"Sea Machines gets $15 million to boost self-steering ships; The Boston company's technology allows boats to run autonomously" by Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff, July 22, 2020
Boston-based Sea Machines Robotics, which builds autonomous control systems for ships and boats, has closed on $15 million in new venture financing, including a significant investment from Navy shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries. Other investors in the deal include Toyota AI Ventures and Accomplice.
Founded in 2015, Sea Machines makes software and sensor packages that enable seagoing craft to operate with minimal assistance from humans. The company’s products allow ships to cruise in a predetermined pattern, while automatically avoiding nautical hazards such as nearby ships. Sea Machines makes automated systems for tugboats, ferries, oil spill skimmers, and naval patrol boats.
“We have systems working off the waters of four continents right now,” said chief executive Michael Johnson.
In addition, Sea Machines is working with the global shipping giant Maersk to test a system for controlling large seagoing passenger and cargo ships.
Huntington Ingalls is the leading builder of ships for the Navy. Earlier this year, it acquired Hydroid Inc., of Pocasset, a maker of autonomous underwater robots used for mine-sweeping, underwater search and rescue, and oceanic research. Johnson said the company’s investment in Sea Machines underscores the Navy’s interest in seagoing robots.
“It’s clear to us that autonomy is going to be powering naval fleets in the coming decades,” he said.....
So much for all hands on deck.
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Time to hit the brakes:
"Tesla makes $104M profit in 2Q despite factory shutdown" by Tom Krisher Associated Press, July 22, 2020
DETROIT — Tesla overcame a seven-week pandemic-related shutdown at its US assembly plant to post a surprising $104 million net profit for the second quarter.
It was the company’s fourth-straight positive quarter, qualifying it to be included in the S&P 500 index of corporate titans. A decision on that will be made later.
Local government restrictions forced the electric car and solar panel maker to close its only US assembly factory in Fremont, Calif., from March 23 to May 11. The company paid roughly 10,000 workers for part of the shutdown and continued health care and other benefits.
How in the world did they make money?
Excluding one-time items such as $347 million in stock-based compensation, Tesla made $2.18 per share. That beat Wall Street estimates of a break-even quarter, according to FactSet. Revenue was down 4.9 percent from a year ago to $6.04 billion. That still beat estimates of $5.15 billion.
The company said its progress in the first half of the year has positioned it for success in the second half as production output continues to improve.
Telsa also said it has picked the Austin, Texas, area as the site for its second US assembly plant. Austin was the front runner, but Tulsa, Okla., was a possibility.
The surprising profit, compared with a $408 million loss a year ago, pushed Tesla’s shares up 5.3 percent to $1,676.22 in after-hours trading Wednesday.
Tesla would have lost money, though, without $428 million it earned from selling electric vehicle credits to other automakers so they can meet government fuel economy and pollution regulations.
OMG, it's all $moke and mirrors!
Tesla said it should have enough money to fund new products and to build factories in the United States and Germany, as well as cover other expenses. The company said it would begin delivering its electric semi truck next year.
Tesla generated $964 million in cash from its operations from April through June, and it ended the quarter with about $9.1 billion in cash, but it also had $8.5 billion in debts, according to financial statements.
Chief executive Elon Musk had pledged to build more than 500,000 vehicles this year, but the company said the Fremont factory shutdown has made that more difficult. Still, the company has a target of delivering more than a half-million vehicles this year and is installing equipment to increase Fremont’s output, the letter said.
Tesla’s second-quarter profit came after it announced better-than-expected global sales during the period. The second-quarter sales came with a feverish push in June to crank out vehicles, but the push was accompanied by numerous quality problems reported on Tesla owner forums and social media.....
That's when I stalled reading it.
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At least Trump and COVID are bringing the factory jobs back:
"So far, the pandemic isn’t bringing back factory jobs" by Ana Swanson and Jim Tankersley New York Times, July 22, 2020
WASHINGTON — For companies with supply chains that snake around the globe, the crises have just kept coming: First the prolonged and painful US-China trade war, then a pandemic that snarled shipments, stalled international travel and shut factory doors.
President Trump and his advisers have seized on the disruptions to make a familiar case to manufacturers: Come back home.
“The global pandemic has proven once and for all that to be a strong nation, America must be a manufacturing nation,” Trump said at a Ford factory in Ypsilanti, Mich., on May 21. “We’re bringing it back.”
