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HOUSE VOTES TO EXTEND CORONAVIRUS AID PROGRAM
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House has easily passed a temporary extension of a subsidy program for small businesses slammed by the coronavirus, speeding the measure to President Donald Trump.
Approval by voice vote without debate came after Democrats pushed the legislation through the GOP-controlled Senate late Tuesday as spikes in coronavirus cases in many states led to renewed shutdowns of bars and other businesses.
Trump is expected to sign the measure.
The legislation extends the June 30 deadline for applying for the program to Aug. 8. Lawmakers created the program in March and have modified it twice since, adding money on one occasion and more recently permitting more flexible use of the funding despite some grumbling among GOP conservatives.
About $130 billion of $660 billion approved for the program remains eligible for businesses to seek direct federal subsidies for payroll and other costs such as rent, though demand for the Paycheck Protection Program has pretty much dried up in recent weeks.
Congressional action came as lawmakers were set to exit Washington for more than two weeks. Upon their return, talks were expected to begin on a fifth coronavirus relief measure.
The House has already passed a $3.5 trillion measure that’s a dead letter in the Senate, but the spike in cases may mean less resistance among Senate Republicans to a new measure. The next COVID rescue effort was likely to focus on aid to state and local governments, an extension of unemployment insurance benefits, and another round of direct payments to individuals.
MISSISSIPPI OFFICIALS HOLD CEREMONY TO RETIRE FORMER STATE FLAG
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi officials have held a ceremony to retire the former state flag and send it to a history museum, a day after Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed a law stripping official status from the last state banner in the U.S. that included the Confederate battle emblem.
One person watching with pride was a history-making former lawmaker whose grandfather was a slave.
Robert Clark in 1967 became the first African American since Reconstruction to win a seat in the Mississippi Legislature, and he rose to the second-highest leadership spot during his 36 years in the House. For decades, he tried to persuade colleagues that Mississippi should change the flag many see as racist. But, people weren’t ready to listen before he left office.
Now 91, Clark said that as he watched the flag being handed over to the museum yesterday, he thought about his grandfather, who was forced to go barefoot and eat from a trough before being released from slavery at age 11.
“That’s why I fought to get the flag changed — because the flag represented that, so far as I was concerned,” Clark said after the ceremony.
Mississippi faced increasing pressure in recent weeks to change its 126-year-old flag since protests against racial injustice have focused attention on Confederate symbols.
A broad coalition of legislators on Sunday passed the landmark legislation to retire the flag, capping a weekend of emotional debate and decades of effort by Black lawmakers and others who see the rebel emblem as a symbol of racism and hatred.
RICHMOND TAKE GEN. STONEWALL JACKSON FROM PEDESTAL IN RICHMOND
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Work crews wielding a giant crane, harnesses and power tools wrested an imposing statue of Gen. Stonewall Jackson from its concrete pedestal along Richmond, Virginia’s famed Monument Avenue yesterday, just hours after the mayor ordered the removal of all Confederate statues from city land.
Mayor Levar Stoney’s decree came weeks after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam ordered the removal of the most prominent and imposing statue along the avenue: that of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which sits on state land. The removal of the Lee statue has been stalled pending the resolution of several lawsuits.
The Jackson statue is the latest of several dozen Confederate symbols to be removed from public land in the U.S. in the five weeks since the death of George Floyd at the hands of police sparked a nationwide protest movement.
In most instances, state or local governments moved to take down monuments in response to impassioned demonstrators, but in a few cases —including several other Virginia Confederate statues — protesters toppled the figures themselves. Also this week, Mississippi retired the last state flag in the U.S. that included the Confederate battle emblem.
Confederate statues were erected decades after the Civil War, during the Jim Crow era, when states imposed new segregation laws, and during the “Lost Cause” movement, when historians and others tried to depict the South’s rebellion as a fight to defend states’ rights, not slavery.
Work crews spent several hours yesterday carefully attaching a harness to the massive Stonewall Jackson statue and using power tools to detach it from its base. A crowd of several hundred people who had gathered to watch cheered as a crane lifted the figure of the general atop his horse into the air and set it aside.
“This is long overdue,” said Brent Holmes, who is Black. “One down, many more to go.”
Flatbed trucks and other equipment were spotted at several other monuments as well. The city has roughly a dozen Confederate statues on municipal land, including one of Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart. Mayor Stoney said it will take several days to remove them.
BLACK ACTIVISTS PLAN VIRTUAL CONVENTION IN AUGUST
NEW YORK (AP) — Spurred by broad public support for the Black Lives Matter movement, thousands of Black activists from across the U.S. will hold a virtual convention in August to produce a new political agenda that seeks to build on the success of the protests that followed George Floyd’s death.
The 2020 Black National Convention will take place Aug. 28 via a live broadcast. It will feature conversations, performances and other events designed to develop a set of demands ahead of the November general election, according to a announcement yesterday shared first with The Associated Press.
The convention is being organized by the Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 150 organizations. In 2016, the coalition released its “Vision for Black Lives” platform, which called for public divestment from mass incarceration and for adoption of policies that can improve conditions in Black America.
The announcement comes at a pivotal moment for the BLM movement. A surge in public support, an influx in donations and congressional action to reform policing have drawn some backlash.
The Black National Convention was originally planned to happen in person, in Detroit, the nation’s Blackest major city. But as the coronavirus pandemic exploded in March, organizers quickly shifted to a virtual event, Byrd said. The first-ever Black Lives Matter convention was held in Cleveland in 2015.
AP FACT-CHECKS TRUMP CLAIM ON JOE BIDEN
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has fabricated a complaint that Democratic rival Joe Biden was fed questions at a news conference and read his answers from a teleprompter. This didn’t happen.
TRUMP: “Biden was asked questions at his so-called Press Conference yesterday where he read the answers from a teleprompter. That means he was given the questions, just like Crooked Hillary. Never have seen this before!” — tweet yesterday.
TRUMP: “He doesn’t know where he is, frankly. I watched his press conference yesterday. He’s answering, he’s answering questions like this from a teleprompter. I said, ‘What’s that all about?’” — interview yesterday on Fox Business Network.
THE FACTS: Biden did not read answers off a teleprompter. Nor did The Associated Press, which asked the first question at the briefing, submit questions in advance.
Biden used a teleprompter to read prepared remarks that took aim at Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, before the questions and answers started, at which point the teleprompter appeared to have been turned off.
His campaign gave him a list of news organizations to call on and he answered questions from reporters on that list as well as some he chose spontaneously. That’s not an uncommon practice when officials give news conferences.
Video footage shows that during nearly 30 minutes of Q&A, which ranged in topics from alleged Russian bounties to the Taliban on U.S. troops in Afghanistan to African American female candidates for the Supreme Court and vice presidency, Biden often looked directly at the reporter, not at the teleprompter.
His answers were at times long-winded, without the practiced pauses typically heard in prepared speeches.
Biden campaign national press secretary TJ Ducklo called Trump’s allegation “laughable, ludicrous, and a lie.”
Trump’s accusation reflected his tactic of trying to stir doubts about Biden’s mental acuity.
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