Post by mhbruin on Jan 8, 2022 9:44:30 GMT -8
US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 518 Million Shots (Population 333 Million)
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California Precipitation (Updated Tuesdays)
Reservoirs are still low, but they take time to refill and it may take the spring snow melt.
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Is There Anything More Useless Than An Influencer?
Canadian officials say a group of influencers whose rowdy behaviour on a flight led to their stranding in Mexico have flown home to face an inquiry.
In a briefing, a top health official said that 27 had returned and were screened at the airport. Some of the group could face stiff punishments.
Video shows a party on their charter plane without masks. Some were passing around bottles and vaping.
Their behaviour caused the airline to refuse to fly them home.
Sunwing Airlines cancelled a 5 January return trip for group of about 130 from Cancun and carriers Air Transat and Air Canada also said they would refuse to fly them.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the group's behaviour a "slap in the face" to citizens who have been following proper social distancing measures, as well as airline workers.
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Welcome Back My Friends to the Fire That Never Ends
Turkmenistan's president has ordered the extinguishing of the country's "Gateway to Hell", a fire that has been burning for decades in a huge desert gas crater.
Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov wants it put out for environmental and health reasons, as well as part of efforts to increase gas exports.
Mystery surrounds the Darvaza crater's creation in the Karakum Desert.
Many believe it formed when a Soviet drilling operation went wrong in 1971.
But Canadian explorer George Kourounis examined the crater's depths in 2013 and discovered that no-one actually knows how it started.
According to local Turkmen geologists, the huge crater formed in the 1960s but was only lit in the 1980s.
The crater is one of Turkmenistan's most popular tourist attractions.
How Do You Pronouce "Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov"? Where's Chris Roberts When You Need Him?
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I Can Think of Plenty of Reason to Want to Lock a Teenage Boy in the Boot (Trunk)
A US teacher has been arrested after allegedly locking her Covid-positive son in a car boot to protect herself from exposure to the virus as she drove to a testing site, say local media.
Sarah Beam, 41, is reportedly charged with endangering a child.
A witness called police after hearing someone in the vehicle's trunk on 3 January at the site in Harris County, Texas, according to click2Houston.com.
The teacher reportedly opened the boot to reveal the boy lying inside.
Ms Beam said her 13-year-old son had tested positive for Covid-19 and she was taking him to the Pridgeon Stadium location for another test to confirm the result, according to local media.
She reportedly said she had placed the teenager in the car boot because she did not want to be infected herself.
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Could Your Picture Be on a Google Maps Street View? Are You OK With That?
Italian police has caught a top mafia fugitive who had been on the run for nearly 20 years thanks to the help of the Google Maps app, an investigator told Reuters on Wednesday.
After a two-year investigation, Gioacchino Gammino, 61, was tracked down in Galapagar, Spain, where he lived under a fake name. The town is close to the capital Madrid.
A Google Maps street view picture portraying a man who looked like him in front of a fruit shop was key in triggering a deeper investigation.
"The photogram helped us to confirm the investigation we were developing in traditional ways," Nicola Altiero, deputy director of the Italian anti-mafia police unit (DIA), said.
Gammino, a member of a Sicilian mafia group dubbed Stidda, had escaped Rome's Rebibbia jail in 2002 and in 2003 had been sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder committed several years earlier.
Altiero said Gammino is currently under custody in Spain and they hope to bring him back to Italy by the end of February.
Can You Spot the Mafia Guy?
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Want a COVID Test? Just Give Me You SSN, Passport Number, DL Number and 2 Credit Cards. What Have You Got to Worry About?
Pop-up testing sites have cropped up on street corners, in parking lots and on shopping properties across the country, but health and legal experts say many of these are unregulated and could be rife for nefarious activities like identity theft.
In the last few weeks, legislators and attorneys general in several states including Illinois, Maryland, California, Texas and Pennsylvania have said they will be investigating and introducing regulatory legislation overseeing these operations.
Numerous illegal, unapproved and unsanitary sites have been cautioned by state officials nationwide.
Outside of St. Louis, a Covid testing site set up at a mall parking lot and was asking people to provide Social Security and passport ID numbers when registering for tests. It was shut down by police, who later urged anyone who visited the site to monitor their credit reports for fraudulent activity.