Trump has spent much of his presidency trying to cajole manufacturers to return to the United States, through both tough talk and policies like tariffs. His advisers have pointed to both the trade war and the pandemic as evidence that it is just too risky for multinational companies to rely on other countries, particularly China, to make their goods, but those arguments have yet to result in a wave of factories returning to the United States. Foreign direct investment into the United States — which measures spending from internationally owned companies to start, expand or acquire American businesses — sank drastically last year, to its lowest recorded level since 2006.
Foreign-owned companies invested about half as much in the United States in 2019 as they did in 2016, the year before Trump took office. After increasing in the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the number of manufacturing jobs flatlined last year and fell sharply with the pandemic. As of June, there were nearly 300,000 fewer factory jobs in the United States than there were when Trump was inaugurated.
That was his great economy?
His presidency has been an abysmal failure.
Worst president ever.
For all the president’s criticisms of global supply chains, the economic incentive to outsource still prevails. While his trade policy has made doing business abroad, particularly in China, more uncertain and costly, higher wages in the United States and the lure of foreign markets mean that most global businesses are choosing to remain global. Most firms that shifted out of China to avoid the crossfire of the trade war moved to other low-cost countries, like Vietnam and Mexico. Other companies say China is a growth market they cannot afford to lose, and while the pandemic has prompted a broader reassessment of the risks of global supply chains, it has also brought about the deepest economic contraction in generations, battering companies’ finances and forcing them to cut back on workers. Executives are deeply uncertain what demand for their products will look like in the coming months and years — hardly the environment to encourage big investments in new American factories.
So COVID didn't really kill globali$m, huh?
It just killed local business!
Under the pressure of the trade war, some multinational companies have opened new facilities in the United States, including Williams Sonoma and Stanley Black & Decker, but there is little data to support claims by administration officials that their trade and tax policies have already encouraged significant reshoring of manufacturing or created a “blue-collar boom.” US factory output declined throughout 2019, as Trump’s trade war intensified, and it has dropped further this year, suggesting there is no boom in new American factories.
The furniture maker La-Z-Boy is one example. The company shifted its production out of China to Vietnam last year to bypass Trump’s tariffs on $360 billion worth of Chinese goods, according to tracking by Panjiva, a research firm. But on a June 24 earnings call, Kurt Darrow, La-Z-Boy’s chief executive, announced that the economic effects of the pandemic would force the firm to make steep cuts to its workforce, including in the United States. “While we were pleased to have brought back some 6,000 furloughed workers, we made the decision to permanently close our Newton, Mississippi, La-Z-Boy branded manufacturing facility and reduce our global workforce by approximately 10 percent,” Darrow said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. announced in May that it would set up a new facility in Arizona, pending funding, and makers of masks and protective gear, like Honeywell and 3M, are expanding domestic production during the pandemic. Politicians from both parties are offering proposals to encourage more manufacturing in the United States, such as more funding for industries like semiconductors and pharmaceutical production. The Trump administration’s newly created US International Development Finance Corp. may offer tens of billions of dollars to help reshore manufacturing of protective equipment and generic drugs. The administration is also considering other tax incentives and “reshoring subsidies,” potentially as part of the next stimulus package, to try to lure factories home.
Pharmaceuticals were not the kind of manufacturing I was wanting back.
Since peaking in mid-2019, corporate investment has declined for three consecutive quarters. Total foreign direct investment in manufacturing was nearly one-third lower in the first three years of Trump’s tenure than it was in the final three years of President Barack Obama’s.
Trump ostensibly fought his trade war on behalf of American manufacturing, but economists say it has actually been a drag on most US factories, by increasing prices for components and inciting foreign retaliation. It has also coincided with a plunge in Chinese investment in the United States to $5 billion in 2019, the lowest level since 2009, according to Rhodium Group, a research firm.
Some Trump officials and their supporters blame a broader global economic malaise that has dragged down factories around the world, and they point to the fact that imports fell last year and now account for a slightly smaller share of the goods consumed by Americans, as a sign of their success.
Trump is toast.
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They will have to fly him into exile:
"United sees revenue stalling at 50% without a virus vaccine" by David Koenig Associated Press, July 22, 2020
NEW YORK —United Airlines executives said Wednesday that travel will rise when the number of new coronavirus cases drops, but airline revenue will stall at around 50 percent of pre-pandemic levels until there is a vaccine.
No doubt United would settle for 50 percent of normal sales right now. Its revenue plunged 89 percent in the second quarter, pushing the Chicago company to a $1.6 billion loss.
They went along with all this so F**K 'EM!
