| Coronavirus cases continue to rise in U.S. as Trump issues reassurance Posted: 06 Mar 2020 11:25 AM PST  As more Americans have been tested for the coronavirus, the number of cases has continued to rise steadily. Yet the Trump administration has sought to portray the situation as under control.
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| Coronavirus: Expert's worst-case scenario is 96 million infected in US with up to 500,000 dead Posted: 07 Mar 2020 02:49 PM PST  A doctor has advised hospitals to prepare for up 96 million coronavirus infections and 500,000 potential deaths as a worst-case scenario for the potential extent of the outbreak, leaked documents reveal.The documents, obtained by Business Insider, come from a presentation made during a webinar hosted by the American Hospital Association (AHA).
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| With cries of 'it's fake', Wuhan citizens voice discontent Posted: 06 Mar 2020 06:57 AM PST  While some expressions of anger against local-level officials during the epidemic have been permitted on China's heavily censored social media, the video was a rare glimpse of unscripted anger involving a top central government official. The clip, shot by an unknown individual, went viral on Chinese social media, and was even allowed by censors to trend on the top 10 searches on Friday morning on Weibo, China's equivalent to Twitter. Wuhan city officials have sent people door-to-door to investigate immediately, the article said.
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| Elizabeth Warren endured sexism at every step of her campaign Posted: 07 Mar 2020 06:02 AM PST  She faced the impossible: be competent but not condescending, cheery but not pandering, maternal but not frumpy, smart but not haughtyA woman cannot be elected president. If that statement was not true when Elizabeth Warren announced her intent to run, on New Years Eve 2018, it has become true now. With her exit from the race, the last serious female presidential candidate has now dropped out, and what was once a historically diverse field has narrowed to two very old white men, the former vice-president Joe Biden, 77, and the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, 78. The next president, it is now assured, will be a man. Again.The bruising contest has left the party divided and rancorous, with the result being that no matter who the Democratic nominee is, he will face not only the formidable resources of a moneyed Republican opposition, but also intense internal enmity within his own party. The internal factionalism and wild hatred within the Democratic party makes either candidate, be it Biden or Sanders, much more likely to lose in November. And the advanced ages of both of the two remaining major candidates means that even if one of them wins the presidency in November, it remains a real question whether they can feasibly run for a second term. And so, win or lose, the long, contentious and often hateful Democratic primary cycle will be repeated in four years for the 2024 cycle, further fracturing and handicapping the party, no matter what.All of this could have been avoided if the media and the electorate were less blinded by cynicism, sexism and fear and more willing to see Warren for who she was – the most capable, competent and kindest candidate in the race.As a woman, the Massachusetts senator always faced an uphill battle of double standards and misogynist resentment. She had to be competent but not condescending, cheery but not pandering, maternal but not frumpy, smart but not haughty. As she rose in the polls last summer and fall, she came under the kind of scrutiny that male frontrunners are not subjected to, and faced skepticism about her claims and character that male candidates do not face.> As she rose in the polls last summer and fall, she came under the kind of scrutiny that male frontrunners are not subjected toThis is the fate of a lot of women who come close to attaining power, and empirical data backs up the phenomenon: writing in the Washington Post, the Cornell philosopher Kate Manne cited a 2010 Harvard study that found that women are viewed more negatively simply by seeking office. "Voters view male and female politicians as equally power-seeking, but respond to them quite differently," Manne writes. "Men who seek power were viewed as stronger and tougher, while power-seeking women provoked feelings of disgust and contempt."As a result, all of Warren's virtues were recast as vices in the public eye. Her impressive credentials and superlative intellect became out-of-touch elitism. Her joyousness and enthusiasm were cast as somehow both insincerely pandering and cringingly over-earnest. This kind of transformation of neutral or positive character traits into negative ones is not something that happens to men in similar positions. Sanders can aestheticize his practiced cantankerousness for laughs and sympathy without anyone asking if its a put-on. Biden can use slang from the 1930s without anyone ever questioning whether the ostentatious folksiness of his "no malarkey" messaging might be just a tad affected. But for Warren, every smile was interpreted as a sign of concealed hatred, of secret, nefarious motives.Her policy efforts, too, were cast as a repudiation of her principles rather than as steps toward realizing them. Her attempt to transform Medicare for All from a symbolic rallying cry into a substantive, workable and affordable policy change that can be made in our time brought, paradoxically, accusations that she was less serious about the policy for trying to make it a reality. Her plans to break up tech monopolies, repair the damage to black wealth done by historic redlining policies and reshape massive federal spending projects to make them environmentally sustainable were all cast as signs of duplicity and lack of commitment to her stated values. Meanwhile, male candidates who did not have substantive plans to implement such policies were believed, largely uncritically, when they told the public that they would put them in place.In this race, men's statements – about who they are, what they value, what they would do as president – have largely been taken at face value, even when male candidates have made false or exaggerated claims or contradicted themselves. But Elizabeth Warren was never given the benefit of the doubt. Her flaws and missteps were magnified, and interpreted in ways disproportionate to their significance, while comparatively greater mistakes by male rivals were all but ignored. When she referred to her father as having worked as a janitor, a days–long news cycle asked why, if he was really a janitor, her brother had once referred to him as a "maintenance man". That these are effectively the same did not matter: the