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Javier E

'The virus is moving in': why California is losing the fight against Covid | US news | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...a-covid-19-coronavirus-surging

california virus pandemic history crisis culture policy

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • By early summer, however, the pressure to open back up rose. Officials discovered the state wasn’t immune to the national fatigue with social distancing and mask-wearing. Amid a patchwork of haphazard rules and guidelines, cases crept up.
  • Today, most of California is back under lockdown amid a dramatic surge in infections. The state has tallied more than 1.3m cases, and broke a record last week with more than 25,000 infections recorded in a single day.
  • LA officials said that one person is now dying of Covid every 20 minutes, and the county’s public health director, Barbara Ferrer, broke down crying at a briefing while talking about the “incalculable loss” of more than 8,000 deaths.
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  • Staff on the frontlines say they are increasingly battling burnout after months of devastation and with a dark winter ahead. “I’ve seen younger people come in through the door, and be admitted right away to the ICU,”
  • It was frustrating that the public no longer seemed to be taking Covid protocols seriously, Santini said. “Every day we go to work, we’re putting our lives and our family’s lives on the line.”
  • “Even lower-risk activities now carry substantial risk because there is more virus out there than ever before. Simply put and bluntly put, we can’t get away with things that we’ve been able to get away with so far.”
  • Some restaurants have invested thousands in outdoor dining infrastructure they hoped would last them through the pandemic, only to see those facilities ordered to close.
  • the organization’s research has shown that 43% of restaurant owners are unsure whether their business will survive the next six months. “People who started out frustrated – today they are feeling just outright desperate.”
  • the latest Covid surge continues to shine a harsh light on inequality. California has seen record levels of unemployment and countless businesses have been shuttered for good, yet some sectors – notably the tech industry – have continued to rake in revenue.
  • post-pandemic, California could see a so-called “K-shaped recovery”, where the incomes of the highest earners continue to rise just as quickly as they plummet for those who are struggling.
  • Latinos in LA county, many of whom are working essential jobs, are also contracting the virus at more than double the rate of white residents. The toll in working-class neighborhoods has been especially devastating for undocumented people, who have been unable to access aid.
  • “We have the confluence of factors where people are facing financial instability, and feel like they have no choice but to work even if they get sick,” she said. “And particularly in California, we have a large population of undocumented people who have been demonized by the federal government and are especially vulnerable.”
lilyrashkind

6 Times the Olympics Were Boycotted - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...olympic-boycotts

olympics history

shared by lilyrashkind on 16 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Some Games, such as the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Berlin, saw countries (including the U.S. and the U.K.) threaten to pull out, before deciding to participate. World Wars I and II forced the cancellation of three Olympic Games—in 1916, 1940 and 1944. And other countries have been banned for a variety of reasons: Germany and Japan in 1948 because of their roles in WWII, South Africa during the era of apartheid and Russia in 2020, due to a doping scandal (although individual athletes were ultimately allowed to compete.)
  • The Details: Australia’s first hosting stint also marked the first Olympic boycott, with numerous countries withdrawing for a variety of political reasons. Less than a month before the opening ceremony, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to stop the Hungarian Revolution against the Communist regime; in protest, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland all refused to participate. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China also withdrew—and would not return until the 1980 Winter Games—because Taiwan, which it considers a breakaway province, was allowed to participate as a separate country. And, finally, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon boycotted the 1956 Olympics due to the Suez Canal Crisis following the British-Israel-French invasion of Egypt to control the waterway.
  • ‘Blood in the Water’: Despite other countries’ boycott against the Soviets, Hungary competed in the Olympics, and its athletes received support from fans, while Soviet athletes faced boos. A violent water polo match between the two teams left one Hungarian player bleeding from the head and led to a fight among spectators and athletes. Hungary, up 4-0 at the start of the brawl, was named the winner and the team eventually won the gold medal. The Soviets, for their part, went on to win the most medals for the first time. Of Note: In a show of peace, the Olympic athletes, for the first time, marched into the closing ceremony mixed together, rather than as separate nations—a tradition that continues today.
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  • The Details: China, North Korea and Indonesia chose to boycott the first Games held in an Asian country after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) declared it would disqualify athletes who competed in the 1963 Jakarta-held Games of the New Emerging Forces, created as an alternative multinational amateur competition. The boycotting countries sent many of their top athletes to the Jakarta games.
  • The Details: When New Zealand’s national rugby team defied an international sports embargo against South Africa and toured the apartheid nation earlier in the year, 28 African nations—comprising most of the continent—declared a boycott of the Olympics, which was allowing New Zealand to participate. Led by Tanzania, the boycott involved more than 400 athletes. In a separate action, Taiwan withdrew from the Games when Canada refused to let its team compete as the Republic of China. Of Note: The boycott led to hotel and ticket refunds totaling $1 million Canadian dollars. It especially affected several track and field events, where nations such as Kenya and Tanzania were frequent medal winners.
  • Afghani athletes, notably, competed in the Games. Some countries did not forbid athletes from competing as individuals under the Olympic flag, but American athletes attempting to compete faced losing their passports. A group of American athletes sued the U.S. Olympic Committee to participate but lost the case. The boycott resulted in just 80 countries competing in the Olympics, the fewest since 1956.
  • In retaliation for the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Games four years earlier, 14 nations, led by the Soviet Union and including East Germany, boycotted the Los Angeles-held Olympics. Joined by most of the Eastern Bloc nations, the Soviets said they feared physical attacks and protests on American soil. "Chauvinistic sentiments and anti-Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in this country,” a government statement read.
  • and Joan Benoit, along with Mary Lou Retton, the first American gymnast to win the gold for all-around, became instant stars. And the Games were considered a huge financial success, with almost double the ticket sales of Montreal and earning the title as the most-seen event in TV history.
  • Angered over not being allowed to co-host the Games with South Korea, North Korea refused to attend the 1988 event in neighboring Seoul. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, accepted the IOC's invitation to compete, along with China and Eastern Bloc nations, leaving just Cuba, Ethiopia and Nicaragua joining North Korea in the boycott. “To have the Olympics in Seoul would be like having them at the Guantanamo naval base occupied by the United States," Cuba President Fidel Castro told NBC News at the time. "I wonder that, if Socialist countries refused to go to (the 1984 Olympics in) Los Angeles for security reasons, if really there is more security in Seoul than in Los Angeles.”
  • candals tarnished the Seoul Games, including reports of residents being forced from their homes and homeless people being detained at facilities in preparation for the Games. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson made global headlines when he was stripped of his world-record-setting 100-meter victory after testing positive for steroids, and controversial boxing calls that went against South Korean athletes caused outrage.
  • North and South Korean leaders met following the events, and agreed to send a combined team to the 2021 Tokyo Summer Games. However, North Korea announced in April 2021 that it would not participate because of the coronavirus pandemic. 
Javier E

