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US Coronavirus: Get fully vaccinated before resuming normal activities, health experts ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html covid
shared by katherineharron on 02 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • With fears growing that the US may be facing a fourth surge of Covid-19 cases, health experts are pleading with Americans to keep taking precautions
  • "Please wait until you're fully vaccinated before you're traveling, before you're engaging in high-risk activities,"
  • when you become vaccinated, the activities that were once higher risk are now going to be lower risk
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  • Wen said she worries the US is on the "precipice" of a fourth surge
  • it is important the US continue taking precautions while vaccinating Americans.
  • "We need to hold out just a bit longer and give vaccines a chance to really get the upper hand in this," Fauci said. "I'll guarantee as we get into the late spring and the early summer, you're going to see a return to gradual degree of normality that everyone is hoping for, but we don't want to do it prematurely."
  • Last week, the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) forecast that 600,000 people would die by the start of July, and this week that number is up to 609,000.
  • More than 30.5 million people in the US have been infected with coronavirus and 553,120 people have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
  • For those who aren't fully vaccinated, the CDC advised they stick to their own household for egg hunts or enjoy these traditions outdoors while six feet apart, according to a series of tweets.
  • The CDC says it's still learning how vaccines protect against the coronavirus and advises that fully vaccinated people going out in public still wear masks and take precautions
  • Nearly 154 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been administered across the country, according to data from the CDC. Thirty percent of the US population -- about 99.6 million people -- has received at least one dose of vaccine, and nearly 17% -- about 56 million people -- have been fully vaccinated.
  • "Most likely the protection that the vaccine will provide will be years even. But we just don't know that."
  • "I do think there's a possibility that we may need to get a booster shot. Maybe booster shots that target new, emerging variants,"
  • Thursday was the first day all Connecticut residents 16-years-old and older were eligible to be vaccinated, Gov. Ned Lamont said during a press conference.
  • Residents made more than 100,000 vaccine appointments, Lamont said, and the state will likely have the supply to outstrip demand by late April.
  • "The first federal mobile vaccination units in the nation, arrived at the Maryland Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Reisterstown," the governor said Thursday. "In the coming days, these 32-foot trailers will be fanning out across the state."
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The Afghanistan War Is Ending. A Pennsylvania Town Exhales. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nsylvania-afghanistan-war.html politics US Culture biden
shared by cartergramiak on 19 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • But straight out of high school, Aidan fulfilled his dream in this patriotic town south of Pittsburgh, where there are crisp American flags around memorials to veterans in front of the municipal building. Today, Aidan is 20 and stationed with the Army in Kentucky. And this past week, his father exhaled in profound relief when President Biden announced that American troops would be coming home from Afghanistan.
  • That view, by a Democratic president in a deeply partisan era, is largely shared among people in southwestern Pennsylvania — a region generally hostile to Democrats, but where even voters who opposed Mr. Biden’s election approved of his withdrawal plan.
  • “It’s a very complicated question,” said Rick Palma, standing outside McGrogan’s Tap Room, reflecting on Mr. Biden’s decision. Mr. Palma is a retired manager at a United States Steel mill in nearby Clairton, which is the fictional setting for “The Deer Hunter,” the 1978 movie that powerfully evoked blue-collar communities whose young men went to Vietnam.“Is it time to bring them home? Perhaps,” Mr. Palma, a former Army officer, said. “If you bring them all the way back, there’s the possibility that Al Qaeda will regroup.”
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  • “I’m not a Biden fan but I’m for that, pulling the troops out of there,” said Mr. Miller, 46, a salesman. He dismissed the arguments of some Republican officials and military leaders that Taliban extremists would overrun the country once Americans left. “We can’t babysit everybody,” he said.
  • “The real problem here is we can’t be isolationist,” said Howard Dean, the Democrat who ran a 2004 presidential campaign as an early opponent of the Iraq War. He proposed a series of excruciating questions that Americans might face about using military force in the near future: What if China invades Taiwan? What if Russian tanks roll across Ukraine?
  • Ms. Pallatto, 59, said Mr. Biden should not have announced a withdrawal deadline. “You televise to the Taliban we’re going to be completely gone at this date,” she said. America’s Afghan partners won’t be able to stand on their own “and we’re going to end up back there again,” she said.
  • Not everyone on Pike Street was aware of the president’s decision to leave Afghanistan, a reflection of how the drawn-out conflict, with relatively low American casualties, has dropped from the headlines. Just 12 percent of Americans told an Associated Press/NORC poll last year that they closely followed events in the war.
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Hundreds of Thousands of Cruise Fans Volunteer to Be First to Sail Again - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cruise-lines-covid.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Since March of last year, cruise ships carrying more than 250 people have been prohibited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from sailing in U.S. waters.
  • On May 25, Royal Caribbean became the first cruise line to receive approval from the C.D.C. to conduct simulated voyages, which are planned for its Freedom of the Seas ship starting from PortMiami in Florida in late June.
