18 July 20
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17 July 20
Garrison Keillor | At a Certain Age, the Blues Comes Naturally
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "I am a writing man, I got the sedentary blues."
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Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "I am a writing man, I got the sedentary blues."
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A coronavirus patient at a Houston hospital is aided by a ventilator. (photo: David J. Phillip/AP)
Disappearance of Covid-19 Data From CDC Website Spurs Outcry
Lena H. Sun and Amy Goldstein, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "On the eve of a new coronavirus reporting system this week, data disappeared from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website as hospitals began filing information to a private contractor or their states instead."
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Lena H. Sun and Amy Goldstein, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "On the eve of a new coronavirus reporting system this week, data disappeared from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website as hospitals began filing information to a private contractor or their states instead."
READ MORE
'In New York City alone, the NYPD used facial recognition more than 8,000 times last year.' (photo: David McNew/Getty)
Did You Protest Recently? Your Face Might Be in a Database
Evan Selinger and Albert Fox Cahn, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "In recent weeks, millions have taken to the streets to oppose police violence and proudly say: 'Black Lives Matter.' These protests will no doubt be featured in history books for many generations to come. But, as privacy researchers, we fear a darker legacy, too."
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Evan Selinger and Albert Fox Cahn, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "In recent weeks, millions have taken to the streets to oppose police violence and proudly say: 'Black Lives Matter.' These protests will no doubt be featured in history books for many generations to come. But, as privacy researchers, we fear a darker legacy, too."
READ MORE
Gabriel Perez, his girlfriend, Melissa Martinez, and sister Solimar Perez chalk messages promoting racial equity on a neighbor's driveway in Selah, Washington, July 11, 2020. (photo: Jovelle Tamayo/The New York Times)
Mike Baker, The New York Times
Baker writes: "First came the warning: A police officer in the small city of Selah told a group of young people that if they continued drawing 'Black Lives Matter' chalk art on the sidewalk in front of City Hall, they would be charged with a crime."
Then came the pressure washer.
As the 10 protesters covered parts of their artwork with their bodies, a city worker walked between them, spraying away the exposed parts of their messages and sending tubs of chalk tumbling into the street. The young activists, wet from the washing, watched in silence and held up signs that were outside the reach of the pressure washer.
“Hate has no home in Selah,” one of them said.
The standoff last week was just one of a growing series of conflicts between conservative leaders of Selah, a community with only a few dozen Black residents, and young people from a wide range of backgrounds who believe the city is long overdue for a conversation about race.
As Black Lives Matter events spread from urban centers to thousands of smaller communities around the country, town officials who saw little reason to explore percolating racial prejudices are finding themselves confronted by residents who have decided it is time to step forward.
In Selah, city officials profess to be perplexed about the sudden activism. The city administrator, Don Wayman, said he did not see any racial issues to address, calling the Black Lives Matter movement “devoid of intellect and reason” and characterizing the activists as a “mob.”
Chalk art has long been a tableau for social activism, a form of instant commentary that takes political expression quite literally onto the streets. Cities have at times targeted it, such as in San Diego, where a man was charged with 13 counts of vandalism in 2013 for writing anti-bank messages on a public sidewalk. A jury acquitted him.
The issue has also come up before in Washington state. A prosecutor in Ferry County filed charges against a political activist for chalk messages she wrote on a walkway leading into a meeting of county commissioners in 2018, according to court records. The judge later dismissed the charge, and a federal judge has since noted that while the state’s “malicious mischief” law prohibits writing on public buildings, it does not directly address public walkways.
Selah’s chalk activism began with Gabriel Fabian, 20, who was not politically active until after seeing the video capturing the arrest in May that led to George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Fabian, who is Latino, decided he needed to play a role in halting the oppression of Black people and that it would need to start at home.
“I basically said, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” Fabian said.
In early June, he began drawing the words “Black Lives Matter” on the street outside his home, which lies on a dead end. He included references to Black people whose deaths in recent years around the country have sparked protests over racial injustice.
By the end of the week, a city crew came by with a street sweeper to clean it off.
Some friends came by to draw more, and a cleaning crew again washed them off. They did it again. Then again.
At one point, a letter from Police Chief Richard Hayes arrived addressed to Fabian’s older brother. It said the chalk drawing “is, by definition, graffiti” and could result in a citation.
