 29 February 20
We are making the best progress on donations we have made all month at this point. Still fewer than 500 readers out of the 600,000 who have visited RSN this month have contributed.
Give us a hand - today, please.
With urgency.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
You Are Subscribed As: FFJP49@YAHOO.COM
Please add do-not-reply@inbound.readersupportednews.org to your email contacts to ensure RSN is not put into your spam folder!
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News PO Box 2043 Citrus Hts, CA 95611 |
29 February 20
Andy Borowitz | CDC Director Says Coronavirus Effort Could Be Helped by Quarantining Pence
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday that significant progress in battling the coronavirus could be achieved by quarantining Mike Pence."
READ MORE
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday that significant progress in battling the coronavirus could be achieved by quarantining Mike Pence."
READ MORE
Bernie Sanders greets supporters in Santa Ana on Friday. (photo: Allen J. Schaben/LA Times)
Can Latinos Seal the Deal for Sanders on Super Tuesday?
Suzanne Gamboa, NBC News
Gamboa writes: "As soon as California moved its primary to Super Tuesday, it was clear Latinos would be crucial in choosing the Democrats' presidential nominee."
READ MORE
Suzanne Gamboa, NBC News
Gamboa writes: "As soon as California moved its primary to Super Tuesday, it was clear Latinos would be crucial in choosing the Democrats' presidential nominee."
READ MORE
Employees work in the DaAn Gene laboratory in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China. (photo: Alex Plavevski/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
As a Doctor, I've Watched Republicans Make the US More Vulnerable to Coronavirus Than It Ever Should Have Been
Eugene Gu, The Independent
Gu writes: "With the CDC announcing that a coronavirus outbreak in the United States is likely to occur and that we may have to modify our behaviors to be more isolated from each other, it's no surprise that many Americans are on edge and the stock markets heavily spooked."
Eugene Gu, The Independent
Gu writes: "With the CDC announcing that a coronavirus outbreak in the United States is likely to occur and that we may have to modify our behaviors to be more isolated from each other, it's no surprise that many Americans are on edge and the stock markets heavily spooked."
Trump and his ilk have dismantled vital research for ideological reasons and made it nearly impossible for us to develop new vaccines
ith the CDC announcing that a coronavirus outbreak in the United States is likely to occur and that we may have to modify our behaviors to be more isolated from each other, it’s no surprise that many Americans are on edge and the stock markets heavily spooked. That’s why all eyes were on Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar during a Congressional hearing this week when he inexplicably said that he could not promise a vaccine for the coronavirus would be affordable. He even went on to say that “we can’t control the price because we need the private sector to invest.
While he soon walked back his comment after receiving blistering criticism, Secretary Azar unwittingly revealed a long standing socio-economic injustice in the way drugs and vaccines are made in America. It becomes all the more glaring as we sit on the verge of a possible coronavirus pandemic.
American taxpayers fund the research and development of many drugs and vaccines, and even risk their own bodies to participate in clinical trials that determine both the safety and efficacy of these drugs. But in a preposterous twist, we must then pay exorbitant prices to pharmaceutical companies just to use the very drugs we helped develop. This is in effect socialism followed by highway robbery for Big Pharma, which Azar knows all too well since he infamously more than tripled the price of insulin when he was the Vice President of Eli Lilly. This was in spite of the fact that the doctors who discovered insulin, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, sold their patent for $1 for the public good to help those suffering from diabetes.
Protecting the rich at the expense of the poor does nothing to fight a contagious disease that attacks the weakest and most vulnerable links in society to bring down the whole chain. But even beyond the economic inequality of American healthcare, this brings to the fore an even deeper issue when it comes to our country’s drug and vaccine development pipeline. Republicans have been waging an ideological war against science in the name of religion for many years that has been hampering our efforts to combat new and emerging infectious diseases. Nothing illustrates this case more than the Republican war on medical research involving fetal tissue.
Throughout history, fetal tissue has been indispensable for developing lifesaving vaccines. Jonas Salk in the 1950s used human fetal kidney cells to incubate the polio virus and develop the polio vaccine, saving countless children from iron lungs. Vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox all come human fetal cell lines. Even our understanding of how HIV causes AIDS comes from studying mice with transplanted human fetal bone marrow, liver, thymus, and lymph nodes to simulate the human immune system.