irrelevant non-story was interpreted as a sign of her constitutional untrustworthiness.Warren was said to be not really running for president, but running as a spoiler; not really happy to meet voters, but shamelessly pretending with her long selfie lines; not really committed to economic inequality, but merely devoting her life to it as some sort of long con. None of these accusations made much logical sense, but that didn't matter, because they were backed up by the force of feeling – a very strong feeling, held by many men and women alike, that a woman seeking power and status just can't be trusted.The epistemic philosopher Miranda Fricker calls this tendency to disbelieve women, and to believe powerful men, "testimonial injustice": the harm done to speakers when prejudiced listeners discount their credibility. Women face testimonial injustice in particular when they challenge or contradict men, as cultural tropes that depict women as conniving, scheming, and selfish can be mustered to make her seem less credible, him more believable. Fricker doesn't apply her concept of testimonial injustice to gender conflict exclusively, but it is an obstacle that many women recount in their own experiences of gendered injustice: the sense that they cannot be believed, that they cannot achieve equal credibility and moral footing with men in the minds of their peers, that they will always be assumed to be either stupid or dishonest. Branded as dishonest even as she told the truth, duplicitous even as she kept her promises, Warren faced testimonial injustice on a huge scale, and it ultimately doomed her campaign.Which brings us to the real moment, I think, that effectively killed Warren's chances at the presidency: not the botched communications rollout of her Medicare for All plan, as many pundits have said, but her conflict with Sanders. In January, CNN reported that Warren and Sanders had met privately in late 2018 before announcing their candidacies, and that Warren had told close associates afterwards that Sanders had said something rude, inconsiderate and sexist to her: that he did not think a woman could defeat Donald Trump. Sanders says that's not what he meant, but the two candidates' accounts of the conversation are not incompatible. When Warren confirmed the report, the story both pointed to the troublesome misogyny of Sanders supporters and incited it: they began a gruesome, hateful and organized attack against Warren and her supporters. They called her a liar. They called her a snake, and made excessive use of the snake emoji. The online conversation veered from the typical competitive snarkiness into something darker and more hateful. Many of the things Sanders supporters said in response to this incident were deeply sexist and deeply cruel. A few of the things they said were threatening.In the aftermath, it became difficult, if not impossible, to say that you believed Warren about the conversation: any public statement of support for her or belief in her account was met with fierce harassment. Perhaps this is why few of them were made. The public consensus quickly became that she was lying about the conversation with Sanders, and that he was not lying. It is plausible, to me, to think that a white man in his late 70s, comfortable in his privilege and out of touch with his time, said something condescending and sexist to a woman in private. I find Warren's account more plausible than the alternative offered by Sanders' supporters, that a woman invented the story and leaked it to hurt an innocent man. But to those that make it, the feasibility of the accusation is not important. What is important, again, is that the accusation is backed up by feeling, the feeling that Warren owes something to this man, that she betrayed him, that she can't be trusted.> What happened to Elizabeth Warren is proof that women's lives are still constrained and narrowed by sexism, that women's talents and ambitions still matter less than men'sMany people believed Warren was lying when she said that Sanders told her a woman couldn't be president, and in politics, what gets believed is effectively indistinguishable from the truth, whether or not it has any bearing on fact. Maybe this is why powerful men, given so much credibility and so much benefit of the doubt, seem to have a strange power of pronouncement. They declare that a woman is deceitful and people stop trusting her; they declare that a woman is unelectable and people stop imagining the country she would shape; they say, even allegedly, even third-hand, that a woman can't beat Trump, and people nod along, believing. And then they vote for a man.Warren events became famous for the selfie lines, the sometimes hours-long rally-after-the-rally in which waiting voters and supporters could chat with campaign reps about the candidate, talk to one another about the issues they cared about and ultimately get a picture with Warren herself. By the time she dropped out, Warren had taken more than 100,000 of these pictures. The events developed a particular ritual, and one aspect was what Warren did when she met a small girl: she would kneel down to the child's eye level and offer her a pinkie promise. "I'm running for president, because that's what girls do," she would tell them, and then ask them to remember.The message to the children was that women can do anything, that when they grow up their talents won't be ignored, their intelligence won't be mocked, their horizons won't be narrowed because of their sex. But if anything, Elizabeth Warren's candidacy proved that this is not true. There is no way for a woman to be enough to overcome misogyny – there is no amount of smart she can be, there is no amount of good she can be, there is no point at which she will be so overpoweringly hardworking and so obviously qualified that people who do not want women to have positions of prominence and authority will have to give her one anyway. What happened to Elizabeth Warren is proof that women's lives are still constrained and narrowed by sexism, that women's talents and ambitions still matter less than men's.I don't think that Elizabeth Warren lied very much during this campaign. I don't think she lied about her principles, or her policy agenda, or about Bernie Sanders. If she ever lied, it was to those little girls. * Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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| Sen. Klobuchar calls for independent review of black man's case Posted: 06 Mar 2020 02:32 PM PST  Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked a top Minnesota prosecutor to initiate an independent investigation into the case of Myon Burrell, a black man who as a teenager was sentenced to life in prison after the stray-bullet killing of an 11-year-old black girl.
