Post by mhbruin on Apr 1, 2022 10:44:27 GMT -8
US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 560 Million Shots (Population 333 Million)
↓ 8.4% Cases, two-week change
↓ 3.9%% Deaths, two-week change - I though yesterdays' increase was just an anomoly.
983,495 Total confirmed deaths
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California Precipitation (Updated Tuesday March 22)
There was some rain in the Nor Cal. A little more in the ten-day.
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April, Come She Will
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees
More Evidence of War Crimes
Footage of Russian troops shooting a man with his hands up on a highway outside Kyiv at the beginning of March was shared around the world. Now the Russians have been pushed out of the area and the BBC's Jeremy Bowen has been to see the grim aftermath of their short-lived occupation.
We counted 13 bodies on a nightmarish stretch of road not much more than 200 yards long, between Mria and Myla, villages whose Ukrainian names translate as Dream and Sweetheart.
Two of the dead are confirmed as Ukrainian civilians who were killed by the Russians. The others have not been identified yet - they lie where they were killed - but only two are wearing recognisable Ukrainian military uniforms.
Our BBC team was able to get to the area, on the main E-40 highway as it approaches Kyiv, because Ukrainian forces had captured the sector only 10 hours earlier.
The marks of battle and of heavy shelling were everywhere. Petrol stations and a hotel that was well-known for its spa and restaurant were in ruins. Shell holes and craters pockmarked both carriageways.
Transgender People Have a Hard Time Believing That People Like Governor Douchebag Exist
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey refused to say Thursday if transgender people actually exist, twice dodging direct questions on the subject just a day after he signed legislation limiting transgender rights.
The Republican worked instead to defend his signatures on bills that bar transgender girls and women from playing on girls high school and women’s college sports teams and barring gender affirming surgery for anyone under age 18.
When specifically asked if he believed that there “are really transgender people,” the governor paused for several seconds before answering.
“I’m going to ask you to read the legislation and to see that the legislation that we passed was in the spirit of fairness to protect girls sports in competitive situations,” Ducey said, referring to the new law that targets transgender girls who want to play on girls sports teams. “That’s what the legislation is intended to do, and that’s what it does.”
Asked again if he believed there are “actual transgender people,” he again answered slowly and carefully.
“I am going to respect everyone, and I’m going to respect everyone’s rights. And I’m going to protect female sports. And that’s what the legislation does,” Ducey said.
I Don't Think This is Very Interesting, But I Never Miss a Chance to Nominate Jared Kushner. If You Have Netflix, I Recommend the "Dirty Money" Episode About Him.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol interviewed its first Trump family member and the highest-ranking official from the previous administration, meeting with Jared Kushner on Thursday for more than six hours, a source in the room said.
The panel met virtually with Kushner — Donald Trump's son-in-law and a former top White House adviser — after he voluntarily agreed to speak with the committee, which Trump has accused of conducting a "witch hunt."
Remember Previous Guy's New Anti-Social Network. It Was Another Scam.
Donald Trump refuses to use it, as if somehow he can run from this failure. Of course, Trump is likely yelling and screaming at Devin Nunes over this. I’m sure Nunes is helping drive this into the ground, but let’s face it: he isn’t the problem. Turns out that no one wants to be on a site that no one else is on, as MAGAts already have their own echo chamber. They don’t need an app to do that.
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TMTG (Trump Media and Technology Group) said that along with SPACs and PIPE, Truth Social has raised $1 billion in December 2021. The investors for the company are unidentified. The funding is expected to reach up to $3 billion as reported by The Financial Times. According to the Digital World Stock Prices, the company is valued at $4 billion as of 3rd December 2021.
Fox "News" Has a Hissy Fit Over Saying "Hello, Friends". It Rivals The Outrage Over "Happy Holidays".
“Last summer we removed all of the gendered greetings in relationship to our live spiels, so we no longer say ‘ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.’ We’ve trained—we provided training for all of our cast members in relationship to that. So now they know it’s ‘hello, everyone’ or ‘hello, friends.’ We’re in the process of changing over those recorded messages and so many of you are probably familiar, when we brought the fireworks back to the Magic Kingdom, we no longer say ‘ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.’ We say ‘dreamers of all ages.’ So I love the fact that it’s opened up the creativity, the opportunity for our cast members to look at that.
We have our cast members working with merchandise, working with food and beverage, working with all of our guest-facing areas, where perhaps we want to create that magical moment with our cast members, with our guests. And we don’t want to just assume because someone might be, in our interpretation, may be presenting as female, that they may not want to be called ‘princess.’ So let’s think differently about how do we really engage with our guests in a meaningful and inclusive way that makes it magical and memorable for everyone?”
Sticking It to the Libs Looks Like This
And It Looks Like This
DeathSentence Picks a Goofy Fight. And He Wants Florida Voter Rolls to Be Snow White.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday signaled support for stripping Disney of its 55-year-old special status that allows the entertainment company to operate as an independent government around its Orlando-area theme park.
It's the latest fallout in the feud between DeSantis, a Republican widely seen as a potential 2024 presidential contender, and Disney, Florida's largest private employer, over a measure that bans schools from teaching young children about sexual orientation or gender identity.
After DeSantis signed the bill into law earlier Monday, the Walt Disney Company wrote in a statement that its "goal" was to get the law repealed or defeated in the courts.
DeSantis previously said Disney "crossed the line" with that statement. On Thursday, DeSantis went further, suggesting Disney's "special privileges" could be lifted.
Why Does the QOP Oppose This? It Takes Away An Excuses to Send People of Color to Jail and Keep Them From Voting.
House set to pass marijuana legalization Friday
The House is set to pass legislation on Friday to legalize marijuana nationwide, an effort that has unprecedented levels of support in both chambers of Congress.
The bill is likely to pass the lower chamber largely along party lines, with most Republicans expected to oppose it.
Proponents argue that legalizing marijuana at the federal level will simply reflect most states' existing policies that allow it in some form.
They also frame the effort as a way to end the disproportionate punishment of racial minorities and people in low-income communities for possessing and using weed.
And with an overwhelming majority of Americans - as much as 91 percent in a Pew Research Poll last year - backing marijuana legalization for at least medical purposes, Democrats believe it's a winning issue for them ahead of November's midterms.
"This landmark legislation is one of the most important criminal justice reform bills in recent history: delivering justice for those harmed by the brutal, unfair consequences of criminalization; opening the doors of opportunity for all to participate in this rapidly growing industry; and decriminalizing cannabis at the federal level so we do not repeat the grave mistakes of our past," Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on the House floor on Thursday.
The bill, titled the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, would eliminate criminal penalties associated with the drug and establish a process to expunge previous convictions from people's criminal records.
Apparently Russia Was Listening
Two days after former President Trump asked the Kremlin for dirt on the Bidens, the Russian government held a briefing that spread a bizarre conspiracy theory about the Bidens.
It’s a different topic than what Trump asked for, but one that’s far more in line with the war that Russia may be losing in Ukraine.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense on Thursday held a briefing that largely picked up the thread from an earlier, bird-related Ukraine biolab conspiracy theory that it had spread. Now, Russian officials claimed, not only were birds, Ukraine, and communicable disease involved, but so was Hunter Biden.
