As Trump plans Arctic oil lease sale, opponents target insurers

Alastair Marsh and Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Bloomberg Green

A group of investment firms, conservationists and indigenous groups have called on some of the world’s biggest insurers to cease supporting oil and gas projects in the U.S. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, even as the Trump administration advances plans to auction drilling rights in the Alaska wilderness.

The Gwich’in Steering Committee, a group representing indigenous tribes that live in Alaska and Canada and opposes efforts to drill in the refuge, coordinated the letter with investment firms, including Boston Common Asset Management LLC and Domini Impact Investments LLC, which collectively manage more than $47 billion of assets. Recipients of the letter, including American International Group Inc. and Allianz SE, are being asked to stop insuring or investing in oil and gas projects in the refuge. Officials from AIG and Allianz weren’t immediately available for comment.

The rugged and remote territory in northeast Alaska, which is home to polar bears, caribou herds, Arctic foxes and more than 200 species of birds, has become a focus of environmental activists and an embodiment of the vastly different climate policies of President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden. While the Trump administration has set the stage for a possible sale of oil and gas leases in the refuge’s 1.56-million-acre (6,313 square kilometers) coastal plain before Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration, Biden has promised to permanently protect the land.

The Alaskan wilderness also serves as a reminder of how proactive investors and pressure groups can force financial giants to change the way they operate. Most major U.S. banks have said they won’t finance oil drilling projects in the Arctic, after a similar pressure campaign. And the one major holdout, Bank of America Corp., was the target of a shareholder resolution filed this week by Trillium Asset Management asking how it will deal with the business risks of backing Arctic oil ventures.

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Newark Mayor Ras Baraka orders 10-day lockdown as pandemic surges


By Daniel J. Munoz, NJBIZ

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said Friday he will shut down the state’s largest city the day before Thanksgiving, as the region becomes ground zero for the weeks-long surge of COVID-19.

The 10-day shutdown will begin on Nov. 25, as the city leads New Jersey in new cases and the positivity rate among tests.

“We are, from Wednesday before Thanksgiving to Dec. 4, going to lock the city down,” Baraka said during a Thursday evening radio appearance on WBGO 88.3 FM’s Newark Today.

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“We want people to shelter in place. We only want folks to come out for essential purposes. Do not go outside if you don’t have to. Don’t mingle with other people if you don’t have to. Stay (with) your family in your immediate household.”

The shutdown orders could conflict with the much looser orders that Gov. Phil Murphy signed in a bid to reverse the recent statewide surges.

Although Murphy allowed local governments to shut down non-essential businesses at 8 p.m. – which Newark and other major cities have done – his orders prohibit local town, city and county governments from implementing their own stricter restrictions.

Casinos, malls, sit-down restaurants, non-essential retail, indoor amusement, indoor theaters, many forms of construction, gyms, nail and hair salons all had to shutter their doors in March. As the pandemic worsens, indoor dining and elective surgeries could be in the next round of reinstated restrictions.

The governor cautioned this week against a “patchwork” of potentially conflicting orders that vary from town to town.

But Murphy has been widely hands-off with how Baraka, a major ally of the governor, has handled the city’s response to the pandemic, both in the past month and during the first wave this spring. The mayors of Orange, Irvington and East Orange are considering similar measures.

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50 House Democrats endorse Deb Haaland to lead Interior Department

Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) joins fellow House Democrats for a news conference. | Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

By Kelsey Tamborrino, Politico Morning Energy

More than 50 House Democratic lawmakers formally backed their colleague Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) for Interior secretary in a letter to President-elect Joe Biden. Haaland, who is already being vetted for the position, would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary in the nation’s history.

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“You can make history by giving Native Americans a seat at the Cabinet table for the first time,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter, obtained by POLITICO on Thursday.

The letter, led by House Natural Resources Chair Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), was delivered to the Biden transition team this week, POLITICO’s Sarah Ferris and Theodoric Meyer report . ME readers will recall Grijalva also endorsed Haaland for the post this week in a letter to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Haaland is a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, a federally recognized tribe near Albuquerque, N.M., and she is one of only two Native American women ever elected to Congress.

Signing on: The letter was signed by progressives such as Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), as well as members of the moderate Blue Dog Caucus, such as Reps. Jim Costa (D-Calif.) and Ed Case (D-Hawaii).