Air travel was slowly recovering until the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States surged, especially in the Sun Belt, starting in late June. New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut now require visitors from 31 states to quarantine themselves for 14 days upon arrival, and other states have similar edicts.
Stay out of New York at all costs!
They are shutting down freedom of movement over this COVID lie.
About 530,000 people went through US airport security checkpoints on Tuesday, the lowest number in July other than the Independence Day holiday, and down 78 percent from a year ago.
United executives said the setback will be temporary.
“We do expect that demand recovery, which stalled in recent weeks, will begin to recover again when new cases start to fall, quarantines are lifted, and borders are reopened,” Andrew Nocella, the airline’s chief commercial officer, said Wednesday on a call with analysts and reporters.
Nocella said United’s revenue will rise to 50 percent of normal “over time” and stay there until there is a vaccine for COVID-19, the disease produced by the coronavirus.
These guys are just as delusional as the president.
United and other airlines are trying to persuade consumers that air travel is safe. CEO Scott Kirby said that filtration systems and air-flow patterns inside planes make them safer than restaurants, office buildings, “or even a hospital.”
“It really is one of the safest places you can be if you are going to leave your house.”
HA!
Have they flown lately?
Passengers have criticized United for booking planes full. American does the same; Delta, Southwest, and JetBlue block some seats to create more space between passengers. United said it limits full flights by substituting larger planes — 4,000 times in May and June, it said.
No concern regarding climate, huh?
Labor is the biggest single expense for most airlines, and United last week warned 36,000 employees that they could be furloughed in October. The company said 6,000 have taken severance packages to leave and will be paid through November.
United also said Wednesday that it is expanding its rule on face coverings. Passengers will have to wear face masks at ticket counters, baggage-claim areas, and in its airport lounges or risk being banned from flights. Delta, JetBlue, and other airlines say they already have similar requirements. All of them require passengers other than small children to wear a mask during flights except while eating or drinking.
Kirby said United has seen “very high compliance” with the rule during flights.
“We have had fewer than 30 that we have had to actually take action against,” he said. “We will welcome them back when this is all over and masks aren’t required.”
That's when I parachuted out of the plane.
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Related:
"The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday it is investigating a skydiving accident at a Connecticut airport that left a Rhode Island police officer and National Guardsman dead. East Greenwich, Rhode Island police confirmed that Sgt. Christopher Callan, a 15-year veteran of the department and a second shift supervisor, died following what the Connecticut State Police described as a “rough landing on the airfield” at Danielson Airport on Saturday morning. Callan was taken to Day Kimball Hospital in Putnam, where he was pronounced dead. The FAA said it will inspect Callan’s parachute rigging to determine if it was packed properly by the appropriate person.Callan had served with the U.S. Army Special Forces Green Berets, police said on Facebook. In a Facebook posting, the Rhode Island National Guard said Callan had “served his country and state honorably for more than 30 years,” including 14 years with the guard. “The entire RING family mourns his loss and holds all of 1st Sgt. Callan’s family, friends and brothers and sisters in uniform, both in the RING and the East Greenwich Police Department, in their thoughts,” the guard said."
What did he know that necessitated him being killed?
Also see:
"Two major airlines reported huge second-quarter losses Thursday and warned that the recovery in air travel seen in April has stalled as coronavirus cases surge in the United States. American posted a loss of more than $2 billion, and Southwest lost $915 million. That pushed the combined loss of the nation’s four biggest airlines to more than $10 billion in just three months. With all those lost ticket sales, airlines have turned to cutting costs and hoarding cash in a desperate bid to hang on until the shadow of COVID-19 passes. Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said he was encouraged by a pickup in leisure travel during May and June after the dark days of March and April, “however, the improving trends in revenue and bookings have recently stalled in July with the rise in COVID-19 cases. We expect air travel demand to remain depressed until a vaccine or therapeutics are available to combat the infection and spread of COVID-19,” he said....."
Yeah, the whole world has been grounded until Bill Gates gets his goddamn vaccine ready.
"US airlines hammered by the catastrophic loss of passengers during the pandemic are confronting a once-unthinkable scenario: that this crisis will obliterate much of the corporate flying they’ve relied on for decades to prop up profits. “It is likely that business travel will never return to pre-COVID levels,” said Adam Pilarski, senior vice president at Avitas, an aviation consultant. “It is one of those unfortunate cases where the industry will be permanently impaired and what we lost now is gone, never to come back.” At stake is the most lucrative part of the airline industry, driven by businesses that accepted — however grudgingly — the need to plop down a few thousand dollars for a last-minute ticket across the United States or over an ocean. While millions of customers fly rarely, road warriors are constantly in the air to close a deal, depose a witness, or impress a client. Even industry leaders such as Delta Air Lines chief executive Ed Bastian are bowing to the inevitable....."
