster rules for that issue as well.

But perhaps the biggest promise Mr. Biden made during the campaign was to be the president who would finally confront the environmental dangers facing the planet. On Thursday, he put it in the bluntest possible terms: “The existential threat to humanity is climate change.”

Mr. Biden and his party are likely to face that threat alone in the coming months and years. Most Republicans have shown little appetite for aggressive action to counter the environmental damage from cars, manufacturing and other economic activities.

Where the Budget Bill Stands in Congress

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A framework has yet to emerge. No final decisions have been made on the plan — which is expected to include education, child care, paid leave, anti-poverty and climate change programs — and negotiations are continuing. But even with a scaled-back version, passage of the bill is no guarantee.

And even within his own party, the president faces divisions that make it difficult to convince the rest of the world that the United States is serious about reducing the emissions that are causing global warming.

For Mr. Biden, then, the question will be: Is he willing to treat the debate of core issues like the climate, voting rights and immigration as a “break the glass” moment in which he and his Democratic allies have no choice but to change the rules, even if it means Republicans will take advantage of the chance to advance their own agenda once they return to power?

Of course, the president can’t change the filibuster by himself. Doing so would take the votes of all 50 Democratic and independent senators, along with a tiebreaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris. And already, some of the same Democratic senators who forced him to accept less spending have said they oppose altering the filibuster.

But the president is the leader of his party, and his voice matters. If he decides it’s time to “fundamentally alter the filibuster,” as he said on Thursday, members of his party may listen.

One argument at his disposal: Changing the rules to allow more of the Democratic agenda to pass could be vital for the party’s success at the polls.

Strategists say enthusiasm among core Democratic voters is critical to defeating the Republican Party in the midterm elections of 2022 (and perhaps Mr. Trump, its leader, two years later). If crucial parts of the president’s coalition remain unhappy because they are disappointed in the compromise bill, that could threaten Democratic hopes to remain in power in Congress and the White House.

“The political costs of this will be large,” Mr. Elmendorf said.

Mr. Podesta, who advised Hillary Clinton during her runs for the presidency, agreed. He said it was a “big problem” if Democrats couldn’t deliver on the fundamental promises. Mr. Biden’s approval ratings have already fallen into the low-to-mid-40s.

“Particularly younger voters,” he said. “You are seeing it among independents, African American and Latino voters. They are just feeling like these guys are not delivering.”

Mr. Biden might turn the enthusiasm gap around by making progress on the rest of his agenda, including voting rights, immigration and climate change.

He vowed on Thursday that he would continue to press for parts of his agenda that were left on the cutting room floor during the debate over the spending bills. He called increasing Pell Grants for college students “a start” but he pledged to keep trying for free community college — in part to satisfy the demands of his wife, Jill Biden, who is a longtime college professor.

“I’m going to get it done,” he vowed, adding with a smile at his wife in the front row, “and if I don’t, I’ll be sleeping alone for a long time.”

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WASHINGTON — A federal magistrate judge ordered the continued detention of the wife of a Navy nuclear engineer on charges she participated in a plot to sell American submarine secrets to a foreign country.

In an order confining Diana Toebbe to the custody of U.S. Marshals, Magistrate Judge Robert W. Trumble noted video evidence presented by prosecutors that she was a willing participant in dropping classified documents in a dead drop set up by undercover F.B.I. agents and cited text messages between her and her husband in 2019 about leaving the country.

“The weight of the evidence against defendant Diana Toebbe is strong,” the judge wrote in his order, which he signed Thursday.

The magistrate judge also said that the government had not found either the full trove of documents the Toebbes were accused of trying to sell to a foreign government or the money provided to them by undercover F.B.I. agents.

The Toebbes pleaded not guilty this week to charges that they conspired to sell secrets of the Navy’s nuclear-powered Virginia-class attack submarines to a foreign country. In a detention hearing that followed, Mr. Toebbe did not contest the government’s efforts to confine him, but Ms. Toebbe’s lawyers mounted vigorous effort to have her freed before her trial.

In the court proceedings, prosecutors argued that the Toebbes had been considering fleeing the country for years. In the order, the judge highlighted encrypted text messages found on the couple’s phones after the F.B.I. raid.

“We’ve got passports, and some savings. In a real pinch we can flee quickly,” Jonathan Toebbe wrote, on March 7, 2019. Responding on the same day, Ms. Toebbe wrote: “Right. Let’s go sooner than later.”

In a hearing this week, Ms Toebbe’s lawyer, Edward B. MacMahon Jr., said the idea that Diana Toebbe was preparing to flee the country was rebutted by one clear fact: She and her husband had let their passports expire in February 2020.

