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ethanshilling

U.S. Aid to Central America Hasn't Slowed Migration. Can Kamala Harris? - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-migration-kamala-harris.html

america biden

shared by ethanshilling on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • An American contractor went to a small town in the Guatemalan mountains with an ambitious goal: to ignite the local economy, and hopefully even persuade people not to migrate north to the United States.
  • Pedro Aguilar, a coffee farmer who hadn’t asked for the training and didn’t see how it would keep anyone from heading for the border, looked confused. Eyeing the U.S. government logo on the pamphlet, he began waving it around, asking if anyone had a phone number to call the Americans “and tell them what our needs really are.”
  • As vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr. led an enormous push to deter people from crossing into the United States by devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to Central America, hoping to make the region more tolerable for the poor — so that fewer would abandon it.
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  • Now, as President Biden, he is doubling down on that strategy once again and assigning his own vice president, Kamala Harris, the prickly challenge of carrying out his plan to commit $4 billion in a remarkably similar approach as she travels to the region Sunday.
  • But the numbers tell a different story. After years of the United States flooding Central America with aid, migration from the region soared in 2019 and is on the upswing once more.
  • Ms. Harris, who has little foreign policy experience and no history in the region, has already been criticized for not visiting the border.
  • The political risks are evident, including the obvious pitfalls of investing billions in a region where the president of Honduras has been linked to drug traffickers and accused of embezzling American aid money, the leader of El Salvador has been denounced for trampling democratic norms and the government of Guatemala has been criticized for persecuting officials fighting corruption.
  • “We’ve looked extensively at different programs that have been approached,” said Nancy McEldowney, a longtime diplomat who serves as Ms. Harris’s national security adviser.
  • Foreign aid is often a difficult, and at times flawed, tool for achieving American interests abroad, but it’s unclear whether there are any simple alternatives for the Biden administration.
  • From 2016 to 2020, 80 percent of the American-financed development projects in Central America were entrusted to American contractors, according to data provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
  • “It’s an incredibly not-transparent situation,” said Eric Olson, an expert on foreign aid to Central America at the Seattle International Foundation. “It’s like this is a national secret.”
  • Even when aid money reached Guatemala in recent years, it often brought little change, according to interviews with dozens who worked with or received assistance from U.S.-financed projects in the country’s western highlands.
  • For decades, migration to the United States followed a pattern: Aside from some spikes in migration from Central America after civil wars or natural disasters, it was mostly single Mexicans who headed north in search of better jobs and pay.
  • Aid workers kept coming to deliver lots of seminars on topics in which the farmers were already well versed, they said, such as planting new varieties of coffee beans, and then left.
ethanshilling

15 Chinese Elephants Are On a 300-Mile Journey. Why, No One Knows. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-elephants.html

china elephants

shared by ethanshilling on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • No one is quite sure. But for some reason, a herd of 15 Asian elephants has been lumbering its way across China for more than a year, traveling more than 300 miles through villages, forest patches — and, as of 9:55 p.m. on Wednesday, the edges of the city of Kunming, population 8.5 million.
  • It’s the farthest-known movement of elephants in China, according to experts. Where they’ll go next, no one knows. When they’ll stop? Also unclear.
  • What is certain is that they have captivated Chinese social media, jolted local officials and caused more than $1.1 million of damage. They have also left elephant researchers scratching their heads.
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  • Experts are urging the public to temper its delight with awareness of the ecological significance, in a country where avid enthusiasm for conservation has not necessarily coincided with a reckoning of what it will mean to live alongside more elephants.
  • But movement is normal for elephants, which have large “home ranges” over which they travel searching for food or mates, said Dr. Campos-Arceiz. So it was not until relatively recently that researchers and government officials began to notice just how far this herd had wandered. In April, the elephants were spotted around Yuanjiang County, about 230 miles north of the nature reserve.
  • It’s not clear what spurred the elephants to leave their home. But after conservation efforts, China’s elephant population has grown in recent years, from fewer than 200 several decades ago to around 300 today, according to official statistics.
  • The elephants’ growing proximity to humans — and their strictly protected status — has emboldened the animals, according to Dr. Campos-Arceiz. And, they’re smart: As they began breaching the boundaries of nature reserves and crossing into more populated areas, they discovered that crops were more appealing than their usual forest fare.
  • As a result, it’s unsurprising to see elephants wandering beyond their usual habitats, he said, and the phenomenon is likely to continue as their population continues to grow.
  • Still, that doesn’t explain the long-distance movement of the “northbound wild elephant herd,” as the other herd has come to be known on social media.
  • While acknowledging the public’s amusement, the government has warned people to stay away from the animals, reminding them that they can be dangerous. The wandering herd has yet to cause any injuries to humans, but there were more than 50 casualties involving Asian elephants between 2011 and 2019, according to state media.
  • The best-case outcome, Ms. Chen said, would be for the attention that the herd has drawn to raise more awareness around the possibility of human-elephant conflict, which is likely to increase. Only by preparing people for that reality, she said, would conservation efforts really succeed.
ethanshilling