Good f**king riddance at this point, and did they take a knee doing it?
Better off going on a cruise or for a walk in the woods:
"Liberal, progressive — and racist? The Sierra Club faces its white-supremacist history" by Darryl Fears and Steven Mufson Washington Post, July 22, 2020
No one is more important to the history of environmental conservation than John Muir — the ‘‘wilderness prophet,’’ ‘‘patron saint of the American wilderness,’’ and ‘‘father of the national parks’’ who founded the nation’s oldest conservation organization, the Sierra Club, but on Wednesday, citing the current racial reckoning, the group announced it will end its blind reverence to a figure who was also racist.
As Confederate statues fall across the country, the club’s leadership said in an early morning post on its website, ‘‘it’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history.’’ Muir, who fought to preserve Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Forest, once referred to African-Americans as lazy ‘‘Sambos,’’ a racist pejorative that many Black people consider to be even more offensive than the n-word.
While recounting a legendary walk from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, Muir described Native Americans he encountered as ‘‘dirty.’’
Muir’s friendships in the early 1900s were equally troubling, the Sierra Club said. Henry Fairfield Osborn, a close associate, led the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History and, following Muir’s death, helped establish the American Eugenics Society, which labeled nonwhite people, including Jews at the time, as inferior.
The Sierra Club isn’t the only organization that is shaking its foundations. Leaders of predominantly white, liberal, and progressive groups throughout the field of conservation say they are taking a hard look within their organizations and don’t like what they see.
Black and other minority employees are pointing out the lack of diversity in green groups and the racial bias that persists in top and mid-level management.
The most startling example is a manifesto by Ruth Tyson, an employee at the Union of Concerned Scientists who quit recently after she ‘‘woke up feeling resentment and agony’’ because her job there was unbearable. Tyson flipped open a laptop to write a short e-mail explaining why she was quitting with only a three-day notice but didn’t stop until she had written 17 pages of searing criticism. She sent it to 200 people. Her open letter ripped the organization’s casual indifference to Black workers. Their ideas were routinely dismissed and the community outreach jobs they were hired to perform were a low priority.
Tyson said the Union of Concerned Scientists, along with other groups, has fallen woefully short in its efforts to make its workplace more diverse and help communities disproportionately impacted by pollution. Tyson was one of four Black women on a 14-member team when she started work three years ago, watching as they quit or were forced out. Now there are none. ‘‘They simply baited us in with the language of equity without making significant infrastructural, cultural, and procedural changes to prioritize and accommodate the [people of color or] the actual work of racial equity,’’ she wrote. ‘‘As if anti-racist work were something you could just sprinkle on top.’’
Remarkably, her bosses agreed.
‘‘I’ve read the letter many times,’’ said Ken Kimmell, the organization’s president. ‘‘I thought it was fair, yeah. I think this is part of a larger issue in all of society and there is real meaning to the culture of white supremacy. ‘‘There are ways that a white-dominated workplace doesn’t make it welcoming to persons of color,’’ Kimmell said. ‘‘I have subsequently learned that many of the things she raised in her letter were not unique to her and things other people of color have experienced.’’
Now, like other green groups, the Union of Concerned Scientists is vowing to look at the way it’s structured; diversify its board, workers, and managers; and police casual racial bias.
At the 53-year-old Environmental Defense Fund, Fred Krupp, its president, also promised change. ‘‘The pandemic has exposed for the American public inequities that have existed, including access to health care, neighborhoods that are much more polluted than others,’’ Krupp said.
Even a coalition of nontraditional groups, GreenLatinos, issued a statement about racism in its community during the racial reckoning. ‘‘In the Latino community, we have had a problem of anti-Black racism for a long time. We’ve finally started to recognize it,’’ said Marce Gutiérrez-Graudiņš, a founder and director of the ocean conservation group, Azul, the Spanish word for blue, but no statement was as forceful as that of the 128-year-old Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest and most venerable environmental group. Michael Brune, Sierra Club’s executive director, recently addressed 800 staff and 4 million members and volunteers with a note that was unusually frank and acquiescent.
As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, the group’s Wednesday statement said, ‘‘John Muir’s words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club. Such willful ignorance is what allows some people to shut their eyes to the reality that the wild places we love are also the ancestral homelands of Native peoples, forced off their lands in the decades or centuries before they became national parks,’’ the statement said.
