08 July 20
We have 2 speeds on fundraising: The panic/hysteria mode which does raise a little money and everything else which raises no money whatsoever and inevitably leads to panic/hysteria mode.
Insanely frustrating.
Marc Ash
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 08 July 20 It's Live on the HomePage Now: Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation!
Robert Reich | Brace Yourself for Trump's Great Recession
 Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website Reich writes: "Trump and businesses demanded America 'reopen' to revive the economy. But we've reopened too soon, before Covid-19 is under control."
So we’re needing to close or partly close again, which will prolong the economic downturn and wreak even more havoc on millions of Americans’ livelihoods.
It never should have been a contest between public health and the economy, anyway. The economy has always depended on getting public health right. And we still haven’t.
Trump has downplayed the risks. He got in the way of governors trying to keep people safe. And now all of us are paying the price.
Brace yourself. The wave of evictions and foreclosures in the next 2 months will be unlike anything America has experienced since the Great Depression. And unless Congress extends extra unemployment benefits beyond July 31, we’re also going to have unparalleled hunger.
Eviction protections for federally subsidized properties run out at the end of July. In some states that enacted their own moratoria on evictions, renter protections are already running out. One study estimates that 19 to 23 million renters, or 1 in 5 people who live in renter households, are at risk of eviction by September 30th.
The people most likely to be evicted are Black and Latinx people, single mothers, people with disabilities, formerly incarcerated people, and undocumented people. This is systemic racism playing out in real time.
Meanwhile, delinquency rates on mortgages have more than doubled since March.
Unemployment itself is different than what we saw back in March and April. Today’s layoffs are permanent, the result of businesses throwing in the towel or permanently slimming down.
In the public sector, loss of state tax revenue is running up against state constitutions that bar deficits. This is putting vital public services on the chopping block – schools, childcare, supplemental nutrition, mental health services, low-income housing, healthcare – at a time when the public needs them more than ever.
In April and May alone, states and localities furloughed or laid off some 1.5 million workers, about twice as many as in the entire aftermath of the Great Recession a decade ago. These cuts will be just the tip of the iceberg if the federal government doesn’t provide more fiscal aid for states and localities.
Let me remind you: Expanded unemployment benefits are set to expire by July 31, leaving at least 21 million unemployed Americans with a 60% income reduction and no stimulus check to fall back on.
To make matters worse, over 16.2 million households have lost employer-provided health insurance. The Census Household Pulse Survey shows large losses in income in coming months, along with high food and housing insecurity.
So what’s Trump’s and Mitch McConnell’s response to this looming catastrophe?
Do nothing.
Don’t extend supplemental unemployment benefits beyond July 31, when they’re due to expire.
Don’t help states and cities.
Reject the HEROES Act, passed by the House of Representatives to keep struggling families afloat and the economy from going into a tailspin.
Trump has even asked the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act. If the Court agrees, 23 million Americans will lose their health insurance, and the richest 0.1 percent of households with annual incomes of over $3 million will receive tax cuts averaging about $198,000 per year.
This is lunacy. The priority must be getting control over this pandemic and helping Americans survive it physically and financially. Extra unemployment benefits must be extended.
The HEROES Act must be signed into law. Moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures must be extended. If it’s necessary to go back to sheltering in place to contain this pandemic, we must be willing to do so.
This shouldn’t be controversial. It’s the bare minimum of what our government must do to prevent an even worse economic and human catastrophe.
Anything less is indefensible.
 Nurses receive training on using ventilators, recently provided by the World Health Organization at the intensive care ward of a hospital allocated for novel coronavirus patients, in Sanaa, Yemen April 8, 2020. (photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)
Trump Administration Begins Formal Withdrawal From World Health Organization
Zachary Cohen, Jennifer Hansler, Kylie Atwood, Vivian Salama and Sara Murray, CNN Excerpt: "The Trump administration has notified Congress and the United Nations that the United States is formally withdrawing from the World Health Organization, a move that comes amid a rising number of coronavirus cases throughout the Americas over the past week."
EXCERPTS:
The withdrawal, which goes into effect next July, has drawn criticism from bipartisan lawmakers, medical associations, advocacy organizations and allies abroad. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden vowed Tuesday to reverse the decision "on (his) first day" if elected.
Sen. Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tweeted the news Tuesday.
"Congress received notification that POTUS officially withdrew the U.S. from the @WHOin the midst of a pandemic. To call Trump's response to COVID chaotic & incoherent doesn't do it justice. This won't protect American lives or interests—it leaves Americans sick & America alone," he wrote.
A State Department official also confirmed that "the United States' notice of withdrawal, effective July 6, 2021, has been submitted to the UN Secretary-General, who is the depository for the WHO." The spokesperson for Secretary-General António Guterres said he had received the notice and "is in the process of verifying with the World Health Organization whether all the conditions for such withdrawal are met." Those conditions "include giving a one-year notice and fully meeting the payment of assessed financial obligations."