Western States Sizzle Under Triple-Digit Temperatures - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...excessive-heat-warning.html

US climate change

shared by ethanshilling on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Temperatures were forecast to hit 107 on Wednesday in the San Joaquin Valley in the center of California, according to the National Weather Service. While temperatures in Fresno were 16 to 18 degrees above normal for this time of year, they fell short of breaking records.
  • In Redding, in Northern California, temperatures reached 107 on Tuesday, a day after peaking at 109 and breaking the previous record of 103 set in 2016, meteorologists said.
  • In Nevada, Las Vegas saw its first 100-degree day of the year on Monday, followed by another triple-digit day — 103 — on Tuesday. It’s forecast to hit 105 on Wednesday and 106 on Thursday.
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  • An expanded heat advisory is also in effect through Thursday night for the central and southeastern portion of Washington, the Weather Service said. High temperatures could reach the upper 90s or lower 100s.
  • Hot weather is also forecast for Montana over Wednesday and Thursday with high temperatures climbing into the upper 80s and upper 90s. High temperatures could reach 15 to 25 degrees above normal, meteorologists said.
  • Warmer-than-average temperatures have been the trend in recent memory. Last year tied 2016 as the hottest year on record, according to European climate researchers. To complicate matters, a severe drought is ravaging the entire western half of the United States, from the Pacific Coast, across the Great Basin and desert Southwest, and up through the Rockies to the Northern Plains.
  • A recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change suggested that more than a third of heat-related deaths in many parts of the world can be attributed to the extra warming associated with climate change.
  • The research found that heat-related deaths in warm seasons were boosted by climate change by an average of 37 percent, in a range of a 20 to 76 percent increase.
ethanshilling

How Many Americans Support the Death Penalty? Depends How You Ask. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...death-penalty-polls.html

US politics

shared by ethanshilling on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The use of capital punishment has fallen to historically low levels in recent years. This year, Virginia became the first Southern state to outlaw the practice.
  • Still, a solid majority of Americans continue to favor keeping the death penalty, driven by the conviction that it’s morally justified in cases of murder — even though most of the country recognizes that there are racial disparities in how it’s doled out, and an overwhelming majority admits that it sometimes results in the death of an innocent person.
  • We can say all this with relative certainty thanks to a Pew Research Center poll released today. Sixty percent considered the death penalty acceptable for people convicted of murder, according to the survey of Pew’s online American Trends Panel.
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  • Polls on the death penalty presented one of the most glaring examples. More than other issues — and far more than on questions about candidate choice, which generally aren’t as deeply impacted by survey mode — capital punishment drew meaningfully different responses.
  • Last year, participants of Pew’s online panel were 13 points more likely than those surveyed by phone to say they approved of the death penalty. Among Democrats, there was a particularly strong aversion to expressing support via phone
  • There are a number of issues that make phone polls different from online surveys, including the fact that they tend to yield a slightly different sample of respondents.
  • “It’s a bit of a touchy subject, it’s kind of sensitive, and admitting that you hold an opinion that has such profound implications for somebody else — not everybody wants to engage with that with a stranger,” Kennedy said, referring to questions about the death penalty.
  • Among Republicans and independents who lean toward the G.O.P., 77 percent said in the new poll that they supported the death penalty.
  • Even among Republicans, however, there was broad acknowledgment that it’s impossible to ensure innocent people won’t be executed. Just 31 percent of Republicans and leaners said there were “adequate safeguards” to that effect. Only 12 percent of Democrats and their leaners said so.
  • And most Americans — 63 percent — doubted that the death penalty successfully discouraged crime. Even among those who favored its use, just 50 percent said it was a deterrent to serious crimes.
  • Fully 85 percent of Black people said that whites were less likely to be put to death for similar crimes, but white respondents were evenly divided on the question.
ethanshilling

A 20-Foot Sea Wall? Miami Faces the Hard Choices of Climate Change. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ami-fl-seawall-hurricanes.html