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COVID second wave crashing on NJ: 4,320 new cases, 34 more deaths

By Brent Johnson | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

New Jersey on Thursday reported 4,320 more coronavirus cases and 34 additional deaths, while hospitalizations rose for the 20th straight day as Gov. Phil Murphy warned the next few months could be “brutal” as the second wave of the pandemic hits the state.

The Garden State has now announced more than 4,000 COVID-19 cases in five of the six last days, pushing its total 293,744 positive tests out of more than 5.46 million tests administered since the start of the outbreak in March.

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The state of 9 million residents has reported 16,689 coronavirus deaths in that time, including 14,877 confirmed fatalities and 1,812 considered probable.

“The virus is in the second wave with a vengeance,” Gov. Phil Murphy said during a virtual economic development event Thursday. “We’re in for a rough few months here, both as a state and as a country. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

New Jersey’s latest seven-day average for new positive tests increased to 3,858 on Thursday, up 35% from a week ago and 277% from a month earlier. Fifteen of the state’s 21 counties reported at least 100 new cases, led by Bergen and Essex counties, which both topped 400.

The seven-day average of cases is now higher than the pandemic’s first wave in the spring, though the comparison is deceiving because the state was conducting less than 12,000 tests then and the outbreak was likely undercounted. The state is now averaging more than 40,000 tests a day, and that number does not include recently-deployed rapid tests.

But hospitalizations, patients in intensive care and on ventilators, positivity rate, transmission rate, and deaths have all been rising in recent weeks.

There were 2,471 patients with confirmed or suspected coronavirus cases in New Jersey on Wednesday. That’s much lower than the 8,000 who were hospitalized in April but the most since May 29. Hospitalizations have more than tripled over the last month.

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Maryland spent $9.46M on coronavirus tests that were never used because of flaws

LabGun coronavirus tests from South Korea are unloaded at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport on April 18. The tests, purchased by the state of Maryland for $9.46 million, were flawed and not used. (Maryland governor’s office)

By Steve Thompson, Washington Post

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) spent $9.46 million in state funding to import 500,000 coronavirus tests from South Korea that turned out to be flawed and weren’t used, emails, documents and interviews show.

As it became clear that the much-touted tests could not help detect which Maryland residents had contracted the novel coronavirus, the Hogan administration quietly paid the same South Korean company $2.5 million for 500,000 replacement tests.

The state offered the tests free to two private labs, one of which declined because the tests took much longer to process than U.S. versions, records and interviews show.

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The University of Maryland, which had spent months equipping its lab in Baltimore to process coronavirus tests, abandoned the replacement South Korean tests this fall after a spate of suspected false positives. But the other private lab continues to use them; a state official said Wednesday that 370,000 of the replacement tests have been used.

Hogan heralded the initial purchase as “an exponential, game-changing step forward” and featured it as the climax of his political memoir, published this summer.

“No one knew how many lives those 500,000 tests might save, but it would be a lot,” he wrote of their arrival in April at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. “The successful mission got tons of attention in the national media.”

Local officials in Maryland hoped that the purchase would make screening in the state more widely available. When the tests were not quickly deployed, they — and state lawmakers — began asking what was going on.

But Hogan and his top health and procurement officials withheld the tests’ flaws from the legislature, state spending authorities and the public, according to a review of public testimony and hundreds of pages of emails and other records.

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Frantic steps by Trump, allies to overturn Biden victory

By Colleen Long , Zeke Miller, Jill Colvin and David Eggert Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and his allies are taking increasingly frantic steps to subvert the results of the 2020 election, including summoning state legislators to the White House as part of a longshot bid to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.

Among other last-ditch tactics: personally calling local election officials who are trying to rescind their certification votes in Michigan, suggesting in a legal challenge that Pennsylvania set aside the popular vote there and pressuring county officials in Arizona to delay certifying vote tallies.

Election law experts see it as the last, dying gasps of the Trump campaign and say Biden is certain to walk into the Oval Office come January. But there is great concern that Trump’s effort is doing real damage to public faith in the integrity of U.S. elections.

Fact checking Giuliani and the Trump legal team’s wild, fact-free press conference

“It’s very concerning that some Republicans apparently can’t fathom the possibility that they legitimately lost this election,” said Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who researches and teaches election law.

“We depend on democratic norms, including that the losers graciously accept defeat,” he said. “That seems to be breaking down.”

Trump’s own election security agency has declared the 2020 presidential election to have been the most secure in history. Days after that statement was issued, Trump fired the agency’s leader.

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