  • Several major cruise companies have already announced Alaska sailings starting in late July, which will require all passengers to prove that they are vaccinated. But in Florida, the cruise lines’ biggest U.S. departure point, recently enacted state law bans businesses from requiring proof of immunizations from people seeking to use their services.
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  • On MSC European cruises, all guests receive antigen tests when they board and if they test positive, they are given an additional PCR test. Non-vaccinated guests boarding its cruises in Britain must also present proof of a PCR test taken 48 hours before they embark.
  • Florida officials have said they will not exempt the cruise lines. If cruise companies decide to sail with a mix of vaccinated and non-vaccinated passengers, they will have to carry out simulation cruises with volunteers to test health and safety protocols.
  • The simulated voyages must be between two to seven days in length with at least one overnight stay, according to C.D.C. guidelines. They are required to test embarkation and disembarkation procedures, medical evacuations, onboard activities such as meal service and entertainment, re
  • Passengers are also tested mid-cruise after three or four days and are required to wear contact tracing bracelets so that they can be tracked down if someone they have come into contact with tests positive.
  • Cruise ships, she said, “have always been a cesspool for viruses, like planes, and I think there were risks at the height of the pandemic, but now with vaccines and health and safety measures I think they are ready to go again.”
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'Insanely cheap energy': how solar power continues to shock the world | Energy | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-continues-to-shock-the-world solar power history economics
shared by Javier E on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Over the last two decades, however, the IEA has consistently failed to see the massive growth in renewable energy coming. Not only has the organisation underestimated the take-up of solar and wind, but it has massively overstated the demand for coal and oil.
  • Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis at BloombergNEF, says that, in fairness to the IEA, it wasn’t alone.
  • “When I got this job in 2005, I thought maybe one day solar will supply 1% of the world’s electricity. Now it’s 3%. Our official forecast is that it will be 23% by 2050, but that’s completely underestimated,”
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  • This rapid radical reduction in the price of PV solar is a story about Chinese industrial might backed by American capital, fanned by European political sensibilities and made possible largely thanks to the pioneering work of an Australian research team.
  • “We’ve got to the point where solar is the cheapest source of energy in the world in most places. This means we’ve been trying to model a situation where the grid looks totally different today.”
  • Every time you double producing capacity, you reduce the cost of PV solar by 28%
  • “The first reaction was: that’s the future. Everybody said that’s the future. But they also said it was one step too early. What they meant was that there was no market for it yet. In China at the time, if you mentioned solar, people thought of solar hot water.”
  • It was a moment that opened up what was possible from the industry, and the new upper limit was “set” at 25% – another barrier Green and his team would smash in 2008. In 2015, they built the world’s most efficient solar cell, achieving a 40.6% conversion rate using focused light reflected off a mirror.
  • In the very early years of the industry, the received wisdom had been that a 20% conversion rate marked the hard limit of what was possible from PV solar cells. Green, however, disagreed in a paper published in 1984.A year later, his team built the first cell that pushed past that limit, and in 1989 built the first full solar panel capable of running at 20% efficiency.
  • All that would change when Germany passed new laws encouraging the uptake of solar power. Quickly it became clear there was a massive global demand and the world’s manufacturers were struggling to keep up with supply.
  • Spying an opportunity for investment, a consortium that included Actis Capital and Goldman Sachs came knocking to pitch Shi on taking the company public. When the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005, it raised $420m and made Shi an instant billionaire. A year later he would be worth an estimated $3bn and crowned the richest man in China, earning him the moniker “the Sun King”.
  • Around 2012 the world market was flooded with solar panels, sending the price plummeting through the floor, leaving SunTech vulnerable. Already under intense financial pressure, disaster struck when an internal investigation found a takeover bid it had launched had been guaranteed by €560m in fake German government bonds.
  • In a quirk of history, what had begun as an American drive to wean itself off oil was eventually taken up by China, which made solar power dirt cheap in the process.“The Chinese approach to renewables is all about energy security,” Mathews says. “At the scale from which they’re building new industries, they would need colossal imports of conventional fossil fuels, which would cripple them economically.
  • “They can get around that problem, which is a geopolitical obstacle, by manufacturing their own energy equipment.”
  • “We think a 40% module, rather than the 22% you can do nowadays with PERC, is what the industry will be doing once we perfect this stacking approach,” Green says. “We’re just trying to find a new cell that will have all the qualities of silicon that we can stack on top of silicon.
  • “The International Energy Agency now says solar is providing the cheapest energy the world has ever seen. But we’re headed towards a future of insanely cheap energy.“It’s a fundamentally different world we’re moving into.”
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Opinion | What We Lose When Only Men Write About Men - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-assault-metoo-literature.html Power US history
shared by saberal on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • In “The Aspern Papers,” the Henry James novella of literary obsession, a biographer becomes fixated on a stash of secret letters belonging to an elderly woman who was once his subject’s girlfriend. Abandoning all his moral scruples, he persuades her to take him in as her tenant and pretends to court her niece.