Opinion | I've Seen a Future Without Cars, and It's Amazing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ban-cars-manhattan-cities.html

car transportation urbanism urban nyc future

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Rather than stumble back into car dependency, cities can begin to undo their worst mistake: giving up so much of their land to the automobile.
  • There is little evidence that public transit is responsible for the spread of the coronavirus in New York or elsewhere; some cities with heavily used transit systems, including Hong Kong, were able to avoid terrible tolls from the virus.
  • rian paths for people to avoid intense overcrowding — transit might be no less safe than cars, in terms of the risk of the spread of disease. In all other measures of safety, transit is far safer than cars.
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  • Chakrabarti is among a group of urbanists who’ve been calling attention to a less-discussed problem with cars. Automobiles are not just dangerous and bad for the environment, they are also profoundly wasteful of the land around us: Cars take up way too much physical space to transport too few people. It’s geometry.
  • In most American cities, wherever you look, you will see a landscape constructed primarily for the movement and storage of automobiles, not the enjoyment of people: endless wide boulevards and freeways for cars to move swiftly; each road lined with parking spaces for cars at rest; retail establishments ringed with spots for cars; houses built around garages for cars; and a gas station, for cars to feed, on every other corner.
  • In the most car-dependent cities, the amount of space devoted to automobiles reaches truly ridiculous levels. In Los Angeles, for instance, land for parking exceeds the entire land area of Manhattan, enough space to house almost a million more people at Los Angeles’s prevailing density.
  • in the most populated cities, physical space is just about the most precious resource there is. The land value of Manhattan alone is estimated to top $1.7 trillion. Why are we giving so much of it to cars?
  • Without cars, Manhattan’s streets could give priority to more equitable and accessible ways of getting around, including an extensive system of bike “superhighways” and bus rapid transit — a bus system with dedicated lanes in the roadway, creating a service that approaches the capacity, speed and efficiency of the subway, at a fraction of the cost.
  • The amount of space devoted to cars in Manhattan is not just wasteful, but, in a deeper sense, unfair to the millions of New Yorkers who have no need for cars.
  • More than half of the city’s households do not own a car, and of those who do, most do not use them for commuting. Of the 1.6 million commuters who come into Manhattan every weekday (or, who did, before the virus), more than 80 percent make the trip via public transit, mostly trains and buses. Only around 12 percent of daily commuters get to the island by car.
  • New York’s drivers are essentially being given enormous tracts of land for their own pleasure and convenience. To add the overall misery of the situation, though, even the drivers are not especially happy about the whole deal, because despite all the roadway they’ve been given, they’re still stuck in gridlock.
  • cars are not just greedy for physical space, they’re insatiable. There is even a term for the phenomenon: “induced demand,” which holds that the more land you give to cars, the more attractive driving becomes, leading to more traffic, leading to more roads — an unwinnable cycle that ends with every inch of our cities paved under parking lot.
  • Even if you’re a committed daily driver, “it’s in your best interest for walking, biking and public transit to be as attractive as possible for everyone else — because that means you’re going to be able to drive easier.”
  • PAU’s plan bears this out. Banning private cars on Manhattan would reduce traffic by as much as 20 percent on routes that start and end within New York’s other boroughs — that is, in places where cars would still be allowed
  • Under PAU’s plan, road traffic in a car-free Manhattan would fall by about 60 percent. The absence of cars would allow pedestrians, buses and bikes to race across New York at unheard-of speeds. Today, a bus trip from uptown to downtown — for instance, from Harlem to City Hall — takes an hour and 48 minutes. With the sort of rapid bus system PAU imagines, and without cars in the way, the same trek would take 35 minutes.
johnsonma23

O.J. Simpson Prosecutor Marcia Clark: If Trial Were Held Today, It'd Probably Be Hung J... - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...ark-if-trial-were-held-n529161

US simpson trial nbc

shared by johnsonma23 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • O.J. Simpson Prosecutor Marcia Clark: If Trial Were Held Today, It'd Probably Be Hung Jury
  • The Los Angeles prosecutor who tried and failed to convict O.J. Simpson says the infamous murder trial would probably end in a hung jury if it were held today.
  • Because in the wake of all these police shootings and all the racial mistrust that has been exposed, probably what would result, in my opinion, is a hung jury."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Clark has long contended that wariness of the Los Angeles Police Department and anger over the brutal Rodney King beating figured in the acquittal of Simpson after a five-month trial in 1995 that transfixed the world.
  • Clark said prosecutors amassed a "mountain of evidence" pointing to Simpson's guilt in the killings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman.
  • "They didn't care whether he was guilty or innocent," she told Dateline's Josh Mankiewicz. "They were going to use this case for payback."
  • , 'I'm not black, I'm O.J.,'"
  • s not exactly your civil rights firebrand."
  • "But at the end of the day, the evidence didn't wind up mattering because there was a fundamental large issue standing in the way of seeing the evidence," she said. "You had this enormous mistrust of everything LAPD, everything officer related."
  • "I think he's someone who is a danger to society," she said. "He was getting into one scrape after another after he was acquitted."
Megan Flanagan

LA County deputies fire 33 rounds at gunman - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by Megan Flanagan on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Los Angeles County officials are investigating the shooting of a man killed by deputies who fired 33 rounds
  • Nicholas Robertson, 28, walking down a road in Lynwood on Saturday morning carrying a gun in his left hand.
  • Robertson behaving erratically and shouting expletives
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • At least six businesses or residents called 911 to report the gunman. Read More
  • evidence indicates that Robertson did fire his .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun in the area.
  • Some indicate that he was armed. ... And then there were others that indicated not only was he armed, but had actually discharged the firearm several times."
  • man fired six to seven rounds as he was walking through a residential area
  • Those 911 calls depict different behaviors of the suspect,"
  • Robertson turned his body with the gun toward the deputies, who opened fire and killed Robertson.
  • one deputy fired 17 shots, and another fired 16.
  • fatal deputy-involved shooting gets independent investigations from the local district attorney's office and the county coroner
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...ting-nikki-haley-1212661827918

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The planned sanctions were an attempt to punish Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad after a chemical weapons attack earlier this month. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. 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  • ...1 more annotation...
  • North Korea to close down nuclear test site in May
malonema1

James Fallows on the Reinvention of America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...556856

