21 April 20
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20 April 20
Charles M. Blow | Stop Airing Trump's Briefings!
Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
Blow writes: "Around this time four years ago, the media world was all abuzz over an analysis by mediaQuant, a company that tracks what is known as 'earned media' coverage of political candidates. Earned media is free media."
Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
Blow writes: "Around this time four years ago, the media world was all abuzz over an analysis by mediaQuant, a company that tracks what is known as 'earned media' coverage of political candidates. Earned media is free media."
The media is allowing disinformation to appear as news.
The firm computed that Donald Trump had “earned” a whopping $2 billion of coverage, dwarfing the value earned by all other candidates, Republican and Democrat, even as he had only purchased about $10 million of paid advertising.
As The New York Times reported at the time, the company’s chief analytics officer, Paul Senatori, explained: “The mediaQuant model collects positive, neutral and negative media mentions alike. Mr. Senatori said negative media mentions are given somewhat less weight.”
The US Supreme Court building. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg)
US Supreme Court Rules That Jury Verdicts Must Be Unanimous
Lawrence Hurley, Reuters
Hurley writes: "The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the constitutional guarantee of trial by jury requires a unanimous verdict in serious crimes, siding with a Louisiana man convicted of murder and paving the way for potentially hundreds of defendants found guilty by divided juries to receive new trials."
READ MORE
Lawrence Hurley, Reuters
Hurley writes: "The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the constitutional guarantee of trial by jury requires a unanimous verdict in serious crimes, siding with a Louisiana man convicted of murder and paving the way for potentially hundreds of defendants found guilty by divided juries to receive new trials."
READ MORE
Healthcare workers stand in the street in counter-protest against hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol to demand the stay-at-home order be lifted in Denver, Colorado. (photo: Alyson McClaran/Reuters)
US Medical Workers Stand Up to Anti-Lockdown Protesters
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "At least two Colorado healthcare workers dressed in full scrubs with masks stood silently with their arms crossed on Sunday as they blocked a line of vehicles full of protesters honking their horns and screaming, 'This is the land of the free.'"
READ MORE
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "At least two Colorado healthcare workers dressed in full scrubs with masks stood silently with their arms crossed on Sunday as they blocked a line of vehicles full of protesters honking their horns and screaming, 'This is the land of the free.'"
READ MORE
Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services, appears with Vice President Pence and members of the coronavirus task force during a briefing on Friday. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
Brett Giroir, Trump's Testing Czar Was Forced Out of Job Developing Vaccine Projects in 2015
Michael Kranish, The Washington Post
Kranish writes: "Brett Giroir, the federal official overseeing coronavirus testing efforts, says that his experience working on vaccine development projects at Texas A&M University helped prepare him for this historic moment. He once said that his vaccine effort was so vital that 'the fate of 50 million people will rely on us getting this done.'"
READ MORE
Michael Kranish, The Washington Post
Kranish writes: "Brett Giroir, the federal official overseeing coronavirus testing efforts, says that his experience working on vaccine development projects at Texas A&M University helped prepare him for this historic moment. He once said that his vaccine effort was so vital that 'the fate of 50 million people will rely on us getting this done.'"
READ MORE
Pedestrians walk past closed shops along Lexington Avenue in New York City on April 7. About 1.2 million people in New York alone are now unemployed, in addition to 22 million people nationwide. (photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images)
Getting Unemployment Has Been a Nightmare for Millions of People Across the Country
Ella Nilsen, Vox
Nilsen writes: "Erin Bradford still hasn't been able to file for unemployment insurance - more than a month after she first started trying."
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Ella Nilsen, Vox
Nilsen writes: "Erin Bradford still hasn't been able to file for unemployment insurance - more than a month after she first started trying."
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Men in the capital of Colombia, Bogotá. (photo: Raul Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images)
Colombia: Not Even the Pandemic Halts Killing of Social Leaders
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Colombia's National Agrarian Coordinator denounced that social leader Teodomiro Sotelo was assassinated on Friday while working on his farm in the El Tambo municipality."
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teleSUR
Excerpt: "Colombia's National Agrarian Coordinator denounced that social leader Teodomiro Sotelo was assassinated on Friday while working on his farm in the El Tambo municipality."
