First lady Jill Biden on Sunday said it was “ridiculous’’ to consider GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley’s call to mandate mental competency tests for pols over 75, suggesting President Biden would never take one.
Jill Biden said she and her husband — who at age 80 is the oldest commander in chief in US history and would be 82 at his inauguration if reelected — would “never even discuss something like that.
Jill Biden — whose full interview will air at 9 p.m. Monday — pointed to the president’s surprise trip last month to Ukraine to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion as proof of the commander-in-chief’s stamina.
“How many 30-year-olds could travel to Poland, get on the train? Go nine more hours, go to Ukraine, meet with President Zelensky?” she said. “So, look at the man. Look what he’s doing. Look what he continues to do each and every day.”
First lady Jill Biden blasted Nikki Haley’s proposal to test the mental competency of politicians over 75 as “ridiculous.”CNNPresident Biden routinely faces questions about his mental fitness to lead the country.Getty Images
Haley, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, floated the proposal to test older politicians on their mental proficiency when she announced last month that she was running for the 2024 Republican nomination, clearly referring to Biden and GOP former President Donald Trump, who is 76 and has already thrown his hat into the presidential ring again.
“We are more than ready for a new generation to lead us into the future,” the 51-year-old Haley told supporters during her campaign kickoff in Charleston, SC. “Ready to move past the stale ideas and faded names of the past.”
Nikki Haley, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, has proposed testing the mental abilities of politicians over age 75.Mark Peterson/Redux for NY Post
The former governor of South Carolina added: “We won’t win the fight for the 21st century if we keep trusting politicians from the 20th century.”
“ANYBODY running for the Office of President of the United States should agree to take a full & complete Mental Competency Test simultaneously (or before!) with the announcement that he or she is running, & likewise, but to a somewhat lesser extent, agree to a test which would prove that you are physically capable of doing the job,” Trump wrote Feb. 21 on his Truth Social messaging platform.
“Being an outstanding President requires great mental acuity & physical stamina. If you don’t have these qualities or traits, it is likely you won’t succeed. MAGA!” he continued.
New York court workers must be rehired — and given back pay with interest —if they were firedbecause they refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine, the state’s Public Employment Relations Board has ruled.
Under terms of the decision issued last month, the Unified Court System must immediately “cease and desist” from enforcing policies that require all non-judicial employees to be vaccinated or undergo regular testing.
In addition, anyone “who lost accrued leave, compensation or employment” will have to be made “whole,” with interest paid “at the maximum legal rate,” according to the Feb. 24 decision obtained by The Post.
The decision affects at least about 25 court officers who were fired, said Dennis Quirk, president of the New York State Court Officers Association, one of 10 unions that challenged the mandate.
A total of about 200 court workers were either fired or resigned or retired, Quirk said Sunday.
Quirk, who said he personally favors vaccination, called the PERB ruling a “landmark decision.”
An FDNY EMS worker gets vaccinated against COVID-19 on Dec. 23, 2020.Getty Images
“You can’t violate an individual’s right to choose. We live in America, not Russia,” he said.
Court officials “are reviewing the decision” and considering whether to appeal, UCS spokesman Lucian Chalfen said.
It’s unclear whether the decision will affect other state and Big Apple government employees who refused to get vaccinated, some of whom are suing New York City.
A spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams said the ruling won’t apply to city workers because it was “based on a different set of facts and laws” than those governing Big Apple employees.
Dennis Quirk, head of the New York State Court Officers Association, said in response to the ruling, “You can’t violate an individual’s right to choose.”Staff
“There have been rulings on the city’s mandate that specifically find this type of relief is not necessary or warranted,”” the spokesperson added.
Earlier this month, Adams dropped the city’s vaccine mandate for municipal employees but said that the nearly 1,800 people who were fired for flouting it would have to reapply for their old jobs and wouldn’t receive back pay.
Meanwhile, an unvaccinated part-time judge in upstate Hornell, Jennifer Donlon, filed suit in December because she is barred from sitting on the bench but allowed to enter court as a lawyer.
In the 31-page PERB ruling, Administrative Law Judge Mariam Manichaikul said court officials “had a duty to negotiate” with labor unions over a September 2021 order requiring non-judicial employees to be vaccinated or undergo regular testing.