Russian officials published slides showing what they claimed to be an email chain involving the younger Biden
Picking up on the narrative that Russia began to manufacture last month of supposed biolaboratories in Ukraine meant to spread harmful agents via migratory birds, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said on Thursday that Hunter Biden was involved.
The Russians trotted out Igor Kirillov, head of radiation, chemical, and biological defense for Russia’s armed forces, to elaborate.
“The content of the messages shows that Hunter Biden played an important role in creating the financial possibility to conduct work with pathogens on Ukrainian territory,” adding that the younger Biden sought investments for the bird scheme.
In some ways, this is all the latest iteration of events that have repeated themselves since 2016, when Trump asked Russia to find “30,000 emails that are missing” from Hillary Clinton’s server. Within a day of that statement, federal prosecutors have said, Russian hackers targeted the candidate’s accounts.
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Today's Best Person in the World Nominees
It Sounds Like We Lost a National Treasure.
The National Park Service’s oldest active ranger has announced her retirement at the age of 100.
Betty Reid Soskin’s last day was Thursday at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, where she led programs with the public and shared her own experiences from the war with visitors.
“Being a primary source in the sharing of that history — my history — and giving shape to a new national park has been exciting and fulfilling,” Soskin said in a statement from the National Park Service. “It has proven to bring meaning to my final years.”
Soskin was born in Detroit in 1921, and her Cajun-Creole family moved to Louisiana when she was a child. They moved again, to California, after being displaced along with hundreds of thousands of others by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
During World War II, she faced discrimination working for the U.S. Air Force before going on to work as a file clerk in a segregated union auxiliary. In 1945, she and then-husband Mel Reid opened Reid’s Records, a Berkeley music store that became an institution and, when it closed in 2019, was the oldest record store in the state.
She was a political staffer at the local and state levels, and in the early 2000s, started helping develop plans for the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park, which opened in 2001 to honor the working women of World War II. She got more and more involved with the park, and by 2011, she was a permanent NPS employee.
Soskin has been a devoted advocate for making sure that Black women’s experiences are included in the history the park commemorates. She’s also said she hoped that seeing her could inspire girls of color.
Colbert Has the Right Response for His Employer
Stephen Colbert gleefully bit the hand that pays him on “The Late Show” Thursday.
The host slammed his network, CBS, for hiring former Donald Trump official Mick Mulvaney as a contributor in its news division. (Watch the video below.)
“What the fuck?” he exclaimed, though the last word was bleeped out.
Colbert explained Mulvaney’s shoddy history as Trump’s “craven toady” while serving as the former president’s acting chief of staff. Mulvaney admitted that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for political dirt (then tried to walk it back), dismissed the emerging COVID-19 crisis as a media plot to take down Trump and promised that if Trump lost the 2020 election, he’d concede gracefully. “He’s Nostra-dumbass!” Colbert cracked of the far-right Mulvaney.
“Why would the Tiffany Network’s venerable news division put this craven toady to a tyrant on their payroll?” Colbert asked.
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Invasions Have Consequences
You Can't Threaten Punishment to You Kid, Unless You Are Prepared to Carry It Out.
Russia has said it will not cut off gas exports to Europe yet in a standoff over its demand to be paid in roubles.
Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Thursday stating buyers must pay in roubles through Russian bank accounts from Friday.
The Kremlin said this would not affect shipments which were already paid for, with payments for deliveries after 1 April due in mid-April at the earliest.
The country is seeking to shore up the rouble as Western sanctions bite.
Kyiv Stands! Now Send Some Troops to Break the Siege of Mariupol
The Battle of Kyiv is definitely over. Russian forces swept to within 15km of the city on the second day of the invasion. They never came closer to taking it.
Throughout the day on Friday, reports have been filled with locations once again under Ukraine’s control. Velyka Dymerka, on the northeast of Kyiv, is completely back under Ukrainian control. So are villages much further east, near Nova Bassan. Those northwestern suburbs that have seemed to be daily in the news for so long—Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel—are all now well behind a line of advance that is racing northward. What Russian forces are left in the area are the subject of mopping up operations. If Russia ever had plans for digging in along a line anchored on the west by Ivankiv, they need to change that plan—because Ukraine retook Ivankiv on Friday morning.
Taking and Holding the Donbas Isn't Simple
The main concern with Russia taking the Donbas was that this would lead to Ukraine drifting away even more from Russia despite the historic connections between the two countries.
This partly explains why he held back from taking the Donbas in 2014 when he had the chance to do so. But it was not the only reason. There were three others. First, he was aware that there was no real clamour in this territory to join Russia. It would be challenging and costly to govern them. Second, there would be far more severe Western sanctions imposed on Russia than those following the annexation of Crimea. And third, a new border would be created between Russia and Ukraine that would then have to be defended against an angry Ukraine that would get increased backing from the West.
This Is Assad's Job's Program? You Can't be Syrious!
Hundreds of Syrian fighters are en route to join Russian forces in Ukraine, effectively returning the favor to Moscow for helping President Bashar al-Assad crush rebels in an 11-year civil war, according to two people monitoring the flow of mercenaries.
A first contingent of soldiers has already arrived in Russia for military training before heading to Ukraine, according to a Western diplomat and a Damascus-based ally of the Syrian government. It includes at least 300 soldiers from a Syrian army division that has worked closely with Russian officers who went to Syria to support Mr. al-Assad during the war.
And many more could be on the way: Recruiters across Syria have been drawing up lists of thousands of interested candidates to be vetted by the Syrian security services and then passed to the Russians.
Syria has grown in recent years into an exporter of mercenaries, a grim aftereffect of years of war that gave many men combat experience but so damaged the country’s economy that people now struggle to find work. So they have deployed as guns-for-hire to wars in Libya, Azerbaijan, the Central African Republic — and now Ukraine.
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This Was a Waffle Crime. The Judge Pours It On. Will the Verdict Stick?
Canada's top court has imposed a C$9.1m ($7.3m; £5.5m) fine on a man behind the theft of 3,000 tonnes of maple syrup.
The so-called Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist saw the loss of nearly C$18m worth of syrup from the country's reserves by a group of thieves.
The court ordered Richard Vallières, a "major player" in the scheme, to pay a penalty or face six years in prison.
Vallières was found guilty in 2016 of fraud, trafficking and theft.
He is currently serving an eight year prison sentence.
At trial, Vallières said he sold the syrup for C$10m and made a personal profit of around C$1m.
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It's a Tough Time for Bruce. First, He Has to Retire. Then They Take His Award Away.
The Razzies, a tongue-in-cheek award show that hands out honors to the worst cinema of the year, has rescinded its prize for Bruce Willis after the actor's family revealed he is struggling with aphasia, a medical condition that affects his cognitive abilities.
"After much thought and consideration, the Razzies have made the decision to rescind the Razzie Award given to Bruce Willis, due to his recently disclosed diagnosis," a statement from The Razzies said. "If someone's medical condition is a factor in their decision making and/or their performance, we acknowledge that it is not appropriate to give them a Razzie."
On Wednesday, the Willis's family -- including his former wife Demi Moore -- said in a joint statement that the actor would be taking a break from acting due to his medical condition.