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| Anxiety aboard US cruise ship as NY declares coronavirus emergency Posted: 07 Mar 2020 01:38 PM PST  Passengers trapped aboard a US cruise ship, stranded by a coronavirus outbreak, spoke of their growing anxiety on Saturday as New York state announced a state of emergency over a spike in new cases. One of the holidaymakers onboard the Grand Princess told AFP the captain announced early Saturday there was "still no word on when or where we will be docking." Carolyn Wright, a professional photographer traveling with a friend, said passengers were earlier told it was unlikely the ship would dock on Saturday.
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| Boeing receives blame for crashes from U.S., Ethiopia investigators Posted: 07 Mar 2020 05:16 AM PST  Nearly a year after a Boeing 737 MAX airplane crashed into an open field shortly after takeoff in Ethiopia, House investigators released a report Friday blaming Boeing's engineering mistakes and "culture of concealment," as well as the Federal Aviation Administration's "grossly insufficient" oversight of the production of the aircraft for the tragedy. The report also applied to an earlier 737 MAX crash in Indonesia, which combined with the Ethiopian Airlines flight killed 346 people.The report highlighted the fact that Boeing avoided putting pilots through necessary training protocols and removed key references about the plane's flight control system — which is believed to be the main cause of the crashes — from official manuals during the FAA certification process for the MAX model, even after the Indonesia crash. The aircraft has been grounded for months and saw its production halt in January.Despite accusing Boeing of withholding information from the FAA, the report still chastised the agency for failing "to identify key safety problems," although some Republican lawmakers pushed back against criticism of the FAA's approval process, arguing the report was rushed and led to premature conclusions.Meanwhile, a draft report from Ethiopian investigators reportedly blamed the plane's design for last year's fatal crash, though it did little to acknowledge the possible role of Ethiopian Airlines and its flight crew. That lies in contrast to Indonesia's report last October which cited errors by Lion Air's workers and crew while also faulting Boeing's software. Read more at Reuters and The Wall Street Journal.More stories from theweek.com China's coronavirus recovery is 'all fake,' whistleblowers and residents claim An ex-MI6 officer reportedly recruited by security contractor with Trump ties helped infiltrate a major teachers union Trump says doctors keep asking how he knows so much about the coronavirus
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| See These Missiles? This Is How North Korea Could Attack with Nearly 'No Warning' Posted: 06 Mar 2020 01:30 AM PST  Not nuclear weapons.
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| Inside the Pyramid of Djoser — the world's oldest still-standing stone building — that reopened after 14 years of restoration Posted: 07 Mar 2020 09:03 AM PST  After 14 years, the oldest pyramid in the world, known as the Pyramid of Djoser, has reopened. Here's what it's like inside.
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| Pence gently tries to correct Trump's false coronavirus testing claims Posted: 06 Mar 2020 04:41 PM PST  Friday evening found Vice President Pence in an uncommon and uncomfortable position: Having to downplay and contradict assertions made by his boss.
