Mornings on the Mall

Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Hosts: Brian Wilson and Larry O’Connor

5am – A/B/C   Trump Jokes That He ‘Always Wanted’ a Purple Heart (NBC)

Donald Trump joked Tuesday that he “always wanted” a Purple Heart and it was “much easier” to receive one from a supporter than earn the military decoration given to wounded and killed service members. The seemingly light-hearted comments come amid Trump’s ongoing controversy with Gold Star families and new reports detailing his own draft deferments. “You know something very nice just happened to me. A man came up to me and he handed me his Purple Heart,” Trump said during an event in Virginia.   “He said, ‘that’s my real Purple Heart I have such confidence in you.’ And I said, ‘Man that’s like big stuff. I’ve always wanted to get the real Purple Heart.’ This was much easier,” he added before inviting the veteran on stage.

Khan to Trump: ‘Put that Purple Heart back’ (CNN) Khizr Khan on Tuesday accused Donald Trump of dodging the Vietnam War draft, and said he shouldn’t have accepted a Purple Heart given to him at a rally earlier in the day, deeming it the latest sign of his inability to empathize with parents of fallen soldiers. “You dodged the draft,” Khan, a Muslim whose son was slain in the Iraq War, said of Trump to CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Put that Purple Heart back on that person’s chest.” A military veteran supporting Trump had gifted the Republican presidential nominee his Purple Heart, prompting Trump to say he “always wanted to get the Purple Heart” and this was “much easier” than serving in combat.

5am – D         Why Corporate America Is Leaving the Suburbs for the City (NYTimes) For decades, many of the nation’s biggest companies staked their futures far from the fraying downtowns of aging East Coast and Midwestern cities. One after another, they decamped for sprawling campuses in the suburbs and exurbs. Now, corporate America is moving in the other direction. In June, McDonald’s joined a long list of companies that are returning to downtown Chicago from suburbs like Oak Brook, Northfield and Schaumburg. Later this month, the top executive team at General Electric — whose 70-acre wooded campus in Fairfield, Conn., has embodied the quintessential suburban corporate office park since it opened in 1974 — will move to downtown Boston. When the move is completed in 2018, the renovated red brick warehouses that will form part of G.E.’s new headquarters won’t even have a parking lot, let alone a spot reserved for the chief executive. But even as they establish new urban beachheads, business giants like G.E. are also changing the nature of their headquarters, staffing them with a few top white-collar employees and a smattering of digital talent, rather than recreating the endless Dilbert-like pods they once built in the ’burbs.

5am – E         Report: US airlifted $400 million to Iran as detained Americans were released (Fox) The U.S. government airlifted the equivalent of $400 million to Iran this past January, which occurred as four detained Americans were released by Tehran, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The cash transfer was the first installment paid in a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a failed 1979 arms deal dating from just before the Iranian Revolution. State Department spokesman John Kirby denied the cash transfer was done to secure the release of the four Americans. The negotiations over the [arms deal] settlement … were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home,” Kirby said in a statement. “Not only were the two negotiations separate, they were conducted by different teams on each side.” “The funds that were transferred to Iran were related solely to the settlement of a long-standing claim at the U.S.-Iran Claims Tribunal at The Hague,” Kirby’s statement concluded. However, the Journal says U.S. officials acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.

6am –A/B/C  Miss Teen USA Karlie Hay Calls Offensive Tweets ‘Careless Mistake’ (ABC) The newly-crowned Miss Teen USA said she is “very sorry” for offensive tweets dating back to 2013 that included the repeated use of the N-word. “I am very sorry. It’s embarrassing,” Karlie Hay, 18, said today on “Good Morning America.” “It’s something I’m ashamed of and I’ve grown up from that 15-year-old girl who used that type of language.” Hay, a Texas native, found herself embroiled in controversy when her past tweets emerged just hours after she was crowned the new Miss Teen USA Saturday night at The Venetian Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Many on Twitter claimed that Hay used curse words, issued threats and even used the N-word on her personal Twitter account, which is now protected. Hay took responsibility for writing the tweets but said the language she used then is not representative of who she is today. “At that age, I was being a follower. I was trying to fit in with my friends. The word was thrown around in the music I listened to, with the friends I hung out with and I had no guidance so it was kind of a careless mistake,” she said. “When the tweet got brought back up I was just like kind of embarrassed, ashamed, and just amazed that I actually at one point in my life thought it was okay to use that word because it’s never okay.” The pageant queen called the tweets a “careless mistake” and said she plans to turn her situation into something positive.

