A Democrat asked Mike Pompeo to point to things on a blank map in a nod to his awkward geography quiz

"To your left, you'll see a map of the world," the lawmaker told Pompeo.

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Wristwatch overshadows South Korea sect leader's coronavirus apology

When the elderly leader of a South Korean religious sect knelt before the nation on Monday, he had hoped to defuse public anger over his church's role in spreading the coronavirus. The gold-colored watch, visible on his left wrist, was apparently given by disgraced former President Park Geun-hye, who was impeached and jailed in 2017 for corruption and abuse of power. Images of the watch quickly trended on Twitter, while "Lee Man-hee watch" was the most searched phrase on South Korea's biggest search portal Naver.

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An adviser to Iran's supreme leader has died of the coronavirus

A top Iranian official and member of a council advising Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has died after contracting the COVID-19 coronavirus, The Associated Press reports.Mohammad Mirmohammadi of Iran's Expediency Council died Monday in a Tehran hospital at the age of 71, state media reported. This, the AP notes, is the first instance of a top official in Iran dying from the coronavirus. Numerous Iranian government officials have tested positive for the virus, including Iran's vice president for women and family affairs, as well as the country's deputy health minister. Iranian media also previously reported that Hadi Khosroshahi, former ambassador to the Vatican, died at 81 after testing positive for the coronavirus. Iran has so far announced about 1,500 coronavirus cases and 66 deaths, which is the highest death toll outside of China; experts have suggested the number of cases might be higher, the AP notes. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently said the United States has offered to help Iran with its coronavirus response, saying, "Their healthcare infrastructure is not robust and to date, their willingness to share information about what’s really going on inside ... Iran has not been robust and I am very concerned that ... it is Iran that is not sharing information."More stories from theweek.com Apple reportedly agrees to $500 million settlement for slowing old iPhones It's not 1972 and Bernie Sanders isn't George McGovern Coronavirus might be the end of international travel as we know it

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Bloomberg rips Sanders for boycotting AIPAC, calls his bigotry comments 'dead wrong'

The Vermont senator had said the pro-Israel lobbying group provides a platform "for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights."

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Barack Obama told Joe Biden he won’t endorse him yet, report claims

Despite Joe Biden’s commanding victory in Saturday’s South Carolina primary, in which he garnered close to 50 per cent of the vote, an endorsement from the president with whom he served seems not to be forthcoming.Speaking to CNN, a source close to Barack Obama said that in a congratulatory phonecall after Mr Biden’s victory, the president told Mr Biden he would not be endorsing him any time soon, citing worries that he could badly divide the party during a still-messy nominating process.

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Brief elation, then crushing disappointment for migrants who sent children across U.S. border

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After rising from relative obscurity, Pete Buttigieg ends his White House bid as crowd chants '2024'

He said he would no longer seek the nomination but would "do everything in my power to ensure that we have a new Democratic president come January.”

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U.S. Supreme Court blocks another cross-border shooting claim

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Vladimir Putin Bets His Political Legacy on a Tax Whiz