climate miami wall

shared by ethanshilling on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Three years ago, not long after Hurricane Irma left parts of Miami underwater, the federal government embarked on a study to find a way to protect the vulnerable South Florida coast from deadly and destructive storm surge.
  • The state could help, to a point. Republican lawmakers, who have controlled the Florida Legislature for more than 20 years, acknowledged in late 2019 that they had ignored climate change for so long that the state had “lost a decade.”
  • “You need to have a conversation about, culturally, what are our priorities?” said Benjamin Kirtman, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami. “Where do we want to invest? Where does it make sense?”
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  • For its study, the corps focused on storm surge — the rising seas that often inundate the coastline during storms — made worse lately by stronger hurricanes and higher sea levels. But that is only one concern.
  • South Florida, flat and low-lying, sits on porous limestone, which allows the ocean to swell up through the ground. Even when there is no storm, rising seas contribute to more significant tidal flooding, where streets fill with water even on sunny days.
  • “What you realize is each of these problems, which are totally intersecting, are handled by different parts of the government,” said Amy C. Clement, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Miami and the chairwoman of the city of Miami’s climate resilience committee.
  • The dramatic $6 billion proposal remains tentative and at least five years off. But the startling suggestion of a massive sea wall up to 20 feet high cutting across beautiful Biscayne Bay was enough to jolt some Miamians to attention
  • The price tag for all that needs to be done, however, is in the billions. The estimate for Miami-Dade County alone to phase out some 120,000 septic tanks is about $4 billion, and that does not include the thousands of dollars that each homeowner would also have to pay.
  • “We were, like, ruh-roh,” said Ken Russell, the Miami city commissioner whose district includes Brickell. “The $40 billion in assets you’re trying to protect will be diminished if you build a wall around downtown because you’re going to affect market values and quality of life.”
  • To some critics, the plan harks back to more than a century of dredging and pumping of the Florida Everglades, which made way for intensive farming and sprawling development but disregarded the serious damage to the environment that the state is still wrestling with.
  • In fact, when local governments have asked the public how they would like to tackle climate change, residents by far prefer what is known as green infrastructure: layered coastal protection from a mix of dunes, sea grasses, coral reefs and mangroves, said Zelalem Adefris, vice president for policy and advocacy at Catalyst Miami, which works with low-income communities in the county.
  • On a recent afternoon along the stretch of Brickell Bay Drive where a wall might go, Rachel Silverstein, executive director of Miami Waterkeeper, an environmental research and activist group, stood next to high-rises built right up to the water
  • “Instead of seeing this beautiful water, you would see a gross wall,” she said.
ethanshilling

Texas Voting Bill Nears Passage as Republicans Advance It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...texas-voting-bill.html

texas voting GOP

shared by ethanshilling on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature was racing against the clock on Sunday night to pass a sweeping overhaul of the state’s election laws that would rubber-stamp some of the most rigid voting restrictions in the country, but Democrats were pledging an all-out fight to try to stall the bill and prevent it from passing by a midnight deadline.
  • Earlier on Sunday, after a legislative power play by Republicans that led to an all-night session and hours of impassioned debate and objections from Democrats, the Senate passed the bill.
  • Mr. Abbott, who could call a special session as early as June, has previously stated that an election overhaul was one of his top priorities for this legislative session, and he was widely expected to sign whatever bill Republicans passed.
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  • The bill includes new restrictions on absentee voting; grants broad new autonomy and authority to partisan poll watchers; escalates punishments for mistakes or offenses by election officials; and bans both drive-through voting and 24-hour voting
  • The bill in Texas, a major state with a booming population, represents the apex of the national Republican push to install tall new barriers to voting after President Donald J. Trump’s loss last year to Joseph R. Biden Jr., with expansive restrictions already becoming law in Iowa, Georgia and Florida in 2021.
  • President Biden and key Democrats in Congress are confronting rising calls from their party to do whatever is needed — including abolishing the Senate filibuster, which moderate senators have resisted — to push through a major voting rights and elections overhaul that would counteract the wave of Republican laws.
  • The bill in Texas, if it passes, is unlikely to be the final G.O.P. voting legislation this year. Multiple states, including Arizona, Ohio and Michigan, have legislatures that are still in session and that may move forward on new voting laws.
  • In a provision added late in the process, the Texas bill would make it easier to overturn the results of an election in the state in some circumstances. Texas law previously required proof that illicit votes had resulted in a wrongful victory
  • By seeking to ban drive-through voting, 24-hour voting and the use of tents or temporary structures as polling locations, the Legislature is targeting cities and suburban areas where Democrats did well in November; roughly 140,000 residents of Harris County used one of those methods in the 2020 election.
  • The bill also creates new regulations for the maintenance of voter rolls, which could lead to bigger and more frequent purges of voters from the lists.
  • “They are intent on creating voting restrictions that reverse the trends that you’ve seen in Texas,” Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, said in an interview this month.
  • “What they’re trying to do is create a system that discourages people from actually going out to vote,” he said.
ethanshilling

Illinois Lawmakers Bar Police From Using Deception When Interrogating Minors - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cago-police-interrogation.html