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"Zero COVID" Lockdowns Are Killing Chinese People
On a cold March afternoon in a locked-down city in China's northeastern Jilin province, Chang Liping was standing outside a hospital, desperate and unsure of where to go.
Chang had been struggling to get her husband, who suffers from a kidney condition, into dialysis for four days -- a routine treatment that's become a seeming impossibility after their city of Changchun was forced into a strict lockdown earlier that month, in response to an outbreak of Covid-19.
She'd taken him to the hospital designated for residents whose housing blocks -- like theirs -- had positive Covid-19 cases, Chang said. Even still, they were turned away. The best a community worker could do, according to Chang, was add her husband to a queue.
"But how can he wait? He has been afraid to eat and drink for four days for fear of poisoning his body," Chang said. "The hospital won't let us in, and we don't know where to go now do I have to watch him die?"
In another part of the city, Li Chenxi was also in a panic, unable to access care for her mother, who has endometrial cancer. For more than two weeks, her mother had received no treatment after the industrial city of 8.5 million went into lockdown on March 11. Their local hospital wasn't accepting patients during the outbreak, Li said, and she hadn't found another opening.
"The only thing we can do is wait. But the tumor won't wait for us. The tumor is growing every day," Li said.
"There are so many diseases that are more serious than Covid ... My mom has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and I just want to get the medicine as soon as possible so I can keep her alive," Li said through tears.
For Li and Chang, their loved ones' individual health crises are inexorably caught up in China's larger one, as the country grapples with its first major outbreak of Covid-19 in more than two years. Now multiple cities -- including the financial hub of Shanghai and several cities in the country's northern "rust belt" -- have been placed under government mandated lockdown, part of China's uncompromising "zero-Covid" strategy.
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I Never Enjoyed the Game of Twister, But This is the Worst Version
After back-to-back tornado outbreaks two weeks in a row, last month set the record for most tornado reports during the month of March.
As of Friday morning, the current preliminary number was 233 tornado reports, breaking the record of 225 reports in 2012, with records going back to the year 2000.
Connecting a higher frequency of tornadoes to climate change is not as easy as say, connecting extreme heat waves or rapidly intensifying hurricanes, and this is due to two primary reasons.
First, historical tornado records do not go back very far, only to 1950. This smaller sample size means there is less data to make high confidence conclusions.
The second reason is that tornadoes and thunderstorms occur at a much higher resolution than coarser climate models, making clear connections difficult to resolve.
However, as more research becomes available scientists are gaining better clarity on possible links.
The strongest link is that the tornado alley may be shifting east, from the more traditional area of the Great Plains into the highly vulnerable regions of the Mississippi Valley, Tennessee Valley and Southeast.
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Rolling Back the Roll-Back
New vehicles sold in the United States will have to travel an average of at least 40 miles per gallon of gasoline in 2026 under new rules unveiled Friday by the government.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said its fuel economy requirements will undo a rollback of standards enacted under President Donald Trump. The new requirements increase gas mileage by 8 percent per year for model years 2024 and 2025 and 10 percent in the 2026 model year.
For the current model year, standards enacted under Trump require the fleet of new vehicles to get just over 24 miles per gallon in real-world driving.
Agency officials say the requirements are the maximum that the industry can achieve over the time period and will reduce gasoline consumption by more than 220 billion gallons over the life of vehicles, compared with the Trump standards.
Trump’s administration rolled back fuel economy requirements so they rose 1.5 percent per year, which environmental groups said was inadequate to limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change.
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Some Good COVID News
Covid hospitalizations are at their lowest levels since the U.S. began keeping records at the start of the pandemic, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Average hospitalizations fell to 16,760, lower than the previous low of 16,808, set before the delta wave in June. Hospitalization figures from the past few days could change as hospitals finalize numbers.
But, A Potential Problem
What was initially viewed by Congress and public health experts as a temporary measure to maintain health coverage during a once-a-century pandemic has dragged on for more than two years with Medicaid sign-ups ballooning to 78.9 million as of November, the most recent figures available.
Now the public health emergency is set to expire April 16. An Urban Institute report estimated up to 12.9 million Americans could lose Medicaid if the public health emergency is not extended.
The end of the emergency also would ripple across other pockets of the health care industry. Federal agencies created temporary initiatives to subsidize private health insurance, improve access to telehealth, provide additional funding to hospitals and make it easier for companies that make medical devices, tests and treatments to bring their products to the market under emergency use.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has not announced a decision on whether to extend the public health emergency, though there is reason to believe he will. HHS has been extending the emergency every 90 days, and an HHS official said the agency would notify states 60 days before ending the emergency. With barely two weeks before the next deadline, that notification has not happened.
Whenever the health emergency ends, unwinding these programs will create a massive logistical task for the Biden administration. Nowhere is the potential disruption more evident than for the millions who might lose Medicaid coverage.
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If You Could Be Arrested for Being Late, I Know Someone Who Would Have Spent More Time in Jail Than Charles Manson.
A Black college professor called the police on two Black students for arriving to class late at Perimeter College at Georgia State University, prompting outrage from the students' peers on TikTok.
TikTok creator and college student Bria Blake posted about the incident on Wednesday evening. In the video, which has over 116,000 likes, she says two of her classmates, known as Taylor and Kamryn, were two minutes late to an English class.
According to Blake's retelling, Taylor said that they as students "paid to be here" and refused to leave. Gray then left the room and returned with two armed police officers,
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Yet, They Still Keep Electing Republicans in Florida
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Be Careful Where You Tweet
Sometimes, bad tweets come with consequences.
A Glasgow man who got drunk and wrote something mean about celebrated British army captain Sir Tom Moore on Twitter was sentenced to 150 hours of community service on Wednesday, skirting a possible jail sentence.
His tweet, made shortly after Moore’s death in February of last year, was legally considered “grossly offensive.”
In a case that seems absurd by U.S. standards of free speech, law enforcement arrested 36-year-old Joseph Kelly for posting, “the only good Brit soldier is a deed [sic] one, burn auld fella, buuuuurn.”
Moore was a 100-year-old veteran of World War II whose efforts to raise money for Britain’s National Health Service by walking laps around his garden at the start of the coronavirus pandemic inspired an outpouring of support.
He set out to raise 1,000 pounds but ended up bringing in nearly 33 million pounds at a time when the country’s nationalized health care system was ― like health care systems worldwide ― strapped for resources during the crisis.
Queen Elizabeth II knighted Moore at a special open-air ceremony at Windsor Castle in the summer of 2020.
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When Biden Took Office the Unemployment Rate was 6.4%.
The U.S. added close to half a million jobs in March and the unemployment rate fell by more than expected, highlighting a robust labor market that’s likely to support aggressive Federal Reserve tightening in the coming months.
Nonfarm payrolls increased 431,000 last month after an upwardly revised 750,000 gain in February, a Labor Department report showed Friday. The unemployment rate fell to 3.6%, near its pre-pandemic low, and the labor force participation rate ticked up. Wage gains accelerated.
The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for a 490,000 advance in payrolls and for the unemployment rate to fall to 3.7%.