US history politics

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • After a several-year immersion in parts of the country that make the news mainly after a natural disaster or a shooting, or for follow-up stories on how the Donald Trump voters of 2016 now feel about Trump, I have a journalistic impulse similar to the one that dominated my years of living in China. That is the desire to tell people how much more is going on, in places they had barely thought about or even heard of, than they might have imagined.
  • At the time Deb and I were traveling, sociologists like Robert Putnam were documenting rips in the social fabric. We went to places where family stories matched the famous recent study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton, showing rising mortality among middle-aged whites without a college degree for reasons that include chronic disease, addiction, and suicide. In some of the same cities where we interviewed forward-moving students, civic leaders, and entrepreneurs, the photographer Chris Arnade was portraying people the economy and society had entirely left behind. The cities we visited faced ethnic and racial tensions, and were struggling to protect local businesses against chain stores and to keep their most promising young people from moving away. The great majority of the states and counties we spent time in ended up voting for Donald Trump.
  • Serious as the era’s problems are, more people, in more places, told us they felt hopeful about their ability to move circumstances the right way than you would ever guess from national news coverage of most political discourse. Pollsters have reported this disparity for a long time. For instance, a national poll that The Atlantic commissioned with the Aspen Institute at the start of the 2016 primaries found that only 36 percent of Americans thought the country as a whole was headed in the right direction. But in the same poll, two-thirds of Americans said they were satisfied with their own financial situation, and 85 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with their general position in life and their ability to pursue the American dream. Other polls in the past half-dozen years have found that most Americans believe the country to be on the wrong course—but that their own communities are improving.
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  • I make no pretense that our proposed answers to those questions are precise or scientific. We traveled as broadly as we could. We listened; we learned. We were looking for civic success stories, and we found them. But we also ended up in places where well-intentioned efforts had failed. So we steadily adjusted our conclusions. We ended up convinced that the national prospect is more promising than we’d felt before we started—full of possibilities that the bleak trench warfare of national politics inevitably obscures.
  • America is becoming more like itself again. More Americans are trying to make it so, in more places, than most Americans are aware. Even as the country is becoming worse in obvious ways—angrier, more divided, less able to do the basic business of governing itself—it is becoming distinctly better on a range of other indicators that are harder to perceive. The pattern these efforts create also remains hidden. Americans don’t realize how fast the country is moving toward becoming a better version of itself.
  • During the Pennsylvania part of Romney’s tour, which then went on to Ohio, we stayed in a cheap motel in the hard-luck coal-country town of Hazleton, where the median household income, in the low $30,000s, was much less than the national level of more than $50,000 and the unemployment rate, about 15 percent at the time, was much greater. The few visible signs of after-dark life were bodegas on downtown Wyoming Street, serving the city’s growing Latino population. When we got back from dinner at a small Mexican restaurant, we channel surfed to a local-access TV station and saw Lou Barletta, the longtime Republican mayor of Hazleton who had recently made it into Congress as part of the 2010 Tea Party wave, warn that ongoing immigration was a threat to Hazleton’s safety and quality of life. As mayor, Barletta had been a proto-Trump, championing a city ordinance that, among other anti-immigrant provisions, declared English the “official language” of Hazleton and required that official city business be conducted in English only. The measures were eventually tossed by federal courts.
  • Were we mistaking anecdotes and episodes for provable trends? This is the occupational hazard of journalism, and everyone in the business struggles toward the right balance of observation and data. But the logic of reporting is that something additional comes from traveling, asking, listening, seeing. This is particularly true in detecting a sense of changed course. A political movement, a new technological or business possibility—I have learned through the decades that enthusiasm in any of these realms does not guarantee world-changing success, but it’s an important marker. (The visionary California entrepreneurs I wrote about in the 1980s were confident that their Osborne and Kaypro computers would change the world. They were wrong. The visionary California entrepreneurs I met at Apple in those same years were confident that their dreams would come true. They were right.) And enthusiasm is what we have seen.
  • “Across the country, we’re seeing significant growth in local officials’ training for civic engagement, and the appearance of many new online platforms and other tools to connect citizens and their governments,” Pete Peterson, the dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, in California, told me. Peterson ran down a list of cities illustrating the effects of a new emphasis on engagement—starting, to my surprise, with the Los Angeles–area city of Bell. In 2010, Bell was the object of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times showing corruption in the city’s administration top to bottom. (For instance, the city manager of this small, low-income city had engineered pay for himself of well over $1 million a year.) The series was followed by arrests, trials, and prison sentences. “That city has seen nothing less than a civic renaissance, with new leadership and a public much more involved in the future of the city,” Peterson said. “It’s an amazing before-and-after illustration of what happens when people get engaged”—for example, involving citizens in decisions about what had been a notably secretive city-budgeting process.
  • In Wichita, Kansas; in Bend, Oregon; in Duluth, Minnesota; in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; in Fresno, we found people who had already worked in the most expensive and “elite” cities or who had been recruited for opportunities there, and decided instead that the overall life balance was better someplace smaller and less expensive. Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL and now the CEO of the technology-investment firm Revolution, has for several years led “Rise of the Rest” tours across the country to promote new tech businesses and support existing ones in places other than the famous tech centers. “For half a century, there’s been a brain drain, as people who grew up in the ‘rest of America’ left their hometowns for better opportunities elsewhere,” Case told me recently. Case himself grew up in Hawaii but built his companies in the Washington, D.C., area. “We’re starting to see less of that brain drain. We’re seeing more graduates stay in place, in cities like Pittsburgh or Columbus, and a boomerang of people returning to where they’re from—for lifestyle reasons, and because they can see that their communities are rising and opportunities are increasing, and they’d like to be part of what’s going on.”
  • There is of course evidence that this has happened, in the form of the bigotry that has been unleashed since 2017. In the months after Donald Trump took office, we checked back with communities where we’d met immigrants and refugees. Some places had seen a nasty shift, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and police became newly aggressive and local racists felt empowered. A few months before the election, we interviewed Catholic nuns and secular volunteers in Garden City, Kansas, who were bringing surplus food and medical supplies to poor households, many of whose members were immigrants working in the area’s vast beef-packing complex. A few months after the election, a white-extremist hate group in Garden City was arrested while plotting to blow up an apartment building where African immigrants and refugees lived. In Dodge City, we met and wrote about a rising, respected young city-government official named Ernestor de la Rosa. His parents had brought him to the U.S. from Mexico when he was a child, and he had stayed in the country as a “Dreamer,” on a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals waiver, while working toward an advanced degree at Wichita State. Trump carried Dodge City more than two to one. But people we spoke with there after the election said they never intended their preference in national politics to lead to the removal of trusted figures like de la Rosa.
nrashkind

