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anonymous

Early Coronavirus Mutation Made It Harder to Stop, Evidence Suggests - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-mutation.html

shared by anonymous on 24 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • one mutation near the beginning of the pandemic did make a difference, multiple new findings suggest, helping the virus spread more easily from person to person and making the pandemic harder to stop.
  • The mutation, known as 614G, was first spotted in eastern China in January and then spread quickly throughout Europe and New York City.
  • Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory argued in May that the variant had probably evolved the ability to infect people more efficiently.
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  • But a host of new research — including close genetic analysis of outbreaks and lab work with hamsters and human lung tissue — has supported the view that the mutated virus did in fact have a distinct advantage
  • There is no evidence that a coronavirus with the 614G mutation causes more severe symptoms, kills more people or complicates the development of vaccines.
  • But other researchers said that a lack of proper containment measures, not the mutation, is largely to blame for resurgent outbreaks.
  • The original variant spotted in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 was already highly contagious
  • Even so, Dr. Andersen said that the variant’s higher transmissibility could help explain why some countries that were initially successful in containing the virus became susceptible to it later. The virus may have been “harder to contain than the first time around,” he said.
  • But the subtle change in the virus’ genome appears to have had a big ripple effect
  • Scientists consider animal experiments a critical step to test whether a mutation that makes viruses more infectious in a lab dish also does so in a living population.
  • The virus will continue to change. and while most of those changes will be mere typos, some may be more meaningful, Dr. Engelthaler said. “There will be the possibility of additional alterations that change the nature of the pandemic,” he said.
Javier E

Beleaguered and besieged, police try to come to grips with a nation?s anger - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9063-e69bd6520940_story.html

police reform culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 11 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • A Washington Post-Schar School poll released Monday found that a wide majority of Americans support the protesters, with nearly three-quarters of the country backing them. More than two-thirds of respondents said they thought Floyd’s killing reflected broader problems with police treatment of black Americans, up from less than half after 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo.
  • Whether police agree remains to be seen. To at least some, the officers are the real victims.
  • “Stop treating us like animals and thugs and start treating us with some respect,” New York police union leader Mike O’Meara demanded angrily at a news conference Tuesday. “We’ve been left out of the conversation. We’ve been vilified. It’s disgusting.”
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  • “They don’t understand the vitriol directed at them because they didn’t do anything. They are a symbol of something,” Klinger said. “Officers understand the righteous anger. But not why it is directed at them personally, and why it takes the form of rocks and bottles and bricks.”
  • “Demonstrations that were peaceful during the day would change, and officers had to put themselves in position to prevent property damage. And that would result in violence toward property and toward them,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a D.C. policy center.
  • The attacks add to a preexisting sense among many officers that they are under siege. But data shows there has been no sustained rise in the number of officers killed or assaulted in the line of duty during the past decade.
  • During two weeks spanning the end of May and the beginning of June, 749 officers were injured while responding to protests and disturbances, according to a Justice Department tally. That figure includes about 150 officers hurt in Washington, D.C., 22 of whom required hospitalization.
  • “What the cameras don’t capture is those officers are standing on those lines for 12-, 14-hour shifts and during that time they’re subject to verbal assault, rocks, bricks, frozen water bottles, human waste,” said Harris, the Los Angeles police union leader. “It takes a mental toll and a physical toll.”
  • “Some of the strongest rhetoric for holding accountable civilians who commit crimes comes from police departments,” Wong said. “But when it comes to officers committing crimes, they try to wiggle their way out of it.”
  • “I’ve never seen people rally around the issue in the way they have today. It’s very loud. It’s got a lot of momentum. I understand it. I respect it. I know it needs to happen,” Arcos said. “But officers will tell me, ‘Chief, we’re doing all these things. And it’s still not enough.’ ”
Javier E

A Rainforest, Maya Ruins and the Fight Over a Tourist Train - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...s-and-fight-over-tourist-train

mexico environment tourism maya

shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Environmentalists point to examples of ecotourism initiatives around the world that have backfired. In Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, famous as the place where Charles Darwin did research that developed into his theory of evolution, the government opened or expanded two airports in the archipelago in 2007 and 2012, resulting in a huge jump in the number of tourists. The increased traffic brought invasive species that killed off some native animals.
  • “There’s no such thing as cost-free tourism,” said David Weaver, a geographer who teaches at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and has written a book on sustainable tourism. “We’re still waiting for those exemplars of sustainable tourism done right.”
  • The Maya Train is just the latest in a series of moves by Mr. López Obrador that have angered environmentalists. They chafe at the deep cuts that the president has made to Mexico’s environmental protection agency and to green civil-society groups, while at the same time doubling down on investments in Petróleos Mexicanos, the state oil company.
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  • The administration has also canceled bidding rounds for clean-energy projects in solar and wind power, while boosting natural-gas pipelines and refineries, which experts say will complicate Mexico’s goals under the Paris Climate Accords
  • “It’s become clear that this guy does not care about the environment at all,” said Gustavo Alanis-Ortega, director of the Mexican Center for Environmental Rights, or Cemda, a prominent nonprofit. Adrián Fernández Bremauntz, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Mexico Climate Initiative, said he feels “totally betrayed.”
  • This week, the government said that it is beginning work on the Maya Train without having published an environmental impact report, as required by law.
Javier E

Even Tories increasingly fear they have inflicted the worst of all worlds on Britain | Boris Johnson | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...worst-of-all-worlds-on-britain