illinois politics

shared by ethanshilling on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Illinois would become the first state to bar the police from using deceptive tactics when interrogating young people under legislation that passed the General Assembly with near-unanimous support from Republicans and Democrats on Sunday.
  • The bill, which is headed to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s desk, is intended to stop the police from lying during interrogations, a technique that is legal but that the bill’s supporters say often leads to false confessions.
  • It would make Illinois the first state to prohibit law enforcement officers from knowingly communicating false facts about evidence — like claiming to have found a young person’s fingerprints on a gun — or making unauthorized promises about leniency when interrogating people under 18, according to the Innocence Project.
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  • False confessions have played a role in about 30 percent of all wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence, and recent studies suggest that people under 18 are between two and three times more likely to falsely confess than adults, according to the Innocence Project.
  • Similar bills have been introduced in New York and Oregon, and supporters hope its passage in Illinois — by a vote of 114 to 0 in the House and 47 to 1 in the Senate — will lead to national movement on the issue.
  • “Our criminal justice system should not be guided by a conviction, but rather it should be guided by the advancement of the truth,” Mr. Durkin said in a statement. “Deception can never be utilized under any condition in our criminal justice system and particularly against juveniles.”
  • One of several cases cited by the bill’s supporters involved four men — Charles Johnson, Larod Styles, LaShawn Ezell and Troshawn McCoy — who had been arrested as teenagers and spent more than 20 years behind bars for a 1995 double murder in Chicago.
  • “The history of false confessions in Illinois can never be erased, but this legislation is a critical step to ensuring that history is never repeated,” Kimberly M. Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney, said in a statement.
  • “When a kid is in a stuffy interrogation room being grilled by adults, they’re scared and are more likely to say whatever it is they think the officer wants to hear to get themselves out of that situation, regardless of the truth,” Mr. Peters, the state senator, said in the statement.
  • “Police officers too often exploit this situation in an effort to elicit false information and statements from minors in order to help them with a case,” Mr. Peters said. “Real safety and justice can never be realized if we allow this practice to continue.”
ethanshilling

Tennessee Plane Crash: Gwen Shamblin and 6 Others Presumed Dead - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...plane-crash-tennessee.html

tennessee crisis

shared by ethanshilling on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • All seven people aboard a small plane were presumed dead after it crashed shortly after takeoff into a lake outside Nashville on Saturday, including an actor who played Tarzan and the leader of a Christian weight loss group, the authorities said.
  • The plane, a Cessna Citation 501, crashed into Percy Priest Lake near Smyrna, Tenn., at about 11 a.m. local time, shortly after it had taken off from Smyrna Airport, south of Nashville.
  • Before noon on Sunday, crews found several parts of the plane as well as human remains in a debris field that was about half a mile wide, officials said.
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  • William Lara, also known as Joe Lara, played Tarzan in the movie “Tarzan in Manhattan” and in the television series “Tarzan: The Epic Adventures,” according to the website IMDb.
  • In a statement posted on Sunday on the church’s website, the congregation said it appreciated prayers for the seven fellowship leaders who were lost in the crash.
  • At a news conference on Saturday night, Capt. Joshua Sanders of Rutherford County Fire Rescue said that after searching the lake since 11 a.m., “we have transitioned from a rescue effort to a recovery effort.”
  • The crews at the scene were “no longer looking for live victims at this point,” Captain Sanders said. “We are now recovering as much as we can from the crash site.”
ethanshilling

Some U.S. States Have Higher Vaccine Rates Inside Prisons That Outside. - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vaccine-prison-covid.html

US vaccine prison

shared by ethanshilling on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • While most of the United States’ prison systems have struggled to vaccinate inmates, some, including California’s, have outperformed vaccination rates among the general public. And experts say their success may offer clues about how to persuade skeptical people outside correctional facilities to get vaccinated.
  • By contrast, North Dakota’s overall vaccination rate is 42 percent. California has administered at least one shot to 56 percent of residents, and Kansas 47 percent.
  • About 73 percent of inmates in California and Kansas prisons have received at least one Covid vaccine dose, according to the project. In North Dakota, another state that has had prison town-hall meetings, the rate is above 80 percent.
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  • “Education is really key,” said Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine who leads the Covid Prison Project, a group that tracks coronavirus cases in correctional settings and compiled the data on vaccination rates.
  • Incarcerated people are at a much greater risk from Covid-19 than the general public, but many say that they are wary both of the vaccines and of the prison medical staff members who administer them.
  • Kevin Ring, a former inmate who is president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group that advocates for changes in sentencing laws, said that peer pressure also had an effect in some prisons.
  • “You could have no one taking it, but then if everyone’s taking it and then you’re in this small group of people — the peer pressure could work in a pro-vaccine way,” he said.
ethanshilling

Amid Historic Drought, a New Water War in the West - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...regon-water-drought-bundy.html