(Bloomberg) -- Vladimir Putin’s political legacy may hinge on the technocratic skills of a little-known tax whiz who revolutionized Russian revenue collection and now aims to bring the same efficiency to the Kremlin’s ambitious spending plans.With parliamentary elections a year away and Putin preparing the public for constitutional changes the would allow him to retain some power after his term ends, Russia’s president surprised the country by replacing long-serving Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in January with Federal Tax Service chief Mikhail Mishustin, a career bureaucrat who’s never held a political post.Over the past several years, as Medvedev failed to implement the big-ticket infrastructure projects Putin says are needed to revive a moribund economy, Mishustin helped return the budget to surplus by doubling revenue from value-added taxes to about a fifth of all state income, behind only the extraction and profit taxes.In a rush to get results in his new job, Mishustin, 53, is wasting no time reshaping the bureaucracy to his liking.“He’s a good practitioner who understands what needs to be done, knows how to do it, and does it,” Putin, 67, said on Feb. 20.Breaking with tradition, Mishustin convenes his first weekday meeting with subordinates at 9 a.m. sharp - practically the crack of dawn by Moscow standards – and then meets with his own staff on Saturdays and Sundays, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.A look at Mishustin’s decade-long tenure as the country’s top taxman may offer some indications about how he intends to govern. His streamlining of the tax regime won praise from international bodies like the World Bank, which cited those improvements as it gradually raised Russia’s ranking in its annual Ease of Doing Business survey to No. 28 last year from 120th in 2012.His signature achievement was overseeing the nationwide installation of more than 3.5 million internet-connected cash registers at retail outlets and restaurants -- all of which feed into two giant server farms, a main one near Moscow and an identical backup near Nizhny Novgorod. The system enables anyone with clearance and a laptop to sift through millions of transactions in real time.“We even have import-export data, so we can surf through the entire economy to track the value-added chain from origination to final sale,” Mishustin’s successor and longtime deputy, Danill Egorov, said in an interview at the service’s headquarters in downtown Moscow.Sitting at a table in front of a wall-sized monitor, Egorov was able to pull up a list of all the most recent transactions at a luxury department store nearby with just a few clicks of a mouse.“Look, someone just bought a pair of jeans for 67,000 rubles ($1,000),” he said. “That’s a crazy price to pay for jeans!” Like all receipts in Russia, the one for designer denim noted that the price included a 20% surcharge for VAT, resulting in the ruble equivalent of a $200 windfall for the government.Egorov, 44, then pulled up a map of Russia on his giant screen, clicked at random on the southern region of Krasnodar and drilled into one of the thousands of local companies that popped up. From there, he could find all the dates and amounts of VAT payments made by that company, as well as all of its suppliers and even the contractors of those suppliers.Another innovation Mishustin introduced is the mandatory printing of a unique QR (quick response) code on every receipt. This allows consumers to log into the Tax Service’s portal, upload a photo of their code and verify that the store or restaurant they just paid money to is operating legally. It also helps authorities root out black-market activity.“Mishustin created a nationwide information service, merging all available data together to enable analysis and management,” Egorov said. “His data-centric platform laid the foundation and we’ve been working step-by-step to build different solutions around it.”The system’s algorithms are now able to identify discrepancies and instances of potential cheating in each step of the manufacturing process. Once spotted, suspect transactions generate automatic alerts that are forwarded to both the companies involved and the local inspectors who oversee them.The trove of information is so valuable that the Tax Service decided to open its interface to third parties, creating an incentive for both companies and consumers to help make sure retail outlets run each purchase through official registers.Some 150 companies are already working to capitalize on the information. These include Edadeal, a marketing company that partners with product makers like Coca-Cola to offer cash-back rewards through a special app that scans QR codes and wires money directly to a consumer’s bank account.With Mishustin now busy running the whole government, it’s up to his protege to finish the work they started in trying to conquer the final frontier in the hunt for new tax revenue: the self-employed.An estimated 25 million Russians, a third of the country’s workforce, has some form of income that isn’t taxed -- from taxi drivers and handymen to landlords and tutors. Always mindful of Putin’s diktat that the state should serve the people and not the other way around, Egorov said he’s approaching these people gingerly.The Tax Service started a pilot program last year to help people legalize their “gray” incomes by paying a flat 4% tax through a special entrepreneur app -- but not before gauging public reaction.At the service’s request, Russia’s biggest online platforms asked their self-employed users how much they’d be willing to pay, and, to Egorov’s surprise, 60% said from 2% to 5% would be fair.“I though everyone would say zero,” Egorov said. “I could easily find these people and urge them to pay, but such a Soviet-style approach would be too harsh and unproductive,” he said. “To paraphrase Adam Smith, a tax should be levied in the manner that’s most convenient for the contributor to pay.”\--With assistance from Anya Andrianova.To contact the reporters on this story: Evgenia Pismennaya in Moscow at epismennaya@bloomberg.net;Ilya Khrennikov in Moscow at ikhrennikov@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Paul Sillitoe at psillitoe@bloomberg.net, Brad CookFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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Mike Bloomberg made crass sexual remarks about women in the workplace as recently as 2014, according to a former executive