Knicks Owner James Dolan Tests Positive for the Coronavirus | Bleacher Report | Latest ... - 0 views

bleacherreport.com/...tests-positive-for-coronavirus

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The New York Knicks announced Saturday that owner James Dolan has tested positive for COVID-19.
  • Dolan, 64, is now in self-isolation
  • Earlier on Saturday, the Dolan Family Foundation agreed to donate $1 million to Madison Square Garden's event staff who are unable to work because of the spread of the virus.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The United States has the second-most cases with 85,228.
  • At least 10 NBA players have had confirmed COVID-19 cases, per USA Today, including Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell of the Utah Jazz, Detroit Pistons big man Christian Wood, Boston Celtics point guard Marcus Smart, four Brooklyn Nets players (including Kevin Durant) and two unnamed Los Angeles Lakers.
  • In addition, three members of the Philadelphia 76ers organization and one in the Denver Nuggets organization have tested positive.
  • ESPN NBA color commentator Doris Burke has also tested positive.
  • Gobert was the first person in the Association to receive an official diagnosis, which in turn led the NBA to suspend play March 11.
jordanp99

LeBron James' L.A. home vandalized with racial slur - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...102347024

culture

shared by jordanp99 on 31 May 17 - No Cached
  • jordanp99 on 31 May 17
     
    A West Los Angeles home owned by LeBron James was vandalized Wednesday morning at 6:44 a.m., Los Angeles Police Department officer Norma Eisenman confirmed to USA TODAY Sports. James was not present when the vandalism took place, Eisenman said.
mattrenz16

LA Students Could Be Back In Classrooms Soon, If Deal Is Approved : Coronavirus Updates... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-classrooms-to-in-person-learn

shared by mattrenz16 on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Los Angeles students could be back in the classroom for in-person learning as soon as next month under a tentative deal struck between teachers and the country's second-largest school district.
  • The agreement, which still must be ratified by members of the United Teachers Los Angeles union (UTLA), would see most students returning to physical classrooms for the first time since they were sent home a year ago this month, just as coronavirus infections were spreading rapidly.
  • "As we have both stated for some time, the right way to reopen schools must include the highest standard of COVID safety in schools, continued reduction of the virus in the communities we serve and access to vaccinations for school staff," UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz and LA schools Superintendent Austin Beutner said in a joint statement. "This agreement achieves that shared set of goals."
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  • Last month, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that California would begin setting aside 10% of its COVID-19 vaccine doses to inoculate teachers, day care workers and other school employees in order to speed up a return to in-person learning.
brickol

Klobuchar gains momentum in Iowa - but can a centrist hope to win there? | US news | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-iowa-democrats-2020-election

politics US election culture

shared by brickol on 04 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The Minnesota senator is reaching out to Iowa’s smallest towns and rural settlements ahead of the vital February caucus and seeing increasing numbers
  • Hiller, whose state is the vital first one to cast ballots in the party’s nomination race to pick an opponent to Donald Trump, was impressed by the Minnesota senator, a fellow midwesterner who desperately needs a strong showing in Iowa to boost her 2020 presidential campaign.
  • That sort of reaction is music to Klobuchar’s ears as she carried out a gruelling tour through 27 counties in rural Iowa in an attempt to build a groundswell of support through reaching out to the state’s smallest towns and rural settlements. With this strategy, even a couple dozen attendees counts as a success.
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  • Two dozen others had turned out to see the Minnesota senator in tiny Ida Grove that same day, a county that doesn’t even have 1,000 registered Democrats. But most striking to Klobuchar was a crowd of around 50 packing the Sac County Cattle Company on a Sunday night just before Christmas.
  • Klobuchar is blunt about her shared background with Iowa’s voters. She brags about being from the midwest, and how she can win in rural Minnesota counties that Trump took by 20 points.
  • Klobuchar said those gatherings are a sign of what to expect on Iowa’s caucus day on 3 February. Klobuchar sits at about 6% support among probable Iowa caucusgoers, according to the most recent Des Moines Register Iowa poll in October, but a strong debate showing in Los Angeles brought her notice
  • A crowd that size in Sac City, anywhere in rural America, means something
  • The proprietor said Klobuchar’s crowds were at least the size of King’s, or any other Republican who has come calling.
  • Her entire argument is built around electability in midwest swing states such as Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan and Ohio
  • “He’s treating farmers like poker chips in one of his bankrupt casinos,” she said to the delight of her audience at one stop
  • The question is whether her momentum, which is mainly confined to Iowa, is too little too late. In less than six weeks, caucusgoers will trudge through a frigid night to precinct meetings in schoolhouses and courthouses – while she may be chained to Trump’s impeachment trial in the US Senate, which is set to start sometime in January and last for an unknown time.
  • “In an ironic way, her stardom in the Senate will hurt her campaigning in Iowa, where she desperately needs to do well.”
  • Klobuchar says a doubling of office spaces in Iowa and positive responses in Des Moines Register/CNN Iowa polls are signs of hope. Best says her strongest advantage is that overwhelming majorities of probable caucusgoers have favorable opinions of her and list her in their top three selections.
  • She says people there have a thirst for economic prosperity that can be achieved realistically, not with promises like Medicare for All. She never mentions challengers from the progressive wing by name. “We can win them back telling the truth. We can bring those people back.”
  • voters in rural areas like Sac City and Rockwell City are easier to organize than in Democratic metro strongholds such as Des Moines or Iowa City. Those who show up in Rockwell City are reliably Democratic and less issue-focused. Rarely do they see a candidate with Klobuchar’s resume. When they do, they leave with a strong impression.
  • “It’s a lot easier to get viability in Sac county than Polk county,” said Scholten. “She recognizes that people are familiar with her. Sac City isn’t a long way from the Iowa-Minnesota border.”
  • Those who hear Klobuchar’s message like her focus on the midwest.
liamhudgings