Mr. MacMahon argued that with court monitoring, Ms. Toebbe was little threat to flee. Continuing to detain Ms. Toebbe would threaten her health, he said, and her two children needed the care of a parent.

But prosecutors said they had not found the $100,000 in cryptocurrency that undercover F.B.I. agents gave the Toebbes while they were gathering evidence against them. Until the money was found, they argued, Ms. Toebbe would have the means to escape.

The judge sided with the prosecutors, saying he was unconvinced by the defense argument that monitoring could ensure Ms. Toebbe would remain in the United States. Judge Trumble wrote in his order that Ms. Toebbe was a flight risk and should be detained for that alone.

He noted the 2019 text message from Ms. Toebbe to her husband, urging them to make plans to leave the country.

“Although defendant has no prior criminal history, the nature and circumstances of the charges against her and her actions demonstrate that defendant is a danger to every community and to our national security by clear and convincing evidence,” the judge wrote.

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10.00am EDT10:00

“White supremacy still remains a critical flaw in our democracy” NAACP’s Ifill on dangers of voting rights legislation stalling

There is furious reaction to stalled attempts to protect voting rights in the US with new laws at the federal level, in the face of determined and brazen efforts by some Republican-led states to suppress the scope to vote, in particular affecting Black voters in non-urban and/or low income communities.

US Senate Republicans once again filibustered voting rights legislation yesterday.

My colleague Sam Levine writes:

The bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, would impose significant new guardrails on the American democratic process and amount to the most significant overhaul of US elections in a generation. It would require every state to automatically register voters at motor vehicle agencies, offer 15 consecutive days of early voting and allow anyone to request a mail-in ballot. It would also set new standards to ensure voters are not wrongfully removed from the voter rolls, protect election officials against partisan interference, and set out clear alternatives people who lack ID to vote can use at the polls.

Sherrilyn Ifill, law professor and president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, responded on MSNBC. She said she was part of a non-partisan organization, but pointed out there was no getting away from the fact that “not a single Republican” in the Senate was prepared even to support debating the bill, let alone voting on it. And with filibuster rules requiring 60 Senate votes, Democrats in the 50-50 Senate were not able to advance the bill.

“[They were] unwilling to even have the conversation about expanding voter access, and we have seen in states like Florida and Georgia and Texas what is happening in terms of voter suppression laws that have been passed…restrictive laws targeted at Black and brown voters over the objections of almost every Democrat in those legislatures.

“That doesn’t change what it is…the reality of what we are dealing with is no different than the reality of what Black voters were dealing with in 1964 and we don’t look back at the great voting rights effort and the Selma march and say the Democrats were doing this or the Republicans were doing that, we look back and recognize that voter suppression was being perpetuated and advanced to keep fellow citizens from being able to vote and participate in the democratic process today.”

Ifill goes on to say that some of the media finds it too convenient to talk about voting rights struggles now in partisan terms…

“…And not to confront the racial discrimination that lies at the heart of it. But the voting Right Act talks about Black voters having the right to elect their candidate of choice, it doesn’t say who that candidate is or what party they belong to…the maps that are being drawn…voter suppression laws that are being passed are targeted very specifically at Black and brown voters and that’s the conversation we need to be having…that is the sign that white supremacy still remains a critical flaw in our democracy…it has come to take down our entire democracy.”

Legal Defense Fund
(@NAACP_LDF)

#ICYMI, @Sifill_LDF joined @allinwithchris on @MSNBC to discuss the Freedom to Vote Act’s failure to advance in the Senate and what is at stake for our democracy. pic.twitter.com/05QbvKk1G0

October 21, 2021

Updated
at 10.07am EDT

9.33am EDT09:33

Former Republican secretary of state Condoleezza Rice shocked many when she said on ABC that it was “time to move on” from investigating the January 6 Capitol attack when extremist supporters of Donald Trump stormed Congress in an effort, ostensibly, to stop lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory.

Rice told The View yesterday that she wept as she watched rioters breaking into the Capitol and stalking the halls, attacking police officers, invading the chambers and looking for lawmakers and staff to hurt.

“I thought: ‘I study countries that do this. I didn’t think it would happen in my own country,’ ” she said and the Washington Post reported.

She said the attack “was wrong” but then said of the ongoing House investigation into the background to the insurrection, and what the Donald Trump White House, aides and Republican lawmakers knew and did in the run-up and on the day, that it was time to move on.

The View
(@TheView)

Sec. @CondoleezzaRice: “Our institutions have to be upheld.”