6am – D         INTERVIEW: CLIFF MAY

• U.S. Sent Cash to Iran as Americans Were Freed

• Obama administration insists there was no quid pro quo, but critics charge payment amounted to ransom

6am – E         Pokemon Go News:

• Get off my lawn: New Jersey man sues Pokemon game creators over players on his property (RT) Augmented-reality game Pokémon Go has motivated millions of its players to hunt for pocket monsters in diverse and sometimes dangerous places, but more often than not, on private properties.  Now a man is suing the company for the players present in his yard. A New Jersey man is taking Niantic Labs, Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. to California’s federal court to keep Pokémon hunters off his lawn. Jeffrey Marder, of West Orange, claims that the companies have created a source of public nuisance by encouraging players to trespass on private property.
• Day care removed from ‘Pokemon Go’ after strangers show up (WTOP) A New Hampshire day care center has been removed from “Pokemon Go” after complaining to game’s developers about strangers lurking around the property. The Portsmouth Herald reports (http://bit.ly/2aYXghm) Little Blessings Child Care Center director Diane Lewis sent a letter to parents and the day care’s two dozen employees explaining that she had seen many random people in the day care’s parking lot and walking the grounds since the game launched last month. The Portsmouth center appeared as a “gym” in the game. Lewis got in touch with game developer Niantic Labs and had it removed.
• New York governor bars sex offenders from playing Pokémon Go (The Verge) At the direction of Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York’s correctional department has made playing online games a violation of parole for sex offenders — particularly Pokémon Go. In a statement, Cuomo said that people on the sex offender registry are now banned from “downloading, accessing, or otherwise engaging in any internet enabled gaming activities, including Pokémon Go.” He also published a letter that he sent to game developer Niantic, asking for its cooperation in preventing registrants from signing up. The decision is based on a report from two New York state senators, released last week. Jeffrey Klein and Diane Savino visited the locations of 100 registered sex offenders in New York City and found 57 pokémon and 59 pokéstops and gyms within half a city block. They were particularly worried about the “lures” that draw pokémon — and thus players, including children — to a location. While criminals have used pokéstops and lures to attract and rob players, there are no known cases of sexual predators using them so far. Nonetheless, Klein and Savino have crafted bills that would ban sex offenders from playing the game and require Niantic to remove any Pokémon Go-related items or locations from near their homes.

7am – A  

INTERVIEW — JOE CONCHA

• Media’s coverage of Trump
• CONCHA: Two conventions, two speeches, two examples of media hypocrisy
• Is there such a thing an objective media? Did it ever exist or was it an illusion
• How Jeff Zucker Made CNN Great Again. (Variety) –Although it’s a sweltering 90 degrees outside, Zucker doesn’t break a sweat in the morning meeting. He wishes a colleague happy birthday before recapping the previous night’s coverage, and praises his team for keeping the cameras on the stage. “There’s a tendency for television networks to interrupt the program for additional commentary,” Zucker later explains to Variety. “The audience would rather see what’s happening.” He believes there’s time for more analysis in the post-convention hours. “As I like to say,” Zucker adds with a smirk, “we’re never off the air.”

7am – B         Trampoline Parks Tied to Jump in Emergency Room Visits (Scientific American) As trampoline parks are becoming more common in the U.S., so are emergency department visits for injuries that happen at these recreational facilities, a new study suggests. “I don’t think trampoline park injuries are increasing because they are especially dangerous compared to home trampolines, but rather because of their growing popularity and the increasing number/availability of these facilities,” said lead study author Dr. Kathryn Kasmire, a researcher at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford. From 2010 to 2014, the average annual number of ED visits for trampoline injuries was close to 92,000. The vast majority happened at home – but injuries at trampoline parks surged more than 10-fold during the study period. In 2014, injuries at trampoline parks accounted for almost 7,000 ED visits, the study found.