After he returned to Bloomberg LP from his stint as mayor, Michael Bloomberg regularly made crass sexual jokes and demeaning comments about women, a former executive says

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California's rules for independent party voters could suppress the Bernie vote

The state’s arcane and complex voting system could steal hundreds of thousands of votes from Bernie SandersIn February, California mailed 3.7m primary ballots that, to the astonishment of many who received them, excluded the presidential candidates. These ballots do have candidates for all other primary races, including for Congress, but not the race for president.Within this mountain of primary ballots, artifacts of California’s arcane and complex voting system, lies the potential to cripple the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, the favored candidate among independent party voters.Particularly at risk of losing their vote are 18- to 24-year-olds and Latinx voters, groups that strongly favor “Tio Bernie”. A quarter of independent voters, more than 1 million people, are Latinx, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.Even if Sanders, as expected, wins the plurality of California’s votes, he could well be shorted out of hundreds of thousands of votes and scores of delegates. The other candidate at risk in California’s odd, troubled balloting: Mike Bloomberg.How did this happen? While Californians, including independent voters, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats in general elections, 5.3 million Golden state voters register “NPP”,: no party preference.These 5 million independents legally have the right to vote in the Democratic primary, but the Democratic party has created an inscrutable obstacle course for them to do so, one that amounts to another type of voter suppression.dividerThe problem begins with a postcard.Last autumn, all 5 million NPP voters were mailed a postcard allowing them to request a ballot with the Democratic party presidential choices. However, as many states have learned, postcards with voter information largely look like junk mail and get thrown out.If the independents don’t respond to the postcards, they get a ballot without presidential choices. But they have one more chance to vote for a candidate in the primaries: at the ballot box.At the polling station, though, things remain confusing. According to rules set by the national Democratic party, the independent voters have to bring in their NPP ballot to the polling station and request to exchange it for a “crossover Democratic” ballot that lists the candidates.However, if the voter fails to ask for the “crossover” ballot by its specific name, the poll worker is barred from suggesting it and they won’t receive it.Jen Abreu, a poll worker, told me about the disaster this created in 2016: “If this NPP voter did not specifically ask for a Democratic crossover ballot, they were given an official NPP ballot, which did not list presidential candidates.”There’s another, new way NPP voters may obtain a presidential ballot: re-register from NPP to Democrat right at the polling station on election day and thereby get a presidential ballot.However, this same day registration option is little known, not advertised by the state – and I found not a single sign at the four voting centers I visited that mentioned the new option.dividerWhat’s the impact of this labyrinthine ballot dance? A lot, according to the statistician Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc, a private firm employed by both the Republican and Democratic parties.Mitchell recently completed a poll of 700 independent voters and found that while 61% wanted to vote in the Democratic primary, nearly half (45%) were clueless about how to get a Democratic ballot. Another third of NPP voters believed that they could not exchange their no-candidate ballots – though the law says they may.This year, hundreds of thousands of these voters have already mailed back the NPP ballot without presidential candidates because, according to Mitchell’s polling, they assumed they had no ability to exchange it.This past week, Mitchell’s pollsters also asked 300 NPP voters whom they’d vote for if they had obtained the correct ballot. About 26% preferred Sanders, which translates to 553,000 potential lost votes, by Mitchell’s estimates. Mike Bloomberg, meanwhile, could come up 383,000 votes short.dividerThe Democratic National Committee chiefs, who created and uphold the rules, show little sympathy for the millions of non-Democrats who want to exercise their right to vote in their primary but refuse to register as Democrats.And that could be because they will continue to back only establishment candidates. Notably, Joe Biden is endorsed by the California official who directs this tragi-comic voting process, the secretary of state, Alex Padilla.By contrast, in Colorado, another vote-by-mail state, the secretary of state simply ignores the DNC, sending every independent voter both a Republican and a Democratic party primary ballot – providing an easy way to vote as they choose.Will California’s voters choose the Democratic candidate ... or will the DNC obstacle course bend the outcome? * Greg Palast has investigated vote suppression for 20 years for the Guardian, Rolling Stone and the BBC’s Newsnight

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Pentagon looks to China in wake of Taliban peace deal

The Trump administration’s peace deal with the Taliban opens the door for an initial American troop withdrawal that Defense Secretary Mark Esper sees as a step toward the broader goal of preparing for potential future war with China.

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Chuck Todd Grills Pence, Says It Feels Like Team Trump’s ‘Gaslighting’ on Dems’ Coronavirus Rhetoric

Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd pressed Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday to “name some names” after the veep groused that there was “irresponsible rhetoric” from Democrats on the coronavirus, with Todd further telling Pence that it feels like Team Trump is “gaslighting” the public.Pence, who was recently tapped by President Donald Trump to lead the administration’s response to the coronavirus crisis, made the rounds on the Sunday news shows to promote the administration’s efforts. After reassuring viewers during his Meet the Press appearance that the risk of contagion “remains low” for Americans, Pence was then questioned on complaints by the president and his allies that Democrats are rooting for the virus.Noting that Pence has gone out of his way to call on everyone to not politicize the outbreak, Todd went on to play a series of clips from conservatives claiming Democrats are weaponizing the virus to seek political gain. The montage also included the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. insisting that Dems want “millions of people” killed in order to stop Trump’s “streak of winning.”Obama’s Ebola Point Man: Trump’s Got a Coronavirus Credibility Problem“None of this seems to match the facts,” Todd said. “What facts are there that Democrats are doing this? … Seems like people are asking questions, and they're concerned about the virus. This, this implies some sort of political motivation, which is kind of gross.”Pence, meanwhile, claimed that there was a “lot of irresponsible rhetoric” on the left, prompting Todd to demand that the vice president “name some names.”“Because this is just—it just feels like gaslighting,” the NBC News anchor continued. “Please name some names. I’m—we're all big—we're all big people here. Name some names.”Eventually, Pence cited a column by New York Times opinion writer Gail Collins in which she said the disease should be renamed “Trumpvirus,” calling Collins a “prominent liberal journalist” who was looking to blame the president.“Does that apply, does that apply to all people,” Todd wondered aloud, adding: “This doesn't help. This does not help us, no?”“This is decisive action to protect the American people,” Pence responded. “And when you see voices on our side pushing back on outrageous and irresponsible rhetoric on the other side, I think that's important, and I think it's justified.”Todd wanted to know how this keeps the country united and focused on fighting the virus, specifically pointing to Trump Jr.’s remarks and asking Pence how those are helpful.After Pence brushed off the presidential scion’s over-the-top comments while focusing again on Collins’ column, Todd questioned whether Pence believed that the entire Democratic Party was doing this.“Do you think there've been irresponsible voices on your side?” Todd further asked. “Do you think Rush Limbaugh saying weaponization of this? What evidence is there?”“Well, look. I have great respect for Rush Limbaugh, and he's a strong conservative commentator,” Pence replied.“He also told people that this wasn't anything to worry about,” Todd shot back. “Was he wrong about that?”Pence immediately deflected, fuming that Democrats have become “reflexively critical” of Trump while claiming that all Trump wants when it comes to the response to the disease is for Americans to know “we’re all in this together.”“So attacking Democrats is a way to do that?” Todd declared.Pence remained undeterred, however, and insisted that there was no issue with the rhetoric coming from the right.“I never begrudge people responding to unwarranted, unjustified attacks,” he concluded. “But I promise you, we're going to continue to focus on the mission the president's given this taskforce and given this government.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Biden addresses supporters following South Carolina victory

Joe Biden addressed his supporters on Saturday, following his campaign victory in South Carolina.