Nipsey Hussle Marathon Book Club creates a space for black men - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...psey-hussle-marathon-book-club

US culture

shared by liamhudgings on 06 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • DeRon Cash, his tattooed forearms resting on his knees, curled a paperback revered by the late Nipsey Hussle in his hand.
  • Once a month, Cash and a group of men come together for The Marathon Book Club — one of several chapters across the country that were founded after Hussle was killed outside his South Los Angeles clothing store in March.
  • They include professors, entrepreneurs, corporate executives, investment bankers and at least one former athlete
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  • All those fancy titles and statuses are left at the door, though
  • All of those were steps in a larger plan to revitalize his Crenshaw district in South L.A. — plans that were cut short when Hussle was gunned down outside his store in broad daylight on March 31.
  • And on this warm summer morning, as so often happens, the book club quickly turned into therapy.
  • Here, they can be themselves
  • These books all educated and empowered Hussle — to release albums, start a record label and hire people with felony records to work at his shop, Slauson Tees, which later became The Marathon Clothing Store.
  • For years, black men rarely discussed mental health, even among themselves. But recently there has been a shift that has coincided with the maturation of hip-hop.
  • It was an hour and a half into the meeting before anyone mentioned Hussle’s name. The conversation had turned to sacrifice, and what one must do to move to the next level in their careers, relationships and other areas of their lives
  • He spoke of waiting tables while he taking acting classes and waiting on his big break. Hussle did something similar, Cash insisted, as he pivoted from street hustler to a Grammy-nominated musician.
  • The men examined their mortality. They discussed plans to live each day with purpose.
  • The men then packed up their belongings and returned to the outside world with the teachings of Hussle guiding them.
katherineharron

The painful absurdity of AG William Barr's slavery comment - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

global politics

shared by katherineharron on 17 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • "It is incredible, as chief law enforcement officer in this country, to equate human bondage to expert advice to save lives. Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives."
  • Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives. For hundreds of years, enslaved Africans were beaten, tortured, raped and treated as property.
  • "The institution of slavery was, for a quarter of a millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired,
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  • In this system, African captives "could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner's debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate," Wilkerson writes.
  • That Barr painted a few months of being told -- or really, in many cases, asked -- to stay home during a global pandemic as even remotely in the same category as the practice of enslavement is ridiculous. (To say nothing of the fact that he skipped over, among other things, Jim Crow, Japanese internment during World War II, and the slaughter of Native Americans.)
  • You know, I think the narrative that the police are on some, you know, epidemic of shooting unarmed Black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that that's based on race," Barr said earlier this month
  • According to The Washington Post's police shootings database, Black Americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of their White counterparts, despite the fact that the former make up less than 13% of the country's population.
  • "It was also Barr, serving as then-President George H.W. Bush's attorney general, who helmed the federal response during 1992's Los Angeles riots, which came after four officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King," Vazquez wrote. "That was, in fact, the last time the Insurrection Act was invoked -- the 1807 law allowing for the use of US military on US soil.
nrashkind

Magnitude 5.5 earthquake rocks Southern California, no immediate reports of damage - Re... - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...eports-of-damage-idUSKBN23B066

shared by nrashkind on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • 5.5 magnitude earthquake struck on Wednesday in the California desert about 150 miles (241 km) northeast of Los Angeles, but there were no reports of damage or injuries in the sparsely populated area.
  • The temblor hit in a sparsely populated area near the Mojave Desert community of Searles Valley but was felt across Southern California, as far away as Los Angeles itself.
  • A series of strong of earthquakes and aftershocks struck that area near the small town of Ridgecrest on July 4 and 5 of last year
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Such quakes are not uncommon in seismically active California.
ethanshilling

Bond Fire Erupts Outside Los Angeles, Forcing Thousands to Evacuate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bond-fire-california.html

us fire pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 04 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Exacerbated by wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour and extremely dry conditions, a fast-moving wildfire spread to more than 6,000 acres in Southern California on Thursday, forcing the evacuation of 25,000 residents, officials said.
  • Fire officials attributed the spread of the Bond fire to the winds.The blaze began as a house fire in Silverado, about 50 miles from Los Angeles, and quickly spread to the surrounding area, fire officials said. The cause was under investigation.
  • Chief Fennessy said that more than 500 firefighters were battling the flames and that more than 30 agencies were involved in the effort, which included fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.
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  • At the same news conference, Sheriff Don Barnes of Orange County warned residents that they should have their medications and other necessities ready to go in case they had to evacuate.“When you need to go, it’s go then,” Sheriff Barnes said.
  • “They can’t walk, they cannot drive,” she said of residents. “People can’t get anything. Besides Covid-19, this adds on top of it.”Ms. Sadollahi said she had lost five days of business because of the Silverado fire in October, which had compounded the economic effects of the pandemic.
  • He said he was unfazed by the latest wildfire.“For us, this is routine, every 10 years,” he said. “It’s kind of like, if you live in California, you expect earthquakes and fires. I think Covid is affecting the area more, to be honest.”
tsainten

