27 March 20
How do we come to a point where this organization has no money to operate? Yes this is a very real funding crisis. Right here, right now. We are battling for the basic resources we need to keep publishing. Our opponent, our adversary is apathy.
We do great things with the resources we are given.
Let’s get active here, please.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
27 March 20
Garrison Keillor | A Note to My Peers: Let Us Disappear
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "After a week in Corona Prison with my loved ones, I must say - if I were to croak tomorrow, I'd look back on the week as a beautiful blessing."
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Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "After a week in Corona Prison with my loved ones, I must say - if I were to croak tomorrow, I'd look back on the week as a beautiful blessing."
READ MORE
Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (photo: David Goldman/AP)
Internal Emails Show How Chaos at the CDC Slowed the Early Response to Coronavirus
Caroline Chen, Marshall Allen and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica
Excerpt: "On Feb. 13, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent out an email with what the author described as an 'URGENT' call for help."
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Caroline Chen, Marshall Allen and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica
Excerpt: "On Feb. 13, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent out an email with what the author described as an 'URGENT' call for help."
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A medical worker wearing a protective mask and suit treats patients suffering from coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in an intensive care unit at the Oglio Po hospital in Cremona, Italy. (photo: Flavio Lo Scalzo/Reuters)
Coronavirus: Teenage Boy Died After Being Turned Away From Urgent Care for Not Having Insurance
Chris Riotta, The Independent
Riotta writes: "A 17-year-old whose death was linked to the novel coronavirus despite not having any previously reported health conditions was denied treatment at a California medical facility over his lack of insurance, according to the mayor."
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Chris Riotta, The Independent
Riotta writes: "A 17-year-old whose death was linked to the novel coronavirus despite not having any previously reported health conditions was denied treatment at a California medical facility over his lack of insurance, according to the mayor."
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Field of poppies. (photo: Salwan Georges)
How Johnson & Johnson Companies Used a 'Super Poppy' to Make Narcotics for America's Most Abused Opioid Pills
Peter Whoriskey, The Washington Post
Whoriskey writes: "As the United States was succumbing to an epidemic of addiction, the Johnson & Johnson family of companies became the leading maker of narcotics for popular opioid pills, a dominance achieved through decades of innovation, navigation of U.S. drug policy, and the cultivation of poppies in this remote haven on the other side of the world."
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Peter Whoriskey, The Washington Post
Whoriskey writes: "As the United States was succumbing to an epidemic of addiction, the Johnson & Johnson family of companies became the leading maker of narcotics for popular opioid pills, a dominance achieved through decades of innovation, navigation of U.S. drug policy, and the cultivation of poppies in this remote haven on the other side of the world."
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New York governor Andrew Cuomo. (photo: Bennett Raglan/Getty)
'I Don't Believe You Need 40,000 or 30,000 Ventilators': Trump Questions New York's Plea for Critical Equipment
Allyson Chiu and Timothy Bella, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "President Trump cast doubt Thursday on New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's assertion that his state, which has become the epicenter for the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, will need 30,000 ventilators to properly care for the influx of patients anticipated to flood hospitals in coming weeks."
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Allyson Chiu and Timothy Bella, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "President Trump cast doubt Thursday on New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's assertion that his state, which has become the epicenter for the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, will need 30,000 ventilators to properly care for the influx of patients anticipated to flood hospitals in coming weeks."
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Doctors and nurses of Cuba's Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade pose with a portrait of Cuban late leader Fidel Castro before traveling to Italy, at the Central Unit of Medical Cooperation in Havana, March 21, 2020. (photo: CNN)
Trump Administration Is Ordering Coronavirus-Hit Countries Not to Accept Medical Help From Cuba
Patrick Oppmann, CNN
Oppmann writes: "Cuba is offering to send doctors to more countries struggling with the coronavirus. But don't accept their help, the US State Department says."
Patrick Oppmann, CNN
Oppmann writes: "Cuba is offering to send doctors to more countries struggling with the coronavirus. But don't accept their help, the US State Department says."
As health care systems around the world are strained to the point of collapse, Cuban health care "brigades" have been invited to assist medical workers in Italy, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Suriname, Jamaica and Grenada. On Tuesday, Cuban officials released video of a field hospital its health care workers had built in Lombardy, Italy, one of the regions hit hardest by the coronavirus.
But the State Department wants countries to reconsider asking Cuba for help in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. "Cuba offers its international medical missions to those afflicted with #COVIDー19 only to make up the money it lost when countries stopped participating in the abusive program," tweeted an account for the US State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor on Wednesday.
"Host countries seeking Cuba's help for #COVIDー19 should scrutinize agreements and end labor abuses," the message said.
Recent requests for help by other countries have marked an abrupt turnaround. Cuba saw hundreds of doctors sent home from medical missions in Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia in recent years, after the US criticized Cuba's medical assistance programs, accusing them of exploiting health care workers and spreading propaganda. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cuba offers some countries free medical assistance out of solidarity, while other countries pay for the services. The workers who deploy typically receive only about 20% of the salaries the host countries pay for their assistance -- a reduced wage, but much more than Cuban doctors earn in hospitals back home, where a top salary is about $60 a month.
