Archives for February 2021

MADRID (AP) — Former Wimbledon champion Conchita Martínez has tested positive for the coronavirus.

Martínez said on social media on Saturday she is in quarantine at a hospital in Doha after the positive test on arrival in Qatar.

Martínez is the coach of former world No. 1 Garbiñe Muguruza, who is set to play at the Qatar Open from Monday.

The 48-year-old Martínez said she was experiencing “mild symptoms” of COVID-19.

“I hope that I can soon be back on this swing of the Middle East tournaments,” Martínez wrote in Spanish. “For now, I will be working via videocalls and connected online constantly with Garbiñe.”

Martínez won Wimbledon in 1994 and helped Spain win five Fed Cups during the 1990s. She was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame last year.

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LONDON (AP) — Church bells rang out and a World War II-era plane flew Saturday over the funeral service of Captain Tom Moore to honor of the veteran who single-handedly raised millions of pounds for Britain’s health workers by walking laps in his backyard.

Soldiers performed ceremonial duties at the service for the 100-year-old Moore, whose charity walk inspired the nation and raised almost 33 million pounds ($46 million) for Britain’s National Health Service last year. Captain Tom, as he became known, died Feb. 2 in the hospital after testing positive for COVID-19.

The private service was small, attended by just eight members of the veteran’s immediate family. But soldiers carried his coffin, draped in the Union flag, from the hearse to a crematorium and formed a ceremonial guard. Others performed a gun salute, before a C-47 Dakota military transport plane flew past.

“Daddy, you always told us ‘Best foot forward’ and true to your word, that’s what you did last year,” Moore’s daughter Lucy Teixeira said at the service. “I know you will be watching us chuckling, saying ‘Don’t be too sad as something has to get you in the end.’”

His other daughter, Hannah Ingram-Moore, said the world was “enthralled” by her father’s “spirt of hope, positivity and resilience.”

“They, too, saw your belief in kindness and the fundamental goodness of the human spirit,” she said.

A version of the song “Smile,” recorded for the funeral by singer Michael Bublé, was played, as well as “My Way” by Frank Sinatra, as requested by Moore. A bugler sounded “The Last Post” to close the service.

A church in Bedfordshire, where the family is based, rang its bell 100 times in Moore’s honor.

Moore, who served in India, Burma and Sumatra during World War II, set out to raise a modest 1,000 pounds for Britain’s NHS by walking 100 laps of his backyard by his 100th birthday last year. But donations poured in from across Britain and beyond as his quest went viral, catching the imagination of millions stuck at home during the first wave of the pandemic.

His positive attitude – “Please remember, tomorrow will be a good day” became his trademark phrase – inspired the nation at a time of crisis. Prime Minister Boris Johnson described him as a “hero in the truest sense of the word.″

He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in July in a socially distanced ceremony at Windsor Castle, west of London.

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This version has been corrected to show the C-47 Dakota was a military transport plane, not a jet.

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NEW YORK (AP) — With the nation’s financial system on the brink of collapse, all but three Republicans voted against the massive stimulus package designed to protect millions of Americans from financial ruin.

It was early 2009, just weeks after Joe Biden was sworn in as vice president, and the vote marked the beginning of a new era of partisan gridlock in Congress. And for beleaguered Republicans coming off a disastrous election, it was their first step back to political power.

Democrats voted alone to stabilize the economy, and two years later, a Republican Party unified only by its unwavering opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency seized the House majority.

Now, just weeks into the Biden presidency, the GOP is gambling that history will repeat itself.

Early Saturday morning, 210 House Republicans joined two Democrats in voting against a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package that would send $1,400 checks to most Americans and hundreds of billions more to help open schools, revive struggling businesses and provide financial support to state and local governments. Senate Republicans are expected to oppose a similar measure in the coming weeks, arguing that the bill is not focused enough on the pandemic. But with near-unanimous Democratic support, the measure could still become law.