  • The book is said to be inspired in part by an anecdote about a fan of Percy Bysshe Shelley who made a similar attempt to win over a former associate of the poet
  • It’s perfectly reasonable for executors charged with sensitive information to vet those who wish to use it. But this system too often rewards cronyism rather than hard work or creativity — and perpetuates the gross inequalities in representation that disfigure the American literary landscape.
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  • To some, it might sound harmless, even amusing. But it made me deeply uneasy. Although the #MeToo movement has helped to raise awareness of the lack of diversity in publishing, biography is a genre in which the voices of women and people of color are still starkly underrepresented. According to a study done by Slate in 2015, 71.7 percent of the biographies the magazine surveyed that year were written about a male subject, and 87 percent of those were by male authors. The study did not consider race, but in the last 20 years, only two books with a person of color as both author and subject have won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.
  • The question of access — to materials, to family members and sometimes to the subject — has major repercussions for the work of scholars. Authorized biographers tend to be fiercely protective of their privileged status, which is often the basis for a book contract. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene’s authorized biographer, argued that a comma in his agreement with Greene allowed him sole access to Greene’s papers for more than a decade while he labored over his three-volume biography, delaying other researchers’ work in the process.
  • As critics pointed out even before the allegations surfaced, the biography’s accounts of some of Mr. Roth’s relationships contain biases and sexist characterizations that appear to parrot Mr. Roth’s opinions, including an uncomplimentary description of one woman’s genitalia. (Nearly five years ago, Mr. Bailey wrote a review of my own biography of Shirley Jackson that was perceived by many, including myself, as sexist.)
  • Critics like to speak of biographies as “definitive,” but in reality there’s no such thing. Biographers aren’t stenographers; we’re more akin to novelists, constructing a narrative of a person’s life and making editorial choices at every turn. An anecdote whose importance I might overlook could be seized on by someone else as a revealing detail.
  • Publishers should explicitly encourage a diversity of perspectives on a person worthy of biography, and biographers who care about improving representation would do well to rethink their own roles in the system. They might begin by pledging to keep the papers of subjects where they belong: in public archives, open to any scholar prepared to devote the time and energy to working with them.
  • The result would bring an infusion of new perspectives on literary giants, giving renewed relevance to an often conservative industry. It would also help to generate a more inclusive roster of authors considered worthy of chronicling, remaking and expanding the American literary canon.
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Opinion: Public sympathy is with the Queen. But the British monarchy may need more than... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html Britain Monarchy Culture
shared by lmunch on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • I remembered that fan as I watched mourners arrive at Buckingham Palace to lay flowers for Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, whose death was announced Friday. My thoughts were also with the new widow whose quiet sorrow already dominated global news. The grief that attaches to public figures is no less real for distance. Public lives provide markers and milestones for others, and few more so than the Queen and her consort, who have spent more than seven decades in the public eye.
  • The Queen has always modeled one response to this situation -- seen, but rarely heard, her feelings and opinions jealously guarded. Shortly she is to face TV cameras to talk about the worst thing that has ever happened to her. There is a poignancy to this most reserved of women being forced to grieve in public. There might also be, in sharply polarized responses to the unfurling pageantry, an intimation of mortality for the constitutional monarchy she has headed for 69 years.
  • The monarchy is the ultimate exclusive club, the sovereign born to reign over subjects, not citizens, hardly the most obvious of qualifications for performing the key role of a head of state: to unify. The Queen has nevertheless largely succeeded in this function, popular and, in decade after decade and poll after poll, trusted, rarely faltering but for a few famous missteps, her delays in leading public mourning for the dead after a mining disaster in Aberfan, Wales and, later, for her daughter-in-law Diana.
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  • Although the heir to the throne will never match the popular appeal of his mother, I imagined that public sympathy for the personal loss that must precede his coronation would tide him over a reign that, at his age, would be transitional, an interlude before the ascendancy of a glossier generation.
  • The one-two punch of revelations about Prince Andrew's profound involvement with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the fracturing of the idea that the royals would easily absorb Meghan Markle into their ranks further rewrote the narrative and highlighted, too, a new frailty to an institution that could neither effectively manage its media operations nor its problematic family members.
  • For the first time, I wonder if I will live to witness the end of the monarchy. On the other hand, if the past year has taught me anything, it is that lives are more fragile than institutions. The Queen's husband and mine are gone forever. They did once meet, at that state banquet. As Andy moved up the receiving line behind members of the Mexican delegation, Prince Philip spotted him and, noting his bleached hair, pale skin and green eyes, exclaimed "thank heavens, one of ours."
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Coronavirus in India: Deaths Mount at Hospital After Oxygen Runs Out - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-deaths-oxygen.html US Global Covid
shared by saberal on 04 May 21 - No Cached
  • At least 10 people, and possibly as many as 24, died after a hospital ran out of an increasingly precious resource here: medical oxygen. It was the latest in a growing series of such accidents.
  • When the pipes carrying oxygen to critically ill Covid-19 patients stopped working at a hospital in the southern Indian state of Karnataka on Sunday evening, relatives of sick patients used towels to fan their loved ones in an attempt to save them.