A public notice announces the Public Employment Relations Board’s ruling against the vaccine mandate for court workers.
“In adopting the Policies, UCS unilaterally implemented extensive procedures that implicate various terms and conditions of employment, including leave time, compensation, discipline, job security and medical privacy, all of which must be bargained,” she wrote.
Manichaikul ruled that “UCS has not met the criteria under which an employer is permitted to take unilateral action in an emergency situation” because it didn’t bargain with the unions beforehand and “showed no genuine desire to negotiate thereafter.”
Thousands of anti-mandate protesters march across the Brooklyn Bridge on Oct. 25, 2021.Gabriella Bass
Although talks took place from August to December 2021, “UCS’ decision to unilaterally cease bargaining over the Policies when no agreements had been reached nor impasse declared, constitutes a violation” of the Public Employees’ Fair Employment Act, she said.
As of Friday, the “community levels” of COVID-19 were low throughout New York City and the surrounding metro area, according to data posted online by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nationwide, nearly 82% of counties had low levels, with moderate or high levels in the rest, according to the CDC.
Administrative Law Judge Mariam Manichaikul handed down the 31-page decision on Feb. 24.
The vaccine mandate was imposed by former state Court of Appeals Chief Judge Janet DiFiore, who resigned in July while reportedly facing an ethics probe stemming from her public feud with Quirk over it.
The state Commission on Judicial Conduct was reportedly investigating whether DiFiore improperly interfered with a disciplinary hearing against Quirk for posting her home addresses on Facebook to encourage protests there.
In a letter to the hearing officer, DiFiore said Quirk “exhibits no remorse” and urged the use of “every means” available “to address this incident and deter future misconduct,” according to Law360, which revealed the probe.
In December, The Post revealed that DiFiore still had court officers assigned to chauffeur and protect her using a pair of state-owned SUVs.
At the time, Chalfen said the unprecedented arrangement was “determined by law enforcement personnel in our Department of Public Safety” and noted the “doxxing” that exposed her addresses.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s pick to replace DiFiore, appellate division Justice Hector LaSalle, was rejected last month by the state Senate, which voted 39-20 to make the centrist Democrat the first nominee ever turned down for a spot on the state’s highest court.
As mRNA vaccines have proved to be very successful in battling the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, this new modality has attracted widespread interest for the development of potent vaccines against other infectious diseases and cancer. Cervical cancer caused by persistent human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is a major cause of cancer-related deaths in women, and the development of safe and effective therapeutic strategies is urgently needed. In the present study, we compared the performance of three different mRNA vaccine modalities to target tumors associated with HPV-16 infection in mice. We generated lipid nanoparticle (LNP)–encapsulated self-amplifying mRNA as well as unmodified and nucleoside-modified non-replicating mRNA vaccines encoding a chimeric protein derived from the fusion of the HPV-16 E7 oncoprotein and the herpes simplex virus type 1 glycoprotein D (gDE7). We demonstrated that single low-dose immunizations with any of the three gDE7 mRNA vaccines induced activation of E7-specific CD8+ T cells, generated memory T cell responses capable of preventing tumor relapses, and eradicated subcutaneous tumors at different growth stages. In addition, the gDE7 mRNA-LNP vaccines induced potent tumor protection in two different orthotopic mouse tumor models after administration of a single vaccine dose. Last, comparative studies demonstrated that all three gDE7 mRNA-LNP vaccines proved to be superior to gDE7 DNA and gDE7 recombinant protein vaccines. Collectively, we demonstrated the immunogenicity and therapeutic efficacy of three different mRNA vaccines in extensive comparative experiments. Our data support further evaluation of these mRNA vaccines in clinical trials.
Is investing in research the best way for the United States to compete with China, or would imposing additional sanctions to prevent the rival superpower from stealing U.S. technology be a better strategy? This week, two committees of the U.S. House of Representatives debated those two approaches to dealing with the increasingly tense U.S.-Chinese relationship.
Speaking hours apart during hearings on 28 February, Representative Frank Lucas (R–OK), the new chair of the House science committee, and Representative Mike Gallagher (R–WI), who leads the new House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), agreed that the United States can’t afford to lose the technology race with its chief economic and military rival.