It’s far too soon to predict the political fallout from the first major legislative fight of the Biden era. But as the nation struggles to recover from the worst health and financial crises in generations, strategists in both parties agree that it’s risky for Republicans to assume their 2009 playbook will lead to the same ballot-box success this time around.

“I think that the Republicans’ misread here is that it is the same, or that they can just oppose it and there’s no ramifications,” said John Anzalone, the Biden campaign’s chief pollster. “It’s a different world.”

Veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz said Republicans now bear the burden of clearly articulating their opposition — a task made more difficult by the distraction of former President Donald Trump’s high-profile war against the Republican establishment.

“The definer of the legislation wins this battle,” Luntz said. “This could end up being the most important vote of 2021.”

There are reasons to believe that politics have changed since Republicans last unified against a sweeping stimulus package, not the least of which is Trump’s omnipresence in the party.

At the same time, the scale of the economic devastation and disruption wrought by the coronavirus pandemic dwarfs that of the 2008 financial crisis. At its peak, roughly 9 U.S. million jobs were lost in the Great Recession, compared with 22 million jobs lost to the coronavirus. A year after the pandemic began, nearly 10 million U.S. jobs remain lost, more than 20 million children are out of school, half a million Americans are dead, and roughly 100,000 businesses are feared closed forever.

Polling suggests that an overwhelming majority of voters — including a significant number of Republicans — supports the Democrats’ pandemic relief plan. And the business community along with state and local leaders in both parties are crying out for help.

On the eve of the House vote, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt joined 31 other Republican mayors in a letter encouraging leaders in both parties to approve the package.

“The major part of the bill that relates to cities is sorely needed,” Holt told The Associated Press, citing pandemic-related cuts to his city’s police and fire departments. “I don’t know any blue or red state or blue or red city that doesn’t have a revenue shortfall due to COVID-19’s fallout.”

In another deep-red state, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice also broke with Washington Republicans and said Congress should “go big or go home” on the new stimulus package.

“We have tried to underspend and undersize what was really needed to get over the top of the mountain,” the Republican governor told reporters during a Friday coronavirus briefing. “You got a lot of people across this nation who are really hurting.”

Yet no Republican in Washington voted to support the sweeping $1.9 trillion stimulus package early Saturday.

Moderate Democratic Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Kurt Schrader of Oregon were the only two lawmakers to cross party lines, joining 210 Republicans to vote against the legislation that ultimately passed 219-212.

“The swamp is back,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said shortly before the final vote, decrying what he called extraordinary “non-COVID waste” and a “blue state bailout.”

“Most states are not in financial distress,” McCarthy said.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, traditionally a Republican ally, declined to support or oppose the Republican position. Neil Bradley, the chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer, said there is a need for a rescue package that is “targeted, timely and temporary.”

“There’s a lot to like in the plan,” Bradley told The AP. “But there’s also a whole lot of elements that fail the test of targeted and timely and temporary.”

The chamber, like congressional Republicans, opposes Democratic efforts to boost the federal minimum wage to $15 hourly by 2025 from its current $7.25 floor. The Senate parliamentarian ruled Thursday that the progressive priority could not be included in the Senate version of the bill, although Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is considering a provision that would penalize large companies that don’t pay workers at least $15 an hour.

Whether the minimum wage provision is included or not, Senate Republicans are expected to oppose the final package.

While there could be political fallout from the GOP’s strategy in next year’s midterm elections, Republican officials privately concede they are more concerned about the intense intra-party feud pitting Trump and his loyalists against leading establishment Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the No. 3 House Republican, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

That divide is playing out this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, where Trump himself is expected to attack his party’s establishment on Sunday as he returns to the public stage for the first time since leaving the White House.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, another CPAC speaker and a 2024 Republican presidential prospect, said party unity is paramount moving forward.

“I think that Republicans need to recognize that what brings us together right now is the left-wing agenda of the Biden-Harris administration,” Cotton told The AP. “The more that we focus on what they’re trying to accomplish in the Congress and through the president’s executive actions, the more united we will be, and the more we will move public opinion in our direction.”

Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political powerhouse, opposes the Democratic-backed package as well, but its president, Tim Phillips, says it’s unclear whether the GOP strategy will be enough to unite the deeply fractured Republican Party.

“This feels a lot like 2009 — that united the Republican caucus and the activist base in a way that probably nothing else could have,” Phillips said. “It served them well in 2009. I wonder if that’ll happen this time.”

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SAN DIEGO (AP) — California is freeing up as much as $28 million to help immigrants arriving from Mexico and being released in the U.S. until their court dates, a sharp contrast from other border states that have emerged as foes of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

The funding, expected to last through June, comes as Biden unwinds former President Donald Trump’s policy to make asylum-seekers wait in Mexico until their court hearings. It will pay for hotel rooms for immigrants to quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic before going to their final destinations throughout the U.S.

Money also will go to Jewish Family Service of San Diego to provide food, transportation and help with travel logistics. The state will fund health services for the short stays, including COVID-19 testing.

Last week, the Biden administration began allowing people into the United States who had been forced to wait south of the border under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. On his first day, Biden suspended the program for new arrivals.

An estimated 26,000 people with active cases will be allowed into the U.S., with about 25 people released a day in San Diego.

“This is what happens when California and Washington are talking with each other instead of at each other,” said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the California Department of Finance.

The first asylum-seekers waiting in the Mexican border city of Matamoros, home to a migrant camp with squalid conditions, were processed for entry Thursday in Brownsville, Texas. Processing began Friday in El Paso, Texas.

At the same time, the U.S. is releasing more asylum-seekers who are not enrolled in “Remain in Mexico” into the country, as it did for hundreds of thousands of people before Trump foisted the responsibility of hosting asylum-seekers on Mexico in 2019.

While most people are quickly expelled without an opportunity to seek asylum under pandemic powers that Trump instituted and Biden kept in place, limited releases in the U.S. have raised financial and humanitarian concerns in some border cities.

“There’s no plan of action once Border Patrol releases migrants in city centers from being detained,” Bruno Lozano, mayor of the South Texas city of Del Rio, said in an interview.

Lozano posted a YouTube video last week calling on the Biden administration to stop releasing migrants during a winter storm that ravaged Texas, knocking out power and water for several days in many cities. The Border Patrol resumed releasing migrants in Del Rio on Feb. 20 after the cold passed.

Lozano said Friday that border agents have resumed releasing people in Del Rio and nearby cities. He noted that nonprofit groups provide cellphones, food and clothing to people leaving border custody and called on federal authorities to ramp up vaccinations in border communities or provide hotel rooms where migrants who test positive can quarantine.

In Yuma, Arizona, Mayor Douglas Nicholls estimated that by the end of Thursday, some 230 migrants, including many families with children, had been released since Feb. 15. Many are dropped at a Greyhound bus stop outside a discount store in a rural area.

Nicholls wants state and federal officials to transport migrants to larger cities with more infrastructure and resources, as the federal government did during Trump’s presidency.

Texas has sent 10,000 rapid COVID-19 tests to Brownsville for arriving migrants. City spokesman Felipe Romero says the tests are administered at the local bus station and anyone who tests positive is told to isolate.

In El Paso, the Annunciation House shelter is receiving 25 immigrants daily from the Remain in Mexico program. The shelter expects releases to double in the coming weeks and perhaps reach 75 a day by the end of March, director Ruben Garcia said.

California has so far been the most generous with aid. Besides the new funding, it’s already spent nearly $12 million to help about 30,000 asylum-seekers at the border since Trump’s presidency.

With Biden in the White House, Arizona and Texas have emerged as chief critics of immigration policy, a position that California proudly took during the Trump years. Texas successfully sued to block Biden’s 100-day moratorium on deportations.

Texas and Arizona signed agreements with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Trump’s final days that could delay any changes to immigration policy. The Biden administration has rejected them.

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Associated Press writers Nomaan Merchant in Houston and Anita Snow in Phoenix contributed to this report.

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