All posts by nedhamson

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

AfD′s Alice Weidel called German government ′pigs′ in racist email, report says | News | DW | 10.09.2017

Germany has been “overrun by Arabs, Sinti and Roma” states an email reportedly written by the AfD’s Alice Weidel. If real, the email could sully Weidel’s image as her far-right party’s more moderate voice.

Source: AfD′s Alice Weidel called German government ′pigs′ in racist email, report says | News | DW | 10.09.2017

Chrissie Wellington: ‘every race I’ve entered, something’s hurting’

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The multiple world champion Ironman triathlete, 40, on the will to succeed, training too hard and the pleasure of snoring in bed

All my world championships were special for different reasons [Wellington won the World Ironman title four times]. But it was in the first one that I surpassed all my expectations. It was such a surprise to everyone – including me. It changed my life for ever.

At school I was extremely focused. I always wanted to achieve the highest grades and to beat as many people in my class as possible. My parents are non-pushy. I don’t know where my competitive spirit comes from.

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‘No Fascist USA!’: how hardcore punk fuels the Antifa movement

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The anti-fascist movement draws on punk’s political awareness and network for activism – and right now may be its most crucial moment

“No Trump! No KKK! No Fascist USA!”

When Green Day chanted the repurposed lyrics from Texan punk trailblazers MDC’s 1981 song Born to Die during the 2016 American Music Awards, it gave the burgeoning anti-Trump, anti-fascist movement the slogan it needed – and it would soon appear on placards, T-shirts and be chanted by protesters in their thousands in months to come.

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A Menacing Line of Hurricanes : Image of the Day

Meteorologists struggled to find the right words to describe the situation as a line of three hurricanes—two of them major and all of them threatening land—brewed in the Atlantic basin in September 2017.Forecasters were most concerned about Irma, which was on track to make landfall in densely populated South Florida on September 10 as a large category 4 storm. Meanwhile, category 2 Hurricane Katia was headed for Mexico, where it was expected to make landfall on September 9. And just days after Irma devastated the Leeward Islands, the chain of small Caribbean islands braced for another blow—this time from category 4 Hurricane Jose.

Source: A Menacing Line of Hurricanes : Image of the Day

Why we have to cut off the head of fascism again and again | Books | The Guardian

The 43 Club was founded in early 1946. It was comprised, at first, of tough, well-trained Anglo-Jewish former servicemen. These men set about disrupting the public meetings of the resurgent fascist movement. They also infiltrated it, at great personal risk, to gather intelligence – to learn their enemy’s plans so as to then sabotage them. They fought the fascists on the streets of British cities, and attracted increasing numbers to their cause. They were disciplined, principled and restrained. They were highly effective tactically, and didn’t hesitate to use brute force when it was required. By 1949 the fascist movement in Britain was effectively finished. Mosley had moved to France.Much of this is told by a founding member of the 43 Group, Morris Beckman, in an extraordinary book called The 43 Group: Battling with Mosley’s Blackshirts, published by the History Press. It’s a story of heroic resistance, also a kind of secret history of that rather murky period. I have borrowed heavily from Beckman’s account of that resistance in my new book, The Wardrobe Mistress. It is a novel of the London theatre in those years, and of the simultaneous revival of fascism in Britain. I end the story in a graveyard, with a kind of echo of the Nazi salute. Fascism may at times seem to fade away but it does not die. Whenever it raises its head, as Beckman and his friends understood and as did those protesters in Charlottesville, it must be resisted. Its head must be cut off, yet again.

Source: Why we have to cut off the head of fascism again and again | Books | The Guardian

New Klebsiella strains ‘worst-case scenario,’ experts say | CIDRAP “Pandemic watch…”

While the overall prevalence of hypervirulent, drug-resistant K pneumoniae in China appears to be low, Chen said, what he and his colleagues are worried about is that it will likely increase in Chinese hospitals, presenting clinicians with more severe infections that don’t respond to the current arsenal of antibiotics.But with few new antibiotics in the pipeline, physicians will be forced to keep using what they have, which will only hasten the further emergence of multidrug-resistant pathogens, said David van Duin, MD, PhD, an antimicrobial resistance researcher at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “Emergence of combined increased virulence and resistance will force doctors to treat patients even more broadly upfront with last-line antibiotics, thus inducing additional resistance,” he said.And if the rapid global spread of the resistance gene MCR-1 is any example, these types of infections won’t be limited to China. The plasmid-mediated gene, which confers resistance to the last-resort antibiotic colistin, was identified in Escherichia coli bacteria in China in 2015, and since then has been detected in more than 30 countries. Other antibiotic resistance genes have demonstrated similar ability to spread rapidly via horizontal gene transfer. The genes and plasmids, and the bacteria that carry them, know no boundaries.”Multidrug-resistant organisms in one part of the world are a threat to patients everywhere,” van Duin said.

Source: New Klebsiella strains ‘worst-case scenario,’ experts say | CIDRAP