“What happened on January 6th was wrong. I also know that as a government and as a country, we’ve got to be concerned about the things that are making life hard for Americans and hard for American families.” pic.twitter.com/GGA3FGfu3J

October 20, 2021

The Post points out:

[Rice’s] comments were a response in agreement to remarks Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gave on Tuesday. McConnell told reporters it was time for lawmakers “to be talking about the future and not the past,” referring to the discussion about false claims of election fraud pushed by Trump and his allies, which ultimately led supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6. McConnell said the issue should no longer be of concern…

Nevertheless, the House’s Jan. 6 committee is moving ahead on the investigation into the insurrection. Over the past few weeks, lawmakers subpoenaed organizers of the pro-Trump rallies that preceded the riot and several former Trump advisers. Among them was Stephen K. Bannon, who last week refused to comply with the subpoena. The committee unanimously voted Tuesday to hold the former adviser in contempt.

9.01am EDT09:01

House to vote on holding Steve Bannon in contempt over Capitol attack evidence

Good morning, US politics live blog readers, on a big day in a crucial week in Washington for Joe Biden’s administration there is a lot going on, so tune in as we bring you all the developments in short order.

Here’s are some of the main items on the docket today:

• The House is due to vote this afternoon on whether to recommend the prosecution of Steve Bannon, former top aide to Donald Trump, for criminal contempt of Congress for defying the subpoena issued by the bipartisan select committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January by extremist Trump supporters. If, as expected, the House votes to do so, the next stage involves federal prosecutors, as part of the Department of Justice (DoJ), deciding whether to prosecute. The House vote follows the unanimous select committee vote two days ago.
• US attorney general Merrick Garland will testify in front of the House judiciary committee from 10am ET and can expect questions from members of Congress on taking actions over defiance of Jan 6 committee subpoenas (also issued to other former top aides of Trump). Garland will also be asked about DoJ efforts – unsuccessful so far – to stop the Texas abortion ban.
• Frantic negotiations between Joe Biden, top staff and members of Congress to reach a deal on an outline agreement to pass the flagship Build Back Better legislation package, amid a mix of acrimony and determined optimism (a heady Capitol Hill cocktail). Biden is racing to find a way to preserve his climate action agenda ahead of going to Scotland next week to represent the US at the Cop26 United Nations climate crisis summit.
• The fall-out continues from the failure of Democrats to advance voting rights legislation, after Senate Republicans again blocked a sweeping voting rights bill yesterday day, a move that will significantly increase pressure on the Biden administration to do away with the filibuster.
• Vice-President Kamala Harris heads to Virginia to campaign for Democrat Terry McAuliffe who is neck-and-neck with his Republican rival for the governorship of that state in next month’s gubernatorial election.
• Donald Trump is launching a social media platform. Yep.

Updated
at 9.24am EDT

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Originally Appeared Here

9.57am EDT09:57

Walter Reed on lockdown following bomb threat

The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center is on lockdown this morning, after its campus received a bomb threat.

Naval Support Activity Bethesda, the military campus that includes Walter Reed, said officials received a threatening phone call about an hour ago.

Naval Support Activity Bethesda
(@nsabethesda)

1/2 – 0925, 20OCT21: At approximately 8:45 a.m., the installation received a phone call from an anonymous source stating there is a bomb at or near Building 10. Security personnel have responded to the scene.

October 20, 2021

“At approximately 8:45 a.m., the installation received a phone call from an anonymous source stating there is a bomb at or near Building 10. Security personnel have responded to the scene,” NSA Bethesda said on Twitter.

“The base is on lockdown. All personnel should shelter in place. All gates are closed to non-emergency traffic. The public is asked to avoid the area.”

9.37am EDT09:37

It’s worth noting that the Biden administration’s plan to administer coronavirus vaccine shots to children aged 5 to 11 includes an educational campaign.

According to the statement issued by the White House this morning, the department of health and human services will launch “a national public education campaign to reach parents and guardians with accurate and culturally-responsive information about the vaccine and the risks that COVID-19 poses to children”.

As part of those efforts, government officials will coordinate with local leaders at schools, churches and health departments to better convey accurate vaccine information to the public.

Vaccines are already available to children aged 12 or older in the US, but American parents have been somewhat hesitant to vaccinate their children.

According to data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just 46% of children aged 12 to 15 are fully vaccinated. Among children who are 16 or 17 years old, the vaccination rate is slightly higher, at 54%.

9.37am EDT09:37

The White House coronavirus response team held a briefing this morning to outline the Biden administration’s plan to distribute coronavirus vaccines to children between the ages of 5 and 11.