uk politics pandemic

shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The most straightforward way to assess the UK’s performance is to compare the number of deaths with the fatalities normally experienced for the time of year.
  • The “excess death” rate over the average of the previous five years has topped 60,000. With 955 “excess deaths” for every million people, the UK has the grimmest record of all countries providing comparable data. In that respect only can the Johnson government’s performance be said to be “world-beating”.
  • The OECD is projecting that the UK will suffer the deepest downturn among advanced economies. It is only a forecast, but it chimes with other indicators suggesting that this country will pay a uniquely high price for its sluggish imposition of the lockdown and the government’s chaotic mismanagement of the attempt to grope towards an exit.
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  • All of which is fuelling the fear that it will be Britain’s fate to get the worst of both worlds: a higher death rate than comparable countries and a more ravaged economy. That dread now radiates from Tories like a pungent musk
  • public approval of the government’s handling of the crisis has fallen to a new low of just 3 in 10.
  • the inevitable public inquiry is convened it will have to decide how much blame should be allocated to longstanding institutional weaknesses and how much can be attributed to the actions and inactions of particular individuals.
  • Many Tory MPs are flashing knives at Public Health England, which they blame for early mis-steps in establishing an adequate testing regime
  • The Tories have been in power for more than a decade and the NHS’s current configuration is a result of the “Lansley reforms” implemented during David Cameron’s premiership.
  • The scientific advisers on the Sage group flagged up the vulnerability of care homes as early as February. Yet the government devoted more zeal to protecting the prime minister’s rule-breaking adviser, Dominic Cummings, than it did to safeguarding the lives of the fragile elderly. A just-released report by the National Audit Office estimates that 25,000 elderly people were discharged from hospitals into homes without being tested at the height of the pandemic.
  • Time and again, I have heard accounts from inside government of warnings given and action exhorted only for the machinery never to properly click into gear for want of decisive leadership.
  • Boris Johnson was complacently late to grasp the gravity of the crisis and then animated by a panic-driven urge to try to impress the public by throwing out pledges he could not deliver. One critique, often to be heard now even from erstwhile admirers, is that his outfit at Number 10 is not so much a government as a campaign
  • , this Number 10 is obsessed with polling and focus grouping, which they conduct daily, and how things are projected in the media. “The problem with this government is that it is led by journalists,”
  • Where energy ought to have been directed to making important things happen, it was expended on concocting brags that might temporarily garner approving headlines or neutralise hostile ones. The result has been a persistent pattern of over-promising and underperforming.
  • His weaknesses have been magnified because he deliberately appointed a cabinet conspicuously light on talent – “the nodding dogs”, as one senior Tory labels them. The cabinet were chosen not for their ability, dynamism or independence of thought, but for their devotion to a hard Brexit and obedience to Number 10.
  • No other European country has made such an abysmal mess of reopening schools.
Javier E

'Cancel culture' doesn't stifle debate, but it does challenge the old order | Billy Bragg | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...free-speech-young-people

cancel culture liberty accountability free speech culture politics

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • a quote from the preface of Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
  • Orwell’s quote is not a defence of liberty; it’s a demand for licence, and has become a foundational slogan for those who wilfully misconstrue one for the other.
  • Over the past decade, the right to make inflammatory statements has become a hot button issue for the reactionary right, who have constructed tropes such as political correctness and virtue signalling to enable them to police the limits of social change while portraying themselves as victims of an organised assault on liberty itself.
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  • Many of those who attached their names to the letter are longstanding cultural arbiters, who, in the past, would only have had to fear the disapproval of their peers. Social media has burst their bubble and they now find that anyone with a Twitter account can challenge their opinions.
  • An open letter that is clearly decrying cancel culture (without naming it as such), signed by 150 academics and writers from all sides of the political spectrum, appeared this week in Harper’s Magazine. The signatories complained of a censoriousness that was stifling debate and called for arguments to be settled by persuasion rather than action.
  • the main thrust of their argument was a howl of anguish from a group that has suddenly found its views no longer treated with reverence.
  • The latest creation in their war against accountability is “cancel culture”, an ill-defined notion
  • The ability of middle-aged gatekeepers to control the agenda has been usurped by a new generation of activists who can spread information through their own networks, allowing them to challenge narratives promoted by the status quo.
  • The great progressive movements of the 21st century have sprung from these networks: Black Lives Matter; #MeToo; Extinction Rebellion. While they may seem disparate in their aims, what they have in common is a demand for accountability.
  • Although free speech remains the fundamental bedrock of a free society, for everyone to enjoy the benefits of freedom, liberty needs to be tempered by two further dimensions: equality and accountability
  • Without equality, those in power will use their freedom of expression to abuse and marginalise others. Without accountability, liberty can mutate into the most dangerous of all freedoms – impunity.
  • a new generation has risen that prioritises accountability over free speech. To those whose liberal ideals are proving no defence against the rising tide of duplicitous authoritarianism, this has come as a shock. But when reason, respect and responsibility are all under threat, accountability offers us a better foundation on which to build a cohesive society, one where everyone feels that their voice is heard
Javier E