Unfortunately, Republicans have gone to war against fetal tissue research and women’s reproductive freedoms to such an extent that our ability to conduct lifesaving medical research has been severely crippled. I found this out the hard way when two armed US Marshals banged on the door of my studio apartment in Nashville to serve me a Congressional subpoena from then-Congresswoman, now-Senator Marsha Blackburn. Having been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research fellow at both Stanford and Duke Medical School, I had done research involving fetal kidneys to cure a deadly disease in babies called bilateral renal agenesis. That’s a disease where babies are born without any functional kidneys, and I wanted to find a way to save their lives. But because of it, my entire life was thrown into turmoil and upheaval, ultimately destroying my reputation and any chance of me finishing my surgical residency at Vanderbilt.
Unfortunately, I was not the only medical researcher targeted by Marsha Blackburn. Dozens of other physicians, graduate students, professors, and ordinary American citizens were subjected to a witch hunt that ultimately ruined careers and squandered some of America’s best and most promising minds. Whereas President Trump makes headlines for firing the National Security Council’s pandemic response team and proposing cuts to the CDC that never materialized, it was Senator Blackburn and her House Select Panel on Infant Lives that truly caused lasting harm to our nation’s preparedness for a pandemic.
We’ve known about the dangers of coronaviruses since the SARS epidemic in 2002. Yet more than 18 years later we still don’t have a human vaccine for SARS that would have been useful as a blueprint to develop a vaccine for Covid-19. Much of this may be because of the ideological and religious war against fetal tissue hampering progress. In fact, even my own research model could have been helpful for studying the coronavirus, since the human fetal kidney has a high concentration of angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors that the coronavirus is known to target to gain entry into our cells.
After experiencing the Republican war on science on the front lines, I learned that discrimination, innuendo, fear, and suspicion are as much part and parcel of the American way of life as are the lofty ideals of freedom and justice. That’s why there is another aspect of the coronavirus epidemic that truly frightens me to my core.
As an Asian American physician, I am painfully aware that the coronavirus not only represents a severe public health challenge but also threatens the basic human rights and civil liberties of minorities like me. Social media has already been abuzz with racist memes of Chinese people eating bat soup or rats. It’s not a far leap for Asian Americans to be labeled as infesters like cockroaches. And if there is another Marsha Blackburn around the corner who uses fear and suspicion as ways to achieve power, the worst among us may turn racism and discrimination into violence.
Border Patrol vehicles stand guard near the U.S.-Mexico International Water Boundary late at night on Sept. 12, 2019, in El Paso, Texas. (photo: Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images)
Border Patrol Agent Speaks Out About a High-Speed Chase That Ended in an Immigrant's Death
Debbie Nathan, The Intercept
Nathan writes: "A few minutes before midnight on January 29, an Ecuadorian man was killed in a car crash near downtown El Paso, Texas, only yards from the U.S.-Mexico border."
Debbie Nathan, The Intercept
Nathan writes: "A few minutes before midnight on January 29, an Ecuadorian man was killed in a car crash near downtown El Paso, Texas, only yards from the U.S.-Mexico border."
EXCERPTS:
Minutes later, all Border Patrol agents in the area were summoned to the corner of West Paisano Drive and San Antonio Street. The car that had picked up the four people lay upside down and totaled. A police report states that the car had rounded a curve on Paisano — the “deadly curve” — at high speed, and the vehicle jumped a median, collided with a tree and a light post, and rolled over. The driver, Daniel Humberto Castillo, fled but was quickly caught. His breath smelled of alcohol. Castillo said he had picked up the four people farther north on Paisano, where the road fronts the river. Then, Castillo said, he panicked when the Border Patrol started chasing him.
Inside the wreck were Castillo’s passengers, all Ecuadorians. One, 30-year-old Edwin Leonardo Solis, died at the scene. Of the survivors, Jessica Alexandra Chirau, 27, sustained bruises and sprains. Juan Carlos Chirau, 36, had several fractured vertebrae. Marcela Naomi Palacios, 28, sustained the worst injuries. In addition to fractures of her elbow, spine, and clavicle, she had a lacerated spleen, air and fluid in her lungs, a brain bleed, and brain swelling. She was near death and in a coma. She underwent surgeries at a local hospital and was placed in intensive care. She remains at the hospital.
Montañez was horrified by the carnage. She was assigned to take an injured passenger to an emergency room, and there, she said, “I talked to a policewoman about what I’d heard on the radio. About how the Border Patrol had started chasing.”
Yet another Border Patrol chase occurred on January 27, two days before the Ecuadorians crashed. Media reports describe agents pursuing a vehicle they’d seen pick up three suspected undocumented migrants. According to reports, the chase that ensued went through a densely populated residential neighborhood and an apartment complex.