At least two sites were identified inBaltimore, where state Attorney General Brian Frosh warned residents to be aware of "illegal, unlicensed pop-up COVID-19 testing sites” that were collecting personal information that could be used for identity theft.
Unsanitary sites were reported in Chicago with workers not wearing masks or gloves. Conditions were being described as a “hellhole,” nonprofit news organization Block Club Chicago reported. People who visited said they never got their results or they came in weeks after visiting.
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No Wonder The Building Is Falling Over, But Ronald Hamburger Is On the Job.
The engineer trying to stabilize the Millennium Tower, a luxury residential skyscraper in San Francisco that is sinking into the ground and now leaning over two feet off of center, said the building is now tilting three inches per year.
Structural engineer Ronald O. Hamburger made the comments Thursday at a city hearing in which he pitched an updated fix for the building's foundation, NBC Bay Area reported.
The 58-story, 645-foot tall tower — opened to residents in 2009 — is now tilting 26 inches north and west at Fremont and Mission Streets in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district, the NBC News affiliate reported.
Residents were informed that the building is settling unevenly and more than anticipated in 2016. The tower sits beside the Salesforce Transit Center, a bus terminal and potential future rail terminus for California’s high speed rail network currently under construction.
But efforts to stabilize the sinking and leaning skyscraper seemed to worsen matters. Engineers halted construction on the fix in summer 2021 so they could “determine why increased foundation movement was occurring and how this could be mitigated.”
To relaunch the stabilization, Hamburger on Thursday proposed slashing the number of support piles beneath the tower from 52 to 18 to "minimize additional building settlement."
A letter to the Millennium Tower’s general manager last month said the new, quicker fix was needed after engineers identified two potential causes for apparent worsening of the building’s settlement: “vibration of the soils associated with pile installation activity, and unintentional removal of excessive soil as the piles were installed.”
Hamburger said the 18 steel piles will be anchored into bedrock 250 feet under the tower, cutting through rapidly compressing clay and sand soil that the building's foundation sits upon today.
Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar Have a Son?
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How Many Ways Is This Dumb?
BTW, The Photo is a Testing Site in New York City
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SCOTUS Won't Keep You Safe, While They Keep Themselves Safe
Neil's Ignorance Will Kill People
There Are Liars, Damned Liars, and Gorsuch
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Another One Bites the Dust
Cirsten Weldon was a right-wing social media darling of sorts, at least in the QAnon wing of the field. Her MAGA posts, anti-vaxx rhetoric, and willingness to embrace wild and fantastic conspiracy theories gained her tens of thousands of followers. Weldon was a firm ‘COVID-is-a-hoax’ believer who made videos where she yelled at people waiting in line for vaccines that “The vaccines kill, don’t get it!” She also believed Dr. Anthony Fauci should be executed.
According to reports, Weldon passed away Thursday from COVID-19 in a hospital in Camarillo, California. The Daily Beast says that Weldon began complaining of feeling sick at the end of December, posting a video on Dec. 28, where she “struggled through her remarks about the coming overthrow of the United States government, coughing and complaining that she was exhausted.”
Weldon’s last social media post was an image of herself in a hospital bed with an oxygen mask on, dated Dec. 31, 2021. In her post she wrote “Is [sic] hospital for 2 days Bacteria pneumonia they and tested me for covid I refused Dr Fauci s Resmedervir sorry no meetup in Santa Monica jan1” On Jan. 1 of the new year, she wrote that she was “not on a ventilator for those gossip s I am I’m a oxygen machine pray for my family God is is in Control.” In her last post, dated Jan. 5, she reportedly wrote “Pray God takes me out of here soon.”
Weldon made headlines not simply because she espoused all of the anti-science ‘vaccines are killing people’ mumbo-jumbo promoted by right-wing conspiracy theorists, but because she was willing to go very far afield in how outrageous her claims of conspiracy could be. In May 2021, Weldon appeared on a podcast claiming that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had died in the year 2020 from the rare brain-degenerating disease kuru. Why kuru? Kuru is a disease caused “by an infectious protein (prion) found in contaminated human brain tissue.”