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| No more refills: U.S. airlines step up measures to guard against coronavirus Posted: 07 Mar 2020 11:15 AM PST |
| Bernie Sanders Is Wrong about Cuba’s Literacy Program Posted: 06 Mar 2020 12:40 PM PST  Last month, on 60 Minutes, in a moment that starkly illustrated his worldview, Bernie Sanders repeated his longstanding admiration for Communist Cuba's education achievements. Though he conceded that Fidel Castro's "authoritarian" mode wasn't ideal, he added, "You know, it's unfair to simply say everything is bad. When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?" And it wasn't just 60 Minutes. In recent weeks, Sanders defended the comments in a CNN town hall and during a Democratic presidential debate.Sanders's defense of Castro was roundly condemned. New Jersey Democratic senator Robert Menendez thundered, "I'm sure all of those who died at Castro's hands and were shot at firing squads, all those who were tortured, those who live in my state and suffered enormously under the regime, the more than a million people who fled, I'm sure they all think that the literacy program was worth all of that."But the responses were so focused on Sanders's moral obtuseness that they often left his point about the purported merits of the literacy program unchallenged. This is a mistake. For the evidence that Castro's program, launched in 1961, drove big increases in Cuban literacy is dubious. Cuba's supposed educational triumph is better understood as a product of propaganda and statistical chicanery.In 1977, at the height of the Castro regime, a congressional delegation visited Cuba. Impressed by what Cuban officials told them, the delegation reported that the literacy rate under Castro had risen from 25 percent to 99 percent. This claim then took on a life of its own, irrespective of reality. In fact, in 1950, nine years before Castro seized power, Cuba already had one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America and the Caribbean: 78 percent, according to Oxford's Latin American economic history database.Indeed, Cuba's reported literacy gains aren't especially impressive in context. Many other nations in Latin America and the Caribbean increased their rates by similar (or larger) amounts over the same period. Castro seized power in 1959. In the following decades, Cuba reported reaching and then sustaining a literacy rate of 98 to 99 percent, a 20 percent increase. But economists at Oxford University's Our World In Data project (using a compilation of Oxford, World Bank, and UNESCO resources) calculated that, during that same 50-year period (1960–2010), Bolivia's literacy rate increased by 48 percent (from 44 to 92 percent); Brazil's by 31 (from 60 to 91 percent); Colombia's by 24 (from 70 to 94 percent); and Paraguay's by 21 (from 73 to 94 percent). As of 2011, the median reported literacy rate for Latin American and the Caribbean was 93 percent.There's also legitimate reason to be skeptical of Cuba's reported rates. As Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, researchers for the Our World In Data project, have noted, countries often self-report literacy data. That is the case with Cuba's data, which come from its national census, in which the head of household provides its literacy status. One's faith in Cuba's metrics depends on how much one trusts citizens to provide a totalitarian regime with inconvenient information and Cuban officials to report inconvenient results.Moreover, a 2008 UNESCO report noted that "conventional assessment methods usually overstate actual literacy levels." The report added that across 20 nations, a "significant proportion of the adult population, although formally literate . . . had relatively weak literacy and numeracy skills." So even if one accepts Cuban numbers (which is a stretch), simple claims of "literacy" can be misleading.Finally, it's well worth recognizing that Castro sought not just to promote literacy, but to have students imbibe revolutionary dogma. In 1961, Castro commissioned a literacy brigade with 300,000 teachers and student volunteers from across the country. He also began closing all private schools, an odd choice for a literacy program. But Castro didn't trust private schools (many of them Catholic) to promote revolution adequately. The school day begins, after all, with students chanting "pioneers of Communism, we will be like Che." And as Castro famously explained, "The universities are only available to those who share my revolutionary beliefs." In 2003, Education Week reported that little had changed over the decades; students feared being ostracized or denied university admission if they didn't partake in "pro-revolutionary" activities. Teachers who questioned such activities "paid a price for their opposition — from losing their teaching jobs to being jailed."Like data on Chinese economic growth or North Korean voting rates, Cuban literacy-rate data are only compelling to those inclined to believe authoritarian regimes. The problem with Sanders is not only that he seems morally obtuse about Castro's means, but also that the ends he excuses weren't great, either.
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| Human remains believed to be missing Tennessee toddler Evelyn Boswell found Posted: 07 Mar 2020 01:41 PM PST  Authorities have found remains they believe belong to Evelyn Boswell, a 15-month-old girl from Tennessee who was reportedly last seen late last year.
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| UK police review probe into abduction of Dubai ruler's daughter Posted: 07 Mar 2020 06:08 AM PST  British police said Saturday they were reviewing an investigation into the disappearance of the ruler of Dubai's daughter after a court found that she had been abducted by her father. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, who is vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, orchestrated the forcible return home of Sheikha Shamsa from Britain in 2000, the High Court ruled earlier this week. The finding was part of a damning judgement that also revealed the sheikh had seized Shamsa's sister Latifa, now 35, twice and returned her to Dubai.
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| Bernie's Fatal Mistake: Most Americans Don't Want Medicare For All Posted: 05 Mar 2020 07:30 PM PST  And the 'public option' isn't much better.
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| A 5-story hotel used for coronavirus quarantine collapsed in China. People are demanding an investigation. Posted: 07 Mar 2020 09:16 AM PST  While new cases appear to be slowing in China, the country is still reeling from fallout and criticism over its response to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19.That was on full display Saturday when a five-story hotel in Quanzhou, China, used to quarantine people potentially exposed to COVID-19 after traveling to the epicenter, Hubei province, collapsed Saturday, reportedly trapping around 70 people. It is not clear if anyone has died, but Reuters reports 34 people have been rescued in the hours after the hotel collapsed.A woman staying under quarantine at another hotel said she tried contacting her relatives who were in the hotel and are reportedly healthy, but has not yet been able to reach them. She said she's "very worried."Some people are reportedly demanding an investigation into how the hotel collapsed, the reason for which is not currently known. But, either way, the incident will likely do little to quell anger directed at Beijing from China's citizenry over how the government has handled the COVID-19 outbreak from the beginning. Read more at Reuters.More stories from theweek.com China's coronavirus recovery is 'all fake,' whistleblowers and residents claim An ex-MI6 officer reportedly recruited by security contractor with Trump ties helped infiltrate a major teachers union Trump says doctors keep asking how he knows so much about the coronavirus
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| No ordinary flu: Coronavirus and the lessons of the 1918 pandemic for a world on edge Posted: 06 Mar 2020 03:01 AM PST  As cases of COVID-19 spread worldwide, one expert tells Yahoo News there's an important lesson we should learn from the deadliest pandemic in modern history: Tell the truth.