Addressing climate change post-coronavirus | McKinsey - 0 views

www.mckinsey.com/...hange-in-a-post-pandemic-world

climate change mckinsey

shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Addressing climate change in a post-pandemic world
  • the coronavirus outbreak seems to indicate that the world at large is equally ill prepared to prevent or confront either.
  • By contrast, financial shocks—whether bank runs, bubble bursts, market crashes, sovereign defaults, or currency devaluations—are largely driven by human sentiment, most often a fear of lost value or liquidity.
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  • Physical shocks, however, can only be remedied by understanding and addressing the underlying physical causes. Our recent collective experience, whether in the public or the private sector, has been more often shaped by financial shocks, not physical ones. The current pandemic provides us perhaps with a foretaste of what a full-fledged climate crisis could entail
  • Pandemics and climate risk also share many of the same attributes. Both are systemic, in that their direct manifestations and their knock-on effects propagate fast across an interconnected world.
  • They are both nonstationary, in that past probabilities and distributions of occurrences are rapidly shifting and proving to be inadequate or insufficient for future projections.
  • Both are nonlinear, in that their socioeconomic impact grows disproportionally and even catastrophically once certain thresholds are breached
  • They are both risk multipliers, in that they highlight and exacerbate hitherto untested vulnerabilities inherent in the financial and healthcare systems and the real economy
  • Both are regressive, in that they affect disproportionally the most vulnerable populations and subpopulations of the world.
  • Finally, neither can be considered as a “black swan,” insofar as experts have consistently warned against both over the years
  • They also require a present action for a future reward that has in the past appeared too uncertain and too small given the implicit “discount rate.” This is what former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has called the “tragedy of the horizon.”
  • addressing pandemics and climate risk requires the same fundamental shift, from optimizing largely for the shorter-term performance of systems to ensuring equally their longer-term resiliency
  • The coronavirus pandemic and the responses that are being implemented (to the tune of several trillion dollars of government stimulus as of this writing) illustrate how expensive the failure to build resiliency can ultimately prove
  • In climate change as in pandemics, the costs of a global crisis are bound to vastly exceed those of its prevention.
  • both reflect “tragedy of the commons” problems, in that individual actions can run counter to the collective good and deplete a precious, common resource.
  • Neither pandemics nor climate hazards can be confronted without true global coordination and cooperation
  • there are also some notable differences between pandemics and climate hazards.
  • A global public-health crisis presents imminent, discrete, and directly discernable dangers, which we have been conditioned to respond to for our survival.
  • The risks from climate change, by contrast, are gradual, cumulative, and often distributed dangers that manifest themselves in degrees and over time.
  • What lessons can be learned from the current pandemic for climate change? What implications—positive or negative—could our pandemic responses hold for climate action?
  • the timescales of both the occurrence and the resolution of pandemics and climate hazards are different.
  • What this means is that a global climate crisis, if and when ushered in, could prove far lengthier and far more disruptive than what we currently see with the coronavirus (if that can be imagined).
  • Finally, pandemics are a case of contagion risk, while climate hazards present a case of accumulation risk.
  • Contagion can produce perfectly correlated events on a global scale (even as we now witness), which can tax the entire system at once; accumulation gives rise to an increased likelihood of severe, contemporaneous but not directly correlated events that can reinforce one another.
  • Climate change—a potent risk multiplier—can actually contribute to pandemics
  • For example, rising temperatures can create favorable conditions for the spread of certain infectious, mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever, while disappearing habitats may force various animal species to migrate, increasing the chances of spillover pathogens between them.
  • Third, investors may delay their capital allocation to new lower-carbon solutions due to decreased wealth.
  • Factors that could support and accelerate climate action
  • For starters, certain temporary adjustments, such as teleworking and greater reliance on digital channels, may endure long after the lockdowns have ended, reducing transportation demand and emissions
  • Second, supply chains may be repatriated, reducing some Scope 3 emissions (those in a company’s value chain but not associated with its direct emissions or the generation of energy it purchases)
  • Third, markets may better price in risks (and, in particular, climate risk) as the result of a greater appreciation for physical and systemic dislocations.
  • There may, additionally, be an increased public appreciation for scientific expertise in addressing systemic issues.
  • there may also be a greater appetite for the preventive and coordinating role of governments in tackling such risks
  • Moreover, lower interest rates may accelerate the deployment of new sustainable infrastructure
  • lastly, the need for global cooperation may become more visible and be embraced more universally.
  • Factors that may hamper and delay climate action
  • Simultaneously, though, very low prices for high-carbon emitters could increase their use and further delay energy transition
  • A second crosscurrent is that governments and citizens may struggle to integrate climate priorities with pressing economic needs in a recovery
  • he environmental impact of some of the measures taken to counter the coronavirus pandemic have been seen by some as a full-scale illustration of what drastic action can produce in a short amount of time.
  • Finally, national rivalries may be exacerbated if a zero-sum-game mentality prevails in the wake of the crisis.
  • For governments, we believe four sets of actions will be important
  • First, build the capability to model climate risk and to assess the economics of climate change.
  • Second, devote a portion of the vast resources deployed for economic recovery to climate-change resiliency and mitigation
  • Third, seize the opportunity to reconsider existing subsidy regimes that accelerate climate change
  • Fourth, reinforce national and international alignment and collaboration on sustainability, for inward-looking, piecemeal responses are by nature incapable of solving systemic and global problems.
  • For companies, we see two priorities. First, seize the moment to decarbonize, in particular by prioritizing the retirement of economically marginal, carbon-intensive assets
  • Second, take a systematic and through-the-cycle approach to building resilience.
  • For all—individuals, companies, governments, and civil society—we see two additional priorities. First, use this moment to raise awareness of the impact of a climate crisis, which could ultimately create disruptions of great magnitude and duration.
  • That includes awareness of the fact that physical shocks can have massive nonlinear impacts on financial and economic systems and thus prove extremely costly.
  • Second, build upon the mindset and behavioral shifts that are likely to persist after the crisis (such as working from home) to reduce the demands we place on our environment—or, more precisely, to shift them toward more sustainable sources.
  • Moving toward a lower-carbon economy presents a daunting challenge, and, if we choose to ignore the issue for a year or two, the math becomes even more daunting.
  • it is also critical that we begin now to integrate the thinking and planning required to build a much greater economic and environmental resiliency as part of the recovery ahead.
Javier E

Denial and Defiance: Trump and His Base Downplay the Virus Ahead of the Election - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-base-virus.html

pandemic trump crisis politics policy denial election

shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • From resistance to face masks and scorn for the science of the coronavirus to predicting the imminent arrival of a vaccine while downplaying the death count, President Trump and a sizable number of his supporters have aligned emphatically behind an alternate reality minimizing a tragedy that has killed an overwhelming number of Americans and gutted the economy.
  • it is also a direct result of the look-the-other-way message that the Trump administration has sent with increasing urgency, pollsters and strategists say, as the president faces a strong challenge to re-election
  • Mr. Trump has called on Twitter for people to “LIBERATE” states that have imposed stay-at-home orders, threatened to withhold aid from Democratic governors and undercut medical professionals who have cautioned against the use of unproven medical treatments and premature school reopenings.
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  • Polls show that Republicans approve of how he has handled the response to the virus by overwhelming margins and — unlike much of the country — think the United States has moved too slowly to reopen.
  • “President Trump was a terrible role model,” said former Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, a Republican who has said he will vote for Mr. Biden.
  • Tucker Carlson told his viewers on Fox News the other night that Covid-19 was “not dangerous to the overwhelming number of people who are destroyed by the Covid restrictions.”
  • The message has been reinforced by figures on Fox News and elsewhere in the pro-Trump news media.
  • These disagreements reflect old and conflicting beliefs about the role of government in America. Leave-me-alone libertarianism and deep suspicion of an overly intrusive federal government have long animated conservatives and taken root in the frontier West. Now those resentments, fanned by Mr. Trump, are colliding with a contagious disease and the most contentious election in recent memory.
  • “I don’t believe that the federal government could have done much more,” said Linda Jackson, 60, a Trump supporter who lives in North Cornwall Township, in Lebanon County, Pa. “The president, in my opinion, thinks outside the box, and he enlisted public-private partnerships to get the equipment, the ventilators, the P.P.E., all the things that we needed on the local level to combat the virus. And he’s really ramped up this testing for a vaccine.
  • “I think he’s done a really good job,” she said.
  • The president has tried to present himself as someone who has aggressively sought to confront the virus from the start. For any shortcomings or failures, he and his allies have tried to shift blame to others: China, the states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the World Health Organization. And he continues to provide projections that experts warn are overly optimistic or misguided. Last week he said that a vaccine could be ready “very, very soon,” and insisted that the virus would simply vanish. “It’s going to disappear,” he said in an interview with ABC News.
Javier E

In the Epicenter of Mexico's Coronavirus Epicenter, Feeling Like a 'Trapped Animal' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-covid-iztapalapa.html