Jeff Zients, the response team coordinator, said he expected the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to make their decisions on authorizing vaccines for those children “in the next couple of weeks”.

The Recount
(@therecount)

“We expect the FDA and CDC’s decision on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5-11 in the next couple of weeks … Should the FDA and CDC authorize the vaccine, we will be ready to get shots in arms.”

— WH COVID Response Coordinator Jeff Zients pic.twitter.com/UkIjbDzWw7

October 20, 2021

An FDA advisory panel will meet next week to discuss Pfizer’s application to make a version of its coronavirus vaccine available to children in that age group. A CDC panel will then convene the following week.

“We know millions of parents have been waiting waiting for Covid-19 vaccine for kids in this age group,” Zients said. “And should the FDA and CDC authorize the vaccine, we will be ready to get shots in arms.”

9.37am EDT09:37

White House outlines plan to vaccinate children aged five to 11

Greetings from Washington, live blog readers.

The Food and Drug Administration has not yet authorized any coronavirus vaccines for children between the ages of five and 11, but the Biden administration is already taking steps to ensure vaccines can be quickly administered once that approval comes through.

The White House announced a plan today “to ensure that, if a vaccine is authorized for children ages five and 11, it is quickly distributed and made conveniently and equitably available to families across the country”.

White House COVID-19 Response Team
(@WHCOVIDResponse)

We expect the FDA and CDC’s decision on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for kids ages 5-11 in the next few weeks and have put together a plan to ensure that vaccines for this age group are available, easy & convenient, should the FDA & CDC authorize the vaccine. https://t.co/o4eX8N2F8e

October 20, 2021

According to the White House, the US already has enough vaccine supply for the 28 million American children in that age group. Pfizer has already created a specific vaccine dose and formula for these children as well.

“Nationwide, more than 25,000 pediatric and primary care provider sites will provide vaccinations for children, in addition to tens of thousands of other provider locations that serve children, including pharmacies, children’s hospitals, and community health centers,” the White House said in its statement.

Of course, parents with young children still need to wait on the FDA approval, but that could occur in a matter of weeks.

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

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Originally Appeared Here

The editor of Germany’s biggest tabloid has been relieved of his duties as its publisher faced allegations that it tried to cover up the full findings of an investigation into sexual misconduct and bullying within its own offices.

Media giant Axel Springer SE, the largest media publishing firm in Europe, recently expanded its global portfolio by acquiring the US political news website Politico for more than $1bn, inviting closer scrutiny of its workplace culture on the other side of the Atlantic.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that Julian Reichelt, the editor of Bild, Axel Springer’s flagship tabloid and Europe’s biggest-selling newspaper, promoted a female junior employee to a high-level newsroom job while having an affair with her.

Axel Springer announced on Monday night that Reichelt had been relieved of his duties with immediate effect. The company said in a statement that after recent revelations, further information regarding the editor’s behaviour had come to light.

“The board has learned that even after the end of the compliance procedure in spring 2021, Julian Reichelt continued not clearly separate private and professional affairs and had told the board untruths about this.”

Reichelt temporarily stepped aside in March this year over “alleged compliance violations”, but was reinstalled to a powerful position after less than two weeks. “Based on what they learned during their investigation,” Axel Springer SE’s executive board said at the time, “Julian Reichelt will continue his work.”

Reichelt said in statement released by the company on his return: “What I blame myself for more than anything else is that I have hurt people I was in charge of.”

A testimony that the female worker gave to investigators hired by the company to look into allegations of sexual misconduct said a then 36-year-old Reichelt told the 25-year-old employee in November 2016: “If they find out that I’m having an affair with a trainee, I’ll lose my job.”

The full extent of the investigation’s findings had not been made public until now.

In recent months, Reichelt has again featured prominently in Bild’s printed newspaper, its website and TV news channel, for example as the host of town hall-style gatherings in western German regions devastated by this summer’s flash floods.

Further details from Axel Springer’s compliance report were due to be published on Sunday by a team of investigative reporters working for Ippen Digital, a large German conglomerate of regional news websites.

In a letter also published on Sunday, however, the journalists claim that their month-long investigation into abuses of power in Bild’s offices were halted at the last minute even though “no legal or editorial reasons were given”.

An Ippen spokesperson told the New York Times it had vetoed the investigation “to avoid the appearance of combining a journalistic publication with the economic interest of harming the competitor”. In Munich and the surrounding area of Upper Bavaria, Ippen Digital publishes tz, a tabloid that could be seen as a direct competitor to Bild, though its circulation is considerably smaller.