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| A senior Chinese official was heckled while visiting Wuhan, showing how much the coronavirus has weakened the Communist Party's grip on power Posted: 06 Mar 2020 03:03 AM PST  Residents under lockdown in Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus, shouted at Sun Chunlan: "Fake, fake, everything is fake."
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| Virginia lawmakers send 'historic' energy bill to governor Posted: 06 Mar 2020 10:37 AM PST  Virginia lawmakers gave final passage Friday to a sweeping energy bill that would overhaul how the state's utilities generate electricity, a measure environmental groups and other renewable energy advocates considered a historic step toward addressing climate change. The state Senate advanced the Virginia Clean Economy Act on a vote of 22-17, sending the bill to Gov. Ralph Northam a day after the House passed it. "Today, the Virginia Senate finalized what would have been impossible just a year ago: comprehensive legislation that gets us to 100 percent clean electricity and zero carbon emissions," Michael Town, executive director of the Virginia League of Conservation Voters, said in a statement.
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| McDonald’s worker arrested after allegedly smashing coffee pot on customer’s head Posted: 06 Mar 2020 11:39 AM PST  The incident reportedly took place after verbal dispute at the drive-thru window.
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| As demand crunch deepens, how far can oil plummet? Posted: 07 Mar 2020 07:31 AM PST  Oil prices have plummeted by more than 30 percent since the start of the year but for producers the worst may be yet to come, warn experts, as the coronavirus epidemic weighs heavily on demand. The OPEC cartel of oil-producing countries and its allies failed to reach a deal on production cuts Friday, after Moscow refused to tighten supply to counter the effects of the outbreak, sending oil prices tumbling. OPEC nations -- led by the world's third-largest oil producer Saudi Arabia -- had agreed the day before to recommend "a further adjustment of 1.5 million barrels per day until 30 June 2020."
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| Tanker War: Can America's Navy SEALs Stop Iran's Attacks On Oil Shipping? Posted: 05 Mar 2020 08:00 PM PST  Tensions have not subsided.
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| Bloomberg Staffers Claim Campaign ‘Was a Grift,’ Admit to Canvassing for Other Campaigns Posted: 06 Mar 2020 09:08 AM PST  Staffers for former New York city mayor Mike Bloomberg's failed presidential campaign have described how the campaign imploded after Bloomberg's Nevada debate performance, and detailed how Bloomberg's vast campaign resources were taken advantage of."Most people knew this was a grift," a campaign official told The Nation's Ken Klippenstein — who reported extensively on Bloomberg throughout the campaign. Staff pointed to the debate as the moment of implosion, after Elizabeth Warren slammed Bloomberg as "a billionaire who calls women 'fat broads' and 'horse-faced lesbians,'" and challenged him over his multiple non-disclosure agreements stemming from sexual harassment claims."The day after when we made calls people were like, 'Oh yeah, I was thinking about him, but I'm not really sure anymore,'" a staffer said."Ever since the first debate all of us faced a ton of hostility" a field organizer added. "I once had a woman chase me back to my car demanding that I say you can't buy the presidency."Despite paying his staff the best salaries and providing amenities — like free housing and meals and new iPhones — Bloomberg lacked loyalty and enthusiasm among his employees."At our first office meeting, my [director] said, 'We don't need to canvass. We can just make calls, right guys?' And everyone was like, 'Yeah, that's sensible,'" an official said.Staffers also admitted to siphoning away resources from the campaign to serve their own interests, with Bloomberg's organizers in San Diego reportedly using Bloomberg's funds for other local campaigns."I would actively canvass for Bernie when I was supposed to be canvassing for Mike. I know of at least one team of 'volunteers' that was entirely fabricated by the organizers who had to hit their goals. It was easy enough to fudge the data to make it look like real people put in real volunteer work, when in reality Mike was getting nothing out of it," one person said.Others detailed how Bloomberg's social media campaign — which included paying $2,500 a month in exchange for staffers to text personal contacts and post daily on social media about Bloomberg — was so lackluster that accounts would be flagged as spam and suspended for copying and pasting campaign talking points.
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| 'Zero-empathy' Trump shows lack of emotion when told about 8-year-old boy's family being killed in tornado Posted: 06 Mar 2020 03:04 PM PST  Donald Trump has been filmed showing "zero empathy" for an 8-year-old boy during a meeting with families of Tennessee tornado victims.The US president met with the families on Friday in the town of Cookeville as part of a trip to see the devastation caused by this week's tornadoes.