More Useless Than a Social Influencer. She Executed Herself.
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You Can Pardon a Crook, But the Next Crime is Right Around the Corner.
Rightwing terrorist Steve Bannon sought to take out a loan shortly after being indicted by a grand jury for his contempt of Congress. The problem is that Steve Bannon didn’t own the house. Though the house had been owned by a non-profit connected to Bannon, the house was sold on Nov. 19, 2020 and Bannon applied for the loan from KS Statebank over a year after the sale of the house on Dec. 2, 2021.
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What Happens in Nur-Sultan Doesn't Stay in Nur-Sultan
Kazakhstan shut down its internet nationwide after political unrest sparked by rising gas prices.
Among the sectors affected by the outage was bitcoin mining, which has taken off in the Central Asian nation.
Other commodities such as uranium and oil also were impacted, with both seeing price spikes days after the uprising.
Nur-Sultan, formerly known as Akmolinsk, Tselinograd, and Astana, is the capital city of Kazakhstan.
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Confused? You May Be After Reading This From USA Today
Early data suggests virus particles from COVID variants – including omicron – may appear in the throat before reaching nasal passages where test swabs are done. And federal regulators warn the rapid tests in general may not be as effective detecting the new variant. To make sure they don't miss an infection, some have opted to add a swab to the back of their throat as well as their nose.
But federal agencies and health experts urge that at-home tests be used as directed and to not add a throat swab – for now. Throat swabbing may be called for in the future, experts say, but the tests currently authorized in the U.S. weren’t manufactured to detect virus in a person’s throat and could deliver false results.
“The thing about anything you do at home is that people are free to use these tests however they want to use them. That’s the democracy of at-home testing, right?” said Dr. Emily Volk, president of the College of American Pathologists. “But they need to do the test as prescribed. They’re not FDA-authorized any other way.”
So the Virus May Live in Your Throat, But Don't Swab Your Throat to See If You Have the Virus? WTF?
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Will They Be Required To Keep Their Toenails Clean in Prison?
A judge in Georgia sentenced Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan to life in prison on Friday for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was running through their mostly white neighborhood in February 2020 when they chased him down and killed him.
Under Georgia law, murder carries a mandatory life sentence unless prosecutors seek the death penalty. For the judge, Timothy Walmsley, the main decision was whether to grant father and son Greg McMichael, 66, and Travis McMichael, 35, and their neighbor, Bryan, 52, a chance to earn parole.
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Ahmaud Arbery's mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, fired back at a "dirty toenails" comment made earlier by an attorney representing the defendants during the sentencing hearing for Travis and Gregory McMichael and William "Roddie" Bryan.
While delivering a victim statement during the sentencing hearing on Friday, Cooper-Jones said that her son "sometimes refused to wear socks."
"I wish he would have cut and cleaned his toenails before he went out for a jog that day," she said. "I guess he would have if he knew he would be murdered."
The comments by Cooper-Jones came in response to remarks made by attorney Laura Hogue, who previously represented Greg McMichael in the case of Arbery's death.
During Hogue's closing arguments in the initial trial hearing, she criticized Arbery's feet and compared him to a "recurring nighttime intruder."
"Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made, does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts, with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails," Hogue said.
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Why? The Demand For Vaccination Remains Stable. Current Sites Are Handling It.
Public officials across the country are reopening temporary mass-vaccination sites that they wound down months ago, in an effort to get more people vaccinated and boosted in the latest Covid-19 surge driven by the Omicron variant.
Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Rhode Island are among states that have opened or are planning soon to open sites designed to administer hundreds or even thousands of shots a day. The locations include Boston’s Fenway Park, malls, a casino and convention centers.
I Don't Think That If They Built It, They Will Come
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A Penny For His Thoughts
The head of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot indicated Friday that the panel will ask former Vice President Mike Pence this month to voluntarily meet with lawmakers.
That's Probably About All They Are Worth
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At Least Floridians Won't Have to Figure Out Where to Swab
Florida officials admitted on Thursday that they had up to a million coronavirus test kits stored in a warehouse that expired just before New Year's Eve. The statement comes as Florida continues to be among those hardest hit by COVID-19, with some residents saying they are "desperate" to find tests.