The roots of American environmentalism are grounded in a reverence for nature and racism. Muir’s contemporaries at the turn of the last century included Madison Grant, a co-founder of the Bronx Zoo who wrote ‘‘The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History,’’ an argument for white supremacy in which he decried the decline of Nordic people. Former president Theodore Roosevelt, who created the first national parks, praised the 1916 book, which helped shape the views the future leader of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler, who would go on to write the anti-Semitic autobiography ‘‘Mein Kampf,’’ called Grant’s book, ‘‘my bible.’’
OMFG, they are trying to tie him into Hitler!
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The only avenue of reparations in this case is to raise the forest and use the products to build homes for Black people.
Related:
"The current pace of human-caused carbon emissions is increasingly likely to trigger irreversible damage to the planet, according to a comprehensive new international study released Wednesday. Researchers studying one of the most important and vexing topics in climate science — how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — found that warming is extremely unlikely to be on the low end of estimates. The scientists now say it is likely that if human activities, such as burning oil, gas, and coal as well as deforestation, push carbon dioxide to such levels, the Earth’s global average temperature will most likely increase between 4.1 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit. If the warming even reaches the midpoint of this new range, it would be extremely damaging, according to Kate Marvel, a physicist at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies and Columbia University, who called it the equivalent of a ‘‘five-alarm fire’’ for the planet. The new range shows at least a 95 percent chance that a doubling of carbon dioxide, which the world is on course to reach within the next five decades, would result in warming greater than 3.6 degrees....."
They are still peddling that bull$hit despite the months-long shutdown that allowed the planet to breathe?
Maybe shutting down the WAR MACHINE would help:
"Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that the United States will become more active in the Arctic to counter growing Russian influence and thwart attempts by China to insert itself into the region. Pompeo hailed the reopening of the US Consulate in the semiautonomous Danish territory of Greenland and announced a new sustainable fisheries and commercial engagement agreement with the Faroe Islands, another Danish territory in the North Atlantic. The US Consulate in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, reopened in June after a decades-long hiatus. The move attracted attention because of President Trump’s stated interest last year in purchasing Greenland from Denmark. The Danish foreign minister said the idea of the United States buying Greenland was not raised during his talks with Pompeo."
What was most noticeable about the trip was the look on Pompeo's face:
"During a trip Wednesday to Copenhagen for meetings with the foreign ministers of Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did not wear a face mask. That led to an awkward diplomatic dance. When he extended a hand in greeting, Jeppe Kofod, Denmark’s foreign affairs minister, kept to social distancing guidelines and refused to shake back. Undeterred, Pompeo tried again with the foreign minister of the Faroe Islands, who also declined. The third time was not quite the charm: Pompeo and the foreign minister of Greenland successfully navigated an elbow bump. The diplomats in question were all in proximity to one another and did exchange some shoulder pats. Denmark does not have a major coronavirus outbreak, while the United States has far and away the most confirmed cases in the world."
That's because Pompeo knows COVID is a "live exercise" that they need to "get right."
"The director general of the World Health Organization upbraided Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday for “untrue and unacceptable” allegations during the coronavirus pandemic after British media reported that Pompeo made a comment about the health agency chief having been “bought” by China. In one of his most defensive and full-throated replies yet to months of criticism from Washington, Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said WHO was focused on “saving lives” as he condemned the reported comments by Pompeo at a closed-door event in London. “The comments were done, I think on Tuesday — last Tuesday, and the comments are untrue and unacceptable, and without any foundation for that matter,” Tedros told reporters. “If there is one thing that really matters to us and which should matter to the entire international community, it’s saving lives, and WHO will not be distracted by these comments.” British newspapers reported Wednesday that Pompeo claimed Tedros had been “bought” by the Chinese government, an unusually personal accusation following the many broadsides the Trump administration has directed at WHO in recent months over its response to the emergence of the coronavirus in China. Critics say the Trump administration has been trying to distract attention from its own failings in managing the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, which has the most confirmed cases and virus-related deaths in the world. The State Department did not immediately respond to queries from the Associated Press about the British reports and Tedros’s remarks, which included blaming partisan politics for worsening the pandemic."
Really snapped at him, didn't he?
"US orders China to close Houston consulate, citing efforts to steal trade secrets" by Edward Wongand Lara Jakes New York Times, July 22, 2020
WASHINGTON — The United States has abruptly ordered China to close its diplomatic consulate in Houston by Friday, accusing diplomats of aiding a nationwide pattern of economic espionage and attempted theft of scientific research, as part of a sharp escalation in the Trump administration’s moves against China.
