Category Archives: Viva!

William Barr’s efforts to protect Roger Stone are another blow to rule of law | Andrew Gawthorpe

Crony Traitors stick together

Barr is a ‘tough on crime’ hypocrite, a Trump toady and chief law enforcement officer who makes a mockery of the legal system

No one has ever accused the US attorney general, William Barr, of being soft on crime. Just last year, he gave a speech in which he blasted progressive district attorneys who “style themselves as ‘social justice’ reformers” and then “spend their time undercutting the police, letting criminals off the hook, and refusing to enforce the law”. When these prosecutors do bring charges, he complained, they seek “pathetically lenient sentences”. Barr’s message was clear: the integrity of the criminal justice system had to be protected at all costs.

Given Barr’s track record of fulmination against weak prosecutors, it came as something as a surprise yesterday when he intervened in the case of longtime Trump associate Roger Stone. Stone – an attention-seeking Republican bit-player whose crimes against fashion alone warrant a heavy sentence – committed a series of felonies including obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and lying to Congress during the Mueller investigation. In turn, these crimes stemmed from Stone’s attempts to obfuscate his contact with WikiLeaks during the 2016 election.

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UN publishes list of companies with ties to Israeli settlements

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Palestinian officials welcome report, while Israel condemns it as ‘shameful blacklist’

The UN has published a list of companies with business ties to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, including the US-based TripAdvisor and Airbnb and the British truck and digger maker JCB.

Most of the 112 companies linked to settlements, which are regarded as illegal under international law, were Israeli. The list included 18 international firms, including the London-based online travel agency Opodo and the Netherlands-based Booking.com.

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Why NPIs Will Be Our 1st Line Of Defense Against COVID-19

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The movie `Contagion’, released 9 years ago, portrayed a fictional SARS-like virus (dubbed MEV-1) emerging from bats in China and spreading quickly around the globe as scientists at the CDC frantically worked to develop a vaccine. Unlike most summer blockbusters, this film endeavored to portray the science as accurately as possible (see my review here).

One area where the movie took considerable dramatic license was in portraying the development (and deployment) of a vaccine for this never-before-seen virus as happening over a matter of months, rather than years.

Just 4 months ago, a naturally occuring novel coronavirus sparking an epidemic was the fictional scenario used by Johns Hopkins Center For Health Security (JHCHS) – in concert with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – in a half-day table top pandemic exercise (#Event201) hosted in New York City.

JHCHS Pandemic Table Top Exercise (EVENT 201) Videos Now Available Online

The JHCHS #Event201 (Fictional) CAPS Pandemic Scenario 

Johns Hopkins Pandemic Table Top Exercise (EVENT 201)

In the JHCHS scenario, there was no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year, and while there was a fictional antiviral drug that could help the sick, it wouldn’t do much to slow the pandemic.

Now, with life imitating art, we’ve got a very real novel coronavirus – albeit of uncertain severity – spreading across China and slowly spilling out around the world. A vaccine is considered a long shot in anything less than 12 to 18 months, and right now, we don’t have a known pharmacological intervention.

Despite all of this, we are not defenseless. 

Last November, I wrote a multi-blog series (links below) on the WHO’s revised 91-page Guidance document on the use of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions during a severe influenza epidemic or pandemic.

WHO Guidance: Non-pharmaceutical Public Health Measures for Mitigating the Risk and Impact of Epidemic and Pandemic Influenza

The WHO NPI Guidance : Personal Protection

The WHO NPI Guidance : Social Distancing

The WHO NPI Guidance : Environmental Measures

The WHO Pandemic Influenza NPI Guidance : Travel Measures

While many countries have triggered these NPIs a lot sooner (and far more rigorously) than envisioned in this WHO document, when properly and consistently used, they can greatly reduce the spread and impact of a pandemic virus. 
The CDC’s Nonpharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) webpage defines NPIs as:

Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) are actions, apart from getting vaccinated and taking medicine, that people and communities can take to help slow the spread of illnesses like influenza (flu). NPIs are also known as community mitigation strategies.

Measures like social distancing, hand hygiene, staying home when sick, avoiding crowds, wearing a mask if you are sick, even the closure of schools or other public venues are all potential NPIs.

While some may scoff at their effectiveness, we have a real-world example during the worst flu pandemic in recorded history – the 1918 Spanish flu.