But Lucas and most Democrats on both panels think the best way for the United States to prevail is to run faster, by providing more funding for research and for training the skilled workforce needed to turn that research into new technologies. In contrast, Gallagher and his Republican colleagues on both panels generally oppose investing more in research and favor hobbling China through trade and other sanctions designed to hinder its access to U.S.-made technology.
Lucas said the science committee chose China as the topic of its first hearing since Republicans regained control of the House because of the threat its investments in technology pose to the nation.
“If the CCP becomes the global leader in scientific discoveries and technology development, we should expect less privacy, less transparency, less access, and less fairness in how these systems operate,” Lucas predicted in his measured opening statement at the morning hearing. “It [would] mean fewer opportunities for American companies to compete in the global economy [and] increased risks to sensitive national security tools, critical technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum information sciences, and cybersecurity.”
In contrast, Gallagher opened his panel’s primetime evening hearing—its first event since its creation in January—with an emotional appeal.
“The CCP is laser-focused on its vision for the future—a world crowded with techno-totalitarian surveillance states where human rights are subordinate to the whims of the Party,” Gallagher declared. “We may call this a ‘strategic competition,’ but this is … an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century.”
The science committee’s four-member panel included science policy experts, among them former President Donald Trump’s onetime science adviser Kelvin Droegemeier, who argued for a 25-year vision to guide U.S. research investments.
Declining to make additional investments would put the United States at a competitive disadvantage, witness Kimberly Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told the panel. And she reinforced that point in speaking to Science after the hearing.
“China is going to continue to innovate,” Budil said. “And we can’t stop them. But we can run faster, and be smarter, in making discoveries that could lead to new industries.”
Democrats on the science committee repeatedly cited Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) as evidence that basic science can contribute to both economic growth and national security. In December 2022, NIF, built to help maintain the continued viability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile, used a high-energy laser pulse to trigger a fusion reaction in a tiny capsule that generated more energy than the laser provided. That groundbreaking result, Budil told lawmakers, brightens the long-term prospects for fusion as a clean, carbon-free, and sustainable source of energy.
Inertial fusion won’t be contributing energy to the nation’s grid by 2032, Budil cautioned in response to a legislator’s question. But a multibillion-dollar investment in the technology, she told Science after the hearing, would accelerate work on overcoming the scientific and engineering challenges to making it a dependable source of power.
In contrast, there were no scientists on the select committee’s roster of witnesses. Gallagher instead chose to hear from a manufacturing lobbyist, two former senior national security advisers to Trump, and a Chinese human rights activist. The testimony was supplemented with videos showing speeches by Chinese leaders and past and present human rights atrocities.
As the only member of Congress to sit on both committees, Representative Haley Stevens (D–MI), used both hearings to make the case for increased investment across all areas of science. At the select committee’s evening hearing, she won support for her argument in an exchange with H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser to Trump and a proponent of severe economic sanctions against the CCP and its allies.
“Would investing more of our GDP [gross domestic product] in research and development pose any threat to national security?” Stevens asked him, taking an implicit jab at legislators who vote for larger defense budgets while demanding cuts in domestic spending. “No, it would not,” McMaster replied.
Speaking the next day with Science, Stevens said she hoped future hearings by the select committee would provide fodder for legislation to beef up U.S. manufacturing that she hopes to move through the science committee later this year. “I’m more optimistic than I was 5 years ago about the bipartisan willingness to invest in our nation’s scientific enterprise,” said Stevens, referring to last year’s enactment of a bill to bolster the U.S. semiconductor industry and promote innovation that she helped craft.
But Republicans on both panels weren’t buying her argument. “The United States should not mimic the Chinese industrial policy and should not copy the Chinese command and control system,” said Representative Andy Barr (R–KY) during the evening hearing, referring to China’s top-down investments in research. “We should not try to counter China by becoming more like China.”
Representative Darrell Issa (R–CA) expressed similar concerns during the science committee’s hearing. “China doesn’t play by the rules” when it comes to following international laws on fair trade and intellectual property, he asserted, seeing those violations as a reason to impose tighter trade and financial sanctions to hinder China’s access to U.S. technology.
“We’re also out of money,” Issa added, a reference to the looming partisan fight in Congress over raising the government’s ability to borrow money to pay its debts, which now total $31 trillion. “We have a massive deficit, and it’s unlikely we’re going to be able to dramatically increase our spending.”
