All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

CDC head pleads with Americans as COVID-19 cases rise | CIDRAP

“I’m speaking today not necessarily as your CDC director and not only as your CDC director, but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter, to ask you to just please hold on a little while longer,” Walensky said.

Deaths on the rise, too, as states open

“I know what it’s like to see a hospital with a mobile morgue,” Walensky said, explaining the United States is seeing an increase not only in daily case counts, but also in deaths.

According to the Washington Post, new COVID-19 cases rose 8.8% in the past week, and new daily reported deaths rose by 10.5%. In total, the United States has 30,267,561 confirmed cases, and 549,364 deaths.

The United States reported 43,694 new COVID-19 cases yesterday, and 506 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 tracker. As of March 26, there were 32,573 Americans hospitalized with COVID-19, according to the CDC.

Walensky explained that these jumps were likely fueled by states relaxing restrictions and abandoning mask mandates too soon, and by the heightened transmissibility of variants—including B117, the variant first identified in the United Kingdom—which now account for 26% of all COVID-19 cases sequenced in the United States.

Vaccinating 2.7 million a day

But both Walensky and Anthony Fauci, MD, chief medical adviser to President Biden, said that another surge was not inevitable.

“We can win this by hanging in there a bit longer,” said Fauci.

Source: CDC head pleads with Americans as COVID-19 cases rise | CIDRAP

COVID: Angela Merkel vows to take tough action | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 29.03.2021

Merkel told Anne Will her patience with state leaders is wearing thin, and signaled her readiness to override them if they failed to act “in the very near future.”

“I have a duty and an obligation to see how we can take action at the national level,” she said. “One possibility is taking another look at the infection protection law and amend it.”

The infection protection law grants the federal government additional powers during a national health emergency. Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, has amended it a few times since the beginning of the pandemic. Critics fear it hands the government too much power and requires increased legislative oversight, although the option is constitutional.

Changing the law to put more power in the hands of the federal government would require signoff from the Bundestag as well as the Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament that represents the states. Merkel said she has not yet decided if she will push for the change.

“We are legally responsible to curb infections, and that’s not happening right now,” she said, rejecting an offer to hold another meeting with state leaders. “We don’t need a meeting. We need the states to take action.”

Source: COVID: Angela Merkel vows to take tough action | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 29.03.2021

Myanmar’s medics go undercover treating protesters in the battle for democracy – ABC News

Many hospitals are closed after doctors and nurses walked off the job as part of the civil disobedience movement following last month’s military coup, but protesters are often too scared to seek help at official medical facilities anyway. As a result, these back-alley, mobile medical services have become a lifeline in cities and towns across the troubled south-east Asian nation. A local journalist working for the ABC spent several days with these secret crews of volunteers in the biggest city of Yangon. One 54-year-old nurse, whom the ABC will not name for her safety, said she had been working every day for the past six weeks to help injured protesters – most of them young people.

Source: Myanmar’s medics go undercover treating protesters in the battle for democracy – ABC News

Average westerner’s eating habits lead to loss of four trees every year | Deforestation | The Guardian

Destruction of forests is a major cause of both the climate crisis and plunging wildlife populations, as natural ecosystems are razed for farming. The study is the first to fully link high-resolution maps of global deforestation to the wide range of commodities imported by each country across the world.

The research lays bare the direct links between consumers and the loss of forests across the planet. Chocolate consumption in the UK and Germany is an important driver of deforestation in Ivory Coast and Ghana, the scientists found, while beef and soy demand in the US, European Union and China results in forest destruction in Brazil.

Coffee drinkers in the US, Germany and Italy are a significant cause of deforestation in central Vietnam, the research shows, while timber demand in China, South Korea and Japan results in tree loss in northern Vietnam.

Source: Average westerner’s eating habits lead to loss of four trees every year | Deforestation | The Guardian

Border Crisis Is Not Actually a Crisis

The reality is that not much has changed at the border, according to an analysis by Tom Wong of the University of California at San Diego’s U.S. Immigration Policy Center. “This year looks like the usual seasonal increase, plus migrants who would have come last year but could not,” Wong wrote of the numbers of people coming to the U.S. What else hasn’t changed is that the border remains, far from “open,” effectively closed, the result of decades of militarization and ramped up border security and begun in earnest during the Clinton years, and that Biden, continuing some of his predecessor’s worst policies enacted under the guise of covid-19, has been turning away the vast majority of single adults and even families who are attempting to seek asylum under Title 42.

You wouldn’t know that, though, from watching or reading the mainstream political press. That this crisis narrative has been eagerly pushed by rightwing news outlets like Fox News and Republicans like Ted Cruz who now suddenly have found it politically expedient to pretend to care about unaccompanied minors crossing the border, while simultaneously characterizing them and other migrants as a threat, is wholly unsurprising. It’s political theater, meant to score cheap and all-too-easy points and to dehumanize people fleeing poverty and violence, in an effort to maintain the status quo and derail any chances of significant immigration reform.

Source: Border Crisis Is Not Actually a Crisis

29th Day of March – Fatcowco – 1974 – Terracotta Army was discovered

1974 – Terracotta Army was discovered

The Terracotta Army is a collection of terracotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China.

It is a form of funerary art buried with the emperor in 210–209 BCE with the purpose of protecting the emperor in his afterlife.

1974 – Terracotta Army was discovered

The figures, dating from approximately the late third century BCE, were discovered on 29 March, 1974 by local farmers in Lintong County, outside Xi’an, Shaanxi, China.

Estimates from 2007 were that the three pits containing the Terracotta Army held more than 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses, and 150 cavalry horses, the majority of which remained buried in the pits near Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum.

Source: 29th Day of March – Fatcowco

Chocolate candy: benefits and harm – For Health

Chocolate was invented even before Columbus discovered America. It was made from cocoa beans. The Aztec and Maya tribes used chocolate as a base for drinks and sauces. Cocoa beans were ground and mixed with water to produce sweet and bitter drinks intended exclusively for the elite and priests. The chocolate itself was made from toasted and ground, fermented Theobroma cacao beans. It grew in the lowlands of the tropics of Central and South America, in Mexico. Currently, this tree is cultivated in all tropical countries. Source: Chocolate candy: benefits and harm – For Health

Haunting Howls of Hanabari

Weekend Stories by Trishikh

About forty-kilometres north of the city of Kolkata on the west bank of the two-hundred-sixty-kilometres-long river Bhāgirathi-Hooghly, a distributary of the mighty Ganges in the state of West Bengal in India lies a once important port town during the pre-colonial times, the ancient borough of Hooghly-Chinsurah city.

Hooghly was founded right after the decline of Satgaon, the mercantile capital of lower Bengal, in 1537 by the Portuguese. They were, however, expelled ninety-five years later in 1632 by the Mughal armies. Nineteen years after that in 1651 it became the first English settlement in lower Bengal, only to be abandoned by the colonialist thirty-nine-years later for the city of Kolkata in 1690.

Chinsurah’s, on the other hand, budded one-hundred-and-nineteen-years later than that of Hooghly when in 1656 the Dutch built their first trading station and factory in the city. One-hundred-and-sixty-nine-years later in 1825, in exchange for holdings in Sumatra (now Indonesia)…

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