Shorter-term Treasury yields rose and the dollar strengthened after the release on expectations that the data will bolster more hawkish Fed policy. The S&P 500 opened higher.
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Has the Price of Beating Up Liberals Gone Up?
A federal jury’s $14 million award to Denver protesters hit with pepper balls and a bag filled with lead during 2020 demonstrations over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis could resonate nationwide as courts weigh more than two dozen similar lawsuits.
The jury found police used excessive force against protesters, violating their constitutional rights, and ordered the city of Denver to pay 12 who sued.
Nationwide, there are at least 29 pending lawsuits challenging law enforcement use of force during the 2020 protests, according to a search of the University of Michigan’s Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.
The verdict in Denver could give cities an incentive to settle similar cases rather than risk going to trial and losing, said Michael J. Steinberg, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and director of the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative. It could also prompt more protesters to sue over their treatment at the hands of police.
“There’s no doubt that the large jury verdict in Denver will influence the outcome of pending police misconduct cases brought by Black Lives Matter protesters across the country,” said Steinberg, whose law students have been working on a similar lawsuit brought by protesters in Detroit.
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I Am Not Sure I Would Call This a "Bike"
UPS said on Friday it was trying out a four-wheeled "eQuad" electric cargo bike for deliveries in densely packed urban areas, where bikes have better and easier access, to complement its push into electric vehicles.
The package-delivery giant is trialing around 100 of the bikes, designed and built by British firm Fernhay, in seven European markets and will also launch trials in the United States and some Asian markets, Luke Wake, UPS vice president of fleet maintenance and engineering, told Reuters.
As well as making public commitments to cut their carbon footprints, package-delivery companies are seeking new ways to cut the cost of last-mile deliveries amid soaring e-commerce orders.
UPS' eQuad has an electric-assisted top speed of around 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) - if you pedal hard you can go faster - and can haul up to 200 kilograms (441 lb) of packages. Its electric battery has a range of around 40 miles (64 km), which Wake said would be more than adequate for urban routes.
The vehicle is only 36 inches (91 cm) wide, so can legally use bike lanes and enter pedestrian zones that UPS' vans and trucks cannot access. Under normal circumstances, drivers would have to get out of their vehicles, load packages on carts and haul them to customers.
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Will QOP Senators Really Screw Over 37 Million Diabetics?
The House has passed a bill capping the monthly cost of insulin at $35 for insured patients, part of an election-year push by Democrats for price curbs on prescription drugs at a time of rising inflation.
Experts say the legislation, which passed 232-193 Thursday, would provide significant relief for privately insured patients with skimpier plans and for Medicare enrollees facing rising out-of-pocket costs for their insulin. Some could save hundreds of dollars annually, and all insured patients would get the benefit of predictable monthly costs for insulin. The bill would not help the uninsured.
But the Affordable Insulin Now Act will serve as a political vehicle to rally Democrats and force Republicans who oppose it into uncomfortable votes ahead of the midterms. For the legislation to pass Congress, 10 Republican senators would have to vote in favor. Democrats acknowledge they don't have an answer for how that's going to happen.
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Over 37 million Americans have diabetes, a group of conditions where there is too much sugar in the blood.6 Of those patients, over 7 million require some form of insulin, a medication based on the naturally made hormone that helps regulate blood sugar. One of the biggest concerns for patients and healthcare providers is the rising price of insulin.
In the past decade, the cost of insulin has tripled in the United States, with out-of-pocket costs doubling. One in four patients say that they ration their insulin because they can't afford it
People with diabetes have over two times the healthcare costs of Americans who don't have this condition. On average, the medical costs related to diabetes can reach over $9,500 per year
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The Eight Percent Solution
Mission accomplished — or close enough, anyway.
That was the message scientists sent to the world in 2003 when they announced that the human genome had been sequenced, assembled and was essentially complete — with a few seemingly minor gaps.
In reality, the effort to quantify and identify the genetic code that makes us all human, which cost the U.S. government billions of dollars, remained a rough draft and at least 8 percent short of being finished.
Some of the largest, most repetitive and complex pieces of the DNA puzzle remained in the dark — until now.
Buoyed by powerful new sequencing technology, a loose collaborative of about 100 scientists announced Thursday they’d filled in the gaps, completing a single human genome from one end to the other and opening new, promising lines of research in areas where scientists have been wandering around in the dark.
The genome’s sequencing was first shared publicly more than a year ago, but the results from a full accounting, now vetted and in use by researchers across the world, was published for the first time Thursday in a peer-reviewed journal. Six new articles describe the complete sequencing effort and additional analysis of its impacts in the journal Science.
The completed genome opens new avenues for research.
For decades, scientists have been poring over the 92 percent of the genome available, probing it to find genetic variations that could be causing diseases.
“We have a good grasp of what variation looks like in those regions, but we have no idea about the other 8 percent,” Phillippy said.
Now, researchers are reanalyzing their old data against the new reference genome, trying to tease out new clues from what had been missing.
“We identified many more, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of new variants,” Dennis said. “Some of them fall within genes that encode proteins and some of those genes are medically important, clinically important, and contribute to diseases.”
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I Thought They Were Protecting LIVING Fetuses
Police found five fetuses in the home of a self-proclaimed “anti-abortion activist” who was indicted this week on federal charges alleging that she was part of a group of people who blocked access to a Washington, D.C. reproductive health center.
The Metropolitan Police Department says officers were responding to a tip about “potential bio-hazard material” at a home in Southeast Washington on Wednesday when they located the five fetuses inside.
A local television station, WUSA9, captured video of police searching the home and reported that the home belonged to Lauren Handy. The 28-year-old was one of nine people charged in an indictment that was made public on Wednesday that accused the group of traveling to Washington, blocking access to the reproductive health center and streaming it on Facebook.
The station, which first reported the discovery, said Handy told a reporter that “people will freak out when they hear” what detectives found inside her house. Handy did not respond to a message sent to her Facebook profile seeking comment.
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↓ 8.4% Cases, two-week change
↓ 3.9%% Deaths, two-week change - I though yesterdays' increase was just an anomoly.
983,495 Total confirmed deaths
New Cases 7-Day Average | Deaths 7-Day Average | |
| Mar 31 | 25,980 | 605 |
| Mar 30 | 25,732 | 626 |
| Mar 29 | 25,218 | 644 |
| Mar 28 | 26,190 | 700 |
| Mar 27 | 26,487 | 690 |
| Mar 26 | 26,593 | 697 |
| Mar 25 | 26,874 | 705 |
| Mar 24 | 27,235 | 732 |
| Mar 23 | 27,134 | 753 |
| Mar 22 | 27,545 | 787 |
| Mar 21 | 28,657 | 861 |
| Mar 20 | 27,786 | 901 |
| Mar 19 | 27,747 | 909 |
| Mar 18 | 28,274 | 972 |
| Mar 17 | 29,317 | 1,035 |
| Mar 16 | 30,040 | 1,052 |
| Mar 15 | 30,934 | 1,107 |
| Mar 14 | 32,458 | 1,186 |
| Mar 13 | 34,113 | 1,187 |
| Mar 12 | 34,253 | 1,210 |
| Mar 11 | 34,805 | 1,198 |
| Mar 10 | 35,269 | 1,197 |
| Mar 9 | 37,146 | 1,179 |
| Mar 8 | 37,879 | 1,161 |
| Mar 7 | 40,433 | 1,208 |
| Mar 6 | 42,204 | 1,259 |
| Mar 5 | 43,665 | 1,281 |
| Mar 4 | 45,555 | 1,319 |
| Mar 3 | 49,888 | 1,413 |
| Mar 2 | 53,016 | 1,558 |
| Mar 1 | 56,253 | 1,674 |
| Feb 16, 2021 | 78,292 |
| At Least One Dose | Fully Vaccinated | % of Vaccinated W/ Boosters | |
| % of Total Population | 76.9% | 65.5% | 44.8% |
| % of Population 5+ | 81.7% | 69.6% | |
| % of Population 12+ | 86.5% | 73.9% | 46.4% |
| % of Population 18+ | 88.3% | 75.4% | 48.2% |
| % of Population 65+ | 95.0% | 89.0% | 67.2% |
California Precipitation (Updated Tuesday March 22)
There was some rain in the Nor Cal. A little more in the ten-day.