'Short-sighted, unnecessary, and unequivocally dangerous'
President Donald Trump said he was halting funding to the organization in mid-April and announced his intention to withdraw from the WHO in May after he said it "failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms." Trump had denounced the US' contribution to the WHO -- $400-500 million -- in comparison to China's and consistently accused the organization of aiding China in allegedly covering up the origins of the virus and allowing its spread.
While lawmakers from both parties have long cited systemic problems with the WHO, many have also denounced the President's decision to withdraw during a once-in-a-century global pandemic.
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it "is an act of true senselessness." Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he disagreed with Trump's decision.
"If the administration has specific recommendations for reforms of the WHO, it should submit those recommendations to Congress, and we can work together to make those happen," he said.
Biden vows to reverse decision
The Trump administration has already diverted funding from the WHO and the process to formally withdraw will take a year to complete. Critics of the decision hope that the withdrawal decision will be reversed if Trump loses the presidential election in November. In a tweet Tuesday, Biden vowed to do so if elected.
"Americans are safer when America is engaged in strengthening global health. On my first day as President, I will rejoin the @WHO and restore our leadership on the world stage," he wrote.
US allies have rallied to the support of the WHO, with a top diplomat from Germany calling for global solidarity and Italy's Health Minister criticizing Trump's decision as "serious and wrong".
Trump's decision to permanently terminate the US relationship with the WHO follows a years-long pattern of railing against global organizations, with the President claiming that the US is being taken advantage of. The President has questioned US funding to the United Nations and NATO, withdrawn from the Paris climate accord and repeatedly criticized the World Trade Organization.
 'It's important to keep in mind how little we truly know about this vastly complicated disease.' (photo: Yara Nardi/Reuters)
Think a 'Mild' Case of Covid-19 Doesn't Sound So Bad? Think Again
Adrienne Matei, Guardian UK Matei writes: "Conventional wisdom suggests that when a sickness is mild, it's not too much to worry about. But if you're taking comfort in World Health Organization reports that over 80% of global Covid-19 cases are mild or asymptomatic, think again." Otherwise healthy people who thought they had recovered from coronavirus are reporting persistent and strange symptoms - including strokes  onventional wisdom suggests that when a sickness is mild, it’s not too much to worry about. But if you’re taking comfort in World Health Organization reports that over 80% of global Covid-19 cases are mild or asymptomatic, think again. As virologists race to understand the biomechanics of Sars-CoV-2, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: even “mild” cases can be more complicated, dangerous and harder to shake than many first thought.
Throughout the pandemic, a notion has persevered that people who have “mild” cases of Covid-19 and do not require an ICU stay or the use of a ventilator are spared from serious health repercussions. Just last week, Mike Pence, the US vice-president, claimed it’s “a good thing” that nearly half of the new Covid-19 cases surging in 16 states are young Americans, who are at less risk of becoming severely ill than their older counterparts. This kind of rhetoric would lead you to believe that the ordeal of “mildly infected” patients ends within two weeks of becoming ill, at which point they recover and everything goes back to normal.
While that may be the case for some people who get Covid-19, emerging medical research as well as anecdotal evidence from recovery support groups suggest that many survivors of “mild” Covid-19 are not so lucky. They experience lasting side-effects, and doctors are still trying to understand the ramifications.
Some of these side effects can be fatal. According to Dr Christopher Kellner, a professor of neurosurgery at Mount Sinai hospital in New York, “mild” cases of Covid-19 in which the patient was not hospitalized for the virus have been linked to blood clotting and severe strokes in people as young as 30. In May, Kellner told Healthline that Mount Sinai had implemented a plan to give anticoagulant drugs to people with Covid-19 to prevent the strokes they were seeing in “younger patients with no or mild symptoms”.
Doctors now know that Covid-19 not only affects the lungs and blood, but kidneys, liver and brain – the last potentially resulting in chronic fatigue and depression, among other symptoms. Although the virus is not yet old enough for long-term effects on those organs to be well understood, they may manifest regardless of whether a patient ever required hospitalization, hindering their recovery process.
Another troubling phenomenon now coming into focus is that of “long-haul” Covid-19 sufferers – people whose experience of the illness has lasted months. For a Dutch report published earlier this month (an excerpt is translated here) researchers surveyed 1,622 Covid-19 patients who had reported enduring symptoms; the patients, who had an average age of 53, reported intense fatigue (88%) persistent shortness of breath (75%) and chest pressure (45%). Ninety-one per cent of the patients weren’t hospitalized, suggesting they suffered these side-effects despite their cases of Covid-19 qualifying as “mild”. While 85% of the surveyed patients considered themselves generally healthy before having Covid-19, only 6% still did so one month or more after getting the virus.
