Joe Biden Faces Sexual Assault Allegations From A Former Staffer

Update, March 28, 2020: Joe Biden’s campaign has denied Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation. In a statement on Friday his campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, said, “Women have a right to tell their story, and reporters have an obligation to rigorously vet those claims. We encourage them to do so, because these accusations are false.” This article was originally published on March 26, 2020.Former Vice President Joe Biden is facing a new sexual assault allegation, from a woman named Tara Reade, who says she has been trying to share her story since 1993 when it allegedly happened. Reade’s allegation comes in the midst of Biden’s surging presidential campaign and is consistent with other stories women have shared about their discomfort with the way Biden has touched them.Reade was a staff assistant for Joe Biden in 1993, when she claims he digitally raped her. She told part of her story in 2019, when Lucy Flores wrote in The Cut about the inappropriate way Biden smelled her hair and kissed the top of her head. At the time, several other women came forward to say that Biden had touched them in ways that made them uncomfortable, including Reade, who said that Biden used to put his hands on her shoulders and run his fingers up and down her neck. Now, she has detailed what she says is the entirety of her experience with Biden on The Katie Halper Show.According to Reade, Biden pressed her up against a wall and digitally penetrated her without her consent. “It happened all at once, and then… his hands were on me and underneath my clothes,” she says. She also remembers him asking “do you want to go somewhere else?” and then, when she had pulled away, “Come on, man, I heard you liked me.” Reade says that “everything shattered” in that moment and his claim that he thought she liked him made her feel like she had “done this” somehow. “I looked up to him, he was my father’s age. He was this champion of women’s rights in my eyes,” she says. “I wanted to be a senator; I didn’t want to sleep with one.”Following her accusations against Biden, reports from Ryan Grim at The Intercept detailed all the ways Reade was stonewalled in telling her story — including from Time’s Up, the high-profile organization founded to help survivors tell their stories in the midst of the MeToo movement, which is housed within the National Women’s Law Center. According to Grim’s reporting, Reade asked for help from the organization in January of this year, but she was told they could not help her because it would jeopardize their non-profit status due to the fact that he was a presidential candidate. “As a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization, the National Women’s Law Center is restricted in how it can spend its funds, including restrictions that pertain to candidates running for election,” NWLC spokesperson, Maria Patrick, told The Intercept. It was also revealed in the same story that “the public relations firm that works on behalf of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund is SKDKnickerbocker, whose managing director, Anita Dunn, is the top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign.”Reade’s accusation has opened up discourse on social media about why the mainstream media is ignoring the story. “I don’t understand why the extremely serious sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden are not getting significant attention outside of left media,” tweeted Vox Senior Correspondent Zack Beauchamp. This is a story that @ReadeAlexandra has been trying to tell since it happened in 1993. It’s a story about sexual assault, retaliation and silencing. meToo https://t.co/yHz3iFi9a5 — Katie Halper (@kthalps) March 25, 2020There were no witnesses to Reade’s assault, but she told The Intercept that she’d spoken to a close friend, as well as her brother, at the time of the alleged assault, and both have confirmed this with The Intercept. Reade said Thursday morning on Rising on Hill TV Live that she’s waited so long to speak publicly about what happened because she was afraid of retaliation, and also because back then she “didn’t have the framework” to understand what had happened to her.If you have experienced sexual violence and are in need of crisis support, please call the RAINN Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673). Related Content:Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?All The Celebrities Endorsing Joe Biden In 2020A Comprehensive History Of MeTooJoe Biden: "I Would Pick A Woman As VP"

• 
  Joe Biden Campaign Denies Sexual Assault Claims, But Says “Women Have The Right To Tell Their Story”
  Deadline
• 
  Joe Biden Accused Of Sexually Assaulting Senate Aide In 1993
  HuffPost

Crocodile Dundee star Mark Blum dies from coronavirus complications

Blum played Rosanna Arquette’s husband in the 1985 comedy Desperately Seeking Susan.

• 
  Mark Blum: Madonna pays tribute to co-star after coronavirus death
  BBC
• 
  Remembering Mark Blum: Madonna & Rosanna Arquette Recall ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ Co-Star; Josh Radnor, Judith Light Among Many Mourning Coronavirus Victim
  Deadline