  • Local officials provided different accounts of the death toll at the hospital. Some said that at least 10 died from oxygen deprivation. Others said that 14 more died after the accident but that they died of comorbidities related to Covid, not directly from the oxygen shortage.
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  • “The deaths happened between Sunday and Monday morning, but we can’t say all died due to lack of oxygen,”
  • Last week, after oxygen ran out at one hospital in India’s capital, New Delhi, 12 people died. The week before that, it was 20
  • Doctors at dozens of hospitals in Delhi have been warning that they have come dangerously close to running out as well and that it was untenable to keep waiting for last-minute supplies to arrive. As the latest incident shows, at a hospital more than a thousand miles from the capital, oxygen shortages have now spread nationwide.
  • The same thing happened at Jaipur Golden Hospital in New Delhi.
  • While people continue to die from a lack of oxygen, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and the local government in Delhi, the epicenter of the oxygen crisis, are fighting in court.
  • Representatives of the federal government told the court on Sunday that its officials are working hard to deal with the crises and any such order would have a demoralizing effect on them.
  • India has been receiving aid from other countries, and many have airlifted oxygen generators, including France, which delivered eight oxygen generator plants on Sunday, and from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The country has also received six planeloads of equipment and supplies including material for coronavirus vaccines from the United States.
  • In recent days delays in moving oxygen to the hospitals in cities that are far from the generating plants have caused deaths which could have been avoided, experts said. On Saturday 12 patients, including a doctor, died when a hospital in New Delhi ran out of oxygen for an hour, according to Sudhanshu Bankata, an official of the Batra Hospital, where the deaths took place.
  • “We are living from oxygen cylinder to oxygen cylinder,” she said.Medical oxygen has suddenly become one of the most precious resources in India, and the need for it will continue as the surge of coronavirus infections is hardly abating.
  • The investigation at the hospital continues. On Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m. doctors and paramedical staff said they had run out of oxygen and contacted everyone they could think of to get help.
  • Officials in the neighboring district of Mysore, which is one of the hot virus spots in the state, said they sent supplies late on Sunday evening, but Chamarajanagar district officials said none arrived at the hospital.
  • When she arrived at the hospital her father-in-law told her she was now a widow. Her husband had died early on Monday, during that 10-hour period when the hospital was out of oxygen.
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Deaths Mount at an Indian Hospital After Oxygen Runs Out - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-deaths-oxygen.html india pandemic crisis
shared by martinelligi on 04 May 21 - No Cached
  • When the pipes carrying oxygen to critically ill Covid-19 patients stopped working at a hospital in the southern Indian state of Karnataka on Sunday evening, relatives of sick patients used towels to fan their loved ones in an attempt to save them.
  • Last week, after oxygen ran out at one hospital in India’s capital, New Delhi, 12 people died. The week before that, it was 20. On Monday, four sick people died in a hospital in Madhya Pradesh State, in central India, after family members said that there, too, the oxygen had run out though officials denied that.
  • Medical oxygen has suddenly become one of the most precious resources in India, and the need for it will continue as the surge of coronavirus infections is hardly abating.
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  • On Monday, the Indian federal Health Ministry reported 368,147 new cases and 3,417 deaths from the virus, a figure that remains low on the first day of the week
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John le Carré Fans Are Getting One More Novel - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...john-le-carre-silverview.html spy novel writer literature uk
shared by Javier E on 19 May 21 - No Cached
  • Le Carré was a grand master of spy novels, books so good they transcended the genre. Philip Roth declared his 1986 book “A Perfect Spy” “the best English novel since the war.”
  • Le Carré did not allow his work to be entered for literary prizes — when he was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2011, he asked that his name be withdrawn — and he called state honors like a knighthood “absolutely fatuous.” But he was widely considered to be one of the greatest British novelists of his time.
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How Republicans Fanned the Flames Before US Capitol Building Riot - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republicans-capitol-riot.html
shared by anonymous on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” said Mr. Brooks, Republican of Alabama. “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? Louder! Will you fight for America?”
  • Hours later, urged on by President Trump at the same rally, rioters stormed the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to formalize Mr. Biden’s election, chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” threatening to shoot Speaker Nancy Pelosi and forcing lawmakers to evacuate the building in a scene of violence and mayhem.
  • But a handful of Mr. Trump’s most loyal allies in the House had gone even further in the days and weeks before the riot, urging their supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to make a defiant last stand to keep him in power.
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  • “We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Mr. Alexander said in a since-deleted video, “so that who we couldn’t rally, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”
  • As rioters laid siege to the Capitol, Mr. Gosar posted a message of calm on Twitter, telling his followers, “Let’s not get carried away here.”
  • Their comments have raised questions about the degree to which Republicans may have coordinated with protest organizers.
  • Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, first-term lawmakers who ran as outspoken defenders of Mr. Trump, referred to the day as Republicans’ “1776 moment.”
