Breaking up big meat
Four big companies dominate the meat processing market — but the Biden
administration has considered breaking them up for a long time.
Meanwhile, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has been on a multi-state
tour talking about new cash programs from the Biden administration and
strengthening local meat supply chains — but it could take billions of
dollars and years of building up for smaller producers to reach a scale
that would threaten the larger companies. Ximena Bustillo reports.
CovidTests.gov is live — but is it ready?
After more than a month of surging case numbers due to the Omicron
variant, the Biden administration is responding with more testing and
masking. On Wednesday, it launched covidtests.gov, a website that allows
users to request four free at-home covid test and this week
also unveiled a plan to distribute hundreds of millions of free N-95
masks through pharmacies and community sites. Adam Cancryn reports.
Airlines face their next challenge: 5G
5G, more like 5 o-m-g! Amid concerns that AT&T’s and Verizon’s 5G
rollout could cause thousands of flight cancellations and disruptions,
the wireless companies agreed to heed the warnings of the aviation
industry and scale back their rollout. How’d this get to be such a mess
in the first place? Oriana Pawlyk reports.
Voting rights legislation: deterred or dead?
Last week, voting rights legislation hit a brick wall when Senators Joe
Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) announced they would not
support changing Senate rules to get around a potential filibuster.
Today, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer still plans to allow debate on
voting rights — despite its almost certain failure. Playbook’s Eugene
Daniels looks at what’s next for the Biden administration.
Oregon's black market for cannabis
There’s a saying that Southern Oregon has more trees than people, but
recently, the area has been overrun by international cartels and
gun-toting outlaw farmers. What’s happening there represents one of the
paradoxes of the legalized marijuana movement: states with large legal
markets are also dealing with rampant illegal production. Natalie Fertig
reports.
The CDC's messaging problem that won't go away
As we round into the third year of Covid-19 and a surging wave of cases,
Democrats and Republicans alike raised sharp questions and complaints on
the state of the pandemic response in the most recent oversight hearing
in Congress. Alice Miranda Ollstein reports.
What happened in Chicago schools
On Monday night, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Teachers
Union reached a deal to bring students back to the classroom after a
five-day standoff. But even after coming to an agreement, the
relationship between the union and Mayor remains strained. Illinois
Playbook author Shia Kapos explains how it unfolded and what this says
about the future of schools in the Covid-19 era.
What happens when your doctor has Covid?
Hospitals and long-term care facilities are so short-staffed, many are
relying on new CDC guidance to bring asymptomatic doctors and nurses
back to work — even as the U.S. is poised to break a record 142,000
covid-19 hospitalizations. Reporter Rachael Levy on the no-win
situation that hospitals now face.
New year, same problems
The Senate is back in session this week — covid numbers are rising and
Joe Manchin has voiced his opposition to President Biden’s social
spending plan. So where do Senate Democrats go from here? Marianne
LeVine on where things stand in Congress right now.
Can solar power the future of manufacturing?
The best example of the Biden administration’s industrial policy goals
might be at Hanwha Q Cells, a solar panel factory in Georgia which
employs 700 people and manufactures more than 10,000 solar panels a day.
Trade reporter Gavin Bade reports with a dispatch from Hanwha.