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Goodbye, Liz

In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to describe the political scene:> A few years ago, there was a revolution against the intelligentsia. People said, “You know, those people, particularly on the coasts, are trying to tell us what to do.” They wanted a change. That explains Donald Trump. Now, people seem to have changed. This cycle, people want stability.Have they changed so much? Bloomberg thinks the tides are turning in his direction. I’m not so sure on either count. If people wanted the intelligentsia, if they wanted someone on the coasts telling them what to do, Elizabeth Warren would be on her way to the Democratic nomination. Instead, she is soon to be packing up her campaign. Her job will have been to knife Michael Bloomberg before he could launch a sneak attack on Sanders on Super Tuesday.Warren was clearly the favorite candidate of academics and journalists -- the intelligentsia. Why? Because she was the quintessential “front row” candidate, to borrow a term from author and photographer Chris Arnade. The image of her campaign will be her on a debate stage, hand raised, ready with an answer -- but losing support roughly every minute she speaks.After her dismal showing in South Carolina, there is no chance of Warren becoming the electoral alternative to Bernie Sanders. The first three states tried Pete Buttigieg in that role. South Carolina resoundingly chose Joe Biden. Her campaign fell between two stools: the young, somewhat nervous Left, and an older, aspirational center.Her campaign persona had a funny way of playing to each. To the Left, she offered her ambition: her plans to end private health insurance, institute a wealth tax, make day care universal and free. Her promise was to give them security. To the center, she gave her ability to do homework. Every issue had an elaborate plan. Every plan was drawn up in dollars and cents. Sometimes the figures weren’t quite right. To them, she offered her competence and attention to detail.Well, sort of. Her Medicare for All plan would send the federal budget into a new stratosphere, and she didn’t even include the cost of her plan to cover illegal aliens as well. Not to mention that her proposal includes tax increases that are unconstitutional and politically infeasible.No matter, her numerous plans weren’t meant to be real. Congress doesn’t make a habit of passing a presidential candidate’s PDFs into law. The plans were meant to communicate that she was serious, that she puts in the overtime and sweats the details, just like all the other high-achieving non-billionaires have to do. Her sell to the Democratic Party was that she could pursue left-wing ideals in a responsible way. That is, she was proposing an impossible trade off: the pretense of radical action to thoroughly restructure existing power structures, while making sure that almost none of the affluent voters who support her would get hurt.But the Left rejected her as a phony. She wouldn’t call herself a socialist, like Bernie Sanders. Also, if you looked carefully, the plans weren’t socialist in a traditional sense. They weren’t intended to destroy the social stratification of American life, but to reinforce it. In the debate preceding the South Carolina primary, Warren said that cancelling student debt was one of the ways she would help black and Latino Americans achieve equality with their white peers. But of course, this would be the equivalent of passing reparations for the doctors, lawyers, academics, and other professionals who hold the bulk of the loan debt and who would benefit the most from seeing it disappear. Working-class kids, disproportionately black and Latin, who saved their pennies, paid their freight as they went along, and chose an affordable night school would come out the biggest sucker of all.She was also a phony in deeper ways. Elizabeth Warren vowed to stop taking the support of super PACs, which she opposed as part of her anti-corruption agenda. She had already tapped out her donor network in super Pacs before she stopped taking their money. Or so she thought. More recently, she reversed her position on super PACs once again and raised millions of the supposedly corrupt soft money in the days leading to Super Tuesday.And on top of it all is the evidence suggesting that she deliberately lied about her own ethnic identity, claiming to be a Native American, so that Harvard Law School, which was desperate for nonwhite law professors, could hire her and quell a growing protest movement on the campus.Elizabeth Warren was not a Native American, she was not a radical egalitarian, her homework answers were elaborate but did not add up. Neither as left-wing as she proposed to be, nor as responsible and diligent. She won’t be missed.