mexico pandemic response effects 2020

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • No part of the world has been as devastated by the pandemic as Latin America
  • Mexico, Brazil, Peru and other Latin American countries — hobbled by weak health systems, severe inequality and government indifference — have several of the highest deaths per capita from the virus in the world.
  • the outbreak in Latin American has not struck in waves. It hit furiously in the spring and has continued for months, with few of the respites savored elsewhere
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  • the 10 countries with the highest deaths per capita were all in Latin America or the Caribbean.
  • deep-seated skepticism among people like Mr. Arriaga — the workers who feed Mexico City and much of the nation — turned to shock, and eventually to resignation, as their neighbors, friends and loved ones died and their neighborhood became ground zero for the outbreak.
  • Officials had posted signs warning of Covid-19 and urging workers to report illnesses. In the beginning, most ignored them.“I think they made it up, to raise prices on the poor,” Mr. Arriaga said of the virus in March
  • A new reality set in for many: A prolonged economic shutdown was clearly impossible. People could wear masks, and distance as much as possible, but almost no one could afford to stay home. They had to keep working.
  • For the vast majority of people, risking illness or death has simply become the price of survival.
  • Mr. Arriaga’s own attempts to stay away from the market lasted only a month before he blew through his life savings and trudged back to work in fear.“I’ve got nothing left,” he said on a recent weekend, bracing himself for another long night in the market. “It’s either go out there and face the virus, or sit here and starve.”
  • Now, Mexico has the fourth-highest death toll in the world, with more than 70,000 lives officially lost to the virus. Experts say the real number may be tens of thousands more than that.
  • Tomas BravoMexico City8h agoGreat article. Even living in the same city there are different realities playing out, and this gives a good insight into the stories of some of the worst struck by the pandemic. Some local media have talked of these issues, but there is an ongoing effort from the government to deny these allegations. It is nice to see a story told from the perspective of individuals through which the bigger issues that have paved the way for this crisis are highlighted
  • (b) we see no arguments about mask wearing in CDMX stores/areas, and witnessed concerns about customers shooting up USA grocery stories if masks are enforced,
  • gtodonGuanajuato, Mexico3h ago@Ignacio Colin Perhaps in your neighborhood of sprawling Mexico City, the "community is strong and doing its part." Where I live, in Guanajuato, about half the people on the streets, and even in the stores, decline to wear masks, and half of those who do wear masks don't wear them properly; they appear to think they're chin-guards. The same is true in nearby León, a much larger city. In the state of Guanajuato, only San Miguel de Allende, with its large foreign population, takes Covid seriously.
  • BVINew York7h agoPowerful article with powerful images. I felt close to the shopkeepers and their families. The intimacy of these stories and revealing personal impact in such detail, without judgment, makes the story so much more human. "At every level, there is simply less." A sadly perfect summation of this pandemic's impact.
  • IvanMemphis, TN9h agoTwo failures seem to be conspiring to make this a catastrophe. First the governments failure to institute simple low cost and effective measures to reduce the spreed - like mandatory and enforced masks in crowded public areas. Second the failure of the public to take it serious and follow common sense guidance - because of paranoia about the motives of experts and government. I guess they are not that different from the US, except they have less resources to counter the predictable outcomes of these failures.
  • gnacio ColinMexico City8h agoOnce again, we are portrayed as a country that diminishes the virus’ impact and downplays it. It’s a great read but tbh most of the responsibility lays on the President, who has been adamant about employing techniques that do not combat the virus. Nonetheless, Mexico City’s government led by a PhD, Claudia Sheinbaum has done a great job and has countered the President in many ways regarding the management. We have a dormant President who chooses to look elsewhere instead of looking for solutions (he’s done the same with medication purchases, education, ecology, human rights commissions, to say the least). The Mexican community is strong and is doing its part on mitigating this national (and global) tragedy.
  • D. HendersonMexico City4h ago@Jorge Romero and @ E. Voigt, you have points and they are well taken. I live in CMDX and work in rural MX. In July, we made a "necessary" risky cross-country drive to see Ohio family b/c we suspect that such is impossible until a vaccine in spring 2021 or later. We used masks, face shields, alcohol solutions when at two hotels & gas stations. Some anectodal sharing
  • Like many people in Iztapalapa, they felt a sense of shame associated with the virus.“There’s a stigma,” said Mr. Dominguez, the organizer. “No one wants to admit they had it.”
  • ExPatMXAjijic, Jalisco Mexico7h ago@observer " We shouldn't be reporting on these "poor countries" as if we are so far removed on our American pedestal any longer." Thank you. Mexico is a magnificent country and the people remind me of how Americans treated each other with kindness and friendliness when I was young. They make eye contact on the streets, wish you a good day, you'll see teenage boys taking young siblings places with care and loving. There are some places in the US that this happens but a lot more places that it doesn't. Is the government corrupt? Certainly. But they are open about it while the US government is equally corrupt but hides it behind religion or other convenient excuses. We have been adopted" into a few Mexican families and attend birthdays, wedding, and fiestas. This article made me want to cry. The poor in Mexico are struggling to survive just as the poor in the US are similarly struggling. This article put faces on the essential workers who are risking their lives to feed their families (and the rest of the country) which I think is needed so the rest of us who are lucky can identify with what this disease is doing to people.
  • (c) CDMX is MASSIVE, centro de abastos is massive, hard to relay really its size and diversity and intensity. It IS "formally" and "informally" opening up again for many of the reasons explained in this article; it "feels" like a deal is being made with the COVID-19 devil (only time and the virus will dictate outcomes).
  • ONE. Thank you NYT for this article and to the commentators for their sharing. Good. TWO. When comparing citizen behavior in CDMX streets to what we saw in TX, TN, AR, KY, OH we note (a) NOW 95-100% of people in CDMX streets, metro, tianguis (markets) use masks, compared with 40-50% (or less depending on USA area),
  • PaulRio de Janeiro10h agoI cannot speak for Mexico, but I can speak for Brazil, where many cities have seen their numbers plummet, sometimes by over 90%. This is the case in Rio where much has been open for weeks, months in the case of malls and many other public places, without dire consequences.
  • At this very moment I personally know more people sick in Europe than I do here in Rio or even in Brazil. This is not to minimize the impact that Covid had on Latin America, on Brazil and on Rio. The opposite in fact: it is close to undeniable that some measure of herd immunity was attained in many of the hardest hit places, including New York City, northern Italy and several Brazilian cities.
  • d) urban CDMX life is different than rural MX life (and other MX cities) always and now; yet, there is a general lack of trust across the board about info and institutions, so much so that we know the death rate IS not accurate, many die in their homes rather than go to hospitals). Survive is what we all must do.
  • The recovery of places like Manaus, Recife, Rio, São Paulo and other Brazilian cities has been woefully underreported by the New York Times and others. It is too bad because an analysis of the data and of the facts on the ground could yield valuable insight for other countries and cities, especially in poor or emerging countries.
  • misinformation was as rampant as the virus itself.Ms. Aquino’s cellphone brimmed with clips sent via WhatsApp. Some claimed that the virus was a Chinese conspiracy, others that bleach was a cure. Even President Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered his own theories, contending that a clean conscience helped prevent infection.
  • “I’ve heard government is paying people to claim their loved ones died from Covid,” Ms. Aquino whispered. “I have two friends who were offered money.”At best, the rumors sowed confusion and doubt. At worst, they were a death sentence.
  • A dull acceptance of the new reality filled Iztapalapa: Coronavirus is a necessary risk, and the reward for taking it is merely survival.
  • Thank you for this story about our new home country. We live far from Mexico City in the state of Jalisco where the governor and local officials took the virus seriously. So far their efforts have been rewarded with per capita numbers of cases around 20 per 100,000, some of the consistently best results anywhere in the world.
  • I was born and raised in Mexico and all my family is still there. Back in March I received video in which a central de abastos worker mocks the pandemic and people who are quarantining calling them lazy, and those wearing masks, gullible. The video to me helped illustrate the hard truth that México, like the USA, has parallel narratives. There are those who believe the science and consume fact-checked news, like my relatives. And there are also many who believe conspiracy theories or folk remedies, including misinformation on YouTube. I believe the official tally of the sick and dead is much lower than the real numbers. This disease is exposing the fragility of Mexico’s institutions, much like it has American ones.
  • As a full-time resident of Mexico I can attest that most Mexicans either have had a family member ill from Covid and/or have lost a family member to Covid. It has attacked not only low income but also middle and upper classes. It is rampant here but unfortunately the wealthy have better access to adequate health care. Most Mexicans I know are very vigilant about mask wearing; unfortunately the American tourists who come to holiday here are not vigilant and are reluctant to wear masks.
  • ilToronto
  • Rachael EiermannLos Cabos, Mexico
  • Brad BurnsMexico
leilamulveny