Jared Kushner, Slumlord Millionaire, Can’t Evict the Virus

In 2016, at the tender age of 35, Jared Kushner discovered America.Traveling with his father-in-law Donald Trump as he campaigned for president, Kushner had the eye-opening opportunity “to really see the country,” as he later recounted to CNN’s Van Jones.On this foray into the unexplored expanse between the coasts, Kushner was surprised by what he observed. “There were a lot of issues that I thought about being in New York… but when I’d go out to the country, I’d hear opinions that were differing from what a lot of the people in New York thought were the right prescriptions for them.”Don’t Worry, America, Jared Kushner Is Going to Save You From COVID-19Presumably, Kushner has become better acquainted since then with the experiences of Americans who dwell outside of his lifelong realm of mansions, penthouses, and boardrooms. We should all hope that is the case because Kushner now has enormous influence over the vital “prescriptions” that shape many facets of our lives, including a leading role in combating the coronavirus crisis. As Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale recently told Time, other than the President, “Nobody has more influence in the White House than Jared. Nobody has more influence outside the White House than Jared.”Unfortunately, for so many of Kushner’s tenants in his former occupation as a Manhattan-based real estate mogul, his awakening to the struggles of regular Americans came too late. In fact, as we show in Slumlord Millionaire, the episode we directed about Kushner for the Netflix documentary series Dirty Money, Kushner was not just oblivious to the struggles of his tenants—he was the perpetrator of them.In New York City, the Kushner playbook was to buy buildings with rent-stabilized tenants and then to harass them systematically with maddening construction until they moved out. Then Kushner Companies, the family real estate firm of which Kushner was CEO from 2008 until January 2017, flipped the buildings to market rate and sold them for a significant profit.In the vicinity of Baltimore, a city President Trump disparaged last September as a “rodent-infested mess”, the Kushner model was even more insidious. In Maryland, Kushner Companies owns and manages thousands of low- and middle-income rental units over more than a dozen housing complexes, which investigative reporter Alec MacGillis collectively dubbed “Kushnerville” in a 2017 exposé. Unlike in New York City, there wasn’t an economic incentive to push out Kushnerville’s tenants. Instead, Kushner Companies maximized profits by spending minimally on the units’ upkeep, while gouging the tenants with a slew of fees, many of them dubious, on top of their rent.It wasn’t just the residents of Kushnerville who were subject to these predatory practices; it was the former tenants of the complexes too. When Kushner Companies bought these buildings, they went into the files of the previous owners looking for money to collect. One of these former tenants was Kamiia Warren, a single mother of three, who was working as a home health aide while also attending school.Kushner Companies relentlessly pursued Warren for $3,014.08 for breaking her lease with the former owners. However, Warren didn’t owe the money. She had received permission to move out early, but years after vacating the property she no longer had the paperwork to prove it and didn’t know how to defend herself in a court system Kushner Companies expertly weaponized against her. Her Kafkaesque ordeal resulted in a legal judgment against her of nearly $5,000. To collect, three days before Christmas Kushner Companies began garnishing her paychecks. Then it zeroed out the $900 in her bank account, leaving her destitute.As if that weren’t heartless enough, Kushner Companies requested that the court approve a body attachment for Warren. A body attachment is a civil arrest warrant that enables the local sheriff to incarcerate debtors, essentially for the crime of being poor. Kushner Companies was not alone in employing this draconian tactic, but it employed it far more aggressively than any other real estate firm in the state.Fortunately, MacGillis’s article resulted in Warren getting pro bono representation, and once she had legal counsel in her corner Kushner Companies immediately caved and eliminated her debt. Why had Kushner Companies been so harsh in its dealings with vulnerable people like Kamiia? Kushner’s CFO told MacGillis the firm had a “fiduciary obligation” to its partners to maximize revenue. While this explanation may be morally bankrupt, it is perfectly in line with how most businesses operate, which is exactly the concern Americans should have in evaluating Kushner’s approach to policymaking.Concerns about conflicts of interest between Kushner’s opaque network of financial interests and the policies he is driving from the West Wing have abounded since the outset of the Trump administration. The coronavirus crisis has brought this dynamic into particularly sharp focus. They first flared up over Oscar, a health insurance company co-founded by Joshua Kushner, Jared’s brother. On March 13, the day Trump finally seemed to acknowledge the severity of the pandemic by declaring it a national emergency, Oscar, which was formerly jointly owned by Jared and Joshua, launched a web portal to provide a number of coronavirus-related services. Though there is no evidence that Oscar is profiting from the administration’s approach, the synchronicity of the timing, along with the fact that a graphic displayed at Trump’s Rose Garden press conference resembled one in Oscar’s media release announcing its portal, prompted questions about inappropriate coordination.Then, on Monday, Crain’s New York reported that the paralysis of commerce caused by the pandemic may force Kushner Companies’ Times Square retail space into default. The next day President Trump tamped down the medical community’s insistence on social distancing in favor of restarting the economy on an arbitrary, accelerated timeline. Kushner, who initially advised the president that the media was exaggerating the threat of the virus, is serving as a liaison between the administration and business leaders, a number of whom have agitated for a hasty return to the workplace. Trump has clearly been receptive to their lobbying at a time when his own family business, The Trump Organization, is struggling financially, with six of his seven top revenue-generating hospitality businesses shuttered. In crafting policy is Kushner calculating the benefit to himself and his family, or is he putting the health and welfare of the American people above all other considerations?Kamiia Warren certainly has her doubts. As she says in our film, “I’m very nervous that Jared Kushner is someone that is making decisions for our country. I firsthand know how he conducts business.”DiMauro and Pehme co-directed and produced Slumlord Millionaire, the episode about Jared Kushner in Netflix’s documentary series Dirty Money.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Coronavirus could kill 81,000 in U.S., subside in June - Washington University analysis