Death Sentence Lies and Lies
DeSantis' office denied the accusation in an email to CBS affiliate WTSP earlier this week. But on Thursday at a press conference in West Palm Beach, DeSantis and other officials admitted to the expired tests.
"We had between 800,000 and a million test kits — Abbott test kits — in our warehouse that did expire," Kevin Guthrie, director of Florida's Division of Emergency Management, said at the conference. "We tried to give them out prior to that, but there wasn't a demand for it."
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"Florida had one of the lowest COVID rates in the country during fall, so the demand for testing was correspondingly low," DeSantis' press secretary Christina Pushaw told CBS News. "Though tests went unused due to insufficient demand, as the governor said: it's better to be overprepared than underprepared."
Yet, at the beginning of August, Florida reported 21,683 new cases of COVID-19 — which, at the time, was the most infections in a single day since the start of the pandemic. Infections in the state are now surging, with a record of nearly 77,000 new cases reported on Friday.
The state currently has the second-highest 28-day COVID case average in the U.S., with more than 745,200 reported cases in that time frame, according to Johns Hopkins University, and 615 deaths. The state has had nearly 4.5 million cases since COVID first hit the nation.
Many Florida residents have questioned DeSantis' claim of "low demand" for the tests.
There Are Liars, Damned Liars, and Gov Death Sentence
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While They Are At It, Can They Cancel One Cruz?
Norwegian Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean, two of the cruise industry’s largest global operators, are temporarily halting certain cruises, marking the first mass cruise cancellations due to the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
Royal Caribbean said Friday it’s canceling cruises on three of its ships starting Saturday and postponing voyages on a fourth ship until March 7. One of the ships will remain out of service until April 26.
Norwegian had already said it was canceling voyages on eight cruise ships, nearly half its fleet, after the Norwegian Pearl on Wednesday returned early to Miami due to a COVID-19 outbreak among crew members.
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CDC doesn't do a good job of reporting around holidays.
Doses Administered 7-Day Average | Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses | Number of People 2 or More Doses | New Cases 7-Day Average | Deaths 7-Day Average | |
| Jan 8 | 1,286,783 | 246,447,823 | 207,452,448 | ||
| Jan 7 | 1,226,151 | 246,050,320 | 207,229,983 | 668,497 | 1,513 |
| Jan 6 | 1,164,127 | 245,653,518 | 207,016,514 | 614,552 | 1,350 |
| Jan 5 | 1,117,999 | 245,278,020 | 206,797,799 | 586,391 | 1,245 |
| Jan 4 | 1,093,005 | 244,947,293 | 206,581,659 | 554,328 | 1,238 |
| Jan 3 | No Data | 491,652 | 1,165 | ||
| Jan 2 | No Data | 438,082 | 1,174 | ||
| Jan 1 | No Data | 411,871 | 1,151 | ||
| Dec 31 | No Data | 391,098 | 1,135 | ||
| Dec 30 | 1,234,917 | 243,527,564 | 205,811,394 | 360,276 | 1,144 |
| Dec 29 | 1,042,911 | 243,182,423 | 205,638,307 | 316,277 | 1,100 |
| Dec 28 | 1,091,279 | 242,813,374 | 205,420,745 | 277,241 | 1,085 |
| Dec 27 | 1,034,442 | 242,433,620 | 205,196,973 | 240,408 | 1,096 |
| Dec 26 | No Data | 206,577 | 1,041 | ||
| Dec 25 | No Data | 196,511 | 1,053 | ||
| Dec 24 | No Data | 195,713 | 1,108 | ||
| Dec 23 | 1,189,954 | 241,520,561 | 204,740,321 | 192,453 | 1,199 |
| Dec 22 | 1,283,244 | 241,583,543 | 204,818,717 | 176,097 | 1,213 |
| Dec 21 | 1,542,936 | 241,132,288 | 204,578,725 | 161,261 | 1,223 |
| Dec 20 | 1,554,261 | 241,881,712 | 204,098,982 | 149,331 | 1,188 |
| Dec 19 | 1,558,720 | 241,571,084 | 203,926,479 | 132,659 | 1,169 |