drought US

shared by ethanshilling on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Through the marshlands along the Oregon-California border, the federal government a century ago carved a whole new landscape, draining lakes and channeling rivers to build a farming economy that now supplies alfalfa for dairy cows and potatoes for Frito-Lay chips.
  • this year’s historic drought has heightened the stakes, with salmon dying en masse and Oregon’s largest lake draining below critical thresholds for managing fish survival.
  • The brewing battle over the century-old Klamath Project is an early window into the water shortfalls that are likely to spread across the West as a widespread drought, associated with a warming climate, parches watersheds throughout the region.
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  • In Nevada, water levels have dropped so drastically in Lake Mead that officials are preparing for a serious shortage that could prompt major reductions in Colorado River water deliveries next year. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has placed 41 counties under a state of emergency.
  • Here in Oregon, conservationists, Native American tribes, government agencies and irrigators are squaring off, and local leaders fear that generations of tensions could escalate in volatile new ways.
  • During a drought in 2001, the federal Bureau of Reclamation initially planned for the first time to fully cut off water for farmers over the summer. That order spurred an uprising of farmers and ranchers who used saws, torches and crowbars to breach the facilities and open the canal head gates.
  • Ammon Bundy, who led an armed takeover of an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016, said he was ready to bring in allies to help keep the gates open, saying that people need to be prepared to use force to protect their rights even if law enforcement arrives to stop them.
  • Some landowners have openly talked about breaching the fence surrounding the dam property and forcing open the irrigation gates. Already, they have purchased property adjacent to the head gates and staged protests there.
  • For the United States, the Klamath Project became a keystone for settling and developing the region. Homestead opportunities for veterans after the two world wars helped to stimulate the economy and to build a new kind of community.
  • The region has a deep history rooted in violence and racial division. In 1846, U.S. War Department surveyors, led by John C. Frémont and Kit Carson, slaughtered more than a dozen Native Americans on the shores of Klamath Lake.
  • “These are not things that are going to get better if climate change continues to give us more uncertainty and less reliable supplies of water,” said William Jaeger, an economics professor at Oregon State University who specializes in environmental, resource and agricultural policy issues.
  • Lake levels fell below the minimum thresholds set by federal scientists, prompting litigation and spurring fears that algae blooms this summer could devastate the imperiled fish populations above the dam
  • Farmers generally have been split on how aggressively to push back against this year’s water shut-off. Ms. Hill said she disliked the idea of forcing open the gates, saying that option would do little to help. Other farmers have also called for ratcheting back the threats.
  • But on Friday night, about 100 people gathered under a large tent next to the head gates on property bought recently by two farmers, Dan Nielsen and Grant Knoll, who say they have a legal entitlement to the water behind the gates in Upper Klamath Lake under state water law.
  • Facing a similar standoff two decades ago, in 2001, the federal government relented with a limited delivery of water to farmers, but there was no sign that agencies, facing an already depleted lake, would budge this time.
ethanshilling

China Wants More Babies. Some Men Choose Vasectomies. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-vasectomies.html

Culture politics

shared by ethanshilling on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • “For our generation, children aren’t a necessity,” said Mr. Huang, a bachelor in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. “Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our spiritual and economic resources on our own lives?”
  • The government’s three-child policy announcement this week was the latest effort to reverse some of those practices, but some men are now seeking the procedure on their own.
  • The lifestyle is also in direct conflict with the Chinese government’s effort to avert a coming demographic crisis. On Monday, Beijing once again revised its family planning policy, allowing families to have three children instead of two.
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  • Today in China, several insurance companies market directly to “Double Income, No Kids” households. Matchmaking agencies are advertising their services to single men and women who don’t want children.
  • According to the latest census, the average household size is now 2.62, down from 3.1 in 2010.
  • “If I got married and had a child, I would still belong to the bottom class,” Mr. Huang said, referring to his background as a child of struggling factory workers. “When the time comes, I could also leave my child at home just like my parents. But I don’t want that.”
  • Choosing voluntary sterilization, especially as a young unmarried man, is still seen as culturally taboo in China’s patriarchal society. In many cities, doctors require a proof of marriage certificate and a partner’s consent.
  • “Raising a child is a high-price, low-return task,” he said. “I think having one is very troublesome.”
  • “They just refused to do it for me and said, ‘Because you’re unmarried without any children, you are openly going against the country’s birth policy,’” said Mr. Jiang, who is single.
  • For decades, Chinese people were conditioned to have children out of tradition, filial obligation and, ultimately, a fallback for retirement. But an expanding social security net and a proliferation of insurance plans have given people more options.
  • China now has the world’s largest number of single people. In 2018, the country reported 240 million of them, accounting for about 17 percent of the total population. Although the percentage is still smaller compared to the United States, the number has risen by about a third since 2010.
  • According to a 2018 study published by the Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies, the direct economic cost of raising a child from 0 to 17 years is about $30,000, seven times the annual salary of the average Chinese citizen.
  • Mr. Huang, a 24-year-old graduate student in computing in the city of Wuxi, said he met his prospective partner, a 28-year-old woman, on a DINK forum. “I constantly tell her how high and scary the costs of childbirth are to women,” he said.
  • Mr. Huang, 27, is striving for a lifestyle known as “Double Income, No Kids,” or DINK. The acronym has been around for decades, but only recently entered the mainstream in China, where rising costs and other economic woes have caused many young people to avoid parenthood.
ethanshilling