Fabian’s mother, Laura Perez, said it was clear to her that the city’s crackdown had everything to do with the content of the message and the fact that it was produced outside the home of a Latino family. To her, it reinforced everything she had felt about the town since moving her family there from California eight years ago.
She had already seen her children being profiled at school. She had been surprised that the district offered little in Spanish despite the large number of Latinos who had settled in the region, originally drawn by agricultural work but now an integral part of many communities in eastern Washington. While her boys were told not to wear rosaries at school, they noticed that white students were not confronted when they wore similar items.
She said the family was stunned to see the Confederate flag openly flown by some people in the community and emblems of it worn at school.
Still, Perez said she wanted to be a good neighbor in her overwhelmingly white neighborhood, and she worried that when the young people started drawing the chalk art that the military veteran who lived across the street might frown upon their work.
After the letter from the police chief, the family had a lawyer respond, objecting to the city’s handling of the art. Rob Case, Selah’s municipal attorney, responded with a more detailed warning, saying the drawings were a violation of the malicious mischief statute “that is punishable by 364 days in jail and a $5,000 fine.”
The city insisted that it had a policy of cleaning away any chalk art it found, no matter the message, though Perez said she had seen no efforts to remove recent chalk art tied to school graduations.
Wayman, the city administrator, has told other Selah leaders that he wants to protect the city from the “mayhem and evil” seen in places like Seattle, where a series of protests led to confrontations between Black Lives Matter protesters and police.
The lawyer working with Fabian’s family, Joseph Cutler, said that the city’s targeted cleaning of the protest messages amounted to an infringement on free speech.
Courtney Hernandez, who is Black and has been organizing Black Lives Matter events in the area, said it was clear to her that the city was attempting to silence protest. She grew up in Selah, she said, and knows that it has not always been welcoming to people of color.
Yet Hernandez said she was in tears during the first rally she organized in Selah because of how many people showed up. More people showed up at later events, which often now feature new chalk art.
Fabian said several white neighbors have invited him now to draw on their driveways, out of reach of the city’s pressure washers.
One of them, Carmen Garrison, said that after seeing what was happening out on the street, she knocked on Fabian’s door. Because of her age and concerns about the coronavirus, she said, she has not attended the demonstrations, but the artwork on her driveway was an opportunity to show her support for changes in the community that she said were overdue.
“I think Selah’s a little behind the times,” Garrison said. “They need to get with the program.”
New York Democratic House candidate Jamaal Bowman greets supporters on June 23, 2020, in Yonkers, New York. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty)
New York Is Riding a Wave of Progressive and Socialist Electoral Wins
David Duhalde, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The past four years have seen a political sea change in New York, with progressives and socialists remaking the state's politics and establishing themselves as a force to be reckoned with."
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David Duhalde, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The past four years have seen a political sea change in New York, with progressives and socialists remaking the state's politics and establishing themselves as a force to be reckoned with."
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Smoke rises as people inspect damage at the site of airstrikes in the city of Sa'ada, Yemen, Jan. 6, 2018. (photo: Naif Rahma/Reuters)
"This Is Trump's War": US-Backed Saudi Bombing in Yemen Continues as Coronavirus Spreads
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "As the coronavirus spreads in Yemen, where the population already devastated by the world's worst humanitarian crisis faces growing hunger and aid shortages, the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed coalition continues to drop bombs in the country."
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Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "As the coronavirus spreads in Yemen, where the population already devastated by the world's worst humanitarian crisis faces growing hunger and aid shortages, the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed coalition continues to drop bombs in the country."
READ MORE
Kangaroo and other wildlife in Australia have been hit hard by recent brushfires. (photo: Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media)
Koalas and Other Marsupials Struggle to Recover From Australia's Bushfires
Todd Woody, National Geographic
Excerpt: "The pandemic slowed recovery efforts, but help for the animals is coming."
Todd Woody, National Geographic
Excerpt: "The pandemic slowed recovery efforts, but help for the animals is coming."
ore than six months after cataclysmic bushfires incinerated an Iowa-size swath of Australia, estimates of the staggering number of native animals killed continue to grow even as the fate of surviving wildlife remains largely unknown.
“The data is still coming in, but if anything, the estimate that a billion animals died was more conservative than I realized,” says Chris Dickman, a University of Sydney ecologist who calculated the preliminary death toll. “I think there’s no doubt that some species will go extinct.”