| Dec 18 | 1,562,366 | 241,205,528 | 203,727,446 | 127,445 | 1,182 |
| Dec 17 | 2,065,555 | 240,775,382 | 203,479,206 | 125,775 | 1,182 |
| Dec 16 | 2,043,207 | 240,321,022 | 203,159,327 | 122,296 | 1,179 |
| Dec 15 | 1,795,384 | 239,975,167 | 202,748,005 | 119,546 | 1,187 |
| Dec 14 | 1,904,464 | 239,553,956 | 202,504,037 | 117,950 | 1,143 |
| Dec 13 | 1,951,329 | 239,274,656 | 202,246,698 | 117,890 | 1,147 |
| Dec 12 | 1,984,721 | 239,008,166 | 201,975,235 | 116,742 | 1,131 |
| Dec 11 | 2,020,853 | 238,679,707 | 201,688,550 | 116,893 | 1,131 |
| Dec 10 | 1,721,570 | 238,143,066 | 201,279,582 | 118,575 | 1,146 |
| Dec 9 | 1,583,662 | 237,468,725 | 200,717,387 | 118,052 | 1,089 |
| Dec 8 | 1,611,831 | 237,087,380 | 200,400,533 | 118,515 | 1,092 |
| Dec 7 | 1,781,389 | 236,363,835 | 199,687,439 | 117,488 | 1,097 |
| Feb 16, 2021 | 1,716,311 | 39,670,551 | 15,015,434 | 78,292 |
| At Least One Dose | Fully Vaccinated | % of Vaccinated W/ Boosters | |
| % of Total Population | 74.2% | 62.5% | 36.0% |
| % of Population 5+ | 78.9% | 66.4% | |
| % of Population 12+ | 84.3% | 71.5% | 39.1% |
| % of Population 18+ | 86.3% | 73.2% | 50.9% |
| % of Population 65+ | 95.0% | 87.8% | 60.2% |
California Precipitation (Updated Tuesdays)
| Percent of Average for this Date | Last Week | |
| Northern Sierra Precipitation | 158% | 170% |
| San Joaquin Precipitation | 156% | 170% |
| Tulare Basin Precipitation | 145% | 151% |
| Snow Water Content - North | 135% | 134% |
| Snow Water Content - Central | 148% | 148% |
| Snow Water Content - South | 160% | 158% |
Reservoirs are still low, but they take time to refill and it may take the spring snow melt.
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Is There Anything More Useless Than An Influencer?
Canadian officials say a group of influencers whose rowdy behaviour on a flight led to their stranding in Mexico have flown home to face an inquiry.
In a briefing, a top health official said that 27 had returned and were screened at the airport. Some of the group could face stiff punishments.
Video shows a party on their charter plane without masks. Some were passing around bottles and vaping.
Their behaviour caused the airline to refuse to fly them home.
Sunwing Airlines cancelled a 5 January return trip for group of about 130 from Cancun and carriers Air Transat and Air Canada also said they would refuse to fly them.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the group's behaviour a "slap in the face" to citizens who have been following proper social distancing measures, as well as airline workers.
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Welcome Back My Friends to the Fire That Never Ends
Turkmenistan's president has ordered the extinguishing of the country's "Gateway to Hell", a fire that has been burning for decades in a huge desert gas crater.
Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov wants it put out for environmental and health reasons, as well as part of efforts to increase gas exports.
Mystery surrounds the Darvaza crater's creation in the Karakum Desert.
Many believe it formed when a Soviet drilling operation went wrong in 1971.
But Canadian explorer George Kourounis examined the crater's depths in 2013 and discovered that no-one actually knows how it started.
According to local Turkmen geologists, the huge crater formed in the 1960s but was only lit in the 1980s.
The crater is one of Turkmenistan's most popular tourist attractions.
How Do You Pronouce "Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov"? Where's Chris Roberts When You Need Him?
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I Can Think of Plenty of Reason to Want to Lock a Teenage Boy in the Boot (Trunk)
A US teacher has been arrested after allegedly locking her Covid-positive son in a car boot to protect herself from exposure to the virus as she drove to a testing site, say local media.