Police Pin a Rise in Murders on an Unusual Suspect: Covid - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-murders.html

US gunviolence california police pandemic

shared by tsainten on 29 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • In a normal year, Mr. Pryor would have been on the field, not on the streets,
  • Oakland has seen a surge in gun violence, including six killings of juveniles since June and a 40 percent increase in homicides over all. To the south, in Los Angeles, the picture is equally bloody, with the city on pace to have more than 300 homicides for the first time since 2009.
  • Criminologists studying the rise in the murder rate point to the effects the pandemic has had on everything from mental health to policing in a time of social distancing, with fewer officers able to perform the up-close-and-personal community outreach work that in normal times has helped mitigate violence.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • residents, particularly in communities of color, stopped turning to the police out of a lack of trust, leading to more disputes being settled violently.
  • “The increase has had nothing to do with the political affiliation of your mayor,”
  • homicides increased an average of 53 percent across 20 major American cities during the summer.
  • 110,000 people in California bought guns this year because they were worried about the destabilizing effects of the pandemic. The number, based on a survey conducted over the summer, appears to be corroborated by the surge of firearm background checks this year, about 95,000 more than last year. And those are only the guns obtained through legal channels. Los Angeles has seen a 45 percent increase this year in the number of guns stolen from cars, some of which have later turned up in shootings.
  • affected community programs that have been credited with helping young people stay away from crime.
  • California’s relatively strict gun laws limit the carrying of firearms in public and ban assault weapons, among many other restrictions. Those laws are circumvented by bringing in guns from neighboring states with more permissive gun laws.
lucieperloff

How Many Countries Will Follow the U.S. Official Snub of Beijing's Olympics? - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...beijing-olympics-reaction.html

pandemic politics human rights china

shared by lucieperloff on 08 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • New Zealand says it decided months ago that its diplomats wouldn’t be attending.
  • Political leaders of other nations are expected to bow out, whether they announce an explicit reason or not.
  • The White House announcement on Monday that it would send no official delegation prompted anger in Beijing, where Chinese officials on Tuesday once again vowed to retaliate.
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  • Chen Weihua of China Daily, bitingly expressed hope that Mr. Biden would live long enough to see China boycott the Summer Olympics to be held in Los Angeles in 2028.
  • The decision will be especially complicated for European nations, which have sharply criticized China’s abuses of human rights and democracy in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
  • At the same time, many European nations have extensive trade ties with Beijing that they do not want to jeopardize, especially for a measure that is likely only to offend China, not change it.
  • Major sporting events like the Olympics, with their universal audiences, “can be instrumental for spreading positive values and promoting freedom and human rights at global level,”
  • Italy would not join the American boycott, an Italian government official said on Tuesday, while France, Germany and Britain were noncommittal.
  • Only a handful of world leaders attended the Summer Games in Tokyo, which were held after a year’s delay because of the coronavirus pandemic.
  • “When we have concerns about human rights we let the Chinese know,” Mr. Macron’s office said. “We took sanctions related to Xinjiang last March.”
  • Britain has made no decision on a diplomatic boycott either, but there are calls from within the ruling Conservative Party to do so.
  • The British government’s approach to China has been toughening amid growing tension over Chinese policy in its former colony, Hong Kong, a direct embarrassment to London.
  • The International Campaign for Tibet said in a statement that a boycott was “the right choice both morally and strategically.”
  • Although the American decision had been expected and, administration officials said, conveyed to Beijing in advance of Monday’s announcement, the Communist Party government appeared flustered, as well as angered.
  • Officials in Beijing last week tried to pre-empt any prospect of a diplomatic boycott by saying they would not extend invitations to foreign leaders to attend the Winter Games, leaving that task to national Olympic committees around the world instead.
  • China has very stringent quarantine rules, requiring everyone who enters the country to spend two weeks in isolation, followed by a week or two of daily health monitoring at home or a hotel, with many restrictions on travel and social interactions.
  • Mr. Putin, an avid sportsman and an increasingly close ally of Mr. Xi’s, has not yet given final confirmation of his attendance despite China’s public statement last month that he would attend the opening ceremony, to be held on Feb. 4 in Beijing’s National Stadium, popularly known as the Bird’s Nest.
Javier E

The Fog of War - Wikipedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...The_Fog_of_War

fog war wikipedia McNamara lessons

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
  • Lesson #2: Rationality alone will not save us.
  • McNamara emphasizes that it was luck that prevented nuclear war—rational individuals like Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro came close to destroying themselves and each other.
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  • Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
  • McNamara talks about the proportions of cities destroyed in Japan by the US before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, comparing the destroyed Japanese cities to similarly-sized cities in the US: Tokyo, roughly the size of New York City, was 51% destroyed; Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, was 99% destroyed; Nagoya, the size of Los Angeles, was 40% destroyed; Osaka, the size of Chicago, was 35% destroyed; Kobe, the size of Baltimore, was 55% destroyed; etc. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment.
  • Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. McNamara affirms Morris' framing of lesson 7 in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident: "We see what we want to believe."
  • Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. McNamara says that, even though the United States is the strongest nation in the world, it should never use that power unilaterally: "if we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we better reexamine our reasoning."
  • We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.
  • we are not omniscient. If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of the proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii.
  • War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court—that the U.S. has refused to support—which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.
  • If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy—I don't mean "sympathy," but rather "understanding"—to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.
  • We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
  • Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
  • We failed then—and have since—to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
  • We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
  • We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
Javier E