China vowed to retaliate, calling the move illegal. Hours after the administration issued its order to the ambassador on Tuesday, consulate employees burned papers in open metal barrels in a courtyard of the Houston building, prompting police officers and firefighters to rush to the area.
The pre$$ makes that seem devious, but that's standard procedure for foreign consulates. The U.S. did the same in Iran in 1979.
President Trump’s campaign strategists, anxious about his failures on the coronavirus pandemic, have been rolling out a blanket anti-China message to appeal to his supporters.
That's just helping him lose more.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been aggressively pushing that message, said on Wednesday in Copenhagen that the Trump administration is “setting out clear expectations as to how the Chinese Communist Party is going to behave.” He warned that when they didn’t, the United States would “take actions” to protect its interests.
The State Department described the Chinese actions as “massive illegal spying and influence operations,” but provided limited details.
Because it is crap.
I'm sorry, but the endless war propaganda and lies is getting f**king old.
David R. Stilwell, who oversees policy for East Asia and the Pacific at the State Department, said some of China’s attempted scientific thefts in the United States had accelerated over the last six months, and could be related to efforts to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus, although he did not present evidence of that.
What a parasite!
He said the Houston consul general, the top Chinese official there, and two other diplomats were recently caught having used false identification to escort Chinese travelers to the gate area of a charter flight in George Bush Intercontinental Airport. He described the consulate, which he said “has a history of engaging in subversive behavior,” as the “epicenter” of research theft by the Chinese military in the United States, without giving details to support that assertion.
How nefarious!
In Beijing, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged Washington to reverse the decision immediately.
“Otherwise China will certainly make legitimate and necessary reactions,” said the spokesman, Wang Wenbin. His remarks suggested that China would, at a minimum, close a US consulate in China.
The consulate in Houston has about 60 employees. There are six other Chinese diplomatic missions in the United States: the embassy in Washington, an office at the United Nations, and consulates in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.
The closure of the consulate in Houston may be less detrimental to US relations with Beijing than shutting down a different one would be. It is the “sister” diplomatic mission to the US consulate in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak first emerged. The State Department evacuated its consulate in Wuhan after the initial outbreak; it is not clear when it might fully reopen.
Juvenile shit!
Wang called the move illegal under international law, and he described it as the latest in a series of aggressions.
“For some time, the United States government has been shifting the blame to China with stigmatization and unwarranted attacks against China’s social system, harassing Chinese diplomatic and consular staff in America, intimidating and interrogating Chinese students and confiscating their personal electrical devices, even detaining them without cause,” he said.
Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor at the School of International Studies at Renmin University in Beijing, said the United States had never taken such a step against China since the two countries established diplomatic relations on Jan. 1, 1979.
The Trump administration’s decision was a significant escalation of its effort to tighten the reins on Chinese diplomats, researchers, scholars, journalists, and others in the United States.
He needs a war!
It comes during rising tensions that have been inflamed by the pandemic and Beijing’s repressive moves in Hong Kong, and that now touch on virtually all aspects of the relationship, even though Trump himself has vacillated wildly on China. He has regularly praised Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, and pleaded with Xi for help with reelection, while failing to denounce, and at some points explicitly endorsing, China’s repression in Hong Kong and the Xinjiang region.
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Related:
"Hong Kong once seemed like a model for how to control the coronavirus. Schools were open. Restaurants and malls buzzed with crowds. Buses and trains operated as usual, with residents dutifully wearing face masks on board, but a new wave of infections in recent days has put the city on edge. Hospitals are now seeing more cases a day than they ever have during the pandemic. More important, health officials are unable to determine the origin of many of these cases, despite having a robust contact tracing system in place. The government reported 73 cases Monday, one of the highest totals for a single day. In short order, the virus has spread across the city, infecting clerical staff at a government-run eye clinic, residents at a senior center, and cleaning workers at the airport. The city had been widely praised by international specialists for its response to the pandemic. It moved quickly to tighten its borders and impose quarantine rules, containing outbreaks traced first to travelers from mainland China and then to Hong Kong residents returning from Europe and the United States, but the latest outbreak has puzzled top health specialists. Officials have so far been unable to trace how a significant number of people caught the virus, a worrisome sign, epidemiologists say, that makes it more difficult to break the chain of transmission. Most people who tested positive for the virus have not traveled and have not been linked to known clusters. After easing restrictions on daily life in recent weeks, Hong Kong officials are once again imposing tough measures aimed at slowing the spread of the virus."