How Trump and Biden Differ on the Environment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-trump-environment-policy.html

trump biden environment new york times Culture

shared by leilamulveny on 22 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Trump is pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, signed by almost every country, and has lifted limits on planet-warming emissions
  • Trump has weakened the Endangered Species Act, arguing that it hurt the economy, and rolled back regulations on hunting, fishing and animal welfare.
  • Trump has cut protections for wetlands, shrunk national monuments and backed logging and drilling in national forests and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.Biden wants to ban new oil and gas permits on public lands and in public waters, and protect 30 percent of the country’s land by 2030.
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  • Before the pandemic, air quality in the U.S. was worsening for the first time in years
  • Biden wants to fund renewable energy development and ban new oil and gas permits on public lands
  • Biden would rejoin the agreement. He has a $2 trillion plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050
  • Biden wants to restore Obama-era regulations, increase spending on water treatment and water pipeline repairs, and prosecute companies that pollute.
ethanshilling

Do India's Cows Have Special Powers? Government Curriculum Is Ridiculed - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...india-cow-exam-curriculum.html

india government cows

shared by ethanshilling on 23 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Indian students were hitting the books hard in preparation for a big test on cows, reading that India’s cows have more emotions than foreign ones, and that their humps have special powers.
  • But facing widespread ridicule, this weekend the government abruptly postponed the first exam based on a new curriculum, pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.
  • Critics said the curriculum, devised by the National Cow Commission set up by Mr. Modi’s government, was an especially bold move by his ruling party to push its ideology and undercut the secularism that is enshrined in India’s Constitution but seems to be increasingly imperiled with each passing day.
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  • “This is very weird, this exam,” said Komal Srivastava, an official for the India Knowledge and Science Society, a nonprofit educational group.
  • India is 80 percent Hindu, but it is also home to large Muslim, Sikh, Christian and other religious minorities. Since Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, his party has embarked on a steady, intense and divisive campaign to make India more of an overtly Hindu state.
  • Cows have become a special flash point. Since Mr. Modi came to power, Hindu nationalist lynch mobs have killed dozens of people in the name of protecting cows.
  • The material has chapters on cow entrepreneurship and sayings from Hindu scriptures.
  • The study material in the new course was designed by the cow commission, which falls under the Ministry of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, and was widely circulated online in several languages, including English.
  • In 2019, Mr. Modi’s government established the National Cow Commission with the express purpose of protecting cows. Its website lists, among other objectives, “proper implementation of laws with respect to prohibition of slaughter and/or cruelty to cows.”
  • The material that students were asked to absorb for the exam, however, made baseless claims, like one that inside the hump of the Indian cow “there is a solar pulse which is known to absorb vitamin D from the sun’s rays and release it in its milk.”
  • The test was not made mandatory, but India’s University Grants Commission, a federal agency, encouraged students — in fact, all citizens — to study the material and take the exam as an extracurricular activity.
  • Nivedita Menon, a professor of political theory at one of India’s premier educational institutions, Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the government was trying to “completely undo research and critical thinking.”
Javier E

Opinion | How white supremacy infected Christianity and the Republican Party - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-christianity-republican-party

white supremacy christianity GOP history

shared by Javier E on 03 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Trump’s ascendancy has snuffed out the White Christian character and virtue industry, at least as these ideals apply to our political leaders
  • One jaw-dropping statistic: In 2011, only 3 in 10 White evangelicals said that it was possible for a political leader to commit immoral acts in his or her private life and still be able to fulfill their duties in their public life; by 2016, with Trump at the top of the ticket, 72 percent of White evangelicals had decided this was no longer a problem.
  • Today, approximately 7 in 10 self-identified Republicans are white and Christian, compared to only 3 in 10 self-identified Democrats.
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  • Q: Is the white-supremacist mind-set a Trump problem or a GOP problem?A: The roots of the GOP problem go back at least to the toleration and execution of the Southern Strategy to win elections. When such a tactic is deployed for half a century, no one should be surprised when white-supremacist sentiments turn out to be an animating core of group identity. I hope there can be a more honest reckoning, both for the Republican Party and for its White Christian base that has provided theological and moral cover for this strategy.
  • Trump is most accurately understood as the inevitable end of a road paved brick by brick through 13 presidential election cycles since 1968. By the time the RNC attempted to apologize for the Southern Strategy in 2005 or advocated for a more pragmatic and humane immigration policy in its “autopsy report” after [Mitt] Romney’s 2012 defeat, this runaway freight train simply had too much momentum behind it to be easily derailed.
  • I do think the clarity of the current moment is calling the moral question in this election like no other in my lifetime. There is an opportunity here, for both the GOP and for White Christians who are a part of its foundation, to rebuild a party of principle that rejects white supremacy and strategies that stoke white racial fears and grievances.
anonymous