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As India counts dead, brutality of Hindu-Muslim riot emerges

The wounded came in waves. As the Mustafabad neighborhood of India's capital was ravaged by communal riots for three days this week, the Al-Hind Hospital turned from a community clinic into a trauma ward. Doctors like M.A. Anwar were for the first time dealing with injuries such as gunshot wounds, crushed skulls and torn genitals.

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There are now 4 coronavirus cases of unknown origin in the U.S.

There are now four presumptive cases of the coronavirus with no known origin in the United States — one in Oregon, one in Washington state, and two in Northern California — and the Centers for Disease Control said in a state Friday that "unprecedented efforts have been taken to contain the spread."The patients tested positive locally, though they are still awaiting confirmation from the CDC. Most of the 67 confirmed cases in the United States so far have been traced to travel to Asia (the disease originated in Wuhan, China), but the four cases mentioned have occurred without any related travel history. Instead they're being labeled as "community spread" cases, though the extent is unclear.The CDC is now working to increase the number of labs who can test for the virus after it expanded its testing guidelines to include people showing symptoms despite not having an identified source of exposure. Additional testing kits have already arrived in California, but some were flawed, delaying labs' ability to administer the test. "This has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked," said Dr. Messonnier, the director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory diseases. Read more at CNN and NBC News.More stories from theweek.com 5 scathingly funny cartoons about Trump's coronavirus response If democratic socialism is so bad, why is Norway so great? Biden doesn't think 'it's time' for an Obama endorsement

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The World Health Organization joined TikTok to post 'reliable' advice about the coronavirus amid a stream of memes and misinformation

The WHO first posted a video to TikTok about COVID-19 prevention on Friday. On Saturday, it shared information about controversial face masks.

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Coronavirus Fever: An Infected Priest, a Murder Charge, and a Shortage of Tests

ROME—It is, by now, impossible to keep up with the fast-changing coronavirus statistics: the number of confirmed cases in new countries seems to roll like ticker tape. The latest confirmations include an American student studying in Italy who reportedly just tested positive for the coronavirus while on a weekend trip to the Czech Republic, one of the first three cases there. Add to that a dozen new cases in the U.K. and an increase by nearly half in Iran to 978 reported cases.Minute by minute, new countries announce deaths, too—the first in both Australia and Thailand followed the first in the U.S. state of Washington Saturday night.But as the strange new world of life in the time of coronavirus takes hold, a few stories still manage to capture attention. On Sunday, U.S. vice president Mike Pence said on CNN that more than 10,000 test kits are “in the mail” to regional health officials trying to stem the spread, after confirming that only around 500 people in the whole of the United States have been tested. That is a shocking number when you consider that nearly 100,000 have been tested in South Korea and more than 21,000 have been tested in Italy, considered two of the most significant outbreaks in the world. In Hungary, the government is using the fear of the spread to close borders and transit zones to migrants on the move, though they are not the first to politicize the virus. President Donald Trump in the U.S. and far-right leader Matteo Salvini in Italy have done the same. In Rome on Sunday, men in white hazmat suits swooped in to close the famous Luigi dei Francesi church next to Piazza Navona which houses three original Caravaggio paintings. A French priest who had been in Rome to celebrate Ash Wednesday mass had just tested positive in France, where the number of confirmed cases is growing. Italy has seen the number of cases climb to nearly 1,700 and the number of deaths rise to 34, but—until now—it had not been a problem in Rome.The spread in France caused the Louvre in Paris on Sunday to close its doors early amid growing concern by workers that they might be at risk. It is unknown how long one of the world’s most famous museums will be closed. In South Korea, which has seen an explosion in the number of cases—now at 3,730—and 21 deaths tied to the Shincheonji religious sect, the founder and 11 others have just been charged with murder, causing harm and violating the Infectious Disease and Control Act. To date, more than 85,403 cases have been confirmed in over 60 countries, according to the World Health Organization. More than 2,900 people have died worldwide. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Mike Bloomberg addresses US in TV ad on coronavirus and Trump response