7am – C         Flossing might not actually have any proven medical benefits (Science Alert) It seems like simple, obvious advice: Eat your vegetables, get some exercise, and – of course – floss. Or not. Turns out that despite being recommended by numerous scientists and universities, the effectiveness of flossing has never been researched, according to a new report from the Associated Press. The US government has recommended flossing for nearly four decades. But according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a set of recommendations the agency sends out every five years, all of the recommendations have to be grounded in scientific evidence.

And flossing is, well, not. In its report, published Tuesday, the Associated Press says that it used the Freedom of Information Act to request evidence for the benefits of flossing from the departments of Health and Human Services. AP never received that evidence. Instead, it got a letter from the government acknowledging that the effectiveness of flossing had never been studied. So the AP took a look at more than 25 studies comparing conventional brushing alone against brushing plus flossing. They found little to no evidence in favour of flossing.

7am – D         INTERVIEW – KT MCFARLAND:

• Obama calls Trump unfit to be president. Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama offered one of his sharpest denunciations of Donald Trump to date Tuesday, declaring the Republican nominee entirely unfit to serve as president and lambasting Republicans for sticking by their nominee. The strong rebuke in the White House East Room came after Trump’s criticism of the family of a slain Muslim US soldier, along with comments that displayed apparent confusion related to the Russian incursion into Ukraine. “The Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president,” Obama said at a White House news conference with the Prime Minister of Singapore. “He keeps on proving it.”
• Obama approves 30-day airstrike mission against ISIS in Libya. (Fox News) — President Obama has authorized a 30-day mission for the U.S. military to conduct airstrikes against the Islamic State terror group in Libya as new strikes were unleashed Tuesday, Fox News has learned.  Marine Corps Harrier jets launched from the Navy amphibious assault ship USS Wasp conducted at least two airstrikes against ISIS targets in the coastal city of Sirte Tuesday. USS Wasp is set to remain off the Libyan coast in the Mediterranean Sea for the next month along with an escort ship, the guided-missile destroyer USS Carney.  The U.S. has launched at least seven airstrikes in total since the campaign began Monday.
• Dems trying to tie Putin and Russia with Trump. Washington (CNN)Donald Trump’s Russia problem isn’t going away. In the past week, the Republican presidential nominee has been pilloried for his comments expressing openness to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, has called on the Russian government to share emails it possibly hacked from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and drawn rebukes from critics who say he’s soft on a traditional US adversary. Trump says Putin is ‘not going to go into Ukraine,’ despite Crimea.
• WSJ: US airlifted $400 million to Iran as detained Americans were released. The U.S. government airlifted the equivalent of $400 million to Iran this past January, which occurred as four detained Americans were released by Tehran, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The cash transfer was the first installment paid in a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a failed 1979 arms deal dating from just before the Iranian Revolution. State Department spokesman John Kirby denied the cash transfer was done to secure the release of the four Americans.
• @RealDonaldTrump tweeted an hour ago: “Our incompetent Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was the one who started talks to give 400 million dollars, in cash, to Iran. Scandal!”

7am – E         ZIKA NEWS:

