Caitlin Rivers and Dylan George, - Foreign Affairs
Stephan: From the beginning of this pandemic, I have been telling you that this is not a unique event but the first of what looks to be an ongoing series of such events as climate change alters the earth's biosphere viruses and bacteria mutate to accommodate for those changes. Animals and humans are not going to have immunity to these mutations.
This is what is needed, but it will never happen as long as Republicans are in power -- they are trying to kill Obamacare. This is one reason we should vote every Republican out of office. The problem is I am not sure Americans are smart enough to realize this because Trump still has a 40.5% approval rating. Hard to believe, but true, and that should be a warning.
A Health and Human Services staff member shows a coronavirus outbreak map in Washington, D.C., February 2020 Credit: Carlos Barria / Reuters
In 1900, the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history hit Galveston, Texas. The storm, estimated to have been a Category 4, all but washed the city away. An estimated 8,000 people died, and even more lives would likely have been lost if Isaac Cline, the chief of the Texas section of the U.S. Weather Service, had not spent the day before the hurricane’s arrival walking around and urging people to seek higher ground. He did so on little more than a hunch based on the fact that a bad storm had recently passed over Cuba. The science of weather forecasting had yet to emerge; guesswork was the best anyone could do.
Over a century later, hurricane forecasts are a central feature of summer and fall for millions of Americans. Such forecasts, along with those predicting winter storms, tornadoes, and floods, have saved an untold number of lives and many billions of dollars. Even fair-weather forecasts play an […]
Stephan: A critical aspect of a successful democracy is a fair and just judiciary. The Republican Party understands that, which is why under Trump and Moscow Mitch, two of Russia's most effective agents, they have spent the past three and a half years corrupting the American judiciary at the Federal level. But it is worse than that, this corruption has been going on at the State level for decades, particularly in Red value states governed by Republicans.
One of the biggest problems facing the United States is that we cannot tell ourselves the truth about ourselves, and this constant lying has eaten away at the integrity of the nation like cancer in the gut. If we are to survive this must change. But it won't until we are honest. The question for me is: Are the people of America finally willing to be honest about who and what we have become. #Black Lives Matter I hope is a first push from the people to do that.
In the past dozen years, state and local judges have repeatedly escaped public accountability for misdeeds that have victimized thousands. Nine of 10 kept their jobs, a Reuters investigation found – including an Alabama judge who unlawfully jailed hundreds of poor people, many of them Black, over traffic fines.
Judge Les Hayes once sentenced a single mother to 496 days behind bars for failing to pay traffic tickets. The sentence was so stiff it exceeded the jail time Alabama allows for negligent homicide.
Marquita Johnson, who was locked up in April 2012, says the impact of her time in jail endures today. Johnson’s three children were cast into foster care while she was incarcerated. One daughter was molested, state records show. Another was physically abused.
“Judge Hayes took away my life and didn’t care how my children suffered,” said Johnson, now 36. “My girls will never be the same.”
Fellow inmates found her sentence hard to believe. “They had a nickname for me: The Woman with All the Days,” Johnson said. “That’s what they called me: The Woman with All the Days. There were people […]
Stephan: Carl Bernstein, who along with Bob Woodward, rose to fame breaking story after story on Watergate, is doing it again. This is a story about treason, Donald Trump's constant and continuing treason. This man and his Igor Mike Pence should have been removed from office by impeachment months ago. They were not because of the abandonment of any sense of integrity by the Republicans in the Senate.
What should concern all of us, is what else can Trump do between now and November 3rd, because you can be sure he is planning to do many things, all of which are designed to help him and harm America? And he can do a lot of harm. What kind of country do you think we will be in November?
Trump telling his usual lies at the daily campaign rally he holds in the press briefing room, where he tells the world nothing is his fault; he’s doing everything wonderfully, and he has great TV ratings Credit: Yuri Gripas/Reuters
In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.
The calls caused former top Trump deputies — including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White […]
Stephan: I have been telling you from the beginning of the mutated Covid-19 pandemic that this was going to be the first, not the final such event. As the earth's biosystem changes all the forms of life on the planet will have to accommodate to those changes, and that means that viruses and bacteria are going to mutate and we will have no immunity to these new life forms. This pig story may be nothing, or it may be a first report on yet another epidemic round.
Pigs are seen at a family farm in Fuyang, Anhui province, China, in July 2019. A study released Tuesday says a team of Chinese researchers looked at influenza viruses found in pigs from 2011 to 2018 and found a ‘G4’ strain of H1N1 that has ‘all the essential hallmarks of a candidate pandemic virus.’ Credit: Reuters
A new flu virus found in Chinese pigs has become more infectious to humans and needs to be watched closely in case it becomes a potential “pandemic virus,” a study said, although experts said there is no imminent threat.
A team of Chinese researchers looked at influenza viruses found in pigs from 2011 to 2018 and found a “G4” strain of H1N1 that has “all the essential hallmarks of a candidate pandemic virus,” according to the paper, published by the U.S. journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Pig farm workers also showed elevated levels of the virus in their blood, the authors said, adding that “close monitoring in human populations, especially the workers in the swine industry, should […]
Stephan: I have been holding this story for a while to see if any of the major media picked it up and did anything with it. Or any Republican came forward and commented on it. No one really did, and I didn't hear a word on the cable networks.
This is yet another perversion of the law by Trump using the powers of the Federal government to promote White supremacy. The corruption of the American government under Trump is almost complete.
The Trump administration just took another significant step toward derailing a controversial fair housing rule issued by the Obama administration in 2015.
Last year, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said that HUD will look to “reinterpret” the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which requires that cities and towns receiving federal funding to examine their local housing patterns for racial bias and to design a plan to address any measurable bias.
Then, in January, HUD announced that it was delaying the deadline for local governments to submit their fair housing evaluations by one year.
But delaying the fair housing evaluations, which were required as part of the AFFH rule, essentially “gutted” the AFFH rule, according to former HUD Secretary Julián Castro, who oversaw the rule’s announcement in 2015.
At the time, HUD said that the delay was due to technological issues with the Local Government Assessment Tool, a computer program that was to be used by local governments to submit their relevant housing data.
