RSN: Nick Turse | "Exceptionally Dire": Secondary Impacts of Covid-19 Could Increase Global Poverty and Hunger

04 May 20 Giving Tuesday is Tomorrow, Don’t Forget RSN Please remember the good work RSN does as you organize you donation list for Giving Tuesday. It’s the most important single day of fundraising for the year and we can really put your contribution to good use. In peace and solidarity. Marc Ash Founder, Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation! Update My Monthly Donation If you would prefer to send a check: Reader Supported News PO Box 2043 Citrus Hts CA 95611

04 May 20

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

---

Nick Turse | "Exceptionally Dire": Secondary Impacts of Covid-19 Could Increase Global Poverty and Hunger

Nick Turse, The Intercept
Turse writes: "More than 240,000 people worldwide have already died of Covid-19, and before the pandemic finishes, it could kill hundreds of thousands, even millions, more."
READ MORE

John Oliver. (photo: HBO)

John Oliver to Jared Kushner: 'If It's a Success Story for Anyone, It's for the Coronavirus'
Adrian Horton, Guardian UK
Horton writes: "Experts agree that, as Oliver explained, 'a lack of testing goes to the very heart of how we got into this situation and the truth is, broad testing is our only safe way out of it.'"





READ MORE

The US Supreme Court building. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg)

Garrett Epps | A Citizen's Guide to SCOTUS Live
Garrett Epps, The Atlantic
Epps writes: "Starting Monday, the Court will at long last air the audio of oral arguments live. For the first time ever, the public will be able to experience oral argument as it happens."

EXCERPT:

Oral argument does reveal something about the personality and disposition of each of the justices, and about the assumptions they will carry with them into the conference room where they will decide the case. And because oral argument is as much spectacle as substance, it’s worth thinking about the players in terms of their show-business analogues. Here’s a playbill:

CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS: Roberts is a character familiar to anyone who watches comedy: the tight-lipped, wary authority figure who tries, usually in vain, to maintain order in a forest full of unruly creatures. Think, perhaps, of Ranger Smith on The Yogi Bear Show, or Herbert Lom as the long-suffering Commissioner Dreyfus in the Pink Panther movies. Before his confirmation, he compared himself to an umpire calling balls and strikes; among the justices, he is sometimes a referee, blowing the whistle when one of them jumps offside. During argument in the Affordable Care Act cases, Roberts ordered Justice Antonin Scalia to stop riffing on old Jack Benny routines. When Scalia continued, Roberts snapped, “That’s enough frivolity for a while.” Even Scalia got the hint. Roberts can be gracious to lawyers; his humor is dry and rarely designed to sting. But he is not a jovial presence on the bench, and he is capable of turning choleric in an instant, often when an advocate makes a favorable remark about federal bureaucrats, for whom he clearly feels contempt.

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS: Thomas is the Silent Bob of the Court. But don’t mistake his reticence for disengagement. On the bench, he is typically the most active in sending pages out to fetch him volumes of case reports or other materials; he whispers constantly to his seatmate, Justice Stephen Breyer. (I assume that the Court’s meeting software will have a “private chat” function.) If Thomas does open his mouth, viewers and listeners can boast that they were virtually there on an important day—like being in the stands when Hank Aaron surpassed Babe Ruth’s all-time home-run total.

JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG: At argument, Ginsburg is a kind of cross between Tweety Bird and a ninja assassin. Listeners at home may need to strain to understand Ginsburg’s questions. Rest assured, though, that they are good ones—she knows the record, is a grand master of federal procedural rules, and has a reason for each inquiry. Ginsburg is not a bully, but she does expect an answer to her question, and if not answered carefully, a Ginsburg question can play hob with an argument.

Her most memorable bon mot of the past decade came during argument in United States v. Windsor, the successful challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Paul Clement, representing members of Congress who supported DOMA, told the Court that, under the law, states were free to recognize same-sex marriage, but the federal government had no obligation to recognize those marriages. “You are really diminishing what the state has said is marriage,” Ginsburg said. “You’re saying, ‘No, state [must have] two kinds of marriage: the full marriage, and then this sort of skim-milk marriage.’”

JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER: Anyone familiar with children’s television will recognize Breyer at his first word; he is the human incarnation of King Friday XIII from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, complete with the air of authority, the elevated vocabulary, and the superb diction. Most oral arguments feature what I call the “Breyer page”—a question from Breyer that takes up a full page of the typed transcript. His questions can be baffling or charming; my favorite is from the second argument of a case called Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, where the issue was whether corporations could be sued in American courts for human-rights violations they commit abroad. “Do you think in the 18th century if they brought Pirates, Incorporated, and we get all their gold, and Blackbeard gets up and he says, ‘Oh, it isn’t me; it’s the corporation’—do you think that they would have then said: ‘Oh, I see, it’s a corporation. Goodbye. Go home’[?]” Breyer is less interested in abstract principles, close readings of text, or notions of the “original understanding” than in workable solutions to present-day problems. In a Court that is often divided into ideological camps, Breyer isn’t a predictable liberal vote, and the Breyer question of each argument is, once a listener unpacks it, usually worth pondering.

JUSTICE SAMUEL ALITO: In the 2011 Looney Tunes Show episode “Jailbird and Jailbunny,” Daffy Duck goes into court as a prosecutor, battering Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny with statements like “Maybe you’re nervous because you’re lying!” Alito is a former federal prosecutor. During oral argument, he is capable of responding with Daffy-style rage to an answer he doesn’t like. His questions tend to be either distractions aimed at the disfavored lawyer (a go-to move is to begin bringing up state-law or procedural issues not passed on by lower courts) or subtle misstatements of the record, seeking to trap the lawyers into a damaging concession. It’s hard to counter, but it can be done: In June of last year, the Cornell professor Sheri Lynn Johnson argued for the life of Curtis Flowers, a Mississippi inmate who had been convicted six different times for the same crime (appellate courts tossed four of the convictions, and one was a mistrial; Mississippi wanted to execute him after the sixth). Alito hammered Johnson with questions moving errors from one trial to another or distorting rulings from the trial bench. Johnson patiently corrected each misstatement. Flowers is a free man today.

JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR: Sotomayor seems a lot like R2-D2, the relentlessly determined droid in the Star Wars movies. Her trademark question usually begins (insincerely) with “I’m sorry,” followed by a challenge to an advocate’s statement of fact or proposition of law. Like her frequent antagonist, Alito, she often seems to know the record and the briefs inside out. And like Alito, she may try to force a lawyer into an admission he or she will regret later. Sotomayor is the most subject to interruption by male justices. Some of this is gender-based, to be sure (male lawyers and justices talk over Ginsburg and Justice Elena Kagan as well), but some is because, well, she talks quite a lot.

JUSTICE ELENA KAGAN: If Alito is Daffy, Kagan is Justice Bugs. Like the trickster bunny, she is smart, sensitive to nuance, and impishly funny. She can be sharp in tone and is capable of metaphors as complex as Breyer’s. At a 2016 oral argument, she compared a provision of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to a complicated lunch order:

Number one, I’ll have the house salad. Number two, I’ll have the steak. Number three, I’ll have the fruit cup. And then I tell the waiter, notwithstanding order number three, I can’t eat anything with strawberries. So on your theory, the waiter could bring me a house salad with strawberries in it, and that seems to me a quite odd interpretation of what’s a pretty clear instruction: No strawberries.

It is hazardous to predict Kagan’s actual vote from her oral-argument questions, perhaps because over time she has gained a reputation for bargaining after argument with the chief justice and, sometimes, other justices, to shape a compromise decision.

JUSTICE NEIL GORSUCH: Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation remember Q, the omniscient, omnipotent being from another dimension who regarded mere humans with amused contempt. In the TV series, the part belonged to the actor John de Lancie. In the Supreme Court continuum, Q is played by Neil Gorsuch. Soon after he ascended to the bench, The Washington Post’s Robert Barnes called him “an active, aggressive and somewhat long-winded questioner.” He is, like Q, also capable of remarkable condescension. In October 2017, as the voting-rights lawyer Paul Smith was presenting a redistricting case, Gorsuch suggested, “Maybe we can, just for a second, talk about the arcane matter, the Constitution”—implying that his senior colleagues were ignorant or careless of the Constitution they are all sworn to interpret. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the Enterprise crew learned to work around Q, but it’s not clear they ever came to love him.

JUSTICE BRETT KAVANAUGH: Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh seemed a lot like Jack Nicholson in The Shining: angry, snarling, and vindictive. Since his confirmation, though, Kavanaugh has seemed more like Boo-Boo Bear, content to play sidekick to Chief Justice Roberts. He has his own conservative causes. He was most aggressive recently during argument in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, a challenge to the invalidation of an entire state school voucher program because Montana’s constitution forbids subsidies to go to religious purposes. Kavanaugh, a Catholic, suggested that the state constitution displayed “grotesque religious bigotry against Catholics.” He spoke 21 times in that argument—more often than any other justice except Sotomayor.