Spike Lee and the Battlefield of American History - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...spike-lee-da-5-bloods.html

history US crisis trump politics

shared by anonymous on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • This is Lee at a strange and singular moment in his career. He has spent nearly four decades and more than 30 films reckoning with the jagged and brutal course of history. Now, in the middle of a global calamity, and with a new film, “Da 5 Bloods,” that revisits the Vietnam War, he is its witness once again — older, more contemplative and as insatiable as ever, despite a legacy as solid as exists in American cinema.
  • If front-line workers are the heroes of this story, it’s clear who Lee thinks is the villain. The director, an outspoken antagonist of Donald J. Trump since the 1980s, lamented the president’s “pathetic lack of leadership,” singling out his widely condemned public musings on crackpot treatments for the virus.
  • “Telling people to use ultraviolet lights? Drinking bleach and whatnot?” Lee said, leaning into a chuckle. He squinted, as if he still couldn’t believe it himself. “People will go to the hospital because they believe” that stuff, he said. “Get out of here with that!”
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  • Trump is a significant figure in “Da 5 Bloods,” an action-adventure tale about four black veterans who return to Vietnam more than 40 years after the war. A central character, Paul, played by the longtime Lee collaborator Delroy Lindo, is an avowed Trump supporter and spends much of the film in a red “Make America Great Again” hat.
  • Though Paul’s vocal defense of the president may come as a surprise to some, Lee has a long track record portraying complicated black characters without sanitizing them. Exit polls show that while the vast majority of black voters overall supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, 13 percent of black men supported Trump.
  • The two were particularly interested in the psychology of black soldiers who fought for freedoms abroad that they’d been denied at home, a subject Lee previously explored in his World War II film “Miracle at St. Anna” (2008).
  • “Da 5 Bloods,” which, in addition to footage of antiwar protests, is intercut with some extremely graphic documentary images of the war, including a haunting photo from the My Lai massacre, reaffirms Lee’s capacity for outrage at his country. That capacity was tested again recently, when footage showing the killing of Ahmaud Arbery was released earlier this month.
  • “It’s 2020, and black and brown people are being shot like animals,” Lee said, his voice climbing to a new register. “Tell me in what world can two brothers with a handgun and a shotgun follow a white jogger in a pickup truck, kill him, and it takes two months for them to get arrested?”
chrispink7

New Ebola outbreak detected in northwest Democratic Republic of the Congo; WHO surge team supporting the response - 0 views

www.who.int/...e-team-supporting-the-response

shared by chrispink7 on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo announced today that a new outbreak of Ebola virus disease is occurring in Wangata health zone, Mbandaka, in Équateur province. The announcement comes as a long, difficult and complex Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is in its final phase, while the country also battles COVID-19 and the world’s largest measles outbreak. Initial information from the Ministry of Health is that six Ebola cases have so far been detected in Wangata, of which four have died and two are alive and under care. Three of these six cases have been confirmed with laboratory testing. It is likely more people will be identified with the disease as surveillance activities increase. “This is a reminder that COVID-19 is not the only health threat people face,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “Although much of our attention is on the pandemic, WHO is continuing to monitor and respond to many other health emergencies.”This is the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 11th outbreak of Ebola since the virus was first discovered in the country in 1976. The city of Mbandaka and its surrounding area were the site of Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 9th Ebola outbreak, which took place from May to July 2018. “It’s happening at a challenging time, but WHO has worked over the last two years with health authorities, Africa CDC and other partners to strengthen national capacity to respond to outbreaks,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa. “To reinforce local leadership, WHO plans to send a team to support scaling up the response. Given the proximity of this new outbreak to busy transport routes and vulnerable neighbouring countries we must act quickly.”WHO is already on the ground in Mbandaka supporting the response to this outbreak, as part of capacity built during the 2018 outbreak. The team supported the collection and testing of samples, and reference to the national laboratory for confirmation. Contact tracing is underway. Work is ongoing to send additional supplies from North Kivu and from Kinshasa to support the government-led response. A further 25 people are expected to arrive in Mbandaka tomorrow. WHO is also working to ensure that essential health services are provided to communities despite these emergency events.The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 10th outbreak of Ebola, in North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri provinces, is in its final stages. On 14 May 2020, the Ministry of Health began the 42-day countdown to the declaration of the end of that outbreak. New outbreaks of Ebola are expected in the Democratic Republic of the Congo given the existence of the virus in an animal reservoir in many parts of the country. 
Javier E

Powell, Mnuchin Outline Contrasting Perils Facing Economy - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...s-lending-programs-11589880602

economy pandemic response strategies

shared by Javier E on 20 May 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Mnuchin echoed comments by President Trump and other administration officials who are predicting a V-shaped recovery—a sharp downturn followed by a strong bounceback.
  • “We’re going to have a really good third quarter. It’s already happening,” Mr. Trump told reporters
  • Mr. Powell, meanwhile, challenged the premise that there is a trade-off between economic growth and protecting the public’s health
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  • Fear of coronavirus infection is the economy’s biggest hurdle, he said, and the recovery will be held back until Americans believe it’s safe to resume commercial activities involving person-to-person contact.
  • “The No. 1 thing, of course, is people believing that it’s safe to go back to work so they can go out,” said Mr. Powell. “That’s what it will take for people to regain confidence.”
  • “If consumers are afraid to eat out, shop or travel, a relaxation in laws requiring business closures may do little to bring back customers and thus jobs,”
  • Mr. Powell and other senior central bank officials have indicated they don’t think a V-shaped recovery is likely. This has fueled their concern that the government’s initial relief measures may prove insufficient to nurse the economy through a shock with no modern parallel and with interest rates already near zero.
  • Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren said he expected the unemployment rate to peak near 20% this year and to stay above 10% through the end of the year. “This outlook is both sobering and a call to action,” he said. “Now is the time for both monetary and fiscal policy to act boldly to minimize the economic pain from the pandemic.”
  • Mr. Rosengren warned that simply allowing businesses to reopen without slowing the spread of the virus risked making the economy worse.
  • For the third time in a week, Mr. Powell suggested additional spending by Washington could be needed to prevent long-term damage from high unemployment and waves of bankruptcies. “The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent and are significantly worse than any recession since World War II,”
  • It is vital that the design and timing of reductions in business restrictions not result in worse outcomes and higher unemployment over a longer period of time.”
  • Congress has appropriated nearly $2.9 trillion so far to support households, businesses, health-care providers and state and local governments, or around 14% of national economic output.
  • “I do think we need to take a step back and ask over time is it enough, and we need to be prepared to act further,” Mr. Powell said Tuesday.
  • Animating the administration’s approach is the expectation of a V-shaped recovery, he indicated. “We believe it’s the best bet,” Mr. Kudlow said.
  • “They’re all assuming after Labor Day everything is fine. Hope is not a strategy,” said Stephen Myrow, a former Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration
  • The issue has taken on urgency because of uncertainty over how long consumers will shun commercial activities that require human contact and because of partisan differences that could hold up further federal spending.
anonymous