U.S. to Donate 20 Million Doses for Global Vaccination Effort - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ovid-vaccine-global-doses.html

us vaccination world

shared by ethanshilling on 18 May 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden, heeding widespread calls to step up his response to the pandemic’s surge abroad, said on Monday that his administration would send 20 million doses of federally authorized coronavirus vaccine overseas in June — the first time he has pledged to give away doses that could be used in the United States.
  • “We know America will never be fully safe until the pandemic that’s raging globally is under control,” Mr. Biden said in a brief appearance at the White House. “No ocean’s wide enough, no wall’s high enough, to keep us safe.”
  • International health activists want far more.“Donating 80 million doses of vaccines without a plan to scale up production worldwide is like putting a Band-Aid on a machete wound,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a longtime AIDS activist.
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  • Those 80 million doses amounted to five times the number that any other country had donated, Mr. Biden said, noting that taking the lead in helping the world beat back the coronavirus was a chance to reassert American authority.
  • “We want to lead the world with our values, with this demonstration of our innovation and ingenuity, and the fundamental decency of the American people,” Mr. Biden said.
  • Mr. Biden’s announcement came not long after a World Health Organization news conference at which the director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that countries with high vaccination rates had to do more to help countries that were being hit hard by the coronavirus, or the entire world would be imperiled.
ethanshilling

Gaza Faces Humanitarian Catastrophe With Shortages of Water and Medicine - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aza-humanitarian-disaster.html

israel gaza crisis

shared by ethanshilling on 18 May 21 - No Cached
  • Until Monday evening, the Al-Rimal health clinic in central Gaza City was a key cog in the Palestinian health system. Its eight doctors and 200 nurses administered hundreds of vaccinations, prescriptions, and screenings a day.
  • But then, on Monday night, an Israeli airstrike hit the street outside, sending shrapnel into the clinic, shattering windows, shredding doors, furniture and computers — and wrecking Gaza’s only coronavirus test laboratory.
  • Sewage systems have been destroyed, sending fetid wastewater into the streets of Gaza City. A critical desalination plant that helped provide fresh water to 250,000 people is offline, and water pipes serving at least 800,000 people have been damaged. Landfills are closed, with trash piling up.
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  • And dozens of schools have been either damaged or ordered to close, forcing some 600,000 students to miss classes on Monday.
  • President Biden added his voice to the growing chorus of international leaders calling for a cease-fire on Monday night, but there was little indication that an end to the hostilities was near on Tuesday morning.
  • “We have a bank of targets that is full, and we want to continue and to create pressure on Hamas,” he said. “This morning, the chief of staff gave us the plans for the next 24 hours, the targets. We will hit anyone who belongs to Hamas, from the first to the last.”
  • “We warn the enemy that if it did not stop that immediately, we would resume rocketing Tel Aviv,” the militant group’s spokesman Abu Ubaida said, according to Reuters.
  • More than 40,000 people have been forced into shelters and thousands more have sought refuge with friends or relatives, according to the U.N. humanitarian affairs office.
  • At least 10 people in Israel have been killed in rocket attacks, the Israeli authorities said.The death toll in Gaza itself has surpassed 200, including at least 61 children, according to the health authorities in the territory.
  • Palestinian activists across Israel took part in a general strike on Tuesday to protest Israel’s air campaign in Gaza and other measures targeting Palestinians.Even before the current conflict, Gaza was facing an economic crisis and political crisis.
  • Since 2007, Hamas has engaged in three major conflicts with Israel and several smaller skirmishes. After each eruption of violence, Gaza’s infrastructure was left in shambles.
  • By Monday, Israeli bombs had destroyed 132 residential buildings and damaged 316 housing units so badly that they were uninhabitable, according to Gaza’s housing ministry.
  • While Hamas fighters move through an extensive series of tunnels under Gaza, and as Israeli warplanes drop bombs aimed at destroying that network, it is the people caught between who suffer the most calamitous losses.
  • “Until a cease-fire is reached, all parties must agree to a ‘humanitarian pause,’” the office said in a statement. “These measures would allow humanitarian agencies to carry out relief operations, and people to purchase food and water and seek medical care.”
ethanshilling

Darwin's Arch, a Famed Rock Formation in the Galápagos, Collapses - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...darwins-arch-collapse.html

shared by ethanshilling on 18 May 21 - No Cached
  • Darwin’s Arch, a famous, photo-friendly rock formation in the remote Galápagos Islands, collapsed on Monday because of natural erosion, Ecuadorean officials said.
  • The collapse of the natural archway in the Pacific Ocean, about 600 miles west of continental Ecuador, left a pile of rubble between two pillars.
  • The waters around the arch are known as a destination for divers, with tours from the main islands offering the opportunity to spot sharks, turtles, manta rays and dolphins. The arch was less than a mile from the uninhabited Darwin Island; both are named after Charles Darwin, the scientist whose study of species on the islands in 1835 influenced his theory of evolution and natural selection.
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  • The Galápagos, once a destination for only well-off travelers unfazed by the islands’ remote location, had seen an increase in tourism before the coronavirus pandemic, with visitor numbers jumping 90 percent between 2007 and 2016.
  • In 2018, a group of tour operators expressed concern about the influx of tourists, saying they could harm not just the wildlife but the islands’ landscapes and beaches.
ethanshilling