FOR THOSE KEEPING SCORE AT HOME: Try not to overread individual questions or exchanges. In close cases, I don’t think oral argument tells us what will happen. I do think, though, that the process should have been broadcast live long ago. The taxpayers, after all, pay for the stage on which the justices preen and strut. Argument is a useful introduction to how lawyers think about the Constitution, federal statutes, and the role of government. And beyond that, it is entertainment for a nation entering its second month of social distancing. It really is, for law nerds and other so-inclined individuals, what UFC cage matches are for the athletically minded—a savage competition pitting the very best appellate lawyers in America against one another in front of judges who, regardless of persuasion, are among the smartest jurists in the world.

The justices have fought for decades to keep the public from this powerful and important spectacle. Now—at least as long as the pandemic lasts—we can all watch and learn.

READ MORE

Companies that added protections, such as enhanced cleaning or spacing out workers, say the moves are further slowing meat production. (photo: Agri-Pulse)

"It's Very Scary": COVID Surges in Meat Plants as Activists Demand Worker Safety and Meatless Mondays
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "At least 20 workers at meat processing plants have died from COVID-19, and around 5,000 have tested positive, but President Trump invoked an executive order to bar local governments from closing meat plants."





READ MORE

Dr. Daniel Kombert works with other medical professionals as they answer calls and track data at the Hartford HealthCare Covid-19 command center in Newington, Connecticut, on March 10. (photo: Kassi Jackson/Hartford Courant/Tribune News Service/Getty Images)

Contact Tracing, Explained
Dylan Scott, Vox
Excerpt: "The US needs tens of thousands of 'disease detectives' to safely reopen the economy."

EXCERPT:

To prevent another spike in cases, public health workers will perform the difficult and sometimes tedious process of interviewing people diagnosed with Covid-19, finding out whom they have recently been in close physical contact with, and then informing those people of their potential exposure and advising them to self-isolate and get tested.

“The rapidity with which this work has to be done is really unprecedented,” Jeff Dunchin, who leads the epidemiology division in King County, Washington, the first epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, told me. “If you miss a few cases, those little sparks can set off a forest fire.”

People in this field — officially known as disease intervention specialists (DISs) — were previously focused on HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Tracing Covid-19 presents new challenges. One person infected with the virus can spread it to half a dozen others and symptoms often don’t present themselves for days after a person is already contagious.

READ MORE

Uenseslao Guerrero. (photo: El Tiempo)

Social Leader Killed in Colombia, 84 So Far in 2020
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Since the start of 2020 on average, one social leader in Colombia is killed every other day as Friday marked the 84th killed social leader in the Latin American nation."

EXCERPT:

According to a report from the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz), more than 710 social leaders have been killed in Colombia, after the signing of the peace agreement in November 2016.

“Colombia is the country with the highest rate of assassinations for human rights defenders,” United Nations Special Rapporteur Michel Forst warned in his report presented back in March. 

The international organization's representative, who visited the South American nation in the late months of 2018 after a governmental invitation, highlighted the impunity on social leaders' assassinations and the lack of administrative preventive measures against the crimes.

READ MORE

Monarchs Clustering on Monterey Pine in California. (photo: Carly Voight/Xerces Society)

'Hummingbird' Spy Creature Films Millions of Monarchs Taking Flight
Liz Kimbrough, Mongabay
Kimbrough writes: "Up in the cool Mexican mountains, billions of monarch butterflies gather together for the winter. When the sun warms their wings to just the right temperature, the mass of monarchs take flight."

EXCERPT:

Year after year, generations of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) migrate to the same trees as their predecessors, bowing the branches down with the weight of their orange-black clusters. They travel 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) from the temperate forests of North America to hibernate in these wintering grounds in the Mexican Neovolcanic Axis. Though it is believed these trees have microclimate conditions that are ideal for monarch overwintering, the mechanism for this multigenerational migration to these specific trees remains a mystery.

Monarchs are divided into two main populations: western monarchs, which overwinter in California, and eastern monarchs, which overwinter in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico. The number of monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico was down by more than half during the 2019-2020 winter season, and western monarch butterfly populations have also been critically low for the past two years.

Mexican overwintering sites face threats from deforestation and mining. The recent murders of two butterfly defenders in the El Rosario butterfly sanctuary within Mexico’s much larger Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, have underscored the seriousness of the threats to these sites and those who defend them.

In December of this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to decide whether the monarch butterfly should be included in the Endangered Species Act, which would offer significant legal protection for the species in the U.S.

This article was originally published on Mongabay.

READ MORE

---

Contribute to RSN 

Update My Monthly Donation