  • “I make no apology for doing my absolute best to inspire patriotic Americans to not give up on our country and to fight back against anti-Christian socialists in the 2022 and 2024 elections,”
  • “We’re going to need to take a broader look at members of Congress who may have encouraged or even facilitated the attack on the Capitol,”
  • Other House Democrats were pushing to invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, added after the Civil War, which disqualifies people who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States from holding public office.
  • Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, introduced a resolution on Monday with 47 co-sponsors that would initiate investigations for “removal of the members who attempted to overturn the results of the election and incited a white supremacist attempted coup.”
  • “Even if it’s just a few, we have to make sure the message is clear that you cannot be a sitting Congress member and incite an insurrection and work to overturn an election,”
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Opinion | I Want Trump to Face Justice. But the House Shouldn't Impeach Him. - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rump-impeachment-tom-reed.html US trump history policy
shared by aleija on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • If we make the wrong decision in holding the president accountable, it could damage our democracy.
  • All responsible parties, including President Trump, must face justice.
  • Yet, the manner in which President Trump and others are held accountable is a difficult question that demands more scrutiny.
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  • If our leaders make the wrong decision in how to hold him accountable, it could damage the integrity of our system of justice, further fan the flames of division, and disillusion millions of Americans ─ all while failing to accomplish anything.
  • Most important, there is inadequate time to reasonably investigate, present and debate articles of impeachment. Rushing through the substantive and procedural requirements for such a monumental action will directly diminish the validity of impeachment. We cannot rush to judgment simply because we want retribution or, worse, because we want to achieve a particular political outcome.
  • A hasty impeachment could raise a host of consequences that could have a striking impact on the long-term stability of our country.
  • Finally, a too-quick impeachment will not suddenly change the minds of millions of Americans who still do not recognize the election of President-elect Biden as legitimate. In fact, rushed proceedings will be seen as validating the view that impeachment is part of a multiyear campaign to delegitimize Mr. Trump’s 2016 election.
  • I implore our congressional leaders and Mr. Biden to take a moment to consider what is at stake. Work with us on constitutionally viable alternatives to ensure that no individual is above the law.
  • But make no mistake, our Constitution is the bedrock of our great nation. Impeachment now, days before Mr. Trump’s term ends, would be a grave error, diluting the meaning of that important constitutional provision forever. We cannot and should not support a rushed, divisive action simply because the emotions of the moment demand it. That is not the American way.
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Hopes for Tokyo's Summer Olympic Games Darken Due to Virus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tokyo-olympics.html
shared by anonymous on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • As coronavirus cases rise throughout Japan and in several large countries in Europe and the Americas, officials both in Tokyo and with the International Olympic Committee have begun to acknowledge that holding a safe Games might not be possible, endangering dreams that the Olympics could serve as a global celebration of the end of the pandemic.
  • For weeks, Japanese and Olympic officials have insisted that the Games will go forward, and that a further delay is not possible. Organizers have been trying to come up with plans to hold the Games in a manner acceptable to the Japanese public, announcing an array of safety measures.
  • In a survey conducted this month, the Japanese broadcaster NHK found that nearly 80 percent of respondents believed the Games should be postponed again or canceled entirely. In October, less than half of respondents said that. The figure rose to 71 percent in December.
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  • Organizers in Tokyo and at the I.O.C. agreed in March to postpone the Games for one year. The biennial sports festival, the world’s largest, was supposed to take place last July and August. The opening ceremony for the Summer Games is now scheduled for July 23.
  • Hopes for the Games had risen as several major sporting events were held around the world without major problems, albeit on a much smaller scale and with few or no fans in attendance.
  • The rollout of the vaccines has been slower than expected, however, and much of humanity will remain unvaccinated by this summer. Japan does not plan to begin vaccinating its citizens until late February, a process that will take months.
  • It is not yet clear whether organizers would allow spectators to attend the Games, or travel from outside Japan for the Olympics. Japan has instituted a travel ban for all international visitors that is scheduled to end Feb. 7, but it could be extended. Elite athletes are no longer exempt from it.
  • While Japan, a country of more than 125 million people, has recorded just over 300,000 cases and 4,200 deaths — far fewer than many Western countries — it has had record caseloads and death tolls in recent days. It reported more than 6,000 new cases on Thursday.
  • Officials have proposed screening and testing visitors upon arrival. Athletes may be subject to multiple tests, and their movements may be limited. They may have to leave the Olympic Village as soon as they are finished competing, and may be restricted in whom they can associate with while in Tokyo.
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As inauguration nears, law enforcement scrutiny drives U.S. extremists into internet's ... - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...ets-dark-corners-idUSKBN29K20U capitol riot parler trump extremists
shared by anonymous on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Shortly after rampaging Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a fan of the president posted a message on the pro-Donald Trump website TheDonald.win. Inspired by the mob’s attempt to stop lawmakers from confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral win, user CONN_WYNN said in an all-caps message, replete with an expletive, that it was “TIME TO LEAVE THE KEYBOARD” and “FIGHT FOR MY...COUNTRY.”
