Brian Todd, Devon M. Sayers, Madeline Holcombe, Nick Valencia and Jason Hanna, - CNN
Stephan: Here is yet another police murder. This routine murdering of men, women, and children, particularly Black and Brown people, is outrageous and unacceptable and has to stop. It is a national humiliation, and a moral evil.
Andrew Brown, Jr.
Elizabeth City, North Carolina (CNN)In the moments following the shooting of Andrew Brown Jr., first responders can be heard on dispatch audio saying a man has been hit and has gunshot wounds to the back.Audio of the call, posted to the archives of the website Broadcastify, includes a dispatcher saying crews are responding to a call of “shots fired” and an individual can then be heard saying “we do have a subject who was hit.”
Later a first responder says, “Be advised EMS has one male, 42 years of age, gunshot to the back.”Another person says the man has “gunshot wounds.”Brown, who was Black, was shot and killed Wednesday morning by deputies in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, when they attempted to serve him with an arrest warrant, the Pasquotank County Sheriff’s Office said.The shooting occurred as protests are held across the nation over the deaths of Black people at the hands of law enforcement officers.Seven deputies have been placed on administrative leave, two have resigned and one retired in the aftermath of […]
Stephan: The massive and historically significant death rate of the Covid-19 pandemic is in large measure due to the politicization of this illness and the utterly incompetent way in which it was managed by Donald Trump and Republican governors. I personally think it has been a form of mass murder, as evil as a genocide, and that Trump, key people in his administration, and the Republica governors should be indicted and tried for crimes against humanity. It won't happen, but it should.
The U.S. death rate in 2020 was the highest above normal since the early 1900s — even surpassing the calamity of the 1918 flu pandemic.
A surge in deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic created the largest gap between the actual and expected death rate in 2020 — what epidemiologists call “excess deaths,” or deaths above normal.
Aside from fatalities directly attributed to Covid-19, some excess deaths last year were most likely undercounts of the virus or misdiagnoses, or indirectly related to the pandemic otherwise. Preliminary federal data show that overdose deaths have also surged during the pandemic.
A New York Times analysis of U.S. death patterns for the past century shows how much 2020 deviated from the norm.
A shift in a downward trend
Since the 1918 pandemic, the country’s death rate has fallen steadily. But last year, the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted that trend, in spite of a century of improvements in medicine and public health.
Death rate in the U.S. over time
1,0002,0003,000 deaths per 100,000191019181933195020002020
Data before 1933 do not include all states.
1918 flu pandemic
Covid-19 pandemicabout:blank
In the first half of the 20th century, deaths were mainly […]
Stephan: When I was a boy, polio was the epidemic of the moment. In 1952 alone almost 60,000 boys and girls became infected with it, thousands died and even many of those who lived were condemned to the hell of being trapped in an iron lung with only your head poking out of the metal cylinder. When the vaccines to protect from polio came in there was none of the anti-vaxxer nonsense that we see today. We were just glad to get the protection. When I was in the fourth grade a boy in my neighborhood contracted polio, and suddenly dropped out of our lives, we the kids on the street. I still see him in my mind as I saw him for the last time. A 9 year old boy with whom I used to run through the woods, now living in a hospital ward basically encased in a coffin that breathed for him.
I get emails from anti-vaxxers all the time, particularly one woman who writes me several times a week with some anti-vaxxer nonsense attached. Anti-vaxxerism I have come to see it as a form of mental illness: the inability to correctly assess facts because of a syndrome. And it is dangerous because it negatively affects our ability to achieve national herd immunity.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty/Brandon Laufenberg
As soon as the United States authorized the use of the first COVID-19 vaccine in mid-December, a small but vocal group of skeptics and conspiracy theorists, baselessly convinced that the jabs were lethal, started hunting for dead people. At first their efforts were relatively small-bore and haphazard—although far from innocuous. But as the scale and sophistication of America’s vaccine rollout have exponentially ramped up over the last three months, so have efforts to hunt down alleged vaccine fatalities.
Starting in mid-January, several social media channels and websites emerged as hubs for stories, generated by admins and users pulling together snippets from across the internet and crafting them into cohesive narratives and brief posts, linking reported deaths to COVID vaccinations. Several of these platforms have grown notably, and become more formalized, in recent weeks. Unsurprisingly, given the robust safety profile of the vaccines in use in the United States, they rarely detail how a vaccination supposedly caused a given death.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not found a causal connection between COVID vaccines and […]
Kenny Stancil, Staff Writer - Common Dreams - Truthout/Common Dreams
Stephan: I think this is good news in several ways. First, it will sustain the lives of thousands of families. Second, it will save the state of West Virginia, from more extreme poverty and social unrest. Third, it will have an effect on Senator Mnuchin, and make him more oriented to a non-carbon energy future.
Men pause while working at a coal prep plant outside the city of Welch in rural West Virginia on May 19, 2017. Credit: Spencer Platt / Getty
The largest union of coal miners in the U.S. announced Monday that it would accept a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy as long as the federal government takes care of coal workers through the provision of green jobs and income support for those who become unemployed.
“There needs to be a tremendous investment here,” said Cecil E. Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) International. “We always end up dealing with climate change, closing down coal mines. We never get to the second piece of it.”
Ahead of a press conference outlining the UMWA’s approach to addressing the climate emergency in a way that improves rather than diminishes the well-being of workers in the dirty energy sector, Roberts said in a statement that “energy transition and labor policies must be based on more than just promises down the road. We want to discuss how miners, their families, and their communities can […]
Stephan: Am I the only one struck by the contrast between Trump and Biden? As I have said here several times, Biden is nearly 100 days in and there has not been a single scandal. Trump is nearly 100 days out of office and new scandals are still emerging. It will be interesting to see how the courts rule on this.
Trump at one of his rallies.
The city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has referred the Trump campaign’s unpaid rally debt to a collections agency, according to Mayor Tim Keller.
Trump left office with nearly $2 million in unpaid bills from cities that hosted his campaign rallies, including a $211,175 invoice from Albuquerque, stemming from his 2019 event in Rio Rancho.
“We decided to bill him because the costs to the city were tremendous,” Keller told The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper this week. “They made us shut down downtown. We had to close City Hall. … In my mind, he owes us a lot more because there were about a day and a half where we couldn’t even function as a city.”
The bill includes costs for extra police protection, security measures and paid leave for city employees who were forced to stay home. But as of roughly 18 months later, Keller said that “no phone calls have been returned, so we hired a collection agency.”
“He should be getting these annoying voicemails that we get, usually from scam companies where it’s like,’You […]