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| Love in the time of the coronavirus: Do you turn your back when someone offers you a hand, a kiss or a hug? Posted: 06 Mar 2020 05:01 AM PST  Editor's note: The toll of the coronavirus grows, with California under a state of emergency, and more than 150 cases and 11 deaths reported in the U.S.. Also, more than 300 million school children worldwide are facing closures of their schools. What does this mean for you in your personal life? We asked Brian Labus, professor of public health at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, about what kinds of physical contact are safe while COVID-19 is spreading.We are exposed to numerous viruses from our day-to-day interactions with other people all the time. However, our risk of being infected by a simple greeting usually isn't in the forefront of our minds. The spread of COVID-19 has changed that. Conferences have banned handshakes, churches have changed their worship services, and even politicians have changed the way they greet each other. But what's the risk in a simple hug or a handshake?If someone's hand is covered in virus because they coughed into it right before they shook your hand, it is no different than handling their dirty tissue. Your hand is now contaminated, and if you absentmindedly rub your eye or touch your mouth, you have potentially just infected yourself. You are relying on other people to wash their hands in order to protect you, but we know that people are terrible about hand-washing, even after using the bathroom. The simple fact is that we put ourselves at some risk of infection every time we interact with other humans. So what should you do if a stranger extends their hand to greet you or a friend tries to hug you? Pulling your hand away from that potential big sale or recoiling in shock from your friend's embrace is probably not the best approach. It's about balancing the risk of infection with the negative consequences of breaching social etiquette. Health experts around the world have been recommending that people reduce unnecessary physical contact with other people, such as shaking hands or kissing on the cheek. Even the French have recommended no cheek kissing. You can still greet each people warmly and politely without touching them, by bumping elbows or fists, tapping feet (the "Wuhan shake" popular on social media), simply waving hi, or one of the many other creative suggestions that are popping up online. This isn't about making extreme changes to our social interactions; it's about taking simple steps to help reduce your risk of disease. The other important step in protecting yourself is to frequently wash your hands or use hand sanitizer if soap and water are not readily available. This is a critical part of protecting yourself, as you can't introduce a virus into your mucous membranes if you have removed it from your hands. As this outbreak progresses, maybe we will see the refusal to shake hands not as a snub, but as an expression of genuine concern for each others' health. If you are worried about offending someone by using hand sanitizer after shaking someone's hand, offer them some of your sanitizer as well. Change the conversation and help make having clean hands something that not only important to you, but socially desirable as well. [You're smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation's authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.Read more: * Why hand-washing really is as important as doctors say * You (and most of the millions of holiday travelers you encounter) are washing your hands wrongBrian Labus previously received funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.
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| Democrats are more 'optimistic' about taking back the Senate after Biden surge Posted: 07 Mar 2020 08:34 AM PST  While they realize they still have a long way to go, some Democratic lawmakers are feeling more confident about their chances of flipping the Senate in 2020. And they're mostly thanking former Vice President Joe Biden, Politico reports.Biden has re-established himself as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination after he secured a coalition of sorts with the backing of some of his more mderate former contenders. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), although very much still alive in the race, has lost some of his momentum that had some Democratic members of Congress worried about losing House and Senate seats because of his more rigidly left-wing approach."We have a better chance of winning now than we did just a few weeks ago," said Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who has backed Biden since early in the campaign cycle.Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), one of the most centrist voices among Senate Democrats, said he feels "optimistic," while Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) added Biden makes it "easier" for down ballot candidates running "in a moderate state."Democrats would need to flip four seats to capture a minimum majority, so it remains a tall task, but, in addition to the growing possibility of a Biden-led ticket, promising Senate candidates like Montana Gov. Steve Bullock have helped brighten the mood within the party at the moment. Read more at Politico.More stories from theweek.com China's coronavirus recovery is 'all fake,' whistleblowers and residents claim An ex-MI6 officer reportedly recruited by security contractor with Trump ties helped infiltrate a major teachers union Trump says doctors keep asking how he knows so much about the coronavirus
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| 82-year-old with record of bank robberies convicted again Posted: 06 Mar 2020 01:39 PM PST  An 82-year-old man who spent most of his adult life behind bars for robbing banks was convicted again for carrying out an armed heist at an Arizona credit union as he struggled to adjust to life outside prison. Robert Francis Krebs faces a maximum 25 years in prison after a jury found him guilty Wednesday of armed bank robbery. The January 2018 holdup in Tucson came about seven months after he was released from prison.
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| An Italian cruise ship was turned away from ports in Malaysia and Thailand even though it has no cases of coronavirus on board Posted: 07 Mar 2020 04:06 AM PST  Phuket, Thailand, and Penang, Malaysia, both barred the Costa Fortuna. Cruise travel has become a nightmare for many as the coronavirus spreads.
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| Sacked DR Congo general died by 'hanging': president Posted: 07 Mar 2020 02:58 AM PST  DR Congo's sacked former deputy chief of military intelligence, who was under European Union sanctions, died by hanging, President Felix Tshisekedi said Saturday. Delphin Kahimbi, 50, a close associate of former president Joseph Kabila, had died of a heart attack on February 28 at home in Kinshasa, his wife and media reports said. Tshisekedi ordered a probe into the death, and the preliminary findings were made public on Saturday after a cabinet meeting.
