(FREE) PAINE IN THE MORNING: 8 things you need to know this Tuesday – April 19, 2022

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UPDATE: TSA will not enforce Covid mask mandate on planes, public transit after court ruling, White House says –  A federal judge in Florida on Monday vacated the Biden administration’s national Covid mask mandate for planes and other forms of public transportation, ruling that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had overstepped its authority.

U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Tampa said the CDC had failed to adequately explain its reasons for the mandate, and did not allow public comment in violation of federal procedures for issuing new rules. Mizelle was appointed by former President Donald Trump in 2020. – READ MORE

Florida Judge Voids U.S. Mask Mandate for Planes, Other Travel – A federal judge in Florida has voided the national mask mandate covering airplanes and other public transportation as exceeding the authority of U.S. health officials in the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision Monday by U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Tampa, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, also said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention improperly failed to justify its decision and did not follow proper rulemaking. – READ MORE

US colleges reinstate mask requirements, but expert says ‘the time for mask mandates is gone’ – Several colleges and universities across the nation are reinstating mask mandates amid a “significant increase” in COVID-19 cases on campus, but one expert thinks the mandates are unnecessary.

Georgetown University, Rice University, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University and American University have all reinstated mask mandates across campus. – READ MORE

Three Easter weekend mass shootings leave 31 people wounded, only one suspect arrested and he was released on a $25,000 bond – There were three mass shootings in the U.S. during Easter weekend that took the lives of two teens and left at least 31 people wounded, according to the Associated Press.

Roughly 200 people – of which the “vast majority” were younger than age 18 – packed themselves into a short-term rental home for a raucous house party on Saturday night. Then around 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, at least 50 gunshots were fired in the home, plus several more rounds were fired outside the home. Police are investigating eight different crime scenes. – READ MORE

Bird Flu Outbreak “Above And Beyond Rate Of Spread” Observed In 2015, Warns Industry Expert – The bird flu outbreak has only been spreading around the US for two months, and some industry experts are warning the rate of spread could be worse than the devastating 2015 outbreak.

On Friday, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced yet another state where the contagious strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza has been detected. Idaho is the 27th state where the virus has been found since February. – READ MORE

Drug And Alcohol Abuse Slowing Labor Force Participation Rate, Fed Study Finds – Drug and alcohol abuse are starting to negatively effect the labor force participation rate, according to a new study by Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta researcher Karen Kopecky, Jeremy Greenwood of the University of Pennsylvania and Nezih Guner of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.

The study was reported last week by Bloomberg in this writeup.

What it found was that between 9% and 26% of the decline in prime-age labor-force participation between February 2020 and June 2021 was due to “increased substance abuse”. – READ MORE

States Are Flush With Cash – As state legislators kicked off their 2022 sessions this spring and started planning new budgets, many found that their tax coffers were overflowing. What lawmakers do with that extra money could have long-range consequences.

The excess revenue resulted from a convergence of two windfalls. State tax collections rose sharply in 2021 as the pandemic waned, businesses fully reopened, and consumers started spending again. And the federal government showered states with more than $360 billion as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in March 2021. The passage of President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill means even more federal taxpayer money for state treasuries in the near future. – READ MORE

Blood Money: How America’s Sports Owners Are in Bed with Communist China – There is no question that basketball is China’s most popular sport. “Roughly 800 million people in China tuned into an NBA game. … That’s more than twice the population of the United States,” NBC News reported in 2019. That was before Daryl Moray sent his simple tweet, “Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong,” in October of 2019 and started a firestorm that would shake the NBA to its core and begin a nearly 18-month-long ban on NBA games aired on Chinese television.

This was also before ESPN exposed Brooklyn Nets Owner Joe Tsai this week, in a report titled “Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai is the face of NBA’s uneasy China relationship.” Tsai, who also owns WNBA’s New York Liberty and the San Diego Seals of the National Lacrosse League, is worth $8.5 billion, mostly from his Amazon-esque company Alibaba, headquartered in Hangzhou, China, with a revenue of over $700 billion per year. Tsai is among many owners in the NBA and other sports associations who have shown public support for protest movements that are publicly critical of America’s supposed human rights struggles, while at the same time covering up, and in some cases defending, China’s abysmal human rights record. – READ MORE

Something Is Rotten In The State Of Shanghai’s Latest COVID Lockdowns – Make no doubt about it, there’s something seriously disturbing about the state of the recent Covid lockdowns taking place in Shanghai. Even for China.

Here is what the outbreak looks like, if we are to believe the numbers coming out of China. You’ll have to excuse me for being frank, but I simply don’t believe them. China has lied about nearly everything since the beginning of the pandemic, and they certainly don’t have the rest of the world’s best interest in mind now that they are allying with Russia economically. – READ MORE