The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly halted most recovery efforts in March. Travel restrictions and social distancing mandates left many scientists homebound and scores of species struggling to survive in apocalyptic landscapes. The lockdown came as the Australian government identified 119 priority animal species “requiring urgent management intervention.”
Australia has the world’s highest rate of mammal extinction, and most of the animals that have disappeared since colonization have been marsupials, or animals whose young develop in their mothers’ pouches. Of the mammal species on the government’s post-fire priority list, the majority are marsupials with declining populations and whose habitat overlaps the range of the bushfires.
Some scientists and volunteers have been able to venture into burn zones to aid koalas, wombats, and other wildlife. What they’re finding indicates the extent of the devastation and the challenges native animals face in bouncing back from fires so intense they obliterated all life in the most ravaged areas.
The fires, according to a new government report, have also laid bare just how little is known about populations of even iconic species like the koala, as well as how little protection conservation laws have provided vulnerable wildlife amid rampant deforestation, development, and climate change.
“Just doing those initial assessments and trying to figure out where we need to focus first has been hampered by this lack of fundamental data,” says Sarah Legge, a wildlife ecologist at Australian National University who helped draft a recovery strategy for the government.
Danger in the trees
Scientists, for instance, long thought few koalas lived in the Blue Mountains, a 2.5 million-acre World Heritage Area of soaring escarpments, deep gorges, and eucalyptus forests 80 miles west of Sydney in the state of New South Wales.
Then in 2013 researchers from a nonprofit conservation organization, Science for Wildlife, began conducting surveys and found large numbers of koalas in the region. That was good news for a threatened species that has long been in decline because of drought, deforestation, and disease. Even better, the scientists discovered that the Blue Mountains population was not only growing, but it was among the most genetically diverse in Australia. It was also largely free of chlamydia, a deadly disease that causes infertility and that afflicts koalas nationwide.
When bushfires began to engulf the Blue Mountains last December, Science for Wildlife’s executive director, Kellie Leigh, scrambled to organize a rescue operation of koalas that had been previously outfitted with radio collars. Authorities gave her team just two days to evacuate them.
“We thought if it all burns, at least we would have got some good genes out,” says Leigh.
Radio trackers fanned out through the scorching and smoky wilderness, and koala catchers scaled 130-foot-tall eucalyptus trees to retrieve the animals. They saved 10 adults and two juveniles. A koala named Houdini had to be left behind as there was no time to extract him from a deep ravine.
The fires burned 80 percent of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. Based on her past surveys, Leigh thinks that a thousand koalas died in the conflagrations. A report released June 30 by the New South Wales parliament estimates that the bushfires killed at least 5,000 koalas—as much as a third of the state population—and that the fires destroyed 24 percent of koala habitat on public lands. It concluded that koalas in the state face extinction by 2050. New South Wales has roughly 10 percent of Australia’s total koala population, though estimates of state and national numbers vary because of a lack of surveys. A 2016 study pegged the number at 329,000 koalas nationwide. (Read more: Koalas are not ‘functionally extinct’—yet.)
Across Australia, at least 30,000 koalas died in the fires, according to experts.
“It was pretty depressing and still is,” Leigh says. “You go out to the badly burned areas and there’s nothing living.”
After the fires, her team studied satellite images to identify woodlands with sufficient remaining tree cover. Then they unleashed a koala-detecting dog named Smudge to search for signs of survivors in prospective resettlement habitat.
“He found a lot of burned scat but also some fresh stuff, so we got an idea of where and when koalas were moving through the area,” says Leigh.
Her staff and more than 140 volunteers spent two months building and deploying food and drinking stations for surviving koalas before the lockdown. In March, they returned the rescued koalas to the Blue Mountains.
Leigh has continued to radio track and observe the koalas throughout the pandemic. “They’re not in top-notch body condition, but they’re doing OK,” she says. But “if most of their home ranges burned, they’re not going to have enough resources to survive longer term.”
Safety in burrows
In contrast to the global media attention focused on the koala’s plight, the fate of the marsupial’s closest cousin, the bare-nosed wombat, has been largely overlooked.
Fires tore through the Southern Highlands south of Sydney after midnight on January 5. “When then sun came up, there was nothing, and I mean nothing there but absolute blackness for as far as the eye could see,” says John Creighton, a wombat carer in the town of Bundanoon who had expected to find hundreds of injured animals in the morning. “It was otherworldly silent. There were no birds, no wallabies, no kangaroos.”