Sarah Beam, 41, is reportedly charged with endangering a child.
A witness called police after hearing someone in the vehicle's trunk on 3 January at the site in Harris County, Texas, according to click2Houston.com.
The teacher reportedly opened the boot to reveal the boy lying inside.
Ms Beam said her 13-year-old son had tested positive for Covid-19 and she was taking him to the Pridgeon Stadium location for another test to confirm the result, according to local media.
She reportedly said she had placed the teenager in the car boot because she did not want to be infected herself.
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Could Your Picture Be on a Google Maps Street View? Are You OK With That?
Italian police has caught a top mafia fugitive who had been on the run for nearly 20 years thanks to the help of the Google Maps app, an investigator told Reuters on Wednesday.
After a two-year investigation, Gioacchino Gammino, 61, was tracked down in Galapagar, Spain, where he lived under a fake name. The town is close to the capital Madrid.
A Google Maps street view picture portraying a man who looked like him in front of a fruit shop was key in triggering a deeper investigation.
"The photogram helped us to confirm the investigation we were developing in traditional ways," Nicola Altiero, deputy director of the Italian anti-mafia police unit (DIA), said.
Gammino, a member of a Sicilian mafia group dubbed Stidda, had escaped Rome's Rebibbia jail in 2002 and in 2003 had been sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder committed several years earlier.
Altiero said Gammino is currently under custody in Spain and they hope to bring him back to Italy by the end of February.
Can You Spot the Mafia Guy?
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Want a COVID Test? Just Give Me You SSN, Passport Number, DL Number and 2 Credit Cards. What Have You Got to Worry About?
Pop-up testing sites have cropped up on street corners, in parking lots and on shopping properties across the country, but health and legal experts say many of these are unregulated and could be rife for nefarious activities like identity theft.
In the last few weeks, legislators and attorneys general in several states including Illinois, Maryland, California, Texas and Pennsylvania have said they will be investigating and introducing regulatory legislation overseeing these operations.
Numerous illegal, unapproved and unsanitary sites have been cautioned by state officials nationwide.
Outside of St. Louis, a Covid testing site set up at a mall parking lot and was asking people to provide Social Security and passport ID numbers when registering for tests. It was shut down by police, who later urged anyone who visited the site to monitor their credit reports for fraudulent activity.
At least two sites were identified inBaltimore, where state Attorney General Brian Frosh warned residents to be aware of "illegal, unlicensed pop-up COVID-19 testing sites” that were collecting personal information that could be used for identity theft.
Unsanitary sites were reported in Chicago with workers not wearing masks or gloves. Conditions were being described as a “hellhole,” nonprofit news organization Block Club Chicago reported. People who visited said they never got their results or they came in weeks after visiting.
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No Wonder The Building Is Falling Over, But Ronald Hamburger Is On the Job.
The engineer trying to stabilize the Millennium Tower, a luxury residential skyscraper in San Francisco that is sinking into the ground and now leaning over two feet off of center, said the building is now tilting three inches per year.
Structural engineer Ronald O. Hamburger made the comments Thursday at a city hearing in which he pitched an updated fix for the building's foundation, NBC Bay Area reported.
The 58-story, 645-foot tall tower — opened to residents in 2009 — is now tilting 26 inches north and west at Fremont and Mission Streets in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district, the NBC News affiliate reported.
Residents were informed that the building is settling unevenly and more than anticipated in 2016. The tower sits beside the Salesforce Transit Center, a bus terminal and potential future rail terminus for California’s high speed rail network currently under construction.
But efforts to stabilize the sinking and leaning skyscraper seemed to worsen matters. Engineers halted construction on the fix in summer 2021 so they could “determine why increased foundation movement was occurring and how this could be mitigated.”
To relaunch the stabilization, Hamburger on Thursday proposed slashing the number of support piles beneath the tower from 52 to 18 to "minimize additional building settlement."
A letter to the Millennium Tower’s general manager last month said the new, quicker fix was needed after engineers identified two potential causes for apparent worsening of the building’s settlement: “vibration of the soils associated with pile installation activity, and unintentional removal of excessive soil as the piles were installed.”