| Percent of Average for this Date | 2 Weeks ago | 3 Weeks ago | |
| Northern Sierra Precipitation | 79% (62% of full season average) | 84% (61%) | 87% (60%) |
| San Joaquin Precipitation | 69% (54%) | 74% (53%) | 76% (51%) |
| Tulare Basin Precipitation | 65% (51%) | 71% (51%) | 70% (48%) |
| Snow Water Content - North | 46% | 55% (52%) | 59% (53%) |
| Snow Water Content - Central | 55% | 59% (64%) | 58% (66%) |
| Snow Water Content - South | 52% | 60% (66%) | 54% (63%) |
April, Come She Will
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Today's Worst Person in the World Nominees
More Evidence of War Crimes
Footage of Russian troops shooting a man with his hands up on a highway outside Kyiv at the beginning of March was shared around the world. Now the Russians have been pushed out of the area and the BBC's Jeremy Bowen has been to see the grim aftermath of their short-lived occupation.
We counted 13 bodies on a nightmarish stretch of road not much more than 200 yards long, between Mria and Myla, villages whose Ukrainian names translate as Dream and Sweetheart.
Two of the dead are confirmed as Ukrainian civilians who were killed by the Russians. The others have not been identified yet - they lie where they were killed - but only two are wearing recognisable Ukrainian military uniforms.
Our BBC team was able to get to the area, on the main E-40 highway as it approaches Kyiv, because Ukrainian forces had captured the sector only 10 hours earlier.
The marks of battle and of heavy shelling were everywhere. Petrol stations and a hotel that was well-known for its spa and restaurant were in ruins. Shell holes and craters pockmarked both carriageways.
Transgender People Have a Hard Time Believing That People Like Governor Douchebag Exist
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey refused to say Thursday if transgender people actually exist, twice dodging direct questions on the subject just a day after he signed legislation limiting transgender rights.
The Republican worked instead to defend his signatures on bills that bar transgender girls and women from playing on girls high school and women’s college sports teams and barring gender affirming surgery for anyone under age 18.
When specifically asked if he believed that there “are really transgender people,” the governor paused for several seconds before answering.
“I’m going to ask you to read the legislation and to see that the legislation that we passed was in the spirit of fairness to protect girls sports in competitive situations,” Ducey said, referring to the new law that targets transgender girls who want to play on girls sports teams. “That’s what the legislation is intended to do, and that’s what it does.”
Asked again if he believed there are “actual transgender people,” he again answered slowly and carefully.
“I am going to respect everyone, and I’m going to respect everyone’s rights. And I’m going to protect female sports. And that’s what the legislation does,” Ducey said.
I Don't Think This is Very Interesting, But I Never Miss a Chance to Nominate Jared Kushner. If You Have Netflix, I Recommend the "Dirty Money" Episode About Him.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol interviewed its first Trump family member and the highest-ranking official from the previous administration, meeting with Jared Kushner on Thursday for more than six hours, a source in the room said.
The panel met virtually with Kushner — Donald Trump's son-in-law and a former top White House adviser — after he voluntarily agreed to speak with the committee, which Trump has accused of conducting a "witch hunt."
Remember Previous Guy's New Anti-Social Network. It Was Another Scam.
Donald Trump refuses to use it, as if somehow he can run from this failure. Of course, Trump is likely yelling and screaming at Devin Nunes over this. I’m sure Nunes is helping drive this into the ground, but let’s face it: he isn’t the problem. Turns out that no one wants to be on a site that no one else is on, as MAGAts already have their own echo chamber. They don’t need an app to do that.
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TMTG (Trump Media and Technology Group) said that along with SPACs and PIPE, Truth Social has raised $1 billion in December 2021. The investors for the company are unidentified. The funding is expected to reach up to $3 billion as reported by The Financial Times. According to the Digital World Stock Prices, the company is valued at $4 billion as of 3rd December 2021.
Fox "News" Has a Hissy Fit Over Saying "Hello, Friends". It Rivals The Outrage Over "Happy Holidays".
“Last summer we removed all of the gendered greetings in relationship to our live spiels, so we no longer say ‘ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.’ We’ve trained—we provided training for all of our cast members in relationship to that. So now they know it’s ‘hello, everyone’ or ‘hello, friends.’ We’re in the process of changing over those recorded messages and so many of you are probably familiar, when we brought the fireworks back to the Magic Kingdom, we no longer say ‘ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.’ We say ‘dreamers of all ages.’ So I love the fact that it’s opened up the creativity, the opportunity for our cast members to look at that.
We have our cast members working with merchandise, working with food and beverage, working with all of our guest-facing areas, where perhaps we want to create that magical moment with our cast members, with our guests. And we don’t want to just assume because someone might be, in our interpretation, may be presenting as female, that they may not want to be called ‘princess.’ So let’s think differently about how do we really engage with our guests in a meaningful and inclusive way that makes it magical and memorable for everyone?”
Sticking It to the Libs Looks Like This
And It Looks Like This
DeathSentence Picks a Goofy Fight. And He Wants Florida Voter Rolls to Be Snow White.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday signaled support for stripping Disney of its 55-year-old special status that allows the entertainment company to operate as an independent government around its Orlando-area theme park.
It's the latest fallout in the feud between DeSantis, a Republican widely seen as a potential 2024 presidential contender, and Disney, Florida's largest private employer, over a measure that bans schools from teaching young children about sexual orientation or gender identity.
After DeSantis signed the bill into law earlier Monday, the Walt Disney Company wrote in a statement that its "goal" was to get the law repealed or defeated in the courts.
DeSantis previously said Disney "crossed the line" with that statement. On Thursday, DeSantis went further, suggesting Disney's "special privileges" could be lifted.
Why Does the QOP Oppose This? It Takes Away An Excuses to Send People of Color to Jail and Keep Them From Voting.
House set to pass marijuana legalization Friday
The House is set to pass legislation on Friday to legalize marijuana nationwide, an effort that has unprecedented levels of support in both chambers of Congress.
The bill is likely to pass the lower chamber largely along party lines, with most Republicans expected to oppose it.
