03 April 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Garrison Keillor | What I Might Be Doing When This Is Over
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "Interesting times we're living in and I wonder what name we'll give it when it's over. Corona Spring is too pretty. Maybe it'll be The Darkness of the Don."
READ MORE
Months before the discovery of the deadly coronavirus in China, the Trump administration ended a program that helped laboratories around the world detect dangerous coronaviruses. (photo: AFP)
Trump Administration Ended Program to Detect Coronaviruses in China Just Two Months Before Pandemic Erupted
Emily Baumgaertner and James Rainey, Los Angeles Times
Excerpt: "Two months before the novel coronavirus is thought to have begun its deadly advance in Wuhan, China, the Trump administration ended a $200-million pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat."
READ MORE
Workers hold signs drawing attention to dangerous working conditions inside the Amazon warehouse. (photo: Bebeto Matthews/AP)
Amazon Fired a Warehouse Organizer Attempting to Draw Attention to a Dangerous Workplace. Then They Tried to Smear Him.
Paul Blest, VICE
Excerpt: "Written notes from the meeting, attended by CEO Jeff Bezos, detail Amazon's strategy to fight union organizing."
READ MORE
A poll worker at the First Baptist Church voting site in Hollywood, Florida, wears a protective mask and gloves on Tuesday, March 17, 2020. Voting in Florida's presidential primary is proceeding despite the novel coronavirus. (photo: Zuma)
Red America Is Becoming a 'Democracy Desert.' Coronavirus Threatens to Make It Worse
David Daley, Rolling Stone
Daley writes: "The coronavirus emergency threatens to become a constitutional crisis. Several states have rescheduled primaries and other elections, amid warnings that we must act quickly to enact a national vote by mail system in case the pandemic continues toward November's presidential election."
EXCERPTS:
We will need to act resolutely to ensure a fair and free vote, after a decade of toxic partisan gerrymandering, “surgically targeted” voter-ID bills, and disingenuous commissions investigating nonexistent “voter fraud.” But this conversation will be held against the backdrop of a political map that is not only filled with red and blue, but covered with “democracy deserts” — entire swaths of the nation where voting rights fail to grow.
In blue Vermont, a new emergency law allows the governor and secretary of state to send every registered voter an absentee ballot this fall. In red Arizona, that same measure failed in March. Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republicans have fought efforts to send mail-in ballots to every registered voter ahead of next week’s election there, likely looking to drive down turnout in a crucial state supreme-court election. Georgia’s Republican house speaker screamed that quiet part aloud, as well, criticizing a decision by the secretary of state simply to send voters absentee-ballot applications: “This will certainly drive up turnout,” said Rep. David Ralston, and “will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”
Unfortunately, Congress has already begun playing politics with the vote. Voting-rights groups asked for $4 billion toward these efforts — the equivalent of pennies for democracy in a bailout plan that could run toward $6 trillion, once action by Congress and the Federal Reserve is totaled. The stimulus package hammered out last week by Senate negotiators, however, includes only $400 million, a woefully inadequate first step that will do little to guarantee every voter, in every state, can vote this fall without risking their health.
In an interview on Fox and Friends earlier this week, President Trump derided the vote-by-mail efforts as “crazy,” saying they would lead to “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
When rural or urban neighborhoods lack access to a grocery store with fresh vegetables, they’re called “supermarket deserts.” Voting rights resemble something similar: More than 59 million of us live in a state so gerrymandered that one or both chambers of the state legislature is controlled by the party that won fewer votes statewide in 2018. Access to vote has been limited or curtailed. Entrenched legislators then feel so untouchable that they’re willing to overrule ballot initiatives and undermine judicial rulings.
Many states across the South and Midwest have introduced dramatic new barriers between citizens and their right to vote. The process accelerated in 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision in Shelby County vs. Holder, gutted key enforcement mechanisms in the Voting Rights Act that had required many of these states to “pre-clear” any voting changes through the Department of Justice.
Freed from any federal oversight, these states rushed to make it more difficult for individuals to register, harder for organizations to conduct registration drives, aggressively purged voting rolls, shuttered precincts, placed seemingly targeted barriers before college students, and demanded specific forms of ID before casting a ballot.
Legislators in New Hampshire, Arizona, Texas, and Florida have worked to make it more difficult for college students to vote on campus, or in the community where they attend school and live at least nine months out of the year. Red states including Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Indiana have embarked on aggressive voter purges and ensnared a disproportionate number of minority voters.
Consider Georgia, where 313,000 voters are at risk of being eliminated from the voting rolls as elections officials continue an aggressive purging of the state’s master registration list. That follows a 2017 purge that canceled the registration of more than 540,000 voters, the largest mass voter expulsion in American history.
Those voter purges, meanwhile, are part of a national trend. More than 17 million voters were culled from the rolls between 2016 and 2018, according to the Brennan Center for Justice (an additional 16 million were wiped in the previous two years),and while every voter purge is not voter suppression, officials often get it wrong in ways that make it look that way. Studies show that states with a history of voter discrimination (including Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and Virginia) have purged at the highest rates.
Legislators in New Hampshire, Arizona, Texas, and Florida have worked to make it more difficult for college students to vote on campus, or in the community where they attend school and live at least nine months out of the year. Red states including Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Indiana have embarked on aggressive voter purges and ensnared a disproportionate number of minority voters.
Consider Georgia, where 313,000 voters are at risk of being eliminated from the voting rolls as elections officials continue an aggressive purging of the state’s master registration list. That follows a 2017 purge that canceled the registration of more than 540,000 voters, the largest mass voter expulsion in American history.