READ MORE
A woman takes a break from collecting waste to read the newspaper at the Dandora municipal dump site in Nairobi, Kenya, on Feb. 15, 2020. (photo: Khadija Farah/The Intercept)
Africa's Exploding Plastic Nightmare
Sharon Lerner, The Intercept
Lerner writes: "Rosemary Nyambura spends her weekends collecting plastic with her aunt Miriam in the Dandora dump in Nairobi."
Sharon Lerner, The Intercept
Lerner writes: "Rosemary Nyambura spends her weekends collecting plastic with her aunt Miriam in the Dandora dump in Nairobi."
EXCERPTS:
But the small amount the group gets for collected plastic on the informal market doesn’t cover the food it gives out through its bank, so Dandora HipHop City has been using donations from its employees and their friends to pay for its programs. The group attempted to get a grant from Coca-Cola, which seemed like a perfect corporate sponsor. Coke, which is valued at more than $200 billion, sees Africa as “one of the core growth engines for the company going forward,” as CEO James Quincey recently put it. And the children of Dandora, who suffer from hunger, neglect, and a variety of health problems related to the dump, clean up many of the company’s bottles — sometimes gathering them when they should be in school.
In the U.S., this externalizing of corporate costs has left municipalities shouldering the collection, carting, and processing of their plastic garbage. For decades, this burden was masked by the export of some 70 percent of the waste to China. But since China closed its doors to most U.S. plastic in 2018, some cities have found that they don’t have the money to recycle and have abandoned the practice, causing widespread inconvenience and a growing awareness of the persistence of plastic.
Dump, Dump, Burn
Even under the best of circumstances, plastic recycling doesn’t work very well. Unlike glass, which can be repurposed infinitely, plastic can be significantly worse for wear after being recycled just once. “Every stage of post-use treatment degrades the functional quality of the polymer,” Kenneth Geiser, emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, explained of the molecules that make up various plastics. “Polymers generally lose strength, stability, and moldability as the linear molecular bonds are severed or broken during recycling processes,” said Geiser, who founded the Center for Environmentally Appropriate Materials. All plastic contains chemical additives, which affect its color, moldability, and other attributes. And those chemicals further complicate the recycling process. “So even if in the laboratory, a polymer can be remelted and reformed, it is not so easily accomplished in actual practice.”
PETCO has a green logo with the infamous triangle of arrows to indicate sustainability and uses the tagline “#do1thing. Recycle.” But it’s not an environmental organization. PETCO has its offices at the Nairobi headquarters of Coca-Cola, one of more than a dozen member companies. And although its formation seems to have quieted talk of a nationwide plastic bottle ban for now, it has clearly not fixed the plastic waste problem. PET bottles that used to hold Coke and other beverages can still be seen littered throughout the country — and projects that intended to use recycled PET plastic report not having enough of the material. That may be because PETCO provided only $385,400 in subsidies for the plastic recycling market in 2019, not enough to make the collection and processing of the plastic waste worthwhile, even for some impoverished Kenyans.
The 1 Percent Solution
The decision to put PETCO forward as a force for environmental good — and a voluntary solution that could preempt binding legislation — parallels the global strategy the plastics industry has taken in response to a growing awareness of the plastics crisis. Last year, major companies involved in plastics manufacturing, including BASF, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC, Covestro, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, and Formosa Plastics, formed the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. The group has pledged $1.5 billion toward ending the flow of plastic waste into the environment, an impressive amount until you realize that the corporate commitment is a mere 1 percent of the estimated $150 billion it will cost to clean plastics from the seas.
And that $150 billion just covers the oceans. In addition to the more than 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic already produced, the industry now churns out an additional 380 million tons a year — roughly the weight of all of humanity — which ends up in all sorts of waterways, as well as in air, soil, and human bodies. The average person replenishes our internal plastics burden by eating some 2,000 tiny microplastic pieces each week, which, taken together, have roughly the same weight as a credit card. While much remains to be learned about the effects of this plastic within us, low doses of some of the chemicals in plastic can affect human development, reproduction, and health.
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