Tag Archives: Detroit

Americans living in Hot and Smokey conditions

Matthew 24:7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

Important Takeaways:

  • Heat and smoke are smothering most of the U.S., putting lives at risk
  • Much of the United States felt like a blazing inferno on Wednesday, as record heat attacked the South like a blowtorch, thick smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed the Great Lakes region, and triple-digit temperatures threatened to wallop California for the first time this year.
  • “Everybody’s saying, ‘We’re used to the heat, but not to this degree,’” said Mayor Victor Treviño of Laredo, Tex., which recorded temperatures of 115 degrees last week, tying its all-time high.
  • Detroit, Chicago and Minneapolis were among the cities with the worst air quality in the world Wednesday, according to IQAir. Unhealthy Code Red and Purple conditions stretched from eastern Iowa across Chicago and the lower Great Lakes region and toward the Appalachian Mountains, according to AirNow.gov.

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5,000 to be laid off at GM to stay on budget

Revelations 13:16-18 “Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.”

Important Takeaways:

  • GM lays off several hundred full-time contract workers – WSJ
  • General Motors Co has laid off several hundred full-time contract workers at its engineering hub in suburban Detroit over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing a company spokesperson.
  • The Detroit automaker did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. GM shares were up about 2.5% to $33.86.
  • GM said in April that about 5,000 salaried workers had opted for buyouts to leave the company, bringing it closer to its cost-cut target of $2 billion by the end of 2024.

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Michigan train derails; investigators on the scene

Important Takeaways:

  • Train derails outside Detroit, Michigan, with one car carrying hazardous materials
  • Van Buren Township train derailment unfolds nearly two weeks after East Palestine, Ohio disaster
  • A train containing one car of hazardous materials has derailed Thursday in Van Buren Township outside Detroit, Michigan, reports say.
  • The cause of the derailment was not immediately clear.
  • Police told Fox2 Detroit that there were no injuries and the area is not a hazmat situation.
  • Officials that spoke to WXYZ, which reported that at least six cars were seen off the track, said one of them was carrying hazardous materials.

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Busiest Border in North America shut down by 18 wheelers

Important Takeaways:

  • Canadian truckers shut down busiest border crossing in North America, back up Detroit roads
  • Business leaders also sounded off that closing the busiest international border crossing in the U.S. will create supply chain issues.
  • Any delay or disruption in the supply chain creates problems, not just for agriculture but the state economy,” Chuck Lippstreu, president of the Michigan Agri-Business Association, told The Detroit News.
  • Officials are directing the travelers to use the Windsor-Detroit Tunnel or the Port Huron Blue Water Bridge instead of the Ambassador Bridge.

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Michigan state court rejects request to block Detroit election certification results

By Tom Hals and Makini Brice

(Reuters) – A Michigan state court rejected on Friday a request by supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump to block the certification of votes and appoint an independent auditor in Detroit, which voted heavily in favor of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden.

The ruling is a setback for Trump and Republicans who have been trying to overturn Biden’s victory in the Nov. 3 election by preventing officials from certifying election results.

“It would be an unprecedented exercise of judicial activism for this Court to stop the certification process of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers,” wrote Timothy Kenny, chief judge of the Third Judicial Circuit Court of Michigan, referring to the county that includes Detroit.

The lawsuit alleged fraud and voting irregularities, which Wayne County has denied.

The judge rejected those allegations, writing: “Plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.”

He noted that allegations, such as city workers encouraging voters to cast their ballot for Democrats, were not backed up by details, such as locations or times when such events allegedly took place.

The judge also said that one witness who had filed an affidavit had posted on Facebook before the election that he speculated that Democrats were using the pandemic as cover for election fraud, undermining his testimony and credibility.

On Wednesday, the Trump campaign filed a similar lawsuit in U.S. District Court in the Western District of Michigan, alleging harassment of Republican poll challengers and a requirement they adhere to six-foot distancing rules that was not equally enforced against Democratic poll challengers.

Michigan is due to certify its election results on Nov. 23.

The campaign and Republicans have also sued in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin seeking to block the certification of election results.

Also on Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision before the election that a former Pennsylvania congressional candidate and four individual voters lacked standing to sue over the state’s decision to allow “no excuses” absentee ballots and to extend mail-ballot deadlines due to the coronavirus pandemic.