  • Before the Capitol attack, such a post may not have elicited a follow-up visit. But in the aftermath of the riot, which left five people dead, federal law enforcement agencies have intensified their scrutiny of extremist chatter online, activity that officials warn could be early warning signals of planned attacks around Biden’s inauguration in Washington on Jan. 20.“You don’t want to be the ones to have FBI agents knocking on your door at 6 a.m.,” Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday during a televised briefing with Vice President Mike Pence. “Anybody who plots or attempts violence in the coming week should count on a visit.”
  • Extremists seeking a politically motivated civil war and those seeking a race war “may exploit the aftermath of the Capitol breach by conducting attacks to destabilize and force a climactic conflict in the United States,” officials wrote in a joint bulletin issued on Wednesday by the National Counterterrorism Center and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and seen by Reuters
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  • The upside of driving extremists underground, Sena said, is that it is harder for them to radicalize others when they do not have access to more mainstream platforms.Law enforcement is also in the difficult position of determining whether people saying “despicable” things online intend harm or are “just practicing keyboard bravado,” Steven D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, told reporters on Tuesday.
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Immigration law: Biden wants to remove this controversial word from US laws - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html trump US Politics Culture history
shared by saberal on 21 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Biden's proposed bill, if passed, would remove the word "alien" from US immigration laws, replacing it with the term "noncitizen." It's a deliberate step intended to recognize America as "a nation of immigrants," according to a summary of the bill released by the new administration.
  • "illegal alien," long decried as a dehumanizing slur by immigrant rights advocates, became even more of a lightning rod during the Trump era -- with some top federal officials encouraging its use and several states and local governments taking up measures to ban it.
  • US code currently defines "alien" as "any person not a citizen or national of the United States."Officials in the past have pointed to the term's prevalence in US laws to defend their word choices.
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  • "We were in the Trump administration the perennial boogeyman," Vargas said. "Whenever Trump was in trouble, he started talking about the 'illegals' and talking about the border."But not everyone in the Trump administration was a fan of the language.
  • In guidelines issued in 2019, New York City banned the term "illegal alien" when used "with intent to demean, humiliate or harass a person." Violations, the city warned, could result in fines up to $250,000.
  • 2017 after officials publicized a hotline for victims of "crimes committed by removable aliens."
  • "Language has power. And I think we saw that in the Trump administration, how it used dehumanizing terms and how it debased language and in turn debased people,"
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Here's a Look Inside Facebook's Data Wars - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-data.html facebook data privacy transparency right-wing
shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform — good, bad or ugly.
  • On the other side were executives, including the company’s chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much.
  • One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits.
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  • They argued that journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle, a kind of turbocharged search engine that allows users to analyze Facebook trends and measure post performance, to dig up information they considered unhelpful — showing, for example, that right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets.
  • These executives argued that Facebook should selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves.Team Selective Disclosure won, and CrowdTangle and its supporters lost.
  • the CrowdTangle story is important, because it illustrates the way that Facebook’s obsession with managing its reputation often gets in the way of its attempts to clean up its platform
  • The company, blamed for everything from election interference to vaccine hesitancy, badly wants to rebuild trust with a skeptical public. But the more it shares about what happens on its platform, the more it risks exposing uncomfortable truths that could further damage its image.
  • Facebook’s executives were more worried about fixing the perception that Facebook was amplifying harmful content than figuring out whether it actually was amplifying harmful content. Transparency, they said, ultimately took a back seat to image management.
  • the executives who pushed hardest for transparency appear to have been sidelined. Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, has been taking time off and no longer has a clearly defined role at the company, several people with knowledge of the situation said. (Mr. Silverman declined to comment about his status.) And Mr. Boland, who spent 11 years at Facebook, left the company in November.
  • “One of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products,” Mr. Boland said, in his first interview since departing. “And it doesn’t want to make the data available for others to do the hard work and hold them accountable.”
  • Mr. Boland, who oversaw CrowdTangle as well as other Facebook transparency efforts, said the tool fell out of favor with influential Facebook executives around the time of last year’s presidential election, when journalists and researchers used it to show that pro-Trump commentators were spreading misinformation and hyperpartisan commentary with stunning success.
  • “People were enthusiastic about the transparency CrowdTangle provided until it became a problem and created press cycles Facebook didn’t like,” he said. “Then, the tone at the executive level changed.”
  • Facebook was happy that I and other journalists were finding its tool useful. With only about 25,000 users, CrowdTangle is one of Facebook’s smallest products, but it has become a valuable resource for power users including global health organizations, election officials and digital marketers, and it has made Facebook look transparent compared with rival platforms like YouTube and TikTok, which don’t release nearly as much data.
  • Last fall, the leaderboard was full of posts by Mr. Trump and pro-Trump media personalities. Since Mr. Trump was barred from Facebook in January, it has been dominated by a handful of right-wing polemicists like Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Bongino and Sean Hannity, with the occasional mainstream news article, cute animal story or K-pop fan blog sprinkled in.