Those voter purges, meanwhile, are part of a national trend. More than 17 million voters were culled from the rolls between 2016 and 2018, according to the Brennan Center for Justice (an additional 16 million were wiped in the previous two years),and while every voter purge is not voter suppression, officials often get it wrong in ways that make it look that way. Studies show that states with a history of voter discrimination (including Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and Virginia) have purged at the highest rates.
Katie Fahey speaks at a rally in a still from Slay the Dragon. (photo: Participant Media)
How Do You Stop Politicians From Rigging the Ballot? This Woman Knows
Ashley Spencer, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Katie Fahey ended gerrymandering in Michigan against all odds. Now, as the documentary Slay the Dragon arrives, Katie Fahey's hoping the momentum is replicated in other states."
EXCERPT:
Defying predictions, Voters Not Politicians managed to get more than 425,000 signatures two months before the deadline. On election day, the proposal, Prop 2, passed with a sweeping 61% of the vote.
“People don’t realize their own power. A lot of people, especially women, in the campaign, were so reluctant to go into leadership positions,” Fahey says, noting that after the campaign ended “we had, like, 17 people who ended up running for local office”.
Next year, Michigan’s district lines will be redrawn by voters, not politicians for the first time.
Slay the Dragon will be released this week during a census year – when the US population will be carefully counted in order to determine the size of electoral districts next year.
It’s clear that Fahey’s hard-won movement is a threat to Republicans across the country during that process. Michigan’s Republican party and activists continue to try and block the change with multiple lawsuits, claiming it is unconstitutional and discriminatory.
But Fahey is hoping the momentum from VNP can be replicated in the 35 other states that still use congressional redistricting. She self-identifies as a “democracy entrepreneur”. (That label worn by anyone else could seem insufferable, but on Fahey, who radiates an infectious earnestness, it works.) And she founded a national not-for-profit last year called the People, which hopes to create Katie 2.0s across the country by giving frustrated citizens the tools to tackle systemic issues they care about, such as the partisan primary process and election security.
To be successful, those initiatives might need people like Katie at the forefront. “She is an inspiring, motivating and tireless leader,” Gurian said.
While the impact of her work can’t be measured quite yet, the ripple effects are clear. In early March, the Democrat-majority Virginia senate voted to relinquish their power in favor of a committee. Groups in Nebraska, Oregon, Arkansas and Oklahoma are currently pushing for reform.
Members of the Iranian Red Crescent Society test people with possible coronavirus symptoms on a highway outside Tehran, Iran. (photo: Abedin Taherkenared/EPA)
Biden Joins Fellow Democrats in Call for Easing Iran Sanctions
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden on Thursday called on the administration of United States President Donald Trump to ease economic sanctions on Iran as a humanitarian gesture during the global coronavirus pandemic."
READ MORE
Sharks and large marine predators have experienced significant decline, but evidence shows their stocks can also be rebuilt with the appropriate protection measures. (photo: Manu San Felix/National Geographic)
Marine Life in the World's Oceans Can Recover to Healthy Levels by 2050, Researchers Say
Amy Woodyatt, CNN
Woodyatt writes: "Marine life in the world's oceans could recover to healthy levels in the next thirty years if decisive and urgent action is taken, an international review has found."
arine life in the world's oceans could recover to healthy levels in the next thirty years if decisive and urgent action is taken, an international review has found.
A team of scientists from around the world found marine life to be "remarkably resilient" despite damage caused by human activity and interference, they said in a review published Wednesday in science journal Nature.
Researchers said ocean populations could be restored as soon as 2050, but warned that there is limited time to achieve this change.
Rising temperatures, marine pollution and acidic water are all affecting marine life. About 70-90% of all existing coral reefs are expected to disappear in the next 20 years due to warming oceans, acidic water and pollution, scientists from the University of Hawaii Manoa said in February.
Meanwhile, other studies have shown that climate change is shrinking fish populations.
Researchers found that in spite of marine biodiversity losses during the 20th century, population losses have slowed and in some cases seen a resurgence during the 21st century.
Scientists nodded to a series of successful interventions that were shown to have an impact on ocean populations, including a resurgence in the numbers of nearly extinct humpback whales following the end of commercial hunting in the southwest Atlantic.
In the review, scientists said that the rate of recovery of marine life could be accelerated for many ocean ecosystems, and that a "substantial recovery" could be achieved within two to three decades if pressures on the world's oceans -- including climate change -- were addressed, and wide reaching interventions were put into place.
"The success of many marine conservation projects in recent years illustrates how we can make a real difference to life in our oceans if we apply the lessons learnt from them at scale and with urgency," Professor Callum Roberts from the department of environment and geography at the University of York and co-author of the study, said.
Researchers found that species and spaces should be protected, habitats should be restored, harvesting done wisely, pollution reduced, and climate change mitigated for ocean recovery to be successful.
Experts identified nine components that are key to restoring marine life, which include seagrass, saltmarshes, mangroves, coral reefs, kelp, oyster reefs, fisheries, megafauna and the deep sea.
"Over-fishing and climate change are tightening their grip, but there is hope in the science of restoration. We now have the skills and expertise to be able to restore vital marine habitats such as oyster reefs, mangrove swamps and salt marshes -- which keep our seas clean, our coasts protected and provide food to support entire ecosystems," Roberts added.
But researchers warned that despite having the tools and knowledge to achieve change, time is of the essence.
"We have a narrow window of opportunity to deliver a healthy ocean to our grandchildren's generation, and we have the knowledge and tools to do so," lead author Dr Carlos Duarte, professor of marine science and Tarek Ahmed Juffali research chair in Red Sea Ecology at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, said.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.