The analysis, using data from governments, hospitals and other sources, predicts that the number of U.S. deaths could vary widely, ranging from as low as around 38,000 to as high as around 162,000. The variance is due in part to disparate rates of the spread of the virus in different regions, which experts are still struggling to explain, said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who led the study. The duration of the virus means there may be a need for social distancing measures for longer than initially expected, although the country may eventually be able relax restrictions if it can more effectively test and quarantine the sick, Murray said.

Why Not Wearing A Bra During Self-Isolation Is The Best

Keep those chest prisons in your dresser drawer where they belong!

Maker of Purell Hand Sanitizer Denied in Request for Trump Tariff Relief

(Bloomberg) -- With the U.S. now surpassing all other countries in the number of coronavirus cases and health experts estimating the peak may still be weeks away, President Donald Trump’s administration is having a harder time defending tariffs on health-related goods imported from China.That’s especially true for products used in the U.S. response to the pandemic that are in high demand but running short on supply, such as ventilators, surgical masks and hand sanitizers.Gojo Industries, the inventor and manufacturer of Purell-branded products, builds its hand-sanitizer and soap dispensers in the U.S., but a key input that ensures the dispensers work is made in China and subject to a 25% duty.In a tariff-exemption request last year, Akron, Ohio-based Gojo said it’s exploring third-country sourcing but added that unilaterally moving production would require reverse engineering of a key chip that’s manufactured by a Canadian company in China. “Such action would violate their intellectual property” and Gojo “does not control the ability to move that production,” the submission reads.The U.S. Trade Representative denied Gojo’s request earlier this month, saying the company failed to show that the duties “would cause severe economic harm to you or other U.S. interests,” according to USTR General Counsel Joseph Barloon’s letter on March 5.Three weeks later, the USTR issued exemptions for Apple’s watches and a range of other products that have no apparent link to Covid-19.The USTR didn’t respond when asked if the Gojo denial would be reassessed as part of a new exclusion process to identify more products needed to treat the virus or limit its outbreak.Publicly, American officials have doubled down on their tariff strategy and are calling for a rethink of supply chains, especially when it comes to key medical products.The reliance on other countries for those supplies has created a strategic vulnerability for the U.S., trade chief Robert Lighthizer said. “By encouraging diversification of supply chains and — better yet — more manufacturing in the U.S., President Trump’s economic and trade policies are helping to overcome that vulnerability,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial last week.Charting the Trade TurmoilConsumers across the globe are still loading their pantries — and the economic fallout from the virus is just starting. The specter of more trade restictions is stirring memories of how protectionism can often end up causing more harm than good. That adage rings especially true now as the moves would be driven by anxiety and not made in response to crop failures or other supply problems.Today’s Must ReadsSecond wave | Much of China’s industrial sector is ramping up production, only to find another painful economic shock: canceled orders from the U.S. and Europe. Workplace safety | Food workers getting sick is the latest threat to the global supply of everything from vegetables to pork, with quarantined workers at production facilities raising fresh concerns. Faster decoupling | One of Apple’s manufacturing partners said half its capacity could reside outside China within a year, underscoring the shift companies are making outside the world’s second-largest economy. Battle fields  | Europe’s farmers are struggling to find people to harvest rapidly ripening fruits and vegetables, as the coronavirus prevents hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers from leaving home. Pulling the plug | Sony said fallout from the coronavirus may wipe out a previously projected increase in its profit and force it to delay an earnings report scheduled for April.Bloomberg AnalysisShrinking growth | A global recession has begun, according to a Bloomberg Economics review. Troubled waters | A Bloomberg Intelligence webinar explains how ship owners are positioned to weather the crisis. Use the AHOY function to track global commodities trade flows. See BNEF for BloombergNEF’s analysis of clean energy, advanced transport, digital industry, innovative materials, and commodities. Click VRUS on the terminal for news and data on the coronavirus and here for maps and charts.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

• 
  The maker of Coors beer is joining other breweries and distilleries across the country in producing hand sanitizer
  Business Insider
• Hand Sanitizer Market Anticipated to Reach $5.5 Billion in 2024 - ReportsnReports
  PR Newswire