  • But the mood shifted last year when I started a Twitter account called @FacebooksTop10, on which I posted a daily leaderboard showing the sources of the most-engaged link posts by U.S. pages, based on CrowdTangle data.
  • The account went semi-viral, racking up more than 35,000 followers. Thousands of people retweeted the lists, including conservatives who were happy to see pro-Trump pundits beating the mainstream media and liberals who shared them with jokes like “Look at all this conservative censorship!” (If you’ve been under a rock for the past two years, conservatives in the United States frequently complain that Facebook is censoring them.)
  • Inside Facebook, the account drove executives crazy. Some believed that the data was being misconstrued and worried that it was painting Facebook as a far-right echo chamber. Others worried that the lists might spook investors by suggesting that Facebook’s U.S. user base was getting older and more conservative. Every time a tweet went viral, I got grumpy calls from Facebook executives who were embarrassed by the disparity between what they thought Facebook was — a clean, well-lit public square where civility and tolerance reign — and the image they saw reflected in the Twitter lists.
  • Mr. Boland, the former Facebook vice president, said that was a convenient deflection. He said that in internal discussions, Facebook executives were less concerned about the accuracy of the data than about the image of Facebook it presented.“It told a story they didn’t like,” he said of the Twitter account, “and frankly didn’t want to admit was true.”
  • Several executives proposed making reach data public on CrowdTangle, in hopes that reporters would cite that data instead of the engagement data they thought made Facebook look bad.But Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s chief executive, replied in an email that the CrowdTangle team had already tested a feature to do that and found problems with it. One issue was that false and misleading news stories also rose to the top of those lists.“Reach leaderboard isn’t a total win from a comms point of view,” Mr. Silverman wrote.
  • executives argued that my Top 10 lists were misleading. They said CrowdTangle measured only “engagement,” while the true measure of Facebook popularity would be based on “reach,” or the number of people who actually see a given post. (With the exception of video views, reach data isn’t public, and only Facebook employees and page owners have access to it.)
  • Mr. Schultz, Facebook’s chief marketing officer, had the dimmest view of CrowdTangle. He wrote that he thought “the only way to avoid stories like this” would be for Facebook to publish its own reports about the most popular content on its platform, rather than releasing data through CrowdTangle.“If we go down the route of just offering more self-service data you will get different, exciting, negative stories in my opinion,” he wrote.
  • there’s a problem with reach data: Most of it is inaccessible and can’t be vetted or fact-checked by outsiders. We simply have to trust that Facebook’s own, private data tells a story that’s very different from the data it shares with the public.
  • Mr. Zuckerberg is right about one thing: Facebook is not a giant right-wing echo chamber.But it does contain a giant right-wing echo chamber — a kind of AM talk radio built into the heart of Facebook’s news ecosystem, with a hyper-engaged audience of loyal partisans who love liking, sharing and clicking on posts from right-wing pages, many of which have gotten good at serving up Facebook-optimized outrage bait at a consistent clip.
  • CrowdTangle’s data made this echo chamber easier for outsiders to see and quantify. But it didn’t create it, or give it the tools it needed to grow — Facebook did — and blaming a data tool for these revelations makes no more sense than blaming a thermometer for bad weather.
  • It’s worth noting that these transparency efforts are voluntary, and could disappear at any time. There are no regulations that require Facebook or any other social media companies to reveal what content performs well on their platforms, and American politicians appear to be more interested in fighting over claims of censorship than getting access to better data.
  • It’s also worth noting that Facebook can turn down the outrage dials and show its users calmer, less divisive news any time it wants. (In fact, it briefly did so after the 2020 election, when it worried that election-related misinformation could spiral into mass violence.) And there is some evidence that it is at least considering more permanent changes.
  • The project, which some employees refer to as the “Top 10” project, is still underway, the people said, and it’s unclear whether its findings have been put in place. Mr. Osborne, the Facebook spokesman, said that the team looks at a variety of ranking changes, and that the experiment wasn’t driven by a desire to change the Top 10 lists.
  • This year, Mr. Hegeman, the executive in charge of Facebook’s news feed, asked a team to figure out how tweaking certain variables in the core news feed ranking algorithm would change the resulting Top 10 lists, according to two people with knowledge of the project.
  • As for CrowdTangle, the tool is still available, and Facebook is not expected to cut off access to journalists and researchers in the short term, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s plans.
  • Mr. Boland, however, said he wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook executives decided to kill off CrowdTangle entirely or starve it of resources, rather than dealing with the headaches its data creates.
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To Battle Climate Change, Begin With Your Air-Conditioner - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-cooling-eric-dean-wilson.html climate change air conditioning cool comfort solutions
shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • After his deftly persuasive opening argument that cutting back on machine-made cooling is the most pressing environmental task of our generation, Wilson walks us through the science of chemical coolants in detail, both the chemistry and physics of these miracle molecules, and the horrifying discovery of the havoc they wreak within the thin protective layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.