Lockdown Eased in England, for Now, at Least - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lockdown-uk-india-variant.html

england india pandemic

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  • The lifting of a wide range of coronavirus rules Monday coincided with a small but worrying spike in cases of a variant, first identified in India, that threatens a lockdown-lifting road map frequently described by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as “cautious but irreversible.”
  • In recent days the authorities have scrambled to ramp up testing and inoculation in parts of the country seeing a sharp rise in cases of the more transmissible variant.
  • The opposition Labour Party has accused Mr. Johnson of bringing on the trouble by delaying a decision to close borders to flights from India last month, while government scientific advisers have expressed their concerns about moving too fast to remove curbs.
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  • Under the changes that came into force on Monday, pubs and restaurants can serve indoors as well as outside, people can hug each other and mix inside their homes in limited numbers.
  • A legal ban on all but essential foreign travel ended too, though travelers to any other than a small number of destinations will have to quarantine on their return.
  • Pakistan and Bangladesh were red listed on April 9 but India was not added until April 23, and Mr. Johnson’s critics have suggested he was reluctant to upset India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, with whom he is trying to strike a trade deal.
  • Altogether, that represents the first real breath of freedom for many in England since the third national lockdown was declared in early January.
  • “We must be humble in the face of this virus,” the health secretary, Matt Hancock, told Parliament on Monday, adding that there were now 86 areas with five or more cases of the variant whose higher transmission rate “poses a real risk.”
  • Mr. Johnson continues to hear criticism for failing to clamp down fast enough on travel from India, even sparing it for some weeks after placing restrictions on travel from Pakistan and Bangladesh.
  • While the government will fight hard not to have to reverse the changes introduced on Monday, there are growing doubts about whether it can proceed with the next stage of the road map. That change, scheduled to take place on June 21, would scrap almost all remaining restrictions.
  • But some experts believe that the government should have reacted faster to the emergence of the variant. “Many of us in the U.K., we’re appalled at the huge delay in classifying it as a variant of concern,” said Peter English, a retired consultant in communicable disease control.
  • In general, Britons are being offered vaccination based on their age, with those oldest treated first. Appointments are to be extended this week to 37-year-olds, Mr. Hancock said.
  • On Monday, Mr. Hancock also said that of 19 cases in Bolton hospitals, most of the patients were eligible for vaccination but had not had one. That prompted a debate in and beyond Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party about whether the lifting of lockdown restrictions should be reversed to protect people who refuse a vaccine.
ethanshilling

Airstrike Damages Gaza's Only Covid-19 Testing Lab, Officials Say - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-gaza-covid-lab.html

israel palestine pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 18 May 21 - No Cached
  • Since Covid-19 first emerged in the blockaded Gaza Strip, a shortage of medical supplies has allowed authorities to administer only a relatively tiny number of coronavirus tests.
  • Now, the sole laboratory in Gaza that processes test results has become temporarily inoperable after an Israeli airstrike nearby on Monday, officials in Gaza said.
  • The strike, which targeted a separate building in Gaza City, sent shrapnel and debris flying across the street, damaging the lab and the administrative offices of the Hamas-run Health Ministry, said Dr. Majdi Dhair, director of the ministry’s preventive medicine department.
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  • The Israeli Army did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the strike. Since Israel began its bombing campaign in Gaza on May 10, the army has said that its airstrikes aim solely at militants and their infrastructure.
  • Over the past week, the authorities in Gaza have tested an average of 515 Palestinians daily for the virus. Only 1.9 percent of Gaza’s two million people were fully vaccinated as of Monday, according to official data, compared with 56 percent in Israel.
  • Unvaccinated Palestinians were crowding into schools run by the United Nations relief agency in Gaza, turning them into de facto bomb shelters. Matthias Schmale, the U.N. agency’s director of operations, said last week that those schools “could turn into mass spreaders.”
  • Mr. Schmale and the top World Health Organization official in Gaza, Sacha Bootsma, also said that all vaccinations had stopped when hostilities broke out, and that any vaccine supplies headed to the territory had been delayed by the closure of Gaza’s border crossings.
ethanshilling

Tokyo Olympics: Japanese Poll Finds 83% Oppose Summer Games - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-japan-olympics-poll.html

tokyo olympics

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  • In a survey released on Monday in Japan, 83 percent of those polled said they did not want Tokyo to hold the Olympics and Paralympics. That total was up 14 percentage points from a survey in April.
  • And a top medical group, the Tokyo Medical Practitioners Association, also wants the games canceled, the news agency Reuters reported.
  • Japan has seen its number of coronavirus cases grow with the spread of deadlier and more contagious variants. The country has been reporting as many as 6,000 cases a day in recent weeks, after recording 1,000 daily in early March.
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  • Nine prefectures, including the large metropolitan areas of Tokyo and Osaka, are under a state of emergency. Residents have been asked to only go out for essential reasons.
  • In the Asahi Shimbun survey, 67 percent said they did not approve of how Mr. Suga and his government had responded to the virus. Japan’s vaccine program has been criticized as one of the slowest among developed countries.
  • As of Monday, only 3.8 percent of the population had received at least one shot of a vaccine, while 1.6 percent have received two.
ethanshilling