Proponents argue that legalizing marijuana at the federal level will simply reflect most states' existing policies that allow it in some form.
They also frame the effort as a way to end the disproportionate punishment of racial minorities and people in low-income communities for possessing and using weed.
And with an overwhelming majority of Americans - as much as 91 percent in a Pew Research Poll last year - backing marijuana legalization for at least medical purposes, Democrats believe it's a winning issue for them ahead of November's midterms.
"This landmark legislation is one of the most important criminal justice reform bills in recent history: delivering justice for those harmed by the brutal, unfair consequences of criminalization; opening the doors of opportunity for all to participate in this rapidly growing industry; and decriminalizing cannabis at the federal level so we do not repeat the grave mistakes of our past," Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on the House floor on Thursday.
The bill, titled the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, would eliminate criminal penalties associated with the drug and establish a process to expunge previous convictions from people's criminal records.
Apparently Russia Was Listening
Two days after former President Trump asked the Kremlin for dirt on the Bidens, the Russian government held a briefing that spread a bizarre conspiracy theory about the Bidens.
It’s a different topic than what Trump asked for, but one that’s far more in line with the war that Russia may be losing in Ukraine.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense on Thursday held a briefing that largely picked up the thread from an earlier, bird-related Ukraine biolab conspiracy theory that it had spread. Now, Russian officials claimed, not only were birds, Ukraine, and communicable disease involved, but so was Hunter Biden.
Russian officials published slides showing what they claimed to be an email chain involving the younger Biden
Picking up on the narrative that Russia began to manufacture last month of supposed biolaboratories in Ukraine meant to spread harmful agents via migratory birds, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said on Thursday that Hunter Biden was involved.
The Russians trotted out Igor Kirillov, head of radiation, chemical, and biological defense for Russia’s armed forces, to elaborate.
“The content of the messages shows that Hunter Biden played an important role in creating the financial possibility to conduct work with pathogens on Ukrainian territory,” adding that the younger Biden sought investments for the bird scheme.
In some ways, this is all the latest iteration of events that have repeated themselves since 2016, when Trump asked Russia to find “30,000 emails that are missing” from Hillary Clinton’s server. Within a day of that statement, federal prosecutors have said, Russian hackers targeted the candidate’s accounts.
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Today's Best Person in the World Nominees
It Sounds Like We Lost a National Treasure.
The National Park Service’s oldest active ranger has announced her retirement at the age of 100.
Betty Reid Soskin’s last day was Thursday at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, where she led programs with the public and shared her own experiences from the war with visitors.
“Being a primary source in the sharing of that history — my history — and giving shape to a new national park has been exciting and fulfilling,” Soskin said in a statement from the National Park Service. “It has proven to bring meaning to my final years.”
Soskin was born in Detroit in 1921, and her Cajun-Creole family moved to Louisiana when she was a child. They moved again, to California, after being displaced along with hundreds of thousands of others by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
During World War II, she faced discrimination working for the U.S. Air Force before going on to work as a file clerk in a segregated union auxiliary. In 1945, she and then-husband Mel Reid opened Reid’s Records, a Berkeley music store that became an institution and, when it closed in 2019, was the oldest record store in the state.
She was a political staffer at the local and state levels, and in the early 2000s, started helping develop plans for the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park, which opened in 2001 to honor the working women of World War II. She got more and more involved with the park, and by 2011, she was a permanent NPS employee.
Soskin has been a devoted advocate for making sure that Black women’s experiences are included in the history the park commemorates. She’s also said she hoped that seeing her could inspire girls of color.
Colbert Has the Right Response for His Employer
Stephen Colbert gleefully bit the hand that pays him on “The Late Show” Thursday.
The host slammed his network, CBS, for hiring former Donald Trump official Mick Mulvaney as a contributor in its news division. (Watch the video below.)
“What the fuck?” he exclaimed, though the last word was bleeped out.
Colbert explained Mulvaney’s shoddy history as Trump’s “craven toady” while serving as the former president’s acting chief of staff. Mulvaney admitted that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for political dirt (then tried to walk it back), dismissed the emerging COVID-19 crisis as a media plot to take down Trump and promised that if Trump lost the 2020 election, he’d concede gracefully. “He’s Nostra-dumbass!” Colbert cracked of the far-right Mulvaney.
“Why would the Tiffany Network’s venerable news division put this craven toady to a tyrant on their payroll?” Colbert asked.
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Invasions Have Consequences
You Can't Threaten Punishment to You Kid, Unless You Are Prepared to Carry It Out.
Russia has said it will not cut off gas exports to Europe yet in a standoff over its demand to be paid in roubles.
Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Thursday stating buyers must pay in roubles through Russian bank accounts from Friday.
The Kremlin said this would not affect shipments which were already paid for, with payments for deliveries after 1 April due in mid-April at the earliest.
The country is seeking to shore up the rouble as Western sanctions bite.
Kyiv Stands! Now Send Some Troops to Break the Siege of Mariupol
The Battle of Kyiv is definitely over. Russian forces swept to within 15km of the city on the second day of the invasion. They never came closer to taking it.
Throughout the day on Friday, reports have been filled with locations once again under Ukraine’s control. Velyka Dymerka, on the northeast of Kyiv, is completely back under Ukrainian control. So are villages much further east, near Nova Bassan. Those northwestern suburbs that have seemed to be daily in the news for so long—Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel—are all now well behind a line of advance that is racing northward. What Russian forces are left in the area are the subject of mopping up operations. If Russia ever had plans for digging in along a line anchored on the west by Ivankiv, they need to change that plan—because Ukraine retook Ivankiv on Friday morning.
Taking and Holding the Donbas Isn't Simple
The main concern with Russia taking the Donbas was that this would lead to Ukraine drifting away even more from Russia despite the historic connections between the two countries.
This partly explains why he held back from taking the Donbas in 2014 when he had the chance to do so. But it was not the only reason. There were three others. First, he was aware that there was no real clamour in this territory to join Russia. It would be challenging and costly to govern them. Second, there would be far more severe Western sanctions imposed on Russia than those following the annexation of Crimea. And third, a new border would be created between Russia and Ukraine that would then have to be defended against an angry Ukraine that would get increased backing from the West.
This Is Assad's Job's Program? You Can't be Syrious!
Hundreds of Syrian fighters are en route to join Russian forces in Ukraine, effectively returning the favor to Moscow for helping President Bashar al-Assad crush rebels in an 11-year civil war, according to two people monitoring the flow of mercenaries.
A first contingent of soldiers has already arrived in Russia for military training before heading to Ukraine, according to a Western diplomat and a Damascus-based ally of the Syrian government. It includes at least 300 soldiers from a Syrian army division that has worked closely with Russian officers who went to Syria to support Mr. al-Assad during the war.
And many more could be on the way: Recruiters across Syria have been drawing up lists of thousands of interested candidates to be vetted by the Syrian security services and then passed to the Russians.
Syria has grown in recent years into an exporter of mercenaries, a grim aftereffect of years of war that gave many men combat experience but so damaged the country’s economy that people now struggle to find work. So they have deployed as guns-for-hire to wars in Libya, Azerbaijan, the Central African Republic — and now Ukraine.
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This Was a Waffle Crime. The Judge Pours It On. Will the Verdict Stick?