After being diagnosed with Covid-19, 26-year-old Fiona Lowenstein experienced a long, difficult and nonlinear recovery first-hand. Lowenstein became sick on 17 March, and was briefly hospitalized for fever, cough and shortness of breath. Doctors advised she return to the hospital if those symptoms worsened – but something else happened instead. “I experienced this whole slew of new symptoms: sinus pain, sore throat, really severe gastrointestinal issues,” she told me. “I was having diarrhea every time I ate. I lost a lot of weight, which made me weak, a lot of fatigue, headaches, loss of sense of smell …”
By the time she felt mostly better, it was mid-May, although some of her symptoms still routinely re-emerge, she says.
“It’s almost like a blow to your ego to be in your 20s and healthy and active, and get hit with this thing and think you’re going to get better and you’re going to be OK. And then have it really not pan out that way,” says Lowenstein.
Unable to find information about what she was experiencing, and wondering if more people were going through a similarly prolonged recovery, Lowenstein created The Body Politic Slack-channel support group, a forum that now counts more than 5,600 members – most of whom were not hospitalized for their illness, yet have been feeling sick for months after their initial flu-like respiratory symptoms subsided. According to an internal survey within the group, members – the vast majority of whom are under 50 – have experienced symptoms including facial paralysis, seizures, hearing and vision loss, headaches, memory loss, diarrhea, serious weight loss and more.
“To me, and I think most people, the definition of ‘mild’, passed down from the WHO and other authorities, meant any case that didn’t require hospitalization at all, that anyone who wasn’t hospitalized was just going to have a small cold and could take care of it at home,” Hannah Davis, an author of a patient-led survey of Body Politic members, told me. “From my point of view, this has been a really harmful narrative and absolutely has misinformed the public. It both prohibits people from taking relevant information into account when deciding their personal risk levels, and it prevents the long-haulers from getting the help they need.”
At this stage, when medical professionals and the public alike are learning about Covid-19 as the pandemic unfolds, it’s important to keep in mind how little we truly know about this vastly complicated disease – and to listen to the experiences of survivors, especially those whose recoveries have been neither quick nor straightforward.
It may be reassuring to describe the majority of Covid-19 cases as “mild” – but perhaps that term isn’t as accurate as we hoped.
 Belén Martínez, 6, with her aunt Rubia Méndez, 36, in San Salvador on Feb. 25, 2020. (photo: Fred Ramos)
A Family Separated Between El Salvador and the US, First Blocked by Trump and Then Coronavirus
Anna-Catherine Brigida, The Intercept Brigida writes: "On a recent morning, 6-year-old Belén Martínez went to one of her favorite spots in her house in San Salvador: her aunt's vanity, where she likes to play dress up. But instead of smiling at the mirror, she began to cry."
EXCERPTS:
When her aunt found her there, Belén said she had been praying to God that the coronavirus would go away. She knows the pandemic is the reason she isn’t with her dad.
Belén and her three sisters — Amy, 19; Abigail, 16; and Génesis, 8 — are stuck in El Salvador, awaiting the end of a long process that would bring them to their father, who lives in Bakersfield, California. The girls were packed and ready to go when their flight was canceled due to lockdowns in El Salvador. It wasn’t the first time their plans had been scuttled. Three years ago, they’d been about to leave when the Trump administration tried to cancel the refugee program that was their ticket out.
“We were sad because there were only a few days left and it was the same situation as before,” said Abigail. “But how were we going to know that this pandemic was going to happen?”
The sisters are among 2,700 children approved for refugee status or temporary residence through the Central American Minors, or CAM, program, which began in 2014 under the Obama administration. The program had strict parameters: Only unmarried children under the age of 21 in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — with a parent legally residing in the U.S. — were allowed to apply.
The girls’ father, Manuel Martínez, has had their rooms ready at his home in Bakersfield since 2017. “Every day [without them] is a day without peace,” he said.
Martínez has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, frequently traveling to El Salvador to spend time with family. He is one of nearly 250,000 Salvadorans with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, a reprieve from deportation which was granted to Salvadorans living in the U.S. in 2001 after a monstrous earthquake rocked their home country. The status was renewed every 18 months until the Trump administration decided to end the protection for Salvadorans in January 2018.
The Department of Homeland Security has since extended TPS for Salvadorans until January 2021, but Manuel and many others still have no pathway to citizenship. This means he has few options to bring family legally to the U.S.
In fiscal year 2019, more than 60,000 unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras crossed the U.S border. Many flee violence and have no legal route to immigrate to the U.S. from their home countries, so instead they try to reach the border and ask for asylum. CIMITRA, an NGO in El Salvador that assists CAM applicants, estimates that at least 80 percent of the minors in the program are fleeing violence. Others who aren’t fleeing an immediate threat can receive humanitarian parole, which lasts for two years.