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The chart above, taken from the PNAS journal article entitled Public Health Interventions and Pandemic Intensity During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, illustrates what happened in two American cities during the 1918 pandemic. 
  • The sharp, but much shorter pandemic wave depicted by the solid line occurred in Philadelphia, where relatively few steps were taken by the public health department to slow the spread of the disease . They even went ahead with a massive Liberty Loan parade on September 28th of that year, apparently heartened by the low number of flu cases reported in Pennsylvania to that point.
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  • The dotted line represents St. Louis, which closed schools early and where the Health Department prohibited public gatherings in places like theaters, churches, and restaurants. As you can see, the percentage of cases reported on a daily basis were far fewer in St. Louis, but their pandemic wave lasted nearly twice as long as in Philadelphia.

During the 3 weeks following Philadelphia’s parade at least 6,081 deaths from influenza and 2,651 deaths from pneumonia were registered in Pennsylvania, most occurring in Philadelphia (CDC source).At its worst, the percentage of excess  people afflicted in the city of Philadelphia was 5 times greater than what St. Louis experienced.

The burden on hospitals, mortuaries, and practically all segments of the economy was certainly far greater. 

In 2017’s  Community Pandemic Mitigation’s Primary Goal : Flattening The Curvewe look at the HHS/CDC’s 2017 revised Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza, which urges communities to be more like St. Louis in a pandemic. 
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Specific goals for implementing NPIs early in a pandemic include slowing acceleration of the number of cases in a community, reducing the peak number of cases during the pandemic and related health care demands on hospitals and infrastructure, and decreasing overall cases and health effects ( Figure 1).

NPIs don’t come without a cost, both economic and societal, but they can greatly limit the impact of a severe epidemic or pandemic, and save lives.

But in order to be successful, they must be rigorously observed. 

If you haven’t done so already, now would be a good time to familiarize yourself with the CDC’s plans to deal with a severe epidemic.  You’ll find some earlier blogs on the revised 2017 guidance at:

CDC/HHS Community Pandemic Mitigation Plan – 2017

PSAF Is The New Pandemic Severity Index

Additionally, the CDC has prepared pandemic guidance for a number of other venues:

While it is too soon to know which of these measures will be needed here for the novel coronavirus, much of what you can do now to prepare for a pandemic will hold you in good stead for any prolonged emergency or disaster.

LA Leaders Want To End Killing Of Mountain Lions For Taking Livestock

5e42b73fb555c5000abe24e5-eight.jpgP-56 was part of the National Park Service’s ongoing study of mountain lions in the area. He was fitted with a radio collar in April 2017. (Courtesy National Park Service via Flickr)

The death of mountain lion P-56 has grabbed the attention of city leaders in L.A., where two council members are calling for an end to permitted killings.

The male mountain lion was shot and killed legally using what’s known as a depredation permit issued by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife after a dozen sheep and lambs were killed in the Camarillo area. Such permits are issued to landowners who can prove the loss or damage of livestock was caused by mountain lions.

Councilmen Paul Koretz, whose 5th District covers parts of the westside and San Fernando Valley, and David Ryu, whose 4th District covers parts of Hollywood, the Hollywood Hills and Sherman Oaks, wrote a resolution calling for the state to stop issuing these permits and establish a fund to reimburse anyone who loses an animal in an attack.

I am outraged at the unnecessary killing of mountain lion P56 in a time when we are working on all levels to protect our local wildlife and habitats. Thank you @davideryu & @BobBlumenfield for your support in stopping depredation permits and listing our local pumas as threatened pic.twitter.com/8PnEkDANhV

— Paul Koretz (@PaulKoretzCD5) February 12, 2020

Mountain lions are not threatened or endangered in California. However, Prop 117, a ballot measure passed in 1990, made them a “specially protected species,” a status which, combined with other statutes, makes it illegal to hunt them, according to CDFW.

In Southern California, the spread of freeways and urban development have left them so dangerously isolated that their long-term survival is in question. P-56 was a collared lion that was part of an ongoing study in the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area.

“I think there’s just an insane disconnect between the fact that we are working to conserve our mountain lions, especially in the city of Los Angeles, where there’s possibly one still surviving that’s collared and there may be another one that’s not collared — two males, and we just allowed one to be killed,” Koretz said.

Speaking on KPCC’s AirTalk, Koretz called the killing “absolutely unnecessary” and pointed to other steps that might be taken to prevent the loss of livestock, including the use of rubber bullets to deter mountain lions and using more sophisticated animal pens for protection.

But some residents in areas impacted by mountain lions say they have a right to defend life and property.

