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TODAY'S HEADLINES:

Bernie Sanders is ending his campaign for president. Joe Biden says has work to do to earn the support of Sanders voters.

Meanwhile, federal officials are seizing shipments of medical supplies bound for state agencies and local hospitals. If anybody knows why, they aren’t saying.

And lastly, the coronavirus pandemic has helped bring an end to one of the world’s great humanitarian disasters. Saudi Arabia said it is calling off its war in Yemen.

THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:

The presidential primaries are effectively over. Bernie Sanders announced the end of his campaign yesterday. In a short recorded speech thanking supporters, the insurgent democratic socialist Senator from Vermont conceded the Democratic Party nomination to the establishment choice, former Vice President Joe Biden. Sanders said he saw no path to victory. Yet he will remain on the ballot in the twenty-seven states that have yet to hold primaries, in order to amass as many delegates as possible for the Democratic National Convention. The hope is to use that leverage to advance his campaign’s agenda of Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, debt cancelation, higher wages, and other policies overwhelmingly favored by younger Americans on the party platform.

Sanders called Biden a very decent man who can beat Donald Trump with a united party behind him. Biden, on Twitter, thanked and complimented Sanders as QUOTE one of the most powerful voices for change in our country ENDQUOTE. Not every Democrat who opposed Sanders was so gracious. BuzzFeed reported that a group of former Hillary Clinton staff planned a Zoom toast titled Bye-Bye Bernard to celebrate his announcement. Clinton herself had no comment. But in a cruel twist of the knife, major health insurance company stocks surged between five and ten percent following the news.

In his concession speech, Sanders said his movement has transformed American consciousness and won the ideological struggle. Sanders said, QUOTE If we don’t believe that we are entitled to health care as a human right, we will never achieve universal health

care. If we don’t believe that we are entitled to decent wages and working conditions, millions of us will continue to live in poverty... The fight for justice is what our campaign has been about. The fight for justice is what our movement remains about ENDQUOTE.

Godspeed.

STORY TWO

The official death toll across Europe surpassed sixty thousand people yesterday. The continent accounts for seventy percent of the officially recorded deaths worldwide, with Italy and Spain faring worst. Things are not going well in the USA, either. And especially not in New York and New Jersey, where nearly eight thousand people have been killed by COVID- 19 as of yesterday. That’s more deaths in two states than in the entire rest of the country.

Why? Thomas Frieden, a former head of the Centers for Disease Control as well as the New York City health department, told the New York Times that if the state and city had acted faster -- by a week or two -- it could have cut the death toll by up to eighty percent. A good share of blame falls to Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill DeBlasio for failing to follow the lead of West Coast cities and states that were also hit early by the virus, and quickly closed schools and businesses. As New York officials dragged their feet, California and Washington State were already telling people to stay home and keep far apart from one another when in public. And now we’re digging graves in parks.

Obstruction and mismanagement from the White House certainly made things worse. ABC News revealed yesterday that a military intelligence report warned Trump’s National Security Council as early as last November about the coronavirus threat. And outright interference in state and local public health efforts may be even worse than the stories we’ve already heard about federally organized bidding wars between states and auctions for medical supplies. The Los Angeles Times reported that federal agents have been seizing large and small shipments of medical supplies destined for hospitals and public health authorities around the country, sometimes without a word of explanation. Hospital officials said it wasn’t clear whether the seized supplies were being stockpiled or distributed, or whether they’d receieve any portion of what they ordered should they need the supplies to deal with COVID-19 patients. Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency refused to provide any answers. Maybe they should have asked Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the guy who has it all figured out.

STORY THREE

Here’s another story you can file under Silver Linings. After five bloody and terrible years, Saudi Arabia called a halt to its war in Yemen. Backed by the United States with military training, equipment and protection, the Saudi bombing campaign and blockade has led to the starvation of more than seventeen million people. Some thirteen thousand civilians have been killed. And millions have been made refugees.

Saudi Arabia -- a country with near-unlimited cash thanks to its oil reserves – risked little in its war. Even before yesterday’s announcement, the Saudi military was beginning to seem outmatched by untrained militia from one of the world’s poorest countries. Armed groups in Yemen received some support from Iran, while Saudi had the unflinching support of major Western powers.

Explaining their decision to call a unilateral cease-fire, Saudi officials said they hoped to advance peace talks through the United Nations. They also said they feared the conflict could spread coronavirus in Yemen, killing those who’ve survived famine and bombardment. Zero cases have been reported in Yemen, but there is virtually no testing. The Saudi elite has been hit hard by the pandemic, however, with at least one-hundred and fifty members of the royal family reported to be suffering from COVID-19. Too sick to bomb villagers? We’ll take it.

AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:

A former federal employee with a major role in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, Linda Tripp, died yesterday at age seventy. Tripp secretly taped conversations with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky to supply evidence to Republican prosecutor Ken Starr. Lewinsky Tweeted her condolences to Tripp’s family.

Five US Senators led by Cory Booker of New Jersey wrote to the billionaire Jeff Bezos to question Amazon’s firing of a worker in the company’s Staten Island warehouse, Christian Smalls. Amazon workers are on the front-lines of the coronavirus pandemic, and Smalls helped organize a protest over conditions. The Senators’ letter called the right to organize QUOTE a bedrock of our economy, responsible for many of the greatest advances achieved by workers over generations ENDQUOTE.

Zoom, the group video-chat program many schools and companies are using during the pandemic, has had a lot of security problems lately. So many that large companies like Google and even countries like Taiwan and Germany are forbidding employees from using it. Yesterday Zoom announced a new hire to deal with these problems: the former security chief of Facebook. You know, because human beings find Mark Zuckerberg so trustworthy.

Many families are celebrating Passover via videoconference this year on account of an honest-to-God plague. May this one also end in freedom.

That’s all for the AM Quickie. Join us this afternoon on the Majority Report.

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EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn