Hispanic citizens born on the Texas side of the U.S.-Mexico border are having a hard time getting passports. They're also finding it impossible to get back into America if they leave.
That's because the federal government has resurfaced a 1990s legal dispute in which some midwives said they gave Texas birth certificates to babies born in Mexico near the U.S. border. Now, the Trump administration is disputing birth records of citizens born in that area and denying them passports — or outright revoking them, The Washington Post reports.
From the 1950s through the '90s, some midwives allegedly sold American birth certificates to families whose children were technically born in Mexico, the Post details. At least 900 fraudulent documents were found during a court case, per The Associated Press, leading the State Department to stop giving passports to people delivered by midwives near the Rio Grande during the Obama administration. A 2009 American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit slowed the practice, attorneys tell the Post, but now the government seems to be kicking into high gear once again.
In a statement, the State Department said its passport practices haven't changed. But immigration lawyers tell the Post that they've seen more and more applicants denied passports if they can't provide documentation beyond an official U.S. birth certificate. Some citizens are having their passports taken away if they go to Mexico and try to return home, while others are tossed into immigration detention centers and slated for deportation. Attorneys — one of whom said she's seen 20 clients detained — say it is basically impossible to tell which birth certificates are real and which ones aren't.
The issue is mostly affecting Hispanic people in a Democratic area of Texas. Read more about the passport catastrophe at The Washington Post. Kathryn Krawczyk
President-elect Joe Biden is expected to nominate former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to lead the Treasury Department, people familiar with the decision told The Wall Street Journal. Yellen declined to comment, the Journal notes.
If confirmed, Yellen would become the first woman to fill the role, as well as the first person to head the Treasury, the central bank, and the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
Yellen oversaw the Fed between 2014 and 2018. She was originally nominated by former President Barack Obama and was confirmed by the Senate with bipartisan support, including three sitting Republican lawmakers — Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). That seemingly increases her chances of getting through the process again, even if the GOP holds on to its majority.
Per the Journal, the Biden transition team views Yellen as a "credible authority on the dangers of prematurely withdrawing government stimulus and as someone who could collaborate closely with the Fed and executive-branch agencies to engineer more support if Congress remains hesitant to act" on coronavirus relief legislation. Read more at The Wall Street Journal. Tim O'Donnell
Another awards show, another new ratings low.
The 2020 American Music Awards on Sunday drew an average of 3.8 million viewers and a 0.9 rating among adults 18-49, both of which were new lows for the ceremony, Variety reports. The AMAs experienced a 50 percent rating decline, as well as a 43 percent viewership decline. Last year's AMAs, Variety notes, only fell four percent in the ratings, and viewership ticked up that year by about 200,000.
But awards shows have been fairly consistently declining in the ratings recently. The 2020 Emmys in September again drew its smallest audience of all time with about 6.1 million viewers, while this year's Billboard Music Awards, Academy of Country Music Awards, and Country Music Association Awards also all hit ratings lows.
Sunday's American Music Awards, which took place in Los Angeles with a limited audience amid the pandemic, featured performances from artists including Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish, and the show's top prize of Artist of the Year went to Taylor Swift. But despite Swift's record-extending win, it seems not a huge amount of TV viewers showed up at this party. Brendan Morrow
The coronavirus almost certainly originated in another species before jumping to humans (perhaps infecting a third party species in between), but new research is suggesting that humans could also play the role of vector, National Geographic reports.
A new study led by Harris Lewin, a professor of ecology and evolution at University of California, Davis, found that humans could potentially spread the virus to wild animals, and they probably already have among animals in captivity. For example, Lewin said it's likely lions and tigers that contracted the virus at the Bronx Zoo in New York were infected by human zookeepers.
That could put endangered species — especially close human relatives like the western lowland gorilla, the Sumatran orangutan, chimpanzees, and bonobos — at high risk of a COVID-19 outbreak, especially in places where wild animals are more likely to come into close contact with humans, Lewin told Nat Geo.
Lewin's co-author Klaus-Peter Koepfli singled out Africa's eastern gorilla as another high-risk species because the fewer than 5,000 remaining individuals live in close-knit family groups, making them more vulnerable to their own pandemic.
The good news is there's no evidence the virus is spreading among wild animal populations, and the animals that have been infected in experimental settings have mostly exhibited mild cases. But the risk remains, so Koepfli and Lewin are calling for a focus on preventative methods such as national park staffers getting regularly tested to mitigate the threat. Read more at National Geographic. Tim O'Donnell