In 2015, the Martínez girls’ mother died of lupus, and Manuel felt it was even more pressing that he be reunited with his daughters and watch them grow up. Around that time, Manuel heard about the CAM program from a distant family member. The Martínez family were part of a select few who qualified for the program.
 Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg met Tuesday with civil rights leaders who rallied hundreds of companies to pull their advertising from the social media site. (photo: Eric Risberg/AP)
Facebook Will Meet With Civil Rights Groups as Hundreds of Companies Join Ad Boycott
Cat Zakrzewski and Hamza Shaban, The Washington Post Excerpt: "Civil rights leaders organizing a major advertising boycott of Facebook said they remained unconvinced that the social network is taking enough action against hate speech and disinformation after meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives on Tuesday." READ MORE  Maria Telumbre, center, holding a poster with the image of her missing son, Christian Alfonso Rodriguez, in Mexico City in 2014. (photo: Marco Ugarte/AP) Mexico: DNA Analysis Identifies Second Student Among 43
Mexico: DNA Analysis Identifies Second Student Among 43 Disappeared in 2014
Kirk Semple, Paulina Villegas and Natalie Kitroeff, The New York Times Excerpt: "Nearly six years after 43 college students disappeared in rural Mexico, the government announced the first major breakthrough in its investigation on Tuesday: Forensic scientists have identified the remains of one of the students." READ MORE  A forest fire in Yakutsk in eastern Siberia on June 2, 2020. (photo: Yevgeny Sofroneyev/TASS/Getty Images)
The Arctic Is on Fire and Warming Twice as Fast as the Rest of the Earth
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch Davidson writes: "Once thought too frozen to burn, Siberia is now on fire and spewing carbon after enduring its warmest June ever."
The most immediate impacts of the climate crisis are in the nether-regions world of the world where temperatures are extreme and inhospitable. One of the most alarming examples is playing out in Siberia, which just saw temperatures reach triple digits as it endured its warmest month ever. That June heatwave in Siberia has led to some staggering numbers, according to scientists, as CNN reported.
The wildfires in Siberia started much earlier in the spring than ever before, according to The Washington Post. Permafrost is thawing, infrastructure is crumbling, and sea ice is dramatically vanishing.
"We always expected the Arctic to change faster than the rest of the globe," said Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, to The Washington Post. "But I don't think anyone expected the changes to happen as fast as we are seeing them happen."
The wildfires released an estimated 59 megatonnes of carbon dioxide across Siberia in June, according to scientists at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). This spate of fires on landscapes that are typically too cold, wet, and icy to burn is raising alarms for ecologists and climate scientists, according to National Geographic. They fear the rash of blazes is another sign that the Arctic is undergoing rapid changes that could set off a series of consequences on a global scale.
The fires can be a double whammy for the Siberian ecosystem. If they become a regular occurrence, it could cause new species to colonize the area, which would set the stage for more fires. Also, the increased intensity and duration of the fires may accelerate the climate crisis by thawing the ground and releasing trapped carbon that has accumulated in frozen organic matter, as National Geographic reported.
"By how big they are and how hot they are, I would say there's no way they're not burning down," said Amber Soja, an associate research fellow with the National Institute of Aerospace and an expert on Siberian wildfires, to National Geographic.
Already, the area's carbon dioxide emissions for June were its highest in the 18 years of the CAMS dataset, surpassing the record of 53 megatonnes set just one year ago in June 2019.
"Higher temperatures and drier surface conditions are providing ideal conditions for these fires to burn and to persist for so long over such a large area," said CAMS senior scientist Mark Parrington, as CNN reported.
"We have seen very similar patterns in the fire activity and soil moisture anomalies across the region in our fire monitoring activities over the last few years."
Siberia also had a warmer than average winter. CAMS said that the warm winter meant that "zombie" blazes were able to smolder through the winter and may have reignited this spring, according to Phys.org.
Globally, June 2020 was more than half a degree Celsius warmer than the 1981-2010 average for the same month, and on a par with June 2019 as the warmest ever registered. Siberia, which is larger than the U.S. and Mexico combined, was more than 5 degrees Celsius above normal for June, according to Copernicus Climate Change Services satellite data, as Phys.org reported.
Some parts of Siberia had an average temperature that was 10 degrees Celsius, or 18 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than average. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet through a process known as Arctic amplification, as CNN reported. Arctic ice melt has accelerated, which leads to seasonal snow cover that isn't as white and absorbs more sunlight, which leads to more warming, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"To me what's really shocking is how warm it's been relative to average for so many weeks and months," said Zack Labe, a climate scientist at Colorado State University, as National Geographic reported.
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