Wendell Phillips is one such resident. He lives in Malibu and had several alpacas and horses killed by P-45. He was issued a depredation permit but only managed to graze the animal with a bullet.

Phillips said victims of attacks shouldn’t be blamed for not building a better pen or taking other precautions that don’t end up working.

“I mean, it would be sort of like tantamount to telling a burglary victim, ‘Your burglar alarm wasn’t the best and therefore you’re at fault for being burglarized,'” he said.

CDFW has said it will review P-56’s death to make sure protocols were followed.

You can listen to the full debate on AirTalk.

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The US Deported Them, Ignoring Their Pleas. Then They Were Killed.

Asylum seekers in the United States face dangerous, even deadly, consequences when their claims are not taken seriously.

Those at risk are people like Santos Amaya, a Salvadoran police officer who had received death threats from gang members. He was deported from the United States in April 2018 and was shot dead, allegedly by gangs, that same month. People like a young Salvadoran woman who fled domestic violence and rape and was deported to El Salvador in July 2018. She now lives in fear, hiding from her abusers.


February 5, 2020Report

Deported to Danger

United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse

These lives hang in the balance while the Trump administration attacks every legal means of protecting them in the United States.

On Feb. 5, Human Rights Watch released a report that identified 138 cases of Salvadorans who had been killed since 2013 after being deported from the United States; more than 70 others were beaten, sexually assaulted, extorted or tortured. These numbers are shocking but certainly an undercount, because no government or entity tracks what happens to deportees.

The Trump administration has put pressure on immigration judges to use overly narrow readings of the definition of a refugee. This approach may result in judges denying asylum to people like Amaya and the young Salvadoran woman — survivors of domestic violence, people who fear violence at the hands of gangs, or people who fear being targeted based on their family relationships. The administration has further proposed several new obstacles to gain asylum, including barring people convicted of illegal reentry into the United States, an offense often committed by people desperate to seek safety.

The Trump administration has tried to destroy the US asylum process in other ways — among them by forcing people to remain in dangerous and inhumane conditions in Mexican border towns while their claims are processed under its Migrant Protection Protocols. A Syracuse University analysis of government data revealed that as of December, 7,668 Salvadorans have been forced to wait in Mexico for their asylum claims to be processed. We have documented cases, included in a tally maintained by Human Rights First, of Salvadorans who have been kidnapped and attacked while waiting.

The United States is also returning asylum seekers to Guatemala, after pressing its government to sign an “asylum cooperation agreement,” despite the fact that many Guatemalans are fleeing for the same reasons as their Salvadoran neighbors.

Salvadorans in the United States are at risk for reasons other than the Trump administration’s attempt to eviscerate the right to seek asylum. More than 220,000 Salvadorans are affected by the administration’s decision to end temporary protected status and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections. The administration also decided to end work authorization for Salvadorans with TPS, which allowed many Salvadorans to come to the United States in 2001 after a series of natural disasters.

These policies cover people who have worked, raised families, educated themselves and built their lives in the United States. This alone should be reason to value their relationship to the United States and regularize their legal status. But the killings and abuse that many Salvadorans will face if they are returned makes the need for Congress to enact legislation to protect recipients of these programs even more acute.

Former long-term residents of the United States face unique risks. Salvadorans who have lived in the United States are often extorted by gangs, as two cases we investigated in detail illustrate. In each, the person’s long-term residence meant that they were seen as having more wealth than most Salvadorans. They were repeatedly extorted by gangs and ultimately killed for their refusal to pay bribes.

But the Trump administration is not solely at fault here. Existing law, passed long before President Trump took office, has largely barred people with criminal convictions from seeking asylum, even when they face harm. They include a young man whose case we investigated, who at age 17, in 2010, fled gang recruitment and violence for the United States. After serving a sentence for two counts related to burglaries in the United States, he was denied protection, deported in 2017 and killed about three months later.

There is a simple way to prevent the murders and abuse we spent the past year and a half investigating: Give all noncitizens a full and fair opportunity to explain what abuses they fear before deporting them. As Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said in a statement after we released our report, the United States must stop “knowingly signing a death sentence by forcibly returning vulnerable people to the very place they fled.”

The right to a fair hearing on claims for protection should apply to everyone — including the more than 59,000 people waiting in dangerous and inhumane conditions in Mexican border towns, people who had been living under the TPS or DACA programs, or those who have paid their debt to society after serving criminal sentences.

Now US authorities are on notice about what is likely to happen when they deport Salvadorans without adequately considering their cases. This shameful and illegal practice should stop.