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware and Makini Brice in Washington; Editing by Louise Heavens and Alistair Bell)

Chicagoans told to stay home, Detroit moves school online as COVID-19 cases surge

By Brendan O’Brien and Maria Caspani

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Chicago issued a stay-at-home advisory and Detroit stopped in-person schooling on Thursday to staunch the coronavirus outbreak as more than a dozen states reported a doubling of new COVID-19 cases in the last two weeks.

Officials in the Midwestern cities along with New York, California, Iowa and other states were re-imposing this week restrictions that had been eased in recent months. The moves were driven by surging infection rates and concern that the onset of winter, when people are more likely to gather indoors, will worsen the trends.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Thursday issued a 30-day advisory calling upon residents to stay at home and have no visitors, even during Thanksgiving festivities. The third- largest city in the United States could see 1,000 more COVID-19 deaths by the end of 2020 if residents do not change behaviors to stop the spread of the virus, Lightfoot said.

Lightfoot set a 10-person limit on gatherings, including indoor and outdoor events, and said travelers from out of the state needed to quarantine for 14 days or submit a negative coronavirus test.

“None of us can keep maintaining the status quo in the face of this very stark reality,” the mayor told reporters, noting the average number of cases have gone from 500 to 1,900 per day over the last month and the city’s positivity rate shot up to 15% from 5%.

Illinois has emerged as the pandemic’s new epicenter in the region as well as across the country. In the past two weeks, the state reported about 130,000 cases, the highest in the country and more than hard-hit Texas and California.

A Reuters tally showed coronavirus cases more than doubling in 13 states in the past two weeks.

In Michigan, the Detroit public school system – the state’s largest – said on Thursday it would suspend of in-person education until Jan. 11, with the infection rate in the city rising rapidly. The district will hold all classes online starting Monday.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Thursday that the country’s largest school system was preparing for a possible shutdown but closure might still be averted.

“We’re not there yet, and let’s pray we don’t get there,” de Blasio told reporters. De Blasio has said schools will close if the percentage of city residents testing positive, now at a seven-day average of 2.6%, surpasses 3%.

Total COVID-19 cases across the United States hit an all-time daily high for a second day in a row on Wednesday at 142,279 and crossed the 100,000 mark for an eighth consecutive day, Reuters data showed.

The number of people hospitalized with the virus surged to at least 64,939 by late Wednesday, the highest ever for a single day during the pandemic, increasing by more than 41% in the past two weeks. The death toll rose by 1,464 to a total of 241,809.

Vaccine developers have offered some good news this week, with Pfizer and BioNTech trumpeting successful early data from a large-scale clinical trial of a coronavirus vaccine.

Health experts are hopeful that a vaccine might become available in the coming months for the most vulnerable populations and for healthcare providers.

But with a more lengthy timeline for the general public, many are urging strict adherence to well-known virus mitigation measures like wearing a face covering, washing hands and maintaining a safe social distance.

“We hope that by the time you get into the second quarter, end of April, early May, May-June – somewhere around that time, the ordinary citizen should be able to get it,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top U.S. health official, told the ABC “Good Morning America” program on Thursday.

“What we need to do is what we’ve been talking about for some time now but really doubling down on it.”

(Reporting by Maria Caspani in New York and Anurag Maan in Bengaluru and Brendan O’Brien in Chicago, additional reporting by Peter Szekely in New York and Doina Chiacu in Washington; Editing by Howard Goller and Cynthia Osterman)

Trump supporters protest outside Arizona vote center

By Mimi Dwyer

PHOENIX (Reuters) – A crowd of Donald Trump supporters, some armed with rifles and handguns, gathered outside an election center in Arizona on Wednesday night after unsubstantiated rumors that votes for the Republican president were deliberately not being counted.

Chanting “Stop the steal!,” and “Count my vote,” the mostly unmasked protesters stood in front of the Maricopa County Elections Department in Phoenix, as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden held a razor thin lead in the critical battleground state. Some news outlets have called Arizona for Biden, but Trump’s campaign says it is still in play.

A victory for Biden in Arizona would give the Democrat 11 electoral votes, a major boost in his bid to win the White House, while severely narrowing Trump’s path to re-election, in a state the Republican won in 2016.

On Election night Fox News and the Associated Press called Arizona for Biden, even though only just over 70% of the vote had been counted, a move that infuriated Trump and his aides.