Hamburger said the 18 steel piles will be anchored into bedrock 250 feet under the tower, cutting through rapidly compressing clay and sand soil that the building's foundation sits upon today.
Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar Have a Son?
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How Many Ways Is This Dumb?
BTW, The Photo is a Testing Site in New York City
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SCOTUS Won't Keep You Safe, While They Keep Themselves Safe
Neil's Ignorance Will Kill People
There Are Liars, Damned Liars, and Gorsuch
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Another One Bites the Dust
Cirsten Weldon was a right-wing social media darling of sorts, at least in the QAnon wing of the field. Her MAGA posts, anti-vaxx rhetoric, and willingness to embrace wild and fantastic conspiracy theories gained her tens of thousands of followers. Weldon was a firm ‘COVID-is-a-hoax’ believer who made videos where she yelled at people waiting in line for vaccines that “The vaccines kill, don’t get it!” She also believed Dr. Anthony Fauci should be executed.
According to reports, Weldon passed away Thursday from COVID-19 in a hospital in Camarillo, California. The Daily Beast says that Weldon began complaining of feeling sick at the end of December, posting a video on Dec. 28, where she “struggled through her remarks about the coming overthrow of the United States government, coughing and complaining that she was exhausted.”
Weldon’s last social media post was an image of herself in a hospital bed with an oxygen mask on, dated Dec. 31, 2021. In her post she wrote “Is [sic] hospital for 2 days Bacteria pneumonia they and tested me for covid I refused Dr Fauci s Resmedervir sorry no meetup in Santa Monica jan1” On Jan. 1 of the new year, she wrote that she was “not on a ventilator for those gossip s I am I’m a oxygen machine pray for my family God is is in Control.” In her last post, dated Jan. 5, she reportedly wrote “Pray God takes me out of here soon.”
Weldon made headlines not simply because she espoused all of the anti-science ‘vaccines are killing people’ mumbo-jumbo promoted by right-wing conspiracy theorists, but because she was willing to go very far afield in how outrageous her claims of conspiracy could be. In May 2021, Weldon appeared on a podcast claiming that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had died in the year 2020 from the rare brain-degenerating disease kuru. Why kuru? Kuru is a disease caused “by an infectious protein (prion) found in contaminated human brain tissue.”
More Useless Than a Social Influencer. She Executed Herself.
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You Can Pardon a Crook, But the Next Crime is Right Around the Corner.
Rightwing terrorist Steve Bannon sought to take out a loan shortly after being indicted by a grand jury for his contempt of Congress. The problem is that Steve Bannon didn’t own the house. Though the house had been owned by a non-profit connected to Bannon, the house was sold on Nov. 19, 2020 and Bannon applied for the loan from KS Statebank over a year after the sale of the house on Dec. 2, 2021.
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What Happens in Nur-Sultan Doesn't Stay in Nur-Sultan
Kazakhstan shut down its internet nationwide after political unrest sparked by rising gas prices.
Among the sectors affected by the outage was bitcoin mining, which has taken off in the Central Asian nation.
Other commodities such as uranium and oil also were impacted, with both seeing price spikes days after the uprising.
Nur-Sultan, formerly known as Akmolinsk, Tselinograd, and Astana, is the capital city of Kazakhstan.
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Confused? You May Be After Reading This From USA Today
Early data suggests virus particles from COVID variants – including omicron – may appear in the throat before reaching nasal passages where test swabs are done. And federal regulators warn the rapid tests in general may not be as effective detecting the new variant. To make sure they don't miss an infection, some have opted to add a swab to the back of their throat as well as their nose.
But federal agencies and health experts urge that at-home tests be used as directed and to not add a throat swab – for now. Throat swabbing may be called for in the future, experts say, but the tests currently authorized in the U.S. weren’t manufactured to detect virus in a person’s throat and could deliver false results.
“The thing about anything you do at home is that people are free to use these tests however they want to use them. That’s the democracy of at-home testing, right?” said Dr. Emily Volk, president of the College of American Pathologists. “But they need to do the test as prescribed. They’re not FDA-authorized any other way.”
So the Virus May Live in Your Throat, But Don't Swab Your Throat to See If You Have the Virus? WTF?