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| China Hates India's Fast and Sneaky Brahmos Missiles Posted: 06 Mar 2020 12:00 PM PST  No way to counter it?
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| Judiciary Committee says McGahn ruling leaves only extreme options — such as arrests — to get White House info Posted: 06 Mar 2020 09:21 AM PST |
| 'Sickening': Bernie Sanders campaign condemns protester who unfurled swastika flag at Phoenix rally Posted: 06 Mar 2020 01:50 PM PST  Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign condemned the protester who unfurled a flag with a swastika on it at a campaign rally in Phoenix on Thursday.
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| 138 Salvadorans who fled to U.S. to escape violence returned to it and died Posted: 06 Mar 2020 10:50 AM PST  According to a report by Human Rights Watch, 138 Salvadorans deported from the United States have been killed upon returning to their country since 2013.
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| Before and after photos show how coronavirus fears have emptied out some the busiest holy sites Posted: 06 Mar 2020 06:03 PM PST  Photos show how empty one of Islam's holiest site is after Saudi Arabia banned visitors amid coronavirus fears.
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| Italy heads for lockdown as coronavirus spreads Posted: 07 Mar 2020 02:54 PM PST  Italy's government plans to place large parts of the north in coronavirus lockdown as Italian cases soared past 200 on Saturday and the Vatican announced Pope Francis's Angelus prayer would be livestreamed. In an unprecedented move echoing China's shutdown of its Hubei province at the start of global outbreak, a draft government plan obtained by an Italian newspaper said Italy intended to quarantine the entire Lombardy region around Milan, as well as tourist magnet Venice, Parma and Rimini, in northern Italy. The quarantine decision was "imminent", Corriere Della Sera reported, as the number of cases worldwide rose to over 100,000 with 3,500 dead across 95 nations and territories.
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| Why the Coronavirus Really Terrifies Us Posted: 06 Mar 2020 05:08 PM PST  Keep calm and wash your hands.
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| South Korea's coronavirus cases climb above 7,000, most cases traced to church Posted: 06 Mar 2020 05:31 PM PST  South Korea's coronavirus cases jumped above 7,000 on Saturday, up by 448 from the previous day, with more than half of the total number linked to a secretive church at the center of the country's outbreak, health authorities said. The death toll rose by two to 46, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC). Since mid-February when a woman tested positive after attending services at a branch of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in the southeastern city of Daegu, the number of infections has exploded in South Korea, giving it the most cases outside China.
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| China’s Dystopian Coronavirus ‘Back to Work’ Campaign Posted: 07 Mar 2020 02:21 AM PST  HONG KONG—People in today's China are only too aware that algorithms crawl over all social media posts, and that multiple cameras are aimed at all street corners. But the coronavirus epidemic and its fallout have heightened the sense of dystopian menace as never before. The Coronavirus Epidemic Is Xi Jinping's Epic FailEvery phone and its user is trackable, no matter how careful you may be with your digital footprints, and new tools built by Tencent and Alibaba, two of China's biggest tech companies, have made painfully obvious the tight surveillance experienced by people all over the country.There's a contradiction unfolding throughout China with an inconsistent message coming down from the top: Maybe you should remain in quarantine, but really you should get back to work, and then go spend your money. President Xi Jinping wants people back at their places of employment immediately, but doesn't want the virus to explode again. Top political leaders declared this week that consumption, which "has been suppressed or frozen" must be "unleashed." Ever since the onset of the coronavirus outbreak in December, Xi has emphasized the need to maintain China's status as a global economic powerhouse, a sentiment echoed repeatedly by cadres under his direction. On Feb. 11, Cong Liang, the secretary general of China's National Development and Reform Commission, an agency that manages the country's economy, articulated a paradox hard to resolve. "If we do not get back to work," he said, "epidemic control won't be sustainable." For many CCP officials, falling in line with Xi's order is of paramount importance, logic be damned. Putting hundreds of millions of people back to work in factories and offices is fundamentally at odds with efforts to contain the spread of a rapidly transmissible disease. But it's easy to make sweeping declarations while viewing the situation from Beijing. Big tech is supposed to square this circle, helping to reboot the economy without rebooting the disease, steering people back to their workplaces, for better or worse, under the cold stare of all-pervasive algorithms. COLOR-CODED QUARANTINETencent is implementing a QR code system that tracks people who use public transportation. Anyone boarding a bus, taxi, or subway car needs to scan the code, linking their identities with that vehicle. And if they later turn out to be a patient with COVID-19, everyone who has shared a ride with them is notified.It's an imperfect system, one that backtracks to issue warnings rather than actively preventing the dissemination of the disease, but it has a precedent. Alibaba, employing its Alipay electronic wallet, which has 900 million users in China, has been assigning colors to people—green meaning clear for passage in public areas, yellow demanding seven days of quarantine, and red for 14 days of isolation. So, whether you can leave a city, or even your apartment complex, depends on Alibaba's algorithm.But your color code is not