The Cuban government has said it keeps the majority of the overseas salaries to finance the island's free health care system.
Extremely effective at disaster relief
Like many institutions in Cuba, the local health care system has seen better days. But the hyper centralization of the Cuban government, which has been so disastrous for the island's economy, makes Cuba extremely effective at disaster relief. And while health professionals on the island operate on a shoestring, the system is geared to preventing disease rather than waiting to treat it.
After the first cases of coronavirus were discovered in Cuba on March 11 in three Italian tourists visiting the colonial city of Trinidad, thousands of Cuban health workers, including medical students, were sent by the government to go door to door across the island to search of people suffering from respiratory illness that could be the coronavirus.
Soon all the government resources were focused on the pandemic. Currently, Cuba has 57 confirmed cases with 1,479 other people who are hospitalized and being monitored for symptoms of the coronavirus.
Earlier this month, the government also took the unusual step of offering help to a British cruise liner with at least five confirmed coronavirus cases aboard and dozens more people suffering from flu-like symptoms. Several other islands including the Bahamas and Barbados, had already turned down the cruise ship.
The MS Braemar docked in the Port of Mariel, site of the boatlift of refugees fleeing the island to the US in 1980, and Cuban health workers carried out the risky, daylong operation of transporting more than 600 cruise ship passengers from the port to the runaway at Havana's airport, where four charter planes to England were waiting.
"I am very grateful to the Cuban government for allowing this operation to move forward," said Antony Stokes, the UK's ambassador to Cuba, on the day the Braemar arrived.
Now, as other countries' health care systems falter, more Cuban doctors are likely to be on the front lines of the pandemic. Those efforts should make the US government reconsider the nearly 60-year-old trade embargo on Cuba, said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which recently called on the Trump administration to lift economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran and Venezuela as part of the fight against coronavirus.
"The sanctions have a more generalized and deadly direct effect by contributing to a more generalized scarcity of life-saving medicine and equipment because they exacerbate an economic downturn," Weisbrot wrote to CNN in an email. "This means more scarcities of vital medical needs and supplies, and more deaths."
If Trump did offer Cuba any sanctions relief, it would fly in the face of his policy of dismantling the Obama administration's opening to Cuba. Trump has also made clear he believes a tough on Cuba posture wins votes with Florida's conservative Cuban American community.
Last week, Trump offered an olive branch to a communist adversary, saying he would be willing to send aid to help North Korea fight the coronavirus. Despite Cuba's growing contributions to the battle against the pandemic, Havana is unlikely to receive a similar offer.
The Mount Thorley Warkworth coal mine is one of several 'super pit clusters' in Australia's Hunter Valley. (photo: Pete Muller/National Geographic)
As Climate Change Alters Beloved Landscapes, We Feel the Loss
Pete Muller, National Geographic
Muller writes: "As coal mines spread like cracks across Australia's Hunter Valley, the phone in Glenn Albrecht's office began to ring."
Pete Muller, National Geographic
Muller writes: "As coal mines spread like cracks across Australia's Hunter Valley, the phone in Glenn Albrecht's office began to ring."
EXCERPT:
My mother experienced a less severe version of the feeling during the mid-20th century. She grew up on Long Beach Island, a narrow, isolated spit of sand off the coast of southern New Jersey. In its pristine marshes, she discovered her lifelong love of biology and the sea. But in the 1950s, real estate development accelerated as wealthy visitors from the mainland bought land and built vacation homes. “I could sense immediately what was happening,” she says. “I was furious. I would go around pulling up the surveyors’ sticks.”
Her protests were motivated not simply by anger but also by a mixture of fear, powerlessness, anxiety, and sorrow that the defining character of her home was in peril. The construction continued, and within a few decades, the past was visible only in the osprey nests atop electrical poles that provided light in the homes that had replaced the wilderness.
Changes like these have always occurred. It is the nature of our dynamic species to reshape landscapes to meet our needs and desires, but the scale and pace of transformation in the 21st century are unprecedented. As our population rapidly approaches eight billion, humans are altering the planet more than at any other point in recorded history. We continue to raze forests, emit carbon, and flush chemicals and plastics into the land and water. As a result, we confront ruinous heat waves, wildfires, storm surges, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and other forms of ecological destruction. All of this causes political, logistical, and financial disruption. It also creates often overlooked emotional challenges.
Only in recent years have scientists begun to devote significant resources to studying how altering the environment affects mental health. In the biggest empirical study to date, a team led by researchers from MIT and Harvard looked at the effects of changes in the climate on the mental health of nearly two million randomly selected U.S. residents from 2002 to 2012. Among other things, they found that exposure to heat and drought magnified the risk of suicide and raised the number of psychiatric hospital visits. In addition, victims of hurricanes and floods were more likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
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