Canada's top court has imposed a C$9.1m ($7.3m; £5.5m) fine on a man behind the theft of 3,000 tonnes of maple syrup.
The so-called Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist saw the loss of nearly C$18m worth of syrup from the country's reserves by a group of thieves.
The court ordered Richard Vallières, a "major player" in the scheme, to pay a penalty or face six years in prison.
Vallières was found guilty in 2016 of fraud, trafficking and theft.
He is currently serving an eight year prison sentence.
At trial, Vallières said he sold the syrup for C$10m and made a personal profit of around C$1m.
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It's a Tough Time for Bruce. First, He Has to Retire. Then They Take His Award Away.
The Razzies, a tongue-in-cheek award show that hands out honors to the worst cinema of the year, has rescinded its prize for Bruce Willis after the actor's family revealed he is struggling with aphasia, a medical condition that affects his cognitive abilities.
"After much thought and consideration, the Razzies have made the decision to rescind the Razzie Award given to Bruce Willis, due to his recently disclosed diagnosis," a statement from The Razzies said. "If someone's medical condition is a factor in their decision making and/or their performance, we acknowledge that it is not appropriate to give them a Razzie."
On Wednesday, the Willis's family -- including his former wife Demi Moore -- said in a joint statement that the actor would be taking a break from acting due to his medical condition.
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"Zero COVID" Lockdowns Are Killing Chinese People
On a cold March afternoon in a locked-down city in China's northeastern Jilin province, Chang Liping was standing outside a hospital, desperate and unsure of where to go.
Chang had been struggling to get her husband, who suffers from a kidney condition, into dialysis for four days -- a routine treatment that's become a seeming impossibility after their city of Changchun was forced into a strict lockdown earlier that month, in response to an outbreak of Covid-19.
She'd taken him to the hospital designated for residents whose housing blocks -- like theirs -- had positive Covid-19 cases, Chang said. Even still, they were turned away. The best a community worker could do, according to Chang, was add her husband to a queue.
"But how can he wait? He has been afraid to eat and drink for four days for fear of poisoning his body," Chang said. "The hospital won't let us in, and we don't know where to go now do I have to watch him die?"
In another part of the city, Li Chenxi was also in a panic, unable to access care for her mother, who has endometrial cancer. For more than two weeks, her mother had received no treatment after the industrial city of 8.5 million went into lockdown on March 11. Their local hospital wasn't accepting patients during the outbreak, Li said, and she hadn't found another opening.
"The only thing we can do is wait. But the tumor won't wait for us. The tumor is growing every day," Li said.
"There are so many diseases that are more serious than Covid ... My mom has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and I just want to get the medicine as soon as possible so I can keep her alive," Li said through tears.
For Li and Chang, their loved ones' individual health crises are inexorably caught up in China's larger one, as the country grapples with its first major outbreak of Covid-19 in more than two years. Now multiple cities -- including the financial hub of Shanghai and several cities in the country's northern "rust belt" -- have been placed under government mandated lockdown, part of China's uncompromising "zero-Covid" strategy.
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I Never Enjoyed the Game of Twister, But This is the Worst Version
After back-to-back tornado outbreaks two weeks in a row, last month set the record for most tornado reports during the month of March.
As of Friday morning, the current preliminary number was 233 tornado reports, breaking the record of 225 reports in 2012, with records going back to the year 2000.
Connecting a higher frequency of tornadoes to climate change is not as easy as say, connecting extreme heat waves or rapidly intensifying hurricanes, and this is due to two primary reasons.
First, historical tornado records do not go back very far, only to 1950. This smaller sample size means there is less data to make high confidence conclusions.
The second reason is that tornadoes and thunderstorms occur at a much higher resolution than coarser climate models, making clear connections difficult to resolve.
However, as more research becomes available scientists are gaining better clarity on possible links.
The strongest link is that the tornado alley may be shifting east, from the more traditional area of the Great Plains into the highly vulnerable regions of the Mississippi Valley, Tennessee Valley and Southeast.
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Rolling Back the Roll-Back
New vehicles sold in the United States will have to travel an average of at least 40 miles per gallon of gasoline in 2026 under new rules unveiled Friday by the government.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said its fuel economy requirements will undo a rollback of standards enacted under President Donald Trump. The new requirements increase gas mileage by 8 percent per year for model years 2024 and 2025 and 10 percent in the 2026 model year.
For the current model year, standards enacted under Trump require the fleet of new vehicles to get just over 24 miles per gallon in real-world driving.
Agency officials say the requirements are the maximum that the industry can achieve over the time period and will reduce gasoline consumption by more than 220 billion gallons over the life of vehicles, compared with the Trump standards.
Trump’s administration rolled back fuel economy requirements so they rose 1.5 percent per year, which environmental groups said was inadequate to limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change.
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Some Good COVID News
Covid hospitalizations are at their lowest levels since the U.S. began keeping records at the start of the pandemic, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Average hospitalizations fell to 16,760, lower than the previous low of 16,808, set before the delta wave in June. Hospitalization figures from the past few days could change as hospitals finalize numbers.
But, A Potential Problem
What was initially viewed by Congress and public health experts as a temporary measure to maintain health coverage during a once-a-century pandemic has dragged on for more than two years with Medicaid sign-ups ballooning to 78.9 million as of November, the most recent figures available.
Now the public health emergency is set to expire April 16. An Urban Institute report estimated up to 12.9 million Americans could lose Medicaid if the public health emergency is not extended.
The end of the emergency also would ripple across other pockets of the health care industry. Federal agencies created temporary initiatives to subsidize private health insurance, improve access to telehealth, provide additional funding to hospitals and make it easier for companies that make medical devices, tests and treatments to bring their products to the market under emergency use.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has not announced a decision on whether to extend the public health emergency, though there is reason to believe he will. HHS has been extending the emergency every 90 days, and an HHS official said the agency would notify states 60 days before ending the emergency. With barely two weeks before the next deadline, that notification has not happened.
Whenever the health emergency ends, unwinding these programs will create a massive logistical task for the Biden administration. Nowhere is the potential disruption more evident than for the millions who might lose Medicaid coverage.
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If You Could Be Arrested for Being Late, I Know Someone Who Would Have Spent More Time in Jail Than Charles Manson.
A Black college professor called the police on two Black students for arriving to class late at Perimeter College at Georgia State University, prompting outrage from the students' peers on TikTok.
TikTok creator and college student Bria Blake posted about the incident on Wednesday evening. In the video, which has over 116,000 likes, she says two of her classmates, known as Taylor and Kamryn, were two minutes late to an English class.
According to Blake's retelling, Taylor said that they as students "paid to be here" and refused to leave. Gray then left the room and returned with two armed police officers,
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Yet, They Still Keep Electing Republicans in Florida
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Be Careful Where You Tweet
Sometimes, bad tweets come with consequences.
A Glasgow man who got drunk and wrote something mean about celebrated British army captain Sir Tom Moore on Twitter was sentenced to 150 hours of community service on Wednesday, skirting a possible jail sentence.
His tweet, made shortly after Moore’s death in February of last year, was legally considered “grossly offensive.”