Some of the roughly 200 protesters, who were faced by a line of armed county sheriffs, chanted “Shame on Fox!”. Some said they came out after a tweet from Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist.

Chris Michael, 40, from Gilbert, Arizona, said he came to make sure all votes are counted. He said he wants assurances that the counting was done “ethically and legally.”

Rumors spread on Facebook Tuesday night that some Maricopa votes were not being counted because voters used Sharpie pens to mark their ballots. Local election officials insisted that was not true.

With the count still under way in several key states, Trump has accused the Democrats of trying to steal the election without evidence and filed lawsuits in several states related to vote-counting.

A similar scene played out on Wednesday afternoon in downtown Detroit, where city election officials blocked about 30 people, mostly Republicans, from entering a vote-counting hall amid unfounded claims that the vote count was fraudulent.

Trump has filed a lawsuit in Michigan to stop vote-counting that the secretary of state called “frivolous.”

The protests echoed the “Brooks Brother riot” during the 2000 recount in Florida that ultimately handed the presidency to Republican George W. Bush. A crowd of blazer-clad Republican protesters stormed a building where a hand recount was underway in a heavily Democratic district, forcing poll workers to stop counting ballots.

The protest is now viewed as a significant event in keeping Bush’s slender vote advantage in Florida intact. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately stopped the Florida recount, handing Bush the presidency and defeat to Democrat Al Gore.

(Reporting by Mimi Dwyer in Phoenix; writing by Tim Reid; Editing by Heather Timmons and Richard Pullin)

Government health experts warn U.S. cities of ‘trouble ahead’

By Doina Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – White House health experts are warning of an uptick in the percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19 in U.S. cities including Boston, Chicago and Washington, urging local leaders to maintain health safety measures to avoid a surge.

“This is a predictor of trouble ahead,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Thursday.

Fauci was asked on CNN about comments made by his White House coronavirus task force colleague, Dr. Deborah Birx, identifying new areas of concern in major cities, even as authorities see encouraging signs across the South.

Baltimore and Atlanta remain at a “very high level,” as well as Kansas City, Portland, Omaha and California’s Central Valley, Birx told state and local officials in a telephone call Wednesday. A recording of the call was obtained by the journalism nonprofit Center for Public Integrity.

White House data shows small increases in the percentage of positive COVID-10 tests in Chicago, Boston and Detroit and those places need to “get on top of it”, Birx said.

Even in cities and states where most people are doing things right, Fauci said, a segment of people not wearing masks or following social distancing remains vulnerable to infection and can keep the virus smoldering in U.S. communities.

“Unless everybody pulls together, and gets the level way down over baseline, we’re going to continue to see these kind of increases that Dr. Birx was talking about in several of those cities,” Fauci said.

White House coronavirus experts have in recent days sent regular warnings to cities and states not to relax anti-coronavirus measures too much before the virus is under sufficient control.

On average, 1,000 people are dying each day nationwide from COVID-19. The U.S. death toll is now over 157,000, with 4.8 million known cases.

President Donald Trump, in contrast, has played down the staying power of the virus, saying on Wednesday “it will go away like things go away” as he urged U.S. schools to reopen on time for face-to-face lessons.

Trump also said children are “almost immune” from COVID-19, prompting Facebook Inc on Wednesday to take down a post by the Republican president containing a Fox News video clip in which he made the statement. Facebook said it violated its rules against sharing misinformation about the virus.

Chicago’s mayor said on Wednesday that school would be online-only in September, after the teachers’ union and many parents in the city objected to a plan to allow students the option of attending class twice a week in pods of 15.

Chicago is the third-largest school district in the United States behind New York and Los Angeles, with 350,000 students.

Los Angeles has already announced that students will be kept home, while New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has said he expects to have children attend classes part of the time.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Trump to send federal forces to more ‘Democrat’ cities

By Steve Holland and Lisa Lambert

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Monday said he would send law enforcement to more U.S. cities, as a federal crackdown on anti-racism protests in Oregon with unmarked cars and unidentified forces angered people across the country.

Trump, a Republican, cited New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland, California, as places to send federal agents, noting the cities’ mayors were “liberal Democrats.” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot frequently blasts Trump on Twitter.

“We’re sending law enforcement,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can’t let this happen to the cities.”