In a statement in response to the allegations, Axel Springer said: “Axel Springer is dedicated to the highest degree of transparency possible and principally does not have a problem with critical debate. But such coverage has to reach a limit where it concerns the private and confidential sphere of employees as well as – in this particular case – witnesses, who were assured of strict anonymity as part of the compliance procedure that was concluded in the spring.

“As far as Axel Springer is aware, there was no attempt to prevent publications linked to the compliance investigation.”

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Originally Appeared Here

Tom West

The polarization of U.S. politics is far beyond what you may believe. It’s not just Uncle Harry or Aunt Sue who have gone off the deep end, making it impossible to discuss politics over dinner. The rift is much deeper than that.

A study released by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics has found that 41% of Biden voters and 52% of Trump voters agree at least somewhat that it is time to split into two countries based on red and blue states. The survey also found that 80% of us still believe that democracy is a preferable system of government, but 75% of Biden voters and 78% of Trump voters think the opposite party represents a “clear and present danger” to the American way of life.

The question that no one in Washington or St. Paul is asking, however, is how do we pull back from the abyss? Call me delusional, if you will, but I think the first step has to be bipartisan election reform. Or more properly, election reform by either party alone will be the last step into chaos.

In the last election, two things impacting election integrity happened. First, many state Democratic election officials, including Minnesota’s Steve Simon, acted without legislative consent (which is required under the U.S. Constitution’s Article I, Section 4) to change some state election laws. Second, after the election, President Trump repeatedly claimed that the election had been “stolen.”

With regard to the first, the most egregious effort by Simon was when he got a judge with ties to Sen. Amy Klobuchar and other DFLers to agree to waive the witness requirement for absentee ballot signatures. He also tried to get late-arriving ballots counted in the vote totals, but a federal appeals court segregated those ballots, and eventually decided not to count them.

Also, in Minnesota, the 1.9 million absentee ballots cast were supposed to be processed by bipartisan absentee ballot election boards, but only a handful of counties used such boards.

As to the second issue, count me as an agnostic. I don’t know if the election was stolen nor do I believe that anyone else knows either. I do think it wrong for the mainstream media to, without fail, always preface Trump’s claims of election fraud with the words “false” or “misleading.” “Unproven” would be the more accurate term.

Republicans repeatedly called for recounts afterward, and the courts stifled almost every request. In Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, Republicans did conduct a “forensic” audit, and the result slightly increased Biden’s victory margin. Georgia recounted its ballots three times resulting in no change in the result. Maybe the count was accurate as to the outcome, but the unconstitutional changes to state election laws continue to cast a shadow over who actually voted.

In the aftermath, it has become clear we are in the midst of a movement by both parties to “game” our elections. A dozen or so Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted reforms designed to increase election security. Democrats have termed all of those efforts “voter suppression.” Only in Utah has there been bipartisan support for the enacted reforms.

Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are attempting to federalize election rules. Klobuchar has been leading the Senate effort, which has stalled because of zero Republican support. The bill is hundreds of pages, even after downsizing. It originally included a move to eliminate gerrymandering. Some Democrats objected because, as it turns out, the Democrats control many state governments and want to reshape districts for partisan advantage just as much as Republicans do. Thus, it was toned down in a way that will make subject to a court challenge any vote outcome perceived to be unfavorable.

A provision still in the bill would make Election Day a national holiday. That’s about the last thing the nation needs right now. Except for Christmas and New Year’s Day, every holiday the nation takes these days is used for other purposes. For many, taking Election Day off will mean creating a long weekend for hunting, getting an early start or holiday shopping or taking a mini-family vacation. There’s no indication it will increase turnout.

The few times I’ve met Klobuchar, I have always found her to be disarmingly nice. As a journalist, I have to remind myself (as her father, the late great journalist Jim Klobuchar, may have told her) my job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. No Minnesota politician has been more comfortable over the past 15 years than Amy.

It’s one thing to disagree on run-of-the-mill policy issues, but it is just flat-out wrong for one party or the other to try to change election laws to their own benefit. Nothing matters more than keeping the voters’ faith that the election is run fairly and securely, that only eligible U.S. citizens cast a ballot, and that the custody of ballots is as secure as that for criminal evidence.

We can see the depth of the division revealed in the University of Virginia survey mentioned above. Klobuchar, Simon and those Republican-controlled state legislatures need to go back to the drawing board and find those things on which they can compromise or agree with the other party. As with Minnesota’s own split-party legislature this year, such changes may only be modest at first. However, continuing to push for partisan advantage in election rules risks the very legitimacy of our experiment in self-government.

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Originally Appeared Here