Queen Elizabeth II recalls WWII evacuations during coronavirus speech - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-speech-wwii-child-evacuations

history

shared by anonymous on 20 May 20 - No Cached
  • She also harked back to her first speech to the public ever, when she was only 14 and still a princess.“It reminds me of the very first broadcast I made, in 1940, helped by my sister,” she said, as an archive photo of the girls appeared on-screen. “We as children spoke from here at Windsor [Castle] to children who had been evacuated from their homes and sent away for their own safety.”
  • The wave of child evacuations had begun the year before, on Sept. 1, 1939 — the same day Nazi Germany invaded Poland and only two days before Britain’s prime minister declared war. Fearing civilian casualties if British cities were bombed, officials urged parents to send their children to the countryside to live with strangers who volunteered to provide space for them.
  • Evacuation of children was voluntary, according to the Imperial War Museum, but since urban schools had been shut down, the decision was made easier.
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  • In the first wave, nearly 1 million children, hundreds of thousands of teachers and half-a-million mothers with babies were evacuated. The teachers were assigned groups of kids to find spaces for when their trains arrived in smaller towns and villages.
  • In September 1940, the predicted Nazi bombing campaign known as “the Blitz” began, and the last wave of child evacuations took place. Many well-to-do families also arranged for their children to be sent overseas to countries such as Canada, Australia and the United States.
  • For others, the evacuation was a nightmare. Their food rations from the government were confiscated by the families they ended up with; they were put to work in fields; many were physically and sexually abused. John Abbott told the BBC he was whipped by his host family whenever he spoke and was eventually rescued by local police, bruised and bleeding.
  • by January 1940, nearly half of parents had brought their children home, the museum said. The health ministry put up threatening posters to discourage this. One poster depicts a mother visiting her children in the country with a ghostly Adolf Hitler over her shoulder, tempting her like Satan to “Take them back! Take them back!”
  • Accommodations varied wildly. Some children were virtually adopted by host families and given love and good care. Some lived in large manors housing dozens of children and run by teachers. Many of the urban children were seeing the countryside, agriculture and farm animals for the first time, finding it both inspiring and boring.
  • It was after this last wave, in October 1940, that Princess Elizabeth addressed the children of Britain.
  • When Elizabeth turned 18 in early 1945, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, where she trained as a truck mechanic and driver. To this day, she is the only female member of the royal family to have served in the military.
  • In 1940, she told the children — her contemporaries — “When peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.”Now 93, she said Sunday: “I hope, in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge. And those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any.”“Today, once again, many will feel a painful sense of separation from their loved ones,” she closed. “But now, as then, we know deep down that it is the right thing to do.”
brookegoodman

Being black while in nature: 'You're an endangered species' | Life and style | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...re-youre-an-endangered-species

culture US

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • It was 2011 when Rue Mapp was followed by a white woman in an Oakland, California, park, while out on a national campaign to get local families connected with nature.
  • “The kids around me might have rightly been thinking, ‘Is she talking about us?’” says Rue, who is black. She says the incident brought “so many levels of shame, embarrassment and of not feeling welcome in nature”.
  • In the days after the video went viral, the woman lost her job and surrendered her dog – but many black people say that it is not an isolated incident.
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  • Jason Ward, whose popular birdwatching series Birds of North America features Christian Cooper, decides to view the injustice the same way a bird would see the world: migrating through spaces, stopping at places that benefit them and passing over ones that offer them nothing.
  • These are defense mechanisms that Ward and many other black nature-lovers have to employ when out in the wild – lest a situation turn sticky and they have to answer questions from a suspecting police officer. In short, in a battle of he-said-she-said, most black people know who the burden of proof falls on.
  • Lanham goes back to his nine rules to exemplify this. When he considers going on a specific trip, alongside weighing up the many universally good factors (nature’s beauty) as well as the bad (the possibility that he will get stung by a wasp or step on an ants’ nest), he also has to make other decisions, mostly based on his safety. “I have to make decisions about where I go, when I go, who I go with, what people will be thinking of me when I am there. I need to make sure I am wearing the right thing, that my car registration is in the right place so when I am stopped, I am not suspected of harboring something,” he says. “I have some complex equation that I have to figure out several times a fucking day.”
  • “I am tired of the narrative of black bodies being harmed in nature and in the outdoors,” she says. “From a practical perspective, we all pay taxes on these public lands and so to enjoy them is an exercise of our citizenship. It is what being American is all about,” she says.
  • “When I grew up, there was no one I knew in the natural world studying animals who looked like I did, at least not on television. And yet, still my love persisted,” he says.
  • In the weeks and months ahead, our journalism will investigate the prospects for a new green settlement. We will showcase the big thinkers and protagonists and amplify the arguments for authorities everywhere to consider as they lead us out of coronavirus.
  • You've read 66 articles in the last six months. Our journalism is open to all because we believe everyone deserves access to factual information, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. If you can afford to, we hope you will consider supporting our journalism today.
Javier E

Guilt Is Powerful for Those Doing Fine in the Lockdown - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ne-in-the-lockdown-11590090101

guilt morality pandemic class inequality

shared by Javier E on 24 May 20 - No Cached
  • Counselors say clients who can work from home are expressing discomfort with the dichotomy between the improvement in their lives during lockdown and the devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic. They are asking themselves whether it is fair that they are not experiencing the same pain they are seeing in the news.
  • “Ninety percent of my clients who are doing well feel an edge of guilt,” says Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist in Santa Rosa, Calif. She warns patients of the toxicity of comparing themselves to other people: There is no benefit to feeling bad because others are feeling pain, and such guilt only leads to anger, sadness and depression.
  • She advises that the way for people to cope with guilt is to accept that they are feeling great even though the current crisis is terrible.
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  • She likens the feeling to survivor’s guilt, when there is a sense of injustice. She recommends a positive action to correct that feeling and to express gratitude.
  • guilt doesn’t have to be destructive, some philosophers argue—in fact, properly understood, it can motivate people to address some of the inequities that the virus is revealing.
  • Guilt is pervasive now because the coronavirus crisis has opened up a very real class division in the country between those whose jobs allow them to stay home and those whose lives and livelihoods are in the process of being destroyed,
  • Guilt tends to promote reparative action, such as helping those in need, says Patricia Greenspan, a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of “Practical Guilt.” She says those benefiting from the crisis have an ethical responsibility to contribute to efforts to alleviate others’ suffering.
  • Catherine Wilson, author of “Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory,” thinks that someone who feels guilty should think instead about what kind of world would be an improvement on the one we are living in now. If people don’t feel bad about enjoying themselves but see that they can make life better for others, they can use their energy and talent to activate moral leadership, sparking innovations to make society more just and fair, she says
Javier E