Purchase of prime time slots for pseudo-presidential address draws taunting tweets from man in the real Oval Office * Pence defends Trump Jr claim Democrats want ‘millions’ to dieMike Bloomberg has bought three minutes of primetime TV on Sunday night, in order to address the US about the coronavirus outbreak and Donald Trump’s response.News of the billionaire former New York mayor’s latest campaign advertising outlay, reckoned to be between $1.25m and $3m, was followed by a pair of tweets from the White House.“Mini Mike Bloomberg’s consultants and so-called ‘advisors’ (how did that advice work out? Don’t ask!), are on the ‘gravy train’,” Trump wrote, “all making a fortune for themselves pushing Mini hard, when they knew he never had what it takes.“Don’t pay them anymore Mike, they led you down a very dark and lonely path! Your reputation will never be the same!”Reportedly impressed, if not cowed, by Bloomberg’s personal fortune of around $60bn, Trump was initially said to have urged aides to take seriously the formerly Republican mayor’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.But despite massive spending Bloomberg has struggled in two Democratic debates and failed to oust Joe Biden as the moderate frontrunner. The key test of his ambitions comes on Tuesday, when 14 states and one territory, American Samoa, will stage primaries.In the ad which will air on CBS and NBC around 8.30pm ET on Sunday – and which is entitled “Leadership in Crisis” – Bloomberg appears in suit and tie and American flag pin, in front of a background which thanks to more flags and a sunlit window looks not unlike the Oval Office.“At times like this it is the job of the president to reassure the public that he or she is taking all the necessary steps to protect the health and wellbeing of every citizen,” Bloomberg says.“The public wants to know their leader is trained, informed and respected. When a problem arises, they want someone in charge who can marshal facts and expertise to confront the problem.”Bloomberg does not mention Trump and instead touts his experience in public health management while mayor of New York City between 2001 and 2013, which he says included dealing with “a hurricane, a blackout, attempted terror attacks, the West Nile virus and swine flu”.In response, the Trump campaign said the president was “effectively managing the coronavirus situation and has placed the United States ahead of the curve in its comprehensive response”.A spokesman added: “Mike Bloomberg is shamelessly politicising the issue and only further exposing himself as an unserious candidate. He’s a joke.”Trump, who complained at a rally on Friday night that Democrats were perpetrating a “hoax” in seeking to use the outbreak against him, has been accused of politicising the virus himself.On Sunday his vice-president Mike Pence, the leader of much-criticised White House efforts to contain the outbreak, parried questions about remarks by Trump and key supporters.The first US death from coronavirus was reported in Washington state on Saturday. According to the World Health Organization, there have been 83,652 cases and nearly 2,800 deaths worldwide. Most are in China but international travel, trade, business and sporting events have been affected. This week saw steep falls on most financial markets.At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland on Saturday, meanwhile, Trump mocked Bloomberg physically.“We’ve got Mini Mike [Bloomberg] but I think he’s out of it,” said Trump, 73 and 6ft 3in, about his 78-year-old, 5ft 4in challenger.“That was probably the worst debate performance in the history of presidential debates. It just shows you can’t buy an election. I mean, there’s a point at which people say, ‘You gotta bring the goods a little bit, too.’”Trump then pretended to be Bloomberg, crouching behind the lectern to audience laughter and chants of: “Four more years!”According to the New York Times, on NBC Bloomberg’s ad will run “during Little Big Shots, a variety show featuring child performers hosted by the [actor] Melissa McCarthy”.

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