“They’re Not Going to Hush Me Up”
No one was hurt in these earlier pursuits. But Border Patrol chases quite often cause injury and death, and they frequently violate contemporary law enforcement practice.
Last year, the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica published an in-depth study about Border Patrol vehicle pursuits that occurred from 2015 to 2018 in border districts in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The reporters found 504 chases. At least 250 people were injured; twenty-two died.
The reporters were unable to obtain records from the Border Patrol and had to work with court and media records. They believe their numbers are undercounts. The data they were able to gather showed that in the two years after Donald Trump assumed office, the number of people hurt in pursuit crashes jumped by 42 percent.
Vehicle pursuits were once the norm for U.S. law enforcement agencies. But by the early 1990s, they had caused so much damage, injury, and death — as well as lawsuits against the government — that the Department of Justice narrowed pursuit guidelines.
“Whether or not to engage in a high-speed chase … becomes a question of weighing the danger to the public of the chase itself against the danger to the public of the offender remaining at large,” the DOJ advised. “For anyone other than a violent felon, the balance weighs against the high-speed chase.”
Last December, after Border Patrol agents in El Paso chased some suspected undocumented migrants into a public grade school during a family Christmas program, a local TV station asked CBP how they decide when to do a chase.
A prisoner in solitary confinement at Rikers Island. (photo: Victor J. Blue/NYT)
Prolonged Solitary Confinement May 'Amount to Torture,' UN Expert Warns
UN News
Excerpt: "'For years, my mandate has raised concerns about the worldwide overuse of solitary confinement which is subject to widespread arbitrariness,' said Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on torture."
UN News
Excerpt: "'For years, my mandate has raised concerns about the worldwide overuse of solitary confinement which is subject to widespread arbitrariness,' said Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on torture."
EXCERPT:
The Connecticut Department of Corrections (DOC) has appeared to routinely repress inmates through prolonged or indefinite isolation, excessive use of in-cell restraints and “needlessly intrusive strip searches", the expert said.
Precarious correctional procedures
According to the independent expert, there seems to be a state-sanctioned policy aimed at purposefully inflicting severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, “which may well amount to torture."
Theses dehumanizing conditions of detention, which sometimes euphemistically referred to as “segregation”, the "hole" or "lockdown", are routinely used by US correctional facilities, particularly against inmates designated as "high risk" due to previous gang affiliations, behaviour abnormalities or mental conditions.
And these practices trigger and exacerbate psychological suffering in inmates who may have experienced previous trauma or have mental health conditions or psychosocial disabilities.
"The severe and often irreparable psychological and physical consequences of solitary confinement and social exclusion are well documented and can range from progressively severe forms of anxiety, stress, and depression to cognitive impairment and suicidal tendencies", noted Mr. Melzer.
"This deliberate infliction of severe mental pain or suffering may well amount to psychological torture", he added.
Illegal confinement practices
Inflicting solitary confinement on those with mental or physical disabilities is prohibited under international law.
Even if permitted by domestic law, under the 2015-updated Mandela Rules, prolonged or indefinite solitary confinement cannot be regarded as a "lawful sanction".
A placard reads 'Not one more death' in a protest against the killing of social activists in Bogota, Colombia. (photo: Reuters)
New Murder of Ex-Guerrilla Fighter Denounced in Colombia
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The president of the Colombian party Common Alternative Revolutionary Force (FARC) Rodrigo Londoño denounced Friday, the murder of a former guerrilla; the fourteenth ex-combatant killed so far this year."
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The president of the Colombian party Common Alternative Revolutionary Force (FARC) Rodrigo Londoño denounced Friday, the murder of a former guerrilla; the fourteenth ex-combatant killed so far this year."
EXCERPT:
"Holman Fabio Montes Sánchez, 38, was shot dead in the municipality of San Vicente del Caguán, in the southern department of Caquetá," FARC President Rodrigo Londoño, known as "Timochenko" because of the alias he used during his time as a guerrilla warned on Twitter.
"This crime joins the escalation of violence against former FARC guerrillas, which has so far left 187 ex-combatants and more than 800 social leaders murdered in recent years," added Londoño.
According to Londoño, "the situation in Colombia is serious. The ex-combatants who signed the peace agreement are still being murdered and have laid down their arms."