Spain Sends Troops to African Enclave After Migrant Crossings Jump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-migrants-ceuta-morocco.html

spain morocco crisis refugee

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  • Spain deployed troops, military trucks and helicopters in its North African enclave of Ceuta on Tuesday after thousands of people crossed over from Morocco, one of the largest movements of migrants reported in the area in recent years.
  • More than 8,000 migrants, including nearly 2,000 minors, arrived on the beaches of Ceuta on Monday and Tuesday, mostly swimming or aboard inflatable boats, according to the Spanish authorities, who said that Spain had already sent back 4,000 people.
  • The sudden arrival of migrants has created a humanitarian emergency in Ceuta, a Spanish autonomous city of 80,000 residents off the tip of Morocco and just 18 miles off Gibraltar, in Spain’s mainland territory.
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  • Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain said on Twitter on Tuesday that his priority was to “get the situation back to normal” in Ceuta.
  • “The most important thing now is that Morocco continues to commit to prevent irregular departures, and that those that do not have the right to stay are orderly and effectively returned,” said Ylva Johansson, the European Union’s commissioner for home affairs.
  • Human rights organizations have warned against the use of excessive force against the migrants and condemned the return of more than 2,700 of them.
  • The Spanish authorities said they were not summarily returning minors, yet Ms. Sunderland questioned whether Spain may have sent back children or vulnerable people, given the speed with which the authorities had deported nearly half of those who had crossed the border.
  • Until this week, around 4,800 people had crossed the Western Mediterranean to Ceuta, Melilla or mainland Spain so far this year, according to government figures, and 106 have died while attempting the crossing, according to the International Organization for Migration. At least 126 have died while trying to reach the Canary Islands.
  • Estrella Galán, the director general of CEAR, a Spanish group that helps asylum seekers and refugees, said Morocco was using migration as leverage against Spain.
  • “This is what happens when we convert other countries into gendarmes of our own borders,” Ms. Galán said.
ethanshilling

More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry Into Coronavirus Origins - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...igins-lab-leak-scientists.html

pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • A group of 18 scientists stated Thursday in a letter published in the journal Science that there is not enough evidence to decide whether a natural origin or an accidental laboratory leak caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • “Most of the discussion you hear about SARS-CoV-2 origins at this point is coming from, I think, the relatively small number of people who feel very certain about their views,” Dr. Bloom said.
  • Proponents of the idea that the virus may have leaked from a lab, especially the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China where SARS viruses were studied, have been active this year since a World Health Organization team issued a report claiming that such a leak was extremely unlikely, even though the mission never investigated any Chinese labs.
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  • Recent letters by another group of scientists and international affairs experts argued at length for the relative likelihood of a laboratory leak. Previous statements from other scientists and the W.H.O. report both asserted that a natural origin was by far the most plausible.
  • The list of signers includes researchers with deep knowledge of the SARS family of viruses, such as Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had collaborated with the Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli in research done at the university on the original SARS virus. Dr. Baric did not respond to attempts to reach him by email and telephone.
  • Speaking for himself only, Dr. Relman said in an interview that “the piece that Kristian Anderson and four others wrote last March in my view simply fails to provide evidence to support their conclusions.”
  • Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, has criticized the politicization of the laboratory leak theory.
  • She supports further investigation, but said that “there is more evidence (both genomic and historical precedent) that this was the result of zoonotic emergence rather than a laboratory accident.”
ethanshilling

Should We Stash Our Masks for Cold and Flu Season? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...masks-covid-flu-cold.html

pandemic masks us

shared by ethanshilling on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • Having been introduced to the idea of wearing masks to protect themselves and others, some Americans are now considering a behavior scarcely seen in the United States but long a fixture in other cultures: routinely wearing a mask when displaying symptoms of a common cold or the flu, even in a future in which Covid-19 isn’t a primary concern.
  • Other leading American health officials, however, have not encouraged the behavior. The C.D.C. — which at the beginning of the pandemic advised against wearing masks, and only changed its guidance a couple of months later — does not advise people with flu symptoms to wear masks, and says they “may not effectively limit transmission in the community.”
  • Though masks proved effective in helping mitigate Covid-19 transmission, they now carry weight as symbols in the red state-blue state culture wars, with segments of the country seeing them as an affront to their freedoms and others considering them a demonstration of caring for others.
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  • “I will still feel a responsibility to protect others from my illness when I have a cold or bronchitis or something along those lines,” said Gwydion Suilebhan, a writer and arts administrator in Washington who said he also plans to continue wearing masks in situations like flying on airplanes.
  • So far, Dr. Leung said, there has been no clear evidence from randomized controlled trials — the gold standard in scientific research — that masking reduced transmission of influenza viruses in a community.
  • For similar reasons, the fact that the flu all but vanished in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic — and that many Americans anecdotally reported that they caught fewer colds than usual in 2020 — is not evidence alone that masks were responsible.
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