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Will They Be Required To Keep Their Toenails Clean in Prison?
A judge in Georgia sentenced Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan to life in prison on Friday for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was running through their mostly white neighborhood in February 2020 when they chased him down and killed him.
Under Georgia law, murder carries a mandatory life sentence unless prosecutors seek the death penalty. For the judge, Timothy Walmsley, the main decision was whether to grant father and son Greg McMichael, 66, and Travis McMichael, 35, and their neighbor, Bryan, 52, a chance to earn parole.
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Ahmaud Arbery's mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, fired back at a "dirty toenails" comment made earlier by an attorney representing the defendants during the sentencing hearing for Travis and Gregory McMichael and William "Roddie" Bryan.
While delivering a victim statement during the sentencing hearing on Friday, Cooper-Jones said that her son "sometimes refused to wear socks."
"I wish he would have cut and cleaned his toenails before he went out for a jog that day," she said. "I guess he would have if he knew he would be murdered."
The comments by Cooper-Jones came in response to remarks made by attorney Laura Hogue, who previously represented Greg McMichael in the case of Arbery's death.
During Hogue's closing arguments in the initial trial hearing, she criticized Arbery's feet and compared him to a "recurring nighttime intruder."
"Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made, does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts, with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails," Hogue said.
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Why? The Demand For Vaccination Remains Stable. Current Sites Are Handling It.
Public officials across the country are reopening temporary mass-vaccination sites that they wound down months ago, in an effort to get more people vaccinated and boosted in the latest Covid-19 surge driven by the Omicron variant.
Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Rhode Island are among states that have opened or are planning soon to open sites designed to administer hundreds or even thousands of shots a day. The locations include Boston’s Fenway Park, malls, a casino and convention centers.
I Don't Think That If They Built It, They Will Come
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A Penny For His Thoughts
The head of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot indicated Friday that the panel will ask former Vice President Mike Pence this month to voluntarily meet with lawmakers.
That's Probably About All They Are Worth
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At Least Floridians Won't Have to Figure Out Where to Swab
Florida officials admitted on Thursday that they had up to a million coronavirus test kits stored in a warehouse that expired just before New Year's Eve. The statement comes as Florida continues to be among those hardest hit by COVID-19, with some residents saying they are "desperate" to find tests.
Death Sentence Lies and Lies
DeSantis' office denied the accusation in an email to CBS affiliate WTSP earlier this week. But on Thursday at a press conference in West Palm Beach, DeSantis and other officials admitted to the expired tests.
"We had between 800,000 and a million test kits — Abbott test kits — in our warehouse that did expire," Kevin Guthrie, director of Florida's Division of Emergency Management, said at the conference. "We tried to give them out prior to that, but there wasn't a demand for it."
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"Florida had one of the lowest COVID rates in the country during fall, so the demand for testing was correspondingly low," DeSantis' press secretary Christina Pushaw told CBS News. "Though tests went unused due to insufficient demand, as the governor said: it's better to be overprepared than underprepared."
Yet, at the beginning of August, Florida reported 21,683 new cases of COVID-19 — which, at the time, was the most infections in a single day since the start of the pandemic. Infections in the state are now surging, with a record of nearly 77,000 new cases reported on Friday.
The state currently has the second-highest 28-day COVID case average in the U.S., with more than 745,200 reported cases in that time frame, according to Johns Hopkins University, and 615 deaths. The state has had nearly 4.5 million cases since COVID first hit the nation.
Many Florida residents have questioned DeSantis' claim of "low demand" for the tests.
There Are Liars, Damned Liars, and Gov Death Sentence
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While They Are At It, Can They Cancel One Cruz?
Norwegian Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean, two of the cruise industry’s largest global operators, are temporarily halting certain cruises, marking the first mass cruise cancellations due to the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
Royal Caribbean said Friday it’s canceling cruises on three of its ships starting Saturday and postponing voyages on a fourth ship until March 7. One of the ships will remain out of service until April 26.
Norwegian had already said it was canceling voyages on eight cruise ships, nearly half its fleet, after the Norwegian Pearl on Wednesday returned early to Miami due to a COVID-19 outbreak among crew members.
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