‘I’m Married to an Asian’: Kellyanne Conway Demands Reporter Name White House Official Who Said ‘Kung Flu’

https://www.mediaite.com/news/im-married-to-an-asian-kellyanne-conway-demands-reporter-name-white-house-official-who-said-kung-flu/?utm_source=mostpopular

President Donald Trump senior advisor, Kellyanne Conway, demanded CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang share with the press pool Wednesday the name of the official who billed referred to coronavirus as the slur “Kung-Flu” to her face.

The exchange on the White House grounds began when PBS News White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor referred to the staffers calling the virus the “Kung-Flu” virus while asking what Conway’s message to those staffers was.

“Excuse me, excuse me, that’s been alleged, no — Yamiche, excuse me, Yamiche; I’m not dealing in hypotheticals, of course, it’s wrong, but you can’t just make an accusation and not tell us who it is.”

“Who is it? Come and tell us,” Conway continued.

“Yamiche, if you want to argue, I’m going argue about standing away from each other and washing our hands and everything,” Conway continued.

“Tells us who it is, Weijia who was it, tell us!” Conway stated.

Trump brushes off 'kung-flu' remark and claims Asian Americans would agree with calling it the 'Chinese coronavirus'

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-says-asian-americans-agree-in-calling-it-chinese-coronavirus-2020-3

President Donald Trump said he did not believe the term "kung-flu" and other discriminatory phrases would put Asian Americans at risk of xenophobic attacks amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The disparaging term was privately used by a White House official to CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang, a Chinese American, on Tuesday morning.

"Makes me wonder what they're calling it behind my back," Jiang said in a tweet.

Asked if he believed that Asian Americans could be subjected to increased racist attacks because of similar terms, Trump pressed for more details.

"I wonder who said that," Trump said to a reporter at the White House on Wednesday. "You know who said that? Say the term again."

After the reporter repeated the phrase, it was still not clear if Trump understood the belittling implication and the relationship it has with Asians.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/18/business/recession-deficit-federal-reserve-coronavirus/index.html

New York (CNN Business)Washington rushed to pump the American economy with emergency-style medicine in recent years -- even though there was no emergency in sight.

Now, there really is a national emergency. And there's a growing realization that Washington blew through a chunk of its recession-fighting ammo long before it was needed.
In 2019, unemployment was sitting at a 50-year low. Consumer spending was strong. The housing market was finally flourishing. And the stock market had never been higher.

Yet policymakers decided to inject costly stimulus into what was already the longest economic expansion in American history. The Federal Reserve, seeking to counter damage caused by the US-China trade war, fired off three of its remaining nine interest rate cuts in 2019.
Worse, Congress and the White House borrowed heavily to pay for spending surges and tax cuts to juice growth. None of it lived up to the hype.

Now the bill is still coming due. The federal deficit topped $1 trillion in 2019, long before the coronavirus outbreak struck.
"You're supposed to have dry powder for the next crisis," said Kristina Hooper, chief global market strategist at Invesco. "When the history books are written, the government will certainly be faulted for taking on too much debt. The Fed will be faulted for maintaining ultra-accommodative rates."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-citizens-abroad-seek-refuge-from-the-coronavirus-epidemic--at-home/2020/03/17/836140f8-67f2-11ea-b199-3a9799c54512_story.html



As the coronavirus started spreading across the United States last week, New York University student Jane Zhang knew what she needed to do. She needed to seek shelter from the outbreak. At home. In China.

“China has already contained the situation, and there are no new domestic cases in Beijing,” the 19-year-old sophomore said, “but I think the number of people with the virus in the United States is going to rise exponentially.”

So on Friday, the day the number of cases in New York state rose 30 percent overnight, she boarded a flight home to the Chinese capital. It just feels safer, she said, because authorities there have made more of an effort to ensure public health.

“The Chinese government basically pays for a patient’s recovery, so we don’t have to worry about how much treatment is going to cost,” she said, making a contrast with the U.S. health-care system.

Plus, she said, Americans didn’t seem to be taking the outbreak seriously enough.

In a matter of weeks, China has gone from being the epicenter of the virus to almost the only refuge from it, prompting hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens abroad to flock home. About 20,000 people a day are arriving on flights into China, while five times as many arrive by land or sea, state media reported.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/world/asia/india-coronavirus.html

Fears are growing about what happens if community transmission takes off in the crowded areas of the world’s second-most-populous nation.



NEW DELHI — Over the weekend in Lucknow, one of India’s bigger cities, young people packed into pubs. Despite the Indian government scrambling to lock things down, few on the bar scene were taking the coronavirus very seriously.

“I am not scared. I eat, party, sleep,’’ said Akshay Gupta, an accountant who was bar hopping on Saturday night. “The scare is overhyped.”

India has reported around 125 cases of the coronavirus, and it is a bit of a mystery how the world’s second-most-populous nation, with 1.3 billion people, has remained relatively unscathed while the number of cases explodes to its east and west. That has spawned a sense of almost disbelief about the crisis in some quarters.

Doctors say it is either that there are many more cases in India than have been detected, because of the difficulties of getting tested, or that India has indeed managed to so far escape the worst, possibly because of quick and strict efforts right from the start.

In Kerala, in the south, the authorities used GPS technology, CCTV footage and mobile phone records to trace the movements of one Indian family believed to be among the first infected here. They returned from Italy in late February, and within days, medical teams fanned out to all the places they had visited including banks, restaurants and churches and quickly quarantined just about everyone they had come in contact with — nearly 1,000 people.

India was also one of the first nations to essentially shut its borders, canceling visas and denying entry to all but a select few foreigners. Some states, such as Kerala, are beginning to beef up internal borders, taking the temperature of passengers in cars and screening people on trains.

https://dcist.com/story/20/03/15/d-c-closes-clubs-puts-restrictions-on-bars-and-restaurants-to-prevent-spread-of-coronavirus/



Nightclubs will have to close and bars and restaurants in D.C. will face new restrictions on how they serve their customers as part of an effort by Mayor Muriel Bowser to curtail opportunities for groups of people to congregate during the spreading coronavirus pandemic.

Under the new guidelines, bars and restaurants will have to comply with the existing ban on gatherings of 250 or more people, which was imposed on Friday. But they will have to go further: they will have to suspend the use of bar seating, will not be allowed to serve drinks to anyone who is standing, limit table seating to six people or less, and ensure that tables and booths are at least six feet away from each other.

Nightclubs and multi-purpose facilities, on the other hand, will have to close during the ongoing state of emergency. That definition of “nightclub” is broad enough — a place that serves alcohol, allows musical performances and dancing — to include everything from sizable music venues like the 9:30 Club (which has already suspended performances) to neighborhood mainstays like Columbia Heights’ Wonderland Ballroom.

The new restrictions — which were announced on Sunday afternoon — fall short of across-the-board closures or limits on operating hours, showing the delicate balance that D.C. officials are trying to maintain in encouraging people to keep their distance from each other while not fully shutting down an industry that provides revenue to the city and jobs to many residents.

And the new restrictions come after a weekend where many D.C. residents took advantage of the warm weather and flocked to bars and restaurants, largely ignoring guidance from city officials that they practice social distancing, or staying away from other people. Health experts say that distancing is needed to “flatten the curve,” limiting the possibility of exponential growth of new coronavirus cases.