Music: Hefner — ‘Fiendish’
At nursing home 13 residents died, 70 employees got sick, as others waited for virus test; Trump’s mismanagement helped fuel coronavirus crisis
The New York Times reports: A week after a deadly coronavirus outbreak was reported inside a nursing home in the Seattle suburbs, officials from the long term care center said on Saturday that 70 staff members were out sick with symptoms resembling coronavirus and six residents were also ill. A federal strike team of nurses and doctors arrived Saturday to support the staff at the long-term nursing home, Life Care Center of Kirkland, Wash., where officials have announced the deaths…
U.S. airport screeners, health workers plagued by fear and anger as coronavirus spreads
Reuters reports: As coronavirus cases exploded across the world, federal medical workers tasked with screening incoming passengers at U.S. airports grew alarmed: Many were working without the most effective masks to protect them from getting sick themselves. Screeners with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked their supervisors this week to change official protocols and require stronger masks, according to an internal document reviewed by Reuters. On Friday evening, they learned their worst fears were realized: Two screeners,…
Trump’s immigration policies may put people at risk of coronavirus
The Guardian reports: Since 2017, Donald Trump has pushed a hardline immigration agenda that has sown confusion, fear and distrust among immigrant communities. Now, as the world deals with a public health emergency in the shape of the coronavirus outbreak, experts worry his immigration policies may put everyone at risk. There is a widespread fear that the president’s policies have sown such fear of deportation and wariness of any contact with US authorities among immigrants – who also have greater…
‘As diagnostic testing ramps up, it will become clear that this is everywhere’
Nature reports: Rohit Shankar left the virology laboratory at 2 a.m. on Wednesday, and was back at the lab bench by 7 a.m. the same day. “It’s okay,” he says, “I had a doughnut and a coffee.” Shankar, a medical scientist, and his colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle are poised to exponentially drive up the number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 around the city, in western Washington state. That’s because this week, they began…
Virus testing blitz appears to keep Korea death rate low; plan to quarantine 16 million sparks chaos in Italy
Bloomberg reports: Highly contagious and manifesting in some with little or no symptoms, the coronavirus has the world struggling to keep up. But when it comes to containing the epidemic, one country may be cracking the code — by doubling down on testing. South Korea is experiencing the largest virus epidemic outside of China, where the pneumonia-causing pathogen first took root late last year. But unlike China, which locked down a province of more than 60 million people to try…
Rainbow Coalition comes full circle as Jesse Jackson endorses Bernie Sanders
Ryan Grim writes: Michigan holds a special place in the memory of Jesse Jackson and the supporters of his insurgent 1988 presidential campaign. It was Jackson’s Nevada, the moment that the party establishment realized this campaign it had long written off might just seize the nomination. At a rally in Michigan on Sunday, Jackson will endorse Sanders ahead of a do-or-die primary for the Vermont senator. The Michigan contest in 1988 fell on March 27. After more than three dozen…
The world is experiencing a new form of autocracy
Tim Horley, Anne Meng, and Mila Versteeg write: In March 2018, Donald Trump, addressing a crowd of donors at his Florida estate, told what sounded like a joke. He was talking about the recent amendment of China’s constitution to remove presidential term limits, allowing Xi Jinping to serve in that office indefinitely. About Xi, Trump said: “He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe…
Music: Smolik — ’50 Tysiecy 881′
How the Trump administration squandered time instead of confronting the coronavirus crisis
The Washington Post reports: This portrait of the precious weeks that President Trump and his administration frittered away in trying to deal with the coronavirus is the result of interviews with 16 current and former administration officials, state health officials and outside experts, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments. Public health experts and officials faced a deluge of challenges, almost from the beginning. First there were the problems with the initial coronavirus test…
‘I didn’t know people died from the flu,’ said Trump, apparently ignorant of his own family history
The Washington Post reports: In Atlanta on Friday, President Trump talked about the number of people infected with the novel coronavirus in other countries vs. the United States. He also compared coronavirus disease with influenza. “Over the last long period of time, you have an average of 36,000 people dying” a year, the president said, gesturing toward National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony S. Fauci, who nodded confirmation. Trump continued: “I never heard those numbers. I would’ve…
Erik Prince recruits ex-spies to infiltrate groups that oppose Trump regime
The New York Times reports: Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents. One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office…
Trump is counting on the Supreme Court to rescue him
David Frum writes: Sometime before June 29, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court will either plunge the United States into the severest constitutional crisis of the Trump years—or save Americans from that crisis. Three different committees of Congress, as well as New York State prosecutors, have issued subpoenas to President Donald Trump’s accountants and bankers for his tax and business records. Trump has sued to stop the accountants and bankers from complying. He has lost twice at the district-court level and…
How Trump siphons U.S. tax dollars into his own company
The Washington Post reports: President Trump’s company charged the Secret Service $157,000 more than was previously known — billing taxpayers for rooms at his clubs at rates far higher than his company has claimed, according to a new trove of receipts and billing documents released by the Secret Service. Many of the new receipts were obtained by the watchdog group Public Citizen, which spent three years battling the Secret Service over a public-records request from January 2017. When added to…
Is anti-Zionism the new anti-Semitism?
Zionism, or the belief in the Jewish right to self-determination in the land of Israel, has been the topic of contentious global debate for decades. And while the United States government is making moves to strengthen its special relationship with Israel, such as relocating the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, scrutiny of Israel and its government looms large in American politics. Is it possible to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism? For the Motion: Bret Stephens – Op-Ed Columnist,…
The unintended beauty of murmurations
Mark MacNamara writes: Eugene Schieffelin was the eccentric ornithologist who in 1890 shipped 60 starlings from London to New York City and set them free in Central Park. The next year he released 40 more, and today there are maybe 200 million starlings in the United States and Southern Canada. As immigrants go, starlings are shrewd flyers, clever mimics, and often unwelcome. The truth is they’re no more than uptown blackbirds, stocky, three-ounce grifters with iridescent blue and green plumage,…