determined by trained medical personnel. Often enough, the system flags people who aren't exhibiting any symptoms and seem to be in perfect health.In physical space, other (sometimes faulty) instruments are being used to carry out Beijing's directives.The police have adopted new tools to fortify their arsenal. On the streets of Shanghai, they wear headsets with thermal camera attachments to locate people who may be running fevers. In other parts of the country, they have dispatched drones to monitor public areas, broadcasting messages to steer people indoors. A video publicizing the presence of these eyes in the sky is meant to be cute and folksy, but it is just about as creepy as it could be. "The world should thank China"Some officials who need to execute Xi's diktats are cautious about his push.Last week, Feng Huiqiang, an official with the Guangdong Health Commission in the southeastern quadrant of China, said that migrant workers, who staff factories that export goods to all corners of the globe, "should not rush to return to Guangdong." But Xi won't have any of that. For the past two weeks, he has been making calls to world leaders, repeating one talking point over and over again: "The fundamentals of the economy [in China] will remain strong in the long run."That may ultimately be the case. But for now, people in China are cautious, precisely because trust in the government has deteriorated as rapidly as COVID-19 has spread among the population. While some parts of the country, like Hubei province, where the virus that causes COVID-19 likely originated, are on forced lockdown, people elsewhere in China are choosing to stay at home and limit their time in public places. They're doing so because they believe this will mitigate opportunities for the coronavirus to propagate—at home and abroad.Despite the ruling party's reassurances and the tech companies' dystopian tools, there is widespread confusion about the immediate future. Several people I have spoken to, all of whom have been working from home in the past weeks, have said that they're not even sure what conditions need to be in place for them to feel safe about commuting and traveling again.The Russian Models Instagramming From China's Coronavirus CapitalAnother part of Beijing's solution for this uncertain future is self-congratulation combined with a transparently cynical effort to rewrite the past. On Wednesday, state-run media outlet Xinhua ran an article titled "Rightfully, the world should thank China," along with a photograph of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and others praying in the vice president's office in the White House. China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, claimed on the same day that the coronavirus' origin may not be China at all. Meanwhile China Daily called Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Market the place that was "once believed to be the origin of the novel coronavirus," thus paving over the fact that about two-thirds of the first batch of COVID-19 patients were linked to this location.The revisionist bureaucrats of the Chinese state even make veiled accusations that the U.S. is the source of COVID-19—or a new epicenter in the making, with science skeptic Pence in charge of the outbreak's containment. Meanwhile, they continue to refine surveillance structures using the preservation of public health as cover. Once new systems are in place, it is unlikely that they will be taken offline—an accidental boon for China's major tech companies and the Chinese Community Party, who are now that much closer to knowing everything about everyone in the country.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Brian Williams blindly furthers false claim Mike Bloomberg could've given every American $1 million Posted: 06 Mar 2020 08:15 AM PST  Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is rich, but he's not that rich.The false inflation of Bloomberg's wealth started when a journalist incorrectly tweeted that he could've used his $500 million in 2020 ad spending and "given each American $1 million and still have money left over." Then, without anyone breaking out a calculator, the tweet ended up on MSNBC's 11th Hour with Brian Williams, with both the host and The New York Times' Mara Gay going along with it."Somebody tweeted recently ... with the money he spent he could've given every American a million dollars," Gay said of Bloomberg on the show. "When I saw this on social media tonight, it kind of all became clear," Williams said before reading the false tweet out loud. "Don't tell us if you're ahead of us on the math here," Williams continued. Someone should've. "It's true, it's disturbing," Gay continued. It is very much not the former.> "Mike Bloomberg spent enough on his campaign to give every American $1 million." @BWilliams on @11thHour @MSNBC pic.twitter.com/iBsWvqEIHf> > — Bad Econ Takes (@BadEconTakes) March 6, 2020Let's get one thing clear: Bloomberg's spending on his failed presidential run could've been used to give every American about $1.50. He'd have to have $330 trillion to give every American the money that tweet promised. More stories from theweek.com China's coronavirus recovery is 'all fake,' whistleblowers and residents claim An ex-MI6 officer reportedly recruited by security contractor with Trump ties helped infiltrate a major teachers union Trump says doctors keep asking how he knows so much about the coronavirus
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| Trump praises CDC amid coronvirus outbreak, calls Washington governor 'a snake' during visit to agency Posted: 06 Mar 2020 05:38 PM PST  Trump calls Washington governor 'a snake' while touring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention amid the global outbreak of coronavirus.
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| Coronavirus outbreak prompts steep travel discounts — but is it worth it? Posted: 06 Mar 2020 02:17 PM PST  As COVID-19 spreads around the world, some travelers are looking to score major deals on airfare and hotel rates.
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