In a case that seems absurd by U.S. standards of free speech, law enforcement arrested 36-year-old Joseph Kelly for posting, “the only good Brit soldier is a deed [sic] one, burn auld fella, buuuuurn.”
Moore was a 100-year-old veteran of World War II whose efforts to raise money for Britain’s National Health Service by walking laps around his garden at the start of the coronavirus pandemic inspired an outpouring of support.
He set out to raise 1,000 pounds but ended up bringing in nearly 33 million pounds at a time when the country’s nationalized health care system was ― like health care systems worldwide ― strapped for resources during the crisis.
Queen Elizabeth II knighted Moore at a special open-air ceremony at Windsor Castle in the summer of 2020.
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When Biden Took Office the Unemployment Rate was 6.4%.
The U.S. added close to half a million jobs in March and the unemployment rate fell by more than expected, highlighting a robust labor market that’s likely to support aggressive Federal Reserve tightening in the coming months.
Nonfarm payrolls increased 431,000 last month after an upwardly revised 750,000 gain in February, a Labor Department report showed Friday. The unemployment rate fell to 3.6%, near its pre-pandemic low, and the labor force participation rate ticked up. Wage gains accelerated.
The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for a 490,000 advance in payrolls and for the unemployment rate to fall to 3.7%.
Shorter-term Treasury yields rose and the dollar strengthened after the release on expectations that the data will bolster more hawkish Fed policy. The S&P 500 opened higher.
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Has the Price of Beating Up Liberals Gone Up?
A federal jury’s $14 million award to Denver protesters hit with pepper balls and a bag filled with lead during 2020 demonstrations over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis could resonate nationwide as courts weigh more than two dozen similar lawsuits.
The jury found police used excessive force against protesters, violating their constitutional rights, and ordered the city of Denver to pay 12 who sued.
Nationwide, there are at least 29 pending lawsuits challenging law enforcement use of force during the 2020 protests, according to a search of the University of Michigan’s Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.
The verdict in Denver could give cities an incentive to settle similar cases rather than risk going to trial and losing, said Michael J. Steinberg, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and director of the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative. It could also prompt more protesters to sue over their treatment at the hands of police.
“There’s no doubt that the large jury verdict in Denver will influence the outcome of pending police misconduct cases brought by Black Lives Matter protesters across the country,” said Steinberg, whose law students have been working on a similar lawsuit brought by protesters in Detroit.
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I Am Not Sure I Would Call This a "Bike"
UPS said on Friday it was trying out a four-wheeled "eQuad" electric cargo bike for deliveries in densely packed urban areas, where bikes have better and easier access, to complement its push into electric vehicles.
The package-delivery giant is trialing around 100 of the bikes, designed and built by British firm Fernhay, in seven European markets and will also launch trials in the United States and some Asian markets, Luke Wake, UPS vice president of fleet maintenance and engineering, told Reuters.
As well as making public commitments to cut their carbon footprints, package-delivery companies are seeking new ways to cut the cost of last-mile deliveries amid soaring e-commerce orders.
UPS' eQuad has an electric-assisted top speed of around 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) - if you pedal hard you can go faster - and can haul up to 200 kilograms (441 lb) of packages. Its electric battery has a range of around 40 miles (64 km), which Wake said would be more than adequate for urban routes.
The vehicle is only 36 inches (91 cm) wide, so can legally use bike lanes and enter pedestrian zones that UPS' vans and trucks cannot access. Under normal circumstances, drivers would have to get out of their vehicles, load packages on carts and haul them to customers.
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Will QOP Senators Really Screw Over 37 Million Diabetics?
The House has passed a bill capping the monthly cost of insulin at $35 for insured patients, part of an election-year push by Democrats for price curbs on prescription drugs at a time of rising inflation.
Experts say the legislation, which passed 232-193 Thursday, would provide significant relief for privately insured patients with skimpier plans and for Medicare enrollees facing rising out-of-pocket costs for their insulin. Some could save hundreds of dollars annually, and all insured patients would get the benefit of predictable monthly costs for insulin. The bill would not help the uninsured.
But the Affordable Insulin Now Act will serve as a political vehicle to rally Democrats and force Republicans who oppose it into uncomfortable votes ahead of the midterms. For the legislation to pass Congress, 10 Republican senators would have to vote in favor. Democrats acknowledge they don't have an answer for how that's going to happen.
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Over 37 million Americans have diabetes, a group of conditions where there is too much sugar in the blood.6 Of those patients, over 7 million require some form of insulin, a medication based on the naturally made hormone that helps regulate blood sugar. One of the biggest concerns for patients and healthcare providers is the rising price of insulin.
In the past decade, the cost of insulin has tripled in the United States, with out-of-pocket costs doubling. One in four patients say that they ration their insulin because they can't afford it
People with diabetes have over two times the healthcare costs of Americans who don't have this condition. On average, the medical costs related to diabetes can reach over $9,500 per year
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The Eight Percent Solution
Mission accomplished — or close enough, anyway.
That was the message scientists sent to the world in 2003 when they announced that the human genome had been sequenced, assembled and was essentially complete — with a few seemingly minor gaps.
In reality, the effort to quantify and identify the genetic code that makes us all human, which cost the U.S. government billions of dollars, remained a rough draft and at least 8 percent short of being finished.
Some of the largest, most repetitive and complex pieces of the DNA puzzle remained in the dark — until now.
Buoyed by powerful new sequencing technology, a loose collaborative of about 100 scientists announced Thursday they’d filled in the gaps, completing a single human genome from one end to the other and opening new, promising lines of research in areas where scientists have been wandering around in the dark.
The genome’s sequencing was first shared publicly more than a year ago, but the results from a full accounting, now vetted and in use by researchers across the world, was published for the first time Thursday in a peer-reviewed journal. Six new articles describe the complete sequencing effort and additional analysis of its impacts in the journal Science.
The completed genome opens new avenues for research.
For decades, scientists have been poring over the 92 percent of the genome available, probing it to find genetic variations that could be causing diseases.
“We have a good grasp of what variation looks like in those regions, but we have no idea about the other 8 percent,” Phillippy said.
Now, researchers are reanalyzing their old data against the new reference genome, trying to tease out new clues from what had been missing.
“We identified many more, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of new variants,” Dennis said. “Some of them fall within genes that encode proteins and some of those genes are medically important, clinically important, and contribute to diseases.”
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I Thought They Were Protecting LIVING Fetuses
Police found five fetuses in the home of a self-proclaimed “anti-abortion activist” who was indicted this week on federal charges alleging that she was part of a group of people who blocked access to a Washington, D.C. reproductive health center.
The Metropolitan Police Department says officers were responding to a tip about “potential bio-hazard material” at a home in Southeast Washington on Wednesday when they located the five fetuses inside.
A local television station, WUSA9, captured video of police searching the home and reported that the home belonged to Lauren Handy. The 28-year-old was one of nine people charged in an indictment that was made public on Wednesday that accused the group of traveling to Washington, blocking access to the reproductive health center and streaming it on Facebook.
The station, which first reported the discovery, said Handy told a reporter that “people will freak out when they hear” what detectives found inside her house. Handy did not respond to a message sent to her Facebook profile seeking comment.
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