Are they sure it isn't a swine flu?
"Hong Kong is tightening anticoronavirus measures following a recent surge in cases. The wearing of masks will be mandatory in all public places, and nonessential civil servants will again work from home. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam introduced the measures on Sunday, saying that the situation in the Asian financial hub is “really critical” and that she sees “no sign” it’s under control. Travelers flying to Hong Kong from areas where the risk of infection is considered particularly severe will have to show a negative coronavirus test before boarding their flight, undergo another test upon arrival, and undergo a 14-day quarantine in a hotel. Previously, those arriving could quarantine themselves at home. The nations included in the new regulation were given as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South Africa. Hong Kong had appeared to have largely contained the coronavirus, but new cases reported last week have brought the city’s total to 1,777, including 12 deaths."
It's the end of freedom, folks.
"Chinese officials are hailing a visit by a team of specialists sent to Beijing by the World Health Organization to investigate the source of the coronavirus as evidence that the country is a responsible and transparent global power, but the investigation by the WHO is likely to take many months and could face delays. For starters, there are logistical headaches. China has placed the advance team of specialists who are laying the groundwork for a broader investigation under a standard 14-day quarantine, forcing it to do some of its detective work from a distance. The WHO’s investigation comes as China faces intense global backlash, including from the United States, for initially downplaying and failing to contain the virus, which emerged in December in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. For weeks, China had resisted demands from other nations that it allow independent investigators onto its soil to study the origin of the pathogen. Beijing has also tried to deflect blame by suggesting, without evidence, that the virus could have originated elsewhere. Now, officials are trumpeting Beijing’s response to the outbreak as a model for the world and attacking the United States for “shirking its responsibilities” in the global fight against COVID-19. The Trump administration, which has repeatedly attempted to distract from its ineffective response to the pandemic, has criticized the WHO’s inquiry. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently said that he expected it to be a “completely whitewashed investigation.” With relations between China and Western countries deteriorating over military, technology, trade, and human rights concerns, specialists worry Beijing will seek to limit the scope of the research so that it does not embarrass the government. The WHO’s inquiry is focused on the question of how the disease jumped to humans from animals. The advance team is made up of a specialist in animal health, as well as an epidemiologist. The team members, who arrived in mid-July, have not yet been identified and have not spoken publicly."
The feeling here is that the engineered bioweapon is a limited hangout fake. I believed in it for a while, but I know believe COVID is a BIG FAT LIE!
"China says it arrested 5,370 people for various forms of illegal activity related to the pandemic between January and June. More than 40 percent were charged with fraud, the state prosecutor’s office announced Monday. Another 15 percent were charged with obstruction of law enforcement, with others accused of producing and selling fake and shoddy goods, creating public disturbances, and transporting and selling endangered species. China has strengthened protection for wild animals following the emergence of the virus, which has been linked to a wet market in Wuhan and is believed to have possibly originated among bats before jumping to humans via an intermediary species such as the pangolin."
That's the crap cover story A!
"In an escalation of tensions with China, Britain on Monday suspended an extradition treaty with Hong Kong in protest of a new security law that gives China sweeping powers and is seen by critics as a significant threat to basic freedoms in the British former colony. The measure also underscored British politicians’ hardening stance over China’s treatment of Hong Kong, a former British colony that returned to Chinese control in 1997, and the growing worries about more assertive behavior by Beijing on the world stage. The announcement came as Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain prepared to welcome Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to London for a two-day visit during which China is expected to be high on the agenda....."
It's no longer any of their business, and at least Britain will be on our side in the next Pacific War:
"Some of the Tower of London’s iconic Beefeaters may soon be facing layoffs amid falling tourist numbers because of the pandemic. Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces confirmed that a voluntary redundancy plan had been introduced. It said staff had been told that cuts were likely among the 37 members of the body formally named the Yeoman Warders, who are known for their distinctive red and black regalia. It is the first time the Beefeaters have faced cuts in a history that dates back to 1485 when Henry VII became the first Tudor king, the charity said. The Tower’s Beefeaters offer tours and regale visitors with tales of intrigue and royal machinations from the history of the building that started off as a fortress in the 11th century and served through most of its history as a prison. The monument, where the Crown Jewels are kept, reopened July 10."
Back then, you could kneel on man’s neck and it was no problem.