The Roman Republic Was Teetering. Then a Volcano Erupted 6,000 Miles Away. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rome-caesar-volcano.html

environmental volcano crisis roman republic empire

shared by Javier E on 24 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • a volcanic eruption in the remote Aleutian Islands, 6,000 miles away from the Italian peninsula, contributed to the demise of the Roman Republic. That eruption — and others before it and since — played a role in changing the course of history.
  • At the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., it’s not unusual to find researchers in puffy parkas and wool hats handling chunks of ice in a minus 4 Fahrenheit “cold room.” Ice cores, typically drilled vertically from glaciers, hide bits of volcanic material that rained down from long-ago eruptions within their layers.
  • Joseph McConnell, a climate scientist at the institute, and his collaborators are in the business of looking for that debris. Using an instrument they designed and built, they melt the ice and pipe the water into an array of sensors. With hundreds of feet of tubing, the setup looks downright chaotic, but it’s exquisitely sensitive. The sensors pinpoint many substances, including about 30 different elements, and they do so by catching just tiny whiffs.“They have sensitivities of parts per quadrillion,” Dr. McConnell said.
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  • Volcanic ash, more generally known as tephra, sometimes hides in ice. It’s a special find because it can be geochemically tied to a specific volcano. “The tephra comes from the magma itself,
  • Sulfur is also indicative of a past eruption. Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, reacts with water in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles can linger in the stratosphere for years, riding wind currents, but they, like tephra, eventually fall back to Earth.
  • The ice also carries a time stamp. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues look for variations in elements like sodium, which is found in sea spray that’s seasonally blown inland. By simply counting annual variations in these elements, it’s possible to trace the passage of time, Dr. McConnell said. “It’s like a tree-ring record.”
  • In layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C., they spotted large upticks in sulfur and, crucially, bits of material that were probably tephra. The timing caught the scientists’ attention.
  • Researchers have previously hypothesized that an environmental trigger may have helped set in motion the crop failures, famines and social unrest that plagued the Mediterranean region at that time. But until now, “There hasn’t been the kind of data that these scholars brought forth to really get those theories into the mainstream,”
  • The match was spot on, Dr. Plunkett said. “There are some events that are tricky. With Okmok, there’s nothing else that looks like it.”
  • This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth’s climate.
  • “They’ve created, for a short term, global cooling events,”
  • Using climate models to simulate the impact of an Okmok eruption, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators estimated that parts of the Mediterranean, roughly 6,000 miles away, would have cooled by as much as 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • Rain patterns changed as well — some regions would have been drenched by 400 percent more precipitation than normal, the modeling revealed.
  • That climate shock came at precisely the wrong time, Dr. Clark said. “This was a period of Mediterranean-wide political, social and economic upheaval.”
  • Historical records compiled by Roman writers and philosophers note food shortages and famines. In 43 B.C., Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, and his army had to subsist on wild fruit, roots, bark and “animals never tasted before,” the philosopher Plutarch wrote.
  • For a society already reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, such trying conditions might have exacerbated social unrest, the researchers concluded. They might even have kick-started transfers of political power that led to the rise of the Roman Empire.
  • “It’s an incredible coincidence that it happened exactly in the waning years of the Roman Republic when things were falling apart,”
  • The links in the study are probable, but not definite. “They’re not being heavy handed and saying this is absolutely it,” Dr. Holmberg said.
  • Egyptian society, before the installation of the Aswan Low Dam in the early 20th century, was anchored by the annual summer flooding of the Nile River. These summer floods, sustained by monsoon rains in the highlands of Ethiopia, delivered irrigation and silt, both critical to Egypt’s agrarian society. “The whole rhythm of the year was built around responding to the flood,” Dr. Manning of Yale said.
  • But volcanic eruptions, even those on the other side of the world, could have disrupted that flooding, Dr. Manning and his colleagues recently showed. Using records from Cairo’s Nilometer — an octagonal marble column that was used for recording Nile flood height from 622 to 1902 A.D., the team found that flooding tended to be weaker, or entirely absent, during years when there was a large volcanic eruption somewhere in the world.
  • he culprit, the team reasoned in a paper published a few years ago, was cooling caused by sulfate aerosols. When Earth cools after a large eruption, its atmospheric circulation patterns change. That can shift the invisible meeting point of Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds — the Intertropical Convergence Zone — that affects where monsoon rains tend to fall. When less precipitation falls over Ethiopia, home to a major tributary of the Nile, there’s less water available for flooding that year.
  • Ptolemaic-era records revealed that this reduced flooding had socioeconomic and political consequences. Revolts increased in the years following “Nile failure,” Dr. Manning and his colleagues found. Priestly decrees — intended to establish the political legitimacy of Greek rulers — also became more commonplace.
  • “There are still large unsourced mystery eruptions up until the early 19th century.”
  • Right now, roughly a dozen volcanoes are erupting. In all likelihood, they’re nothing to worry about — it’s doubtful you’ve even heard of them. But every once in a while, there’s bound to be a really big eruption. How its effects ripple around the world awaits to be seen.
anonymous

Yellow Fever killed 10 percent in Philadelphia - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...n-percent-residents-still-died

history US

shared by anonymous on 21 May 20 - No Cached
  • In summer 1793, a malignant visitation spread over the nation’s capital, carrying off young and old, poor and prosperous in agonizing ways.People collapsed in the streets untended and died horrible deaths at home, their skin turning yellow, their vomit dark with blood.
  • Families were wiped out. Handshaking stopped. Citizens avoided one another and covered their faces with cloth.Half the residents fled the city, including President George Washington. Schools were closed. Some roads outside town were guarded to keep refugees away.This was Philadelphia, the U.S. capital from 1790 to 1800. Wagons arriving from the city were burned as a precaution. Letters and newspapers from Philadelphia were handled with tongs.
  • During the worst of it, a hundred people were buried a day. Historian J.H. Powell’s classic 1949 account is entitled “Bring Out Your Dead,” after the calls of the roving burial teams.What was destroying them, scientists say, was the first virus found to cause human disease.
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  • “For every death, there’s about 21 other infections,” she said modeling showed. So most of Philadelphia’s 50,000 people probably were infected. “They were either lucky that they didn’t develop disease or had mild disease compared to those that were unlucky and died.”Yellow fever is one of more than 200 known human viruses, according to the National Institutes of Health. They include those that cause HIV/AIDS, Ebola, polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, rabies, the common cold and now the novel coronavirus.
  • In the late 1800s, scientists were just starting to realize that strange microbes smaller than bacteria were causing disorders in plants and animals. Bacteria, which had been discovered in the 1670s, had been associated with human illnesses such as typhoid fever, cholera and tuberculosis.
  • U.S. Army physician Walter Reed reported in 1900 that the leading suspect bacteria was not found in the blood of fever cases he studied in Cuba.There was an alien “parasite” at work, he believed.“At the time they didn’t even call it a virus,” Staples said. “They didn’t know really what a virus was.”
  • In 1900, Reed set up what he called an “experimental sanitary station” in Cuba, where yellow fever was prevalent. He named it Camp Lazear, for Jesse W. Lazear, a medical colleague who had died of the fever that year.
  • After extensive testing on volunteer patients who were infected, Reed confirmed that mosquitoes were the carrier and eliminated bacteria as a cause.
  • The yellow fever virus was isolated in 1927, and scientists soon came up with an effective vaccine, called 17D, a weakened form of the virus itself. It’s still in use, and a recent scholarly paper called it “one of the most outstanding human vaccines ever developed.”
  • But in Philadelphia in 1793, the only remedy would be something that killed mosquitoes.
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