Can the Paris Climate Goals Save Lives? Yes, a Lot of Them, Researchers Say - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lobal-warming-heat-deaths.html

Paris accords climate change effects cities global warming crisis

shared by Javier E on 07 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • The half-degree difference between 1.5 and two degrees may not seem like much, but, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, it could mean saving or losing thousands of lives each year in the United States alone.
  • Dr. Lo and her colleagues used the 1.5 degree Celsius temperature target from the Paris Agreement as their baseline, and under that level of warming estimated the heat deaths that would occur in 15 cities across the United States. They selected those cities — which included Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York — because there was reliable climate and health data available.
  • “The numbers are quite astonishing in terms of how many deaths we could afford by limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees from three degrees,” Dr. Lo said. For example, she said, that would allow New York City to avoid 2,716 heat-related deaths during the most extreme temperature years
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  • What they found is that, in almost every city they considered, the more global temperatures rose, the more people will die
  • The 2003 heat wave in Europe is a good example. That year, an estimated 1,050 people died in London and Paris because of soaring temperatures
  • There are some caveats. For example, as temperatures warm people tend to adapt
  • But in 2010, even though similar temperatures hit Europe, far fewer people in Western Europe died. (An estimated 56,000, however, died in Russia.)
  • “People become aware of the dangers,” Dr. Wehner said. “They changed their behaviors so that they were more likely to survive.”
  • A key form of adaptation is air-conditioning. But in cities like Seattle, where heat mortality is expected to increase, only a third of residents have air-conditioners. And air-conditioners pose their own problems both as contributors to climate change through energy consumption and because they pump warm air outside, further increasing urban temperatures
  • “The people that are at risk in cities are the very young, the very ill, and, generally, the poor,” Dr. Wehner said. “It’s people who don’t have access to air-conditioning.
Javier E

Suburban Disequilibrium - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...suburban-disequilibrium

suburb inequality social history policy economics

shared by Javier E on 08 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • , rich and poor neighborhoods like these house a growing proportion of Americans, up to 31 percent compared with 15 percent in 1970, according to a recent study by Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff. Meanwhile, iconic middle-income suburbs are shrinking in numbers and prospects.
  • another truth about suburban places: their tendency to sustain and reinforce inequality. Bradbury and Azusa have maintained their spots in the top and bottom tiers of the Los Angeles suburbs for decades. The sociologist John Logan described this “stratifying” feature long ago, noting that localities held on to social advantages and disadvantages over time. Patterns are established, and successive waves of pressure — fiscal, political, social — tend to keep things moving in the same direction.
  • Some of this is obvious. High property values support high-achieving schools, which in turn increase property values and personal wealth. Racial redlining holds property values down, limiting investment in schools and preventing families from building equity, disadvantages that pass to the next generation like a negative inheritance. The point is not simply that rich and poor people live in different places through a kind of class sorting in the marketplace. The places themselves help to create wealth and poverty. Because of this power of places to fix inequity over time, current patterns are likely to outlive their residents.
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  • Globalization helps drive these patterns to new extremes. Money flows into suburbs like San Marino and Palos Verdes, where Asian immigrants buy up expensive properties and generously donate their time and money to the local schools. Money flows out of poorer suburbs like South Gate, Bell and Huntington Park, all heavily Latino, where disposable income is tight and many families export remittances to a home country. New poverty builds upon old impoverishment. Infrastructure is stretched as renters crowd into dwellings that were modest to begin with. The toxic footprint of departed industries is left behind for new residents to contend with.
  • Many of Los Angeles’s middling suburbs have also slipped, especially those ravaged by plant closures since the 1980s. The southern section of blue-collar suburbs was hit especially hard. Here, suburbia transformed from comfortable communities housing unionized workers with well-paying jobs in local factories that gave them access to a middle-class lifestyle to fiscally strained communities housing immigrants working in low-paying, nonunion jobs.
  • Outer suburbs have fared little better. As home costs skyrocketed in recent decades, families chased “affordable” housing to the exurbs. They took on outsize mortgages and monster commutes, and they took with them congested roads, smog and sprawl. Compounding these strains, tax revenues lagged behind the cost of schools, roads, parks and libraries — the very infrastructure necessary to sustain middle-class life. This edifice came crashing down in the recession.
  • Policies to redress suburban inequality must focus not only on factors like income but also on tax equity across metro areas and regional planning that fairly distributes resources and responsibilities (like affordable housing). We should limit the mortgage-interest deduction for second homes and for values above the regional median. These steps would reduce distortions that inflate housing prices and concentrate wealth in what are already wealthy places.
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