In the Shadows of Men: Threat of Divorce – nadiaharhash

THREAT OF DIVORCE It was as if my divorce threatened to break apart all the marriages in society. Suddenly, I became a threat to every man and woman, and a threat to my own family—both my married and unmarried sisters. I brought disgrace when I asked for divorce. In the midst of the aggression that…
— Read on nadiaharhash.com/2020/02/11/in-the-shadows-of-men-threat-of-divorce/

Mountain Lion P-56 Killed After Death Of Livestock

Mistake – puma more important than 2 sheep – catch and move should have been the move. 5e41e725b555c5000abe24c7-eight.jpgMountain lion P-56 (Courtesy of National Park Service)

A four- or five-year-old mountain lion was killed in the Santa Monica Mountains after the deaths of 12 privately owned sheep and lambs in the area.

The owner of the livestock obtained permission to kill the mountain lion from the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.

P-56 was part of the National Park Services’ ongoing study of mountain lions in the area. He was fitted with a radio collar in April 2017, and was the first animal involved in the study to be euthanized as a result of predatory behavior. He was killed on January 27.

P-56 was believed to be the father of at least four other mountain lions: P-70, P-71, P-72 and P-73. Authorities were able to confirm that he was responsible for a majority of the livestock deaths by tracking his movements via his collar.

California landowners whose livestock or pets are threatened by a mountain lion are required to implement non-lethal deterrents before requesting a depredation permit from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to kill the animal.

Such a permit is granted only after property owners or animal owners have made serious attempts to protect their livestock or pets, said Tim Daily, a public information officer with CDFW.

“We make sure the person has done whatever he or she can to prevent further incidents,” he said.

In the case of P-56, the landowner – whose property was in the Camarillo area – tried various methods over the course of approximately two years to dissuade the mountain lion from returning and killing more livestock, including bringing the livestock inside, penning the livestock, and utilizing guard dogs, lights, sound and electric fencing, according to CDFW.

When those attempts failed, the resident was granted the depredation permit, which allows a resident to kill a mountain lion, or to name another person to kill it.

Whoever carries out the killing must use “humane methods,” said Daly.

“Not poison, not metal traps,” he said, adding that whoever does the killing must also follow local gun and hunting laws and be legally authorized to hunt or kill animals. The person must not have been convicted of a violation of taking game or fur-bearing animals in the last 24 months, or be on probation and barred from hunting or possessing firearms.

The method used to kill P-56 has not been confirmed, nor has the name of the person who killed the animal.

Scientists at NPS who are involved in the mountain lion study say that the death of P-56 could be detrimental to their project, and to the well-being of mountain lions in the area.

“We have a very small population, and our lions are already facing a number of significant challenges, especially with the Woolsey Fire that destroyed almost half of the mountains,” said Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist with NPS. “The loss of any animal in this small population could be significant.”

CDFW will review P-56’s death to make sure all protocols were followed.

Lita Martinez contributed to this report.

Philippines moves to strip biggest media group of its franchise

Being afraid of a truth other than theirs is endemic to tin hat dictator wannabes

Action against ABS-CBN denounced as worst attack yet on press by Rodrigo Duterte

Activists and media organisations in the Philippines have denounced Rodrigo Duterte’s government after its lawyers moved to strip the nation’s biggest media group of its franchise in the most severe attack on press freedom in the country yet.

Duterte has repeatedly pledged to stop the broadcast operations of ABS-CBN and expressed anger over its reporting during the 2016 presidential election campaign.

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Generations of Handwritten Mexican Cookbooks Are Now Online

The story of Mexican food is usually told as a happy merging of indigenous ingredients and techniques with those brought by the Spanish in the 1500s, as if the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire was just a means to a better burrito. In fact, what we now know as Mexican cuisine is the result of centuries of shifting borders and tastes.

“When it came to culinary cultural exchange in the colonial period, the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo referred to corn dishes as the ‘misery of maize cakes,'” says Stephanie Noell, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). “On the other side, Indians were not impressed by the Spaniards’ wheat bread, describing it as ‘famine food.’” The eventual confluence of native and European ingredients and traditions is, of course, what defines North American cuisine to this day.

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A rough timeline of this transformation exists in the UTSA’s Mexican cookbook collection, the largest-known trove of Mexican and Mexican-American cookbooks in North America. It started with a donation of nearly 550 books from San Antonio resident Laurie Gruenbeck in 2001, amassed during her decades of travel throughout Mexico. It now has more than 2,000 books, including some of renowned chef and scholar Diana Kennedy’s rarest books, as well as her personal papers. It has the oldest cookbooks published in Mexico (from 1831), elaborate vegetarian cookbooks from 1915 and 1920, corporate and community cookbooks, and much more.