There were wombats, though.
“They were the only animal to make it through the fires,” Creighton says of the stocky, bear-like marsupials that spend most of their time in deep burrows. “The wombats were just sitting in the entrance to their burrows, disoriented and in shock as everything they knew had been erased.”
He had already been providing supplemental water and food to the wombats because a years-long drought had left them with little to eat or drink. In the wake of the fires, he stepped up efforts as the animals faced starvation in an obliterated landscape.
Creighton and volunteers set up feeding stations on the grounds of a Buddhist monastery that borders a burned national park. Wombats have a keen sense of smell, and they soon made their way to the food and water. Solitary creatures whose cuddly appearance belies their fierceness, the wombats gathered in uncharacteristically large groups.
“There would be eight wombats around a feeding station,” Creighton says. “They were virtually waiting in line to eat.”
Weeks after the fires, he found a wombat near death. “She was just skin and bones but had the biggest head I’ve ever seen and would have been queen of that forest,” says Creighton. “Wombats like that survived the fires only to die of starvation and thirst.” While there are no scientific estimates of wombat deaths during and after the fires, he says it’s likely that “thousands and thousands of wombats” perished.
Then came torrential rains that finally snuffed out the fires but flooded wombat burrows, killing scores of animals.
Today, community volunteers are still feeding about a hundred wombats at the monastery. “As areas are greening up, animals are moving back,” Creighton says. “But the burned areas are still desolate, and it’s shocking how little feed is growing.”
Back in the field
Evan Quartermain, head of programs for Humane Society International Australia, was on Kangaroo Island in South Australia after firestorms killed half of the isle’s 50,000 koalas. It’s uncertain, he says, if the insects, fungi, seeds, and microbes needed to recover the ecosystem survived temperatures that reached nearly 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit in some places. “It may be that some building blocks of the ecosystem will not come back,” he says. (Read more: Some of Australia's forests may not recover.)
Many crucial wildlands had been destroyed by development before the fires. The New South Wales parliamentary koala inquiry found that even after laws were implemented to protect koala habitat, deforestation increased because of lax enforcement of environmental regulations. The state government, for example, has approved the construction a coal mine in prime koala habitat in New South Wales. Accelerating climate change and severe drought have put further pressure on habitats.
A wildlife study commissioned by WWF Australia found a 90 percent reduction in ground-dwelling animals in parts of New South Wales surveyed in early March. Elsewhere, scientists are most concerned about the survival of already endangered species such as the Kangaroo Island glossy black cockatoo and Kangaroo Island dunnart, a rat-size marsupial, whose limited habitat burned in the fires. But even less vulnerable animals, like the platypus and a small eucalypt-dwelling marsupial called the greater glider, are now in peril due to the sheer amount of land lost. In the state of Western Australia, fires burned the habitat of one of the last mainland populations of quokkas, the smiley-faced marsupial that has starred in thousands of selfies. As for the iconic kangaroos, thousands likely died, but with a population estimated at 50 million, scientists aren’t concerned about the species’ survival.
As pandemic restrictions ease, scientists are planning their return to field and volunteers are putting the tens of millions of dollars in international donations to work to help wildlife. The federal government has allocated $200 million Australian dollars toward wildlife recovery. (Learn more about how you can help Australia recover.)
University of Sydney biologist Valentina Mella’s research established that koalas will use drinking stations during drought and heatwaves. She is now working with wildlife rescue group WIRES to distribute 800 drinking stations around Australia. WIRES is also issuing grants to communities for habitat restoration while Humane Society International is providing financial support to wildlife carers and helping them prepare for the fires to come. Quartermain says koalas rescued and later released on Kangaroo Island were implanted with microchips and will be tracked to keep tabs on their condition.
Science for Wildlife, meanwhile, is launching a six-month survey of koala habitat in the Blue Mountains. But Leigh is relieved to already have found one particular koala: Houdini, the radio-collared marsupial she could not rescue during the fires.
Houdini earned his name for his skill at escaping capture, and he proved adept at eluding the bushfires. “He was in a steep gully with huge trees, which don’t burn easily,” Leigh says. “He has given us some hope that in other steep gullies that suffered a similar low-intensity burn, we might find more surviving koalas.”
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