• CDC struggling to wipe out mosquitoes carrying Zika virus (CBS) Pregnant women are being warned to stay away from a popular Florida neighborhood over the Zika virus, the first time a warning of this kind has been issued in the United States. The small Miami neighborhood of Wynwood is home to the first ongoing Zika transmission in the continental U.S. There are now 14 locally transmitted cases in or near the Wynwood district, among more than 1,600 travel-related Zika cases in the country. State and county health officials, along with an emergency response team from the Centers for Disease Control, are on the scene but struggling to control the Aedes aegypti mosquito — the bug spreading the virus — because the chemicals they’re using to kill the mosquitoes aren’t very effective, reports CBS News correspondent David Begnaud. “They’ve been applying both chemicals that kill larval mosquitoes and adult mosquitoes every day. It isn’t working as well as we had hoped. That could be because some of the mosquitoes are resistant to those insecticides,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Frieden said the mosquito only travels about 164 yards in its lifetime (although some research suggests it can fly farther), but it moves quickly. “It’s been referred to as the cockroach of mosquitoes. It lives indoors and outdoors, it can breed or hatch in a few drops of water, the eggs can last for months,” Frieden said. “And it can bite four or five people at once so it spreads the disease rapidly.”
• Tim Kaine, Straddling Dual Roles, Calls for Congress to Provide Zika Funding (NY Times) Tim Kaine’s dual jobs, Democratic senator from Virginia and vice-presidential candidate, collided on Tuesday during a visit to Florida, when he called on Republicans to bring the Senate back into session to deal with the Zika threat given the outbreak in the state’s south. “Congress should not be in recess when Zika is advancing,” Mr. Kaine told a crowd in Daytona Beach, urging quick approval of $1.1 billion in health funding that has been the subject of a fierce and lengthy partisan fight.

8am – A         INTERVIEW – QUENTIN KIDD – Vice Provost and Director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, VA:

• Trump holds Virginia rally Tuesday: has a few gaffes about purple heart medal, booting baby out of rally and more

• What are Trump’s chances in Virginia considering Sen. Kaine on the Clinton ticket?

8am – B         What ‘Hookup Culture’? Millennials Having Less Sex Than Their Parents (NBC) For younger millennials, #netflixandchill really means watching TV.

According to a new study from Florida Atlantic University, the Millennial “hookup culture” myth of obsessively swiping right may be just that — a myth. The Millennial generation includes people born between 1980 and 1994. The new study, published Tuesday in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, finds that younger Millennials — those born in the early 1990s and sometimes referred to as “the Snapchat Generation” — are 41 percent more likely to be sexually inactive than their Millennial peers born in the 1980s and more than twice as likely to be sexually inactive in their early 20s than 1960s-born Generation X’ers.

8am – C         Wi-Fi coming to some Metro stations this month (WTOP) Metro is set to launch a “lite” Wi-Fi network for riders in six downtown stations this month. The pilot program follows installation and testing over the course of the spring and summer. Overall, Metro is installing Wi-Fi at all 91 stations by the end of the year for internal engineering and operational use. Metro said the pilot program will begin this month “once a new website is launched.” The pilot includes Metro Center, Gallery Place, L’Enfant Plaza, Union Station, Judiciary Square and Archives stations.

8am – D         Nice Cargo Shorts! You’re Sleeping on the Sofa (Wall Street Journal)

Dane Hansen, who operates a small steel business in Pleasant Grove, Utah, says that throughout his 11-year marriage, 15 pairs of cargo shorts have slowly disappeared from his closet. On the occasions when he has confronted his wife about the missing shorts, she will either admit to throwing them away or deflect confrontation by saying things like, “Honey, you just need a little help.” Mr. Hansen, 35 years old, is now down to one pair of cargo shorts, and he guards them closely. He has hidden them in small closet nooks where his wife can’t find them. “I don’t let her get her hands on them,” he said. “I wish I had caught on sooner.” Relationships around the country are being tested by cargo shorts, loosely cut shorts with large pockets sewn onto the sides. Men who love them say they’re comfortable and practical for summer. Detractors say they’ve been out of style for years, deriding them as bulky, uncool and just flat-out ugly.

8am – E         Trump declines to endorse Ryan, McCain in GOP primaries (USA Today) Donald Trump declined to support Paul Ryan’s re-election bid in Wisconsin. His challenger, Paul Nehlen, blasted Ryan in an interview.  Maintaining tense relations with the Republican Party establishment, Donald Trump is pointedly refusing to endorse Paul Ryan and John McCain in GOP primary races later this month. While Ryan faces underdog Paul Nehlen in a primary next week, Trump told The Washington Post that “I’m not quite there yet” with an endorsement of the House speaker. “I like Paul, but these are horrible times for our country,” Trump said. “We need very strong leadership. We need very, very strong leadership. And I’m just not quite there yet.”