The earliest book in the collection is from 1789, making it one of the oldest Mexican cookbooks in existence. This so-called “manuscript cookbook”—written by “Doña Ignacita,” who Noell believes was the kitchen manager of a well-off family—is a handwritten recipe collection in a notebook, complete with liquid stains, doodles, and pages that naturally fall open to the most-loved recipes. These manuscript cookbooks, never intended for public scrutiny, provide essential insight on how real households cooked on a regular basis. Though the UTSA only has about 100 manuscript cookbooks, they are impossibly rare documents that form the heart of the collection.

Written in flowery scripts and stained with the cooks’ DNA, these recipe-packed tomes feel like living histories that inform our present as much as they illuminate the past. “I’ve had students in tears going through these, because it’s so powerful to see that connection with how their family makes certain dishes and where they originated,” says Noell.

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Anyone can visit the collection, but, Noell says, “I want anybody with an internet connection to be able to see these works.” Toward that end, the UTSA has stepped up digitization efforts to get the majority of their older books—in particular the fragile, one-of-a-kind manuscript cookbooks—not just scanned but transcribed, so the contents are searchable. About half of the approximately 100 manuscript cookbooks have been digitized so far. While anyone can visit the collection, this global availability is a game-changer for not just students and scholars, but anyone interested in the development of Mexican and Mexican-American cuisine.

“Aside from the treasure of the recipes, many of these [manuscript cookbooks] read like stories themselves,” says Rico Torres, chef and co-owner of San Antonio’s Mixtli, one of the country’s most acclaimed restaurants dedicated to progressive Mexican cuisine. “Often there’s a hint of longing for a dish from a faraway place. There was a recipe I came across that was an interesting take on paella, substituting saffron with poblano chile, and Spanish chorizo with local varieties from Puebla.”

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Deciphering these densely written books is worth the effort for Mexican gastronomy obsessives. A close read of cookbooks from the late 18th and early 19th centuries shows vino de Parras appearing over and over again. It’s a reference to wine from the city of Parras in the state of Coahuila, the center of Mexican wine production even after winemaking was forbidden for everyone except clergy in 1699. The wine is offered as an alternative to both white and red wine (presumably imported from Spain) for cooking. It shows that this “forbidden” red wine was extremely common outside the church, and, as historical hearsay suggests, that it was light enough to stand in for wine of either color.

In the 1789 book, most of the “fancy” meat dishes include ingredients such as almonds, sesame seeds, raisins, cloves, and cinnamon, which—from our modern-day standpoint—seem like obvious precursors to the the flavorings added to mole. In the first published Mexican cookbooks of the 1830s, the same items are ground with dried chiles in recipes that read much like today’s mole recipes from Oaxaca and Puebla, but with names like mole gallego (Galician, of northwest Spain) and castellano (Castilian, of central Spain). The language used lends weight to the idea that mole sauces were intentional fusions of native and Spanish tastes, and that some of these luxury ingredients still weren’t considered Mexican, even 300 years post-Conquest.

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Many of the dishes at Mixtli, from several of their mole sauces to a recent dish of pickled mussels, were inspired by the university’s collection. “Having the UTSA Mexican Cookbook collection as one of our resources has been incredibly valuable to the message of our restaurant; to preserve, protect, and promote Mexican gastronomy,” says Torres.

Noell also stresses that “this collection is an attempt to preserve the culinary heritage of all of these different regions of Mexico and also of Mexican-Americans.” It traces the period when Mexico was New Spain and idealized European dishes, to the era after the second Mexican Revolution, when pride in native dishes took center stage. Earlier books have multi-day recipes, while later books prioritize convenience, including packaged and frozen foods. And throughout the centuries, the books are dessert-heavy.

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Given that most of the southeastern U.S. was part of Mexico for centuries, the collection brings to life local culinary history as well. “Today we identify Tex-Mex with large goblets of margaritas and nachos, but the gastronomy of the Texas Mexican terroir predates political and national boundaries,” says Torres, noting that many of the ingredients mentioned in the cookbooks, such as maize, chiles, and nopal, are eaten on both sides of the border. As both a culinary resource and historical record, the UTSA Mexican cookbook collection shows how intertwined Mexico and the U.S. have always been, and continue to be.

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