  • is an interesting fable about how our best efforts toward environmental regulation can bring out the worst in us.
  • the Montreal Protocol effectively ended the production of CFCs in 1987, forcing the temperature-control industry to switch to less powerful fluorocarbon compounds. Since then, while the production of CFCs has been banned, their use has not been. This has created a vigorous underground market in previously hoarded Freon that caters to small-time farmers and mechanics
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  • eventually, the chemical compounds used for this cooling cannot help leaking from coils and holding tanks as machines age and are discarded. Upon release, they form persistent greenhouse gases — meaning refrigeration as a practice makes an outsize contribution to global warming.
  • our world before the adoption of institutional air-conditioning was cooler overall.
  • He describes how the history of cooling personal and professional spaces is entwined with the history of racism and the institution of slavery. Before mechanical coolers were invented, enslaved children living in intemperate climes were forced to fan their oppressors for long hours, or to move air across containers of water in an effort to cool whole parlors and palaces. “One life was comforted at the expense of another,” Wilson writes with powerful simplicity.
  • Today, he explains, the global socioeconomic gap between those who can effectively cool their surroundings and those who cannot is widening rapidly.
  • But what does it really mean to be comfortable? Is it merely the absence of discomfort, or is it something more? Is it a bodily experience or an emotional state?
  • Wilson invites the reader into deep existential discussions by invoking broad themes of culture and philosophy — an unusual and delightful trait for a book on climate change.
  • Wilson notes that racism, misogyny and poverty have been vigorously acknowledged in the media recently and are beginning to be addressed at scales both large and small, and he contrasts this with how his friends and colleagues are simply “waiting for the topic to pass” whenever he brings up climate change
  • Wilson dares to state plainly that lasting climate solutions hinge on our capacity to redefine what makes our lives meaningful, not on new technologies or better products.
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What Trump supporters think of impeachment - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-50017561 trump politics us culture
shared by brookegoodman on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • "It's the first time I've worn my cap downtown," confesses Jake Biehn as he waits for President Donald Trump's rally to start in Minneapolis, a city currently run by Democrats.
  • If anything, it has galvanised the thousands of supporters some of whom queued for days to be at the front of the Target Center crowd when he stepped out to a rock star's welcome.
  • Mr Trump tells the crowd: "They want to erase your vote like it never existed. They want to erase your voice and they want to erase your future. "But they will fail because in America, the people rule again."
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  • Mr Trump and his supporters allege that Mr Biden abused his power to persuade Ukraine to back away from a criminal investigation that could implicate his son, Hunter, who worked for a Ukrainian energy company.
  • "I don't think Donald Trump has done any impeachable offence that's a high crime or misdemeanour.
  • The president's supporters don't believe there is any substance to the allegations against him.
  • They've tried to impeach Trump since before he was in office. It's not really the Democratic Party - it's just anti-Republican. If they want an official investigation, they should just go to the courts and do it."
  • If Trump treats his rallies like a rock concert, these are the devoted hardcore fans, buying merchandise as vendors walk past with badges and t-shirts. There's a cardboard cut out Trump people are posing for pictures with.
  • She also says only "high crimes and misdemeanours" are impeachable offences.
  • If Obama had that same conversation would any of this be coming up? The answer is 100% no. That's all it is. They're out to get him.
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'Game of Thrones' Finale Sets HBO Ratings Record - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-3-million-viewers-11558382378 tv audience culture us history commonality
shared by Javier E on 21 May 19 - No Cached
  • HBO spared no expense for “Game of Thrones,” with episodes typically costing $10 million to make and some hitting the $15 million mark
  • The 19.3-million figure for Sunday night is likely to grow during the week, as fans who missed the finale catch up. This season, “Game of Thrones” averaged nearly 44.2 million viewers per episode when delayed viewing, video on demand and streaming platforms are factored in.
  • The audience for Sunday night’s finale is even more impressive given that HBO is in only 35 million of the country’s 120 million television homes.
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  • In the epic’s first season, episodes averaged 9.3 million viewers
  • it pales in comparison to the final episodes of other iconic shows such as “M*A*S*H,” which drew 105.9 million viewers, and “Cheers,” which attracted 80 million viewers.
  • More recently, the CBS hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” ended its 12-season run with 18 million tuning in for the final episode.
  • The political comedy “Veep” ended its run last week with a season-high 1.1 million viewers
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In photos: Australia bushfires - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Deadly bushfires are burning across Australia, fanned by strong winds and a record-breaking heat wave as the country experiences one of its worst droughts in decades.
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Greta Thunberg celebrates her 18th birthday with a snarky tweet - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by mattrenz16 on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Greta Thunberg turned 18 on Sunday, and she thanked her fans with a snarky Twitter message about how she was celebrating.
  • "Thank you so much for all the well-wishes on my 18th birthday!" she said. "Tonight you will find me down at the local pub exposing all the dark secrets behind the climate- and school strike conspiracy and my evil handlers who can no longer control me! I am free at last!!"
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