A polar bear walks across rubble ice in the Alaska portion of the southern Beaufort Sea in 2011. (photo: Mike Arctic Drilling Operators Can't Accurately Pinpoint Polar Bear Dens - Which Means They Can't
Arctic Drilling Operators Can't Accurately Pinpoint Polar Bear Dens - Which Means They Can't Avoid Destroying Them
Darryl Fears, The Washington Post
Fears writes: "A method used by fuel companies to avoid polar bear dens before they search for oil or gas works less than half the time, according to a study released Thursday."
Darryl Fears, The Washington Post
Fears writes: "A method used by fuel companies to avoid polar bear dens before they search for oil or gas works less than half the time, according to a study released Thursday."
EXCERPTS:
That failure could pose a grave risk to mothers and their cubs in the dens, which are hidden under ice, if the Trump administration finalizes its plan to expand drilling into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
According to the study published in the journal PLOS One, infrared technology mounted on airplanes missed 55 percent of dens that were known to exist west of the Alaskan refuge off Prudhoe Bay. Oil operators search for the dens to comply with a federal requirement to build roads and facilities at least a mile away from the hibernating bears, whose shrinking populations are designated as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Since the 1990s, mining operations have used surveillance technology known as FLIR — Forward Looking Infrared — to identify the heat signature of maternal bears that bore as deep as four meters under thick ice to give birth. But FLIR is often disrupted by bad weather that blinds it to dens in some surveys and causes it to falsely identify dens in others.
Researchers who used the surveys provided by the industry as a guide to find dens and study bears between 2004 and 2016 found at least 18 dens that the technology missed. Conversely, they said, bears didn’t occupy areas that surveys said they inhabited.
“We froze our bleeps off out there,” said Tom S. Smith, a study co-author and associate professor at Brigham Young University. “I mean, it’s rough. When someone is telling us there’s a den here and we invest a lot of time and a lot of effort and there’s nothing there, and then we’re going down the sea ice 10 miles away and there’s a den when they said there wasn’t any, we took it kind of personal. We said this is useless. This is not working.”
Smith and researchers at Polar Bears International, a nonprofit conservation group, embarked on their study of aerial surveys using FLIR. They determined the technology can easily be disrupted if surveys are conducted in windy conditions or bad winter weather on the tundra.
Patrick N. Bergt, a manager of regulatory and legal affairs for the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, said FLIR “is just one of many mitigation activities” used by the industry to minimize harm to polar bears. Bergt said 40 years of data collection has shown “at most, a negligible impact on polar bear populations” on the North Slope Borough, an area of Prudhoe Bay where the study was conducted.
Much of what scientists understand about polar bears “is due in large part to the funding, personnel, and cooperation of oil and gas operators” that have a long history of cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials in the area, Bergt said.
The study comes five months after the Trump administration announced a controversial proposal to allow petroleum operations in the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the most aggressive of five listed options. The proposal is in the process of being finalized, possibly by year’s end. It would be the first time exploration and drilling would be allowed in the environmentally pristine refuge, a critical habitat for polar bears.
“They have to socialize and create a bond with their cubs so that they’ll stay close for a couple of years or they could wander off and get picked off by a predator,” he said. “They develop muscle skills … so they can learn to walk and jump on ice.”
But if the mothers are disturbed, or the den destroyed, and they leave prematurely, all that is potentially lost. “That’s not going to end well for those little cubs,” Smith said.
According to the study, co-authored by Steven Amstrup and Geoffrey York of Polar Bears International, FLIR has flaws that the Arctic’s harsh conditions expose nearly every time it is used. Howling wind throws it off. It cannot detect heat signatures under a meter of ice.
Smith’s student researchers used handheld infrared to detect dens. The industry contracts pilots to fly Twin Otter fixed-wing airplanes to canvass a wide area with attached infrared technology.
“They miss them because they’re flying in bad weather,” Smith said. “They’re not paying heed to all the research that’s gone before that says you can’t just go out and fly.”
At Prudhoe Bay, the weather is unforgiving in the spring and especially bad in winter when the surveys are conducted. The findings are shared with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, another division of Interior, that manages the area. Researchers rely on the word of the agency’s biologists.
“We were told by the Fish and Wildlife Service that a bear was gone,” Smith said. So he had one of his students dig with a shovel to determine the thickness of the den. “All of a sudden, right at his feet, a bear sticks its head out.” The student ran for his life. The bear stayed for another week.
“Yeah, it’s alarming” that surveys miss so many dens, Smith said. “It really undermines your confidence that they truly know where the bears are.”
he president opened his response to a looming pandemic with 
