Today’s edition of quick hits:
* The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has some explaining to do: “A recently launched federal effort to collect data on the impact of the coronavirus in nursing homes will leave the full toll unclear, because a new rule doesn’t require facilities to report deaths and infections that occurred before early May.”
* Texas shooting: “A gunman opened fire at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi on Thursday, wounding at least one security force member in a ‘terrorism related’ attack, authorities said.”
* Arizona shooting: “Three people were injured and a suspect was in custody after a shooting Wednesday evening in a suburban Phoenix shopping and entertainment complex, police said.”
* Hong Kong: “China is proposing to introduce new legislation that could limit opposition activity in Hong Kong, state media reported Thursday.”
* Open Skies Treaty: “The Trump administration is planning to withdraw from the Open Skies arms control treaty, which allows more than 30 nations to conduct unarmed, short-notice flights over one another’s territories, a senior administration official confirmed to NBC News.”
* As if the case weren’t complex enough: “An appeals court added another layer of complexity to the already convoluted mess surrounding the Justice Department’s effort to drop the Michael Flynn case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit responded Thursday to Flynn’s request that it intervene in his judge’s handling of the matter. The appeals court ordered that the judge, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan of D.C., respond within the next 10 days to Flynn’s request that he drop the case.”
* Wait, what? “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus.”
* Cohen’s out: “President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen was released from federal prison on Thursday because of coronavirus concerns and will serve the rest of his three-year sentence at home.”
* Hmm: “NASA’s top human-exploration official resigned abruptly, about a week before the agency’s most important astronaut launch in a decade, over what a person familiar with the details described as alleged contracting improprieties on a separate program.” * This was an unsettling story: “March 16 was the day a microscopic virus brought the financial system to the brink. Few realized how close it came to going over the edge entirely.” * Again? “In yet another setback for the Museum of the Bible, federal authorities on Monday began the process of taking ownership of a rare cuneiform tablet, known as the Gilgamesh Dream tablet, that the museum’s main supporter, Hobby Lobby, bought for $1.6 million in 2014. Prosecutors believe the historically significant tablet, originally from an area that is part of modern Iraq, entered the country illegally.” * Reflecting on his latest coronavirus test, Trump told reporters this morning, “I tested very positively in another sense. So, this morning, yeah. I tested positively toward negative, right? So, no, I tested perfectly this morning, meaning I tested negative. But that’s a way of saying it: positively toward the negative.” That ought to clear things up. See you tomorrow.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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