State and local leaders in Oregon, as well as members of Congress, have called for Trump to remove Department of Homeland Security secret police forces from Portland, Oregon, after videos showed unidentified federal personnel rounding up people and whisking them away in black minivans.

“Not only do I believe he is breaking the law, but he is also endangering the lives of Portlanders,” the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, tweeted, having previously called the federal presence “political theater” in an election year.

Trump, trailing in opinion polls behind Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, in June declared himself “president of law and order” and threatened to send the U.S. military into cities after sometimes violent protests and looting in the aftermath of African American ‘s death in police custody in Minneapolis.

Federal agents last week began cracking down on Portland protests against police brutality and systemic racism, using tear gas to defend federal buildings and taking some activists into custody without explanation.

“They grab a lot of people and jail the leaders. These are anarchists,” Trump said of federal agents sent to the historically liberal city to quell often unruly protests.

Despite a national outcry over the tactics, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials on Monday said they would not back down and would not apologize.

The state of Oregon and the American Civil Liberties Union have sued the Trump administration for unlawfully detaining Oregon residents, and some Republicans spoke out against its tactics on Monday.

“There is no place for federal troops or unidentified federal agents rounding people up at will,” tweeted U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

The Chicago Tribune reported that Homeland Security was making plans to deploy around 150 agents in the city this week where police defending a statue clashed with protesters on Friday.

The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment.

(Reporting by Steve Holland, Doina Chiacu and Lisa Lambert in Washington, additional reporting by Maria Caspani in New York, Deborah Bloom in Portland; Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)

Hundreds protest Michigan stay-at-home order

By Michael Martina and Seth Herald

DETROIT/LANSING, Mich. (Reuters) – Hundreds gathered to protest Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order on Thursday in Lansing, the third but smallest major demonstration at the state’s Capitol since businesses were shuttered in March due to the coronavirus.

Whitmer recently extended Michigan’s stay-at-home order – one of the strictest in the United States – until at least May 28 to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and the respiratory disease it causes, COVID-19.

The protest was organized by Michigan United for Liberty, which says it is a nonprofit with nearly 8,000 members that views the order as unconstitutional.

About 150 protesters gathered in light rain around 9 a.m. near the steps of the Capitol building, but the crowd grew to several hundred by mid-morning, some carrying signs in support of President Donald Trump. A handful had firearms, including long guns.

“Open your business now. Open the restaurants. Open the bars. Open the movie theaters,” one protester, who did not announce his name, told the crowd. “Michigan, wake up America.”

Michigan State Police quickly responded to a small scuffle but said there were no injuries and the site was secure. Speakers had packed up the audio system before 11 a.m., as rain intensified.

The Capitol building was closed because the legislature had been adjourned.

Debate over how and when to ease restrictions on commerce and social life has grown increasingly politicized in the United States, with Trump and his supporters agitating to loosen social-distancing measures more swiftly than medical experts deem prudent.

Democratic governors of states hardest hit by the outbreak have taken a more cautious stance, abiding by public health officials – and guidelines from the White House itself – warning that vastly expanded coronavirus testing and other safeguards be put in place first.

Hundreds of protesters, some armed, gathered at the same site in Lansing on April 30 to protest against Whitmer’s request to the state legislature to extend emergency powers to combat COVID-19.

That rally saw large groups of protesters enter the Capitol building and demand to be let onto the House floor, which is prohibited. Some protesters with guns — which are allowed in the statehouse — went to the Senate gallery.

The Republican-led state legislature has declined to outlaw weapons inside the Capitol building, something Democratic governor Whitmer lamented in an interview on CNN on Wednesday.

“No one should have to go to work and feel intimidated,” she said. “Making the Capitol a gun-free zone is important in making people feel they can do their job safely.”

Authorities had told protesters to expect a heavy police presence at Thursday’s protest, and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel warned in advance that she was prepared to prosecute potential violations, including brandishing of weapons and trespassing into the legislative chambers.

“I vehemently support the First Amendment right to protest government actions at the Capitol or elsewhere around the state; however any such activity must be done in a manner that is safe and lawful,” she wrote in a tweet on Wednesday.

Michigan had the fourth highest death toll from COVID-19 in the United States as of Thursday, at 4,714 dead among its 48,391 confirmed cases.

(Reporting by Michael Martina in Detroit and Seth Herald in Lansing; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)