"British Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed Thursday that the United Kingdom’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has shown the country’s “sheer might,” seeking to underline the bonds that tie the nations of the UK together as polls indicate rising support for Scottish independence. Johnson’s visit does not include a meeting with Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon, who countered his upbeat tone with a frosty tweet saying the prime minister’s visit “highlights” the arguments for Scotland breaking away from the UK. Johnson’s office emphasized ahead of his visit that being part of the UK and its economic recovery policies meant Scotland saw 900,000 jobs protected during the pandemic, with the UK Treasury granting loans to thousands of businesses, but Sturgeon rebuffed that argument, telling reporters Thursday that “none of us should be crowing about this pandemic in a political sense."
"A new snapshot of the frantic global response to the coronavirus pandemic shows some of the world’s largest government donors of humanitarian aid are buckling under the strain: Funding commitments, for the virus and otherwise, have dropped by a third from the same period last year. The analysis by the UK-based Development Initiatives, obtained in advance by the Associated Press, offers a rare real-time look at the notoriously difficult-to-track world of aid. At a time when billions of people are struggling with the pandemic and economic collapse — on top of long-running disasters like famine, drought, or unrest — more, not less, money is urgently needed. The reality on the ground could be even worse than the analysis indicates: Crucially, it only shows promises of aid. Just how much of the billions of dollars pledged have reached those in need is not yet clear....."
Not so much difficulty when it comes to tracking and tracing you, citizen.
While we are in the neighborhood:
"The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa urged the government on Wednesday to pressure the US military to do more to stop an escalating coronavirus outbreak at American bases there that has infected more than 130 Marines. Governor Denny Tamaki flew to Tokyo to ask Defense Minister Taro Kono to share the concerns of local communities that host American bases and urge the US military to be more cooperative with them. Tamaki complained that US military officials have refused to provide details of infections among US service members, citing confidentiality and a risk of terrorist attacks. He said 36 more cases were reported at Camp Hansen, one of several US bases on Okinawa hit by the outbreak, bringing the total to 136. Most of the cases are at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, which is at the center of a relocation dispute. Others were at Camp Kinser, Camp McTureous, and Kadena Air Base. Kono on Wednesday said a US military family of three had tested positive after taking a commercial flight to Iwakuni in western Japan after landing in Tokyo. US service members and their families are not covered by a travel ban on foreigners imposed by Japan."
"Japan’s capital has recorded a single-day record number of new coronavirus cases for a second straight day, confirming 293 in Tokyo on Friday. Virus cases in Tokyo were confirmed at 286 Thursday, setting off concerns the economy had reopened too quickly. Tokyo was taken off the area eligible for discounts, set to start next week, under the government “Go To Campaign” to encourage travel and tourism within Japan. Japan has never had a total lockdown but asked businesses to close and people to work from home in an “emergency,” starting in April. That has been gradually lifting. Japan has so far avoided the massive cases of the hardest hit nations, at fewer than 24,000 confirmed cases and about 1,000 deaths."
That is coming to an end:
"The city of Tokyo announced a record 366 new daily coronavirus cases on Thursday, exceeding 300 for the first time as Japan begins a four-day weekend with many people joining a tourism promotion campaign that the government is pushing despite concerns of a new wave of infections nationwide. The number of daily cases in Tokyo had fallen to just several in late May after the government ended a national state of emergency but have climbed steadily since late June, with the number tripling in the first three weeks of July. Tokyo now has 10,420 confirmed cases, including 327 deaths. “Please be mindful of your actions and do your utmost not to get infected, and not to infect others,” Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike said Thursday. Nationwide, Japan had 775 new confirmed cases Wednesday, the largest daily increase since 720 on April 11 during an earlier peak, for a national total of 27,029 cases."
Whatever you do, don't cross over to Korea:
"The widow of the former Korean Air chairman received a suspended prison sentence Tuesday for assault and other abuses of her chauffeur, security guard, and other employees in a case that extended a bizarre legal saga surrounding the company’s founding family. Lee was accused of physically andverbally abusing her employees between 2011 and 2018, including reportedly kicking her chauffeur for failing to load luggage into a car and throwing pruning shears toward a security guard at her home. She is the widow of former Korean Air chairman Cho Yang-ho, who died last year. Their son, Walter Cho, has been leading Korean Air since then. Their daughter, Cho Hyun-ah, was a company executive who gained notoriety in 2014 after she ordered a Korean Air passenger plane to return to a terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York because she was angry that the crew served her macadamia nuts in a bag instead of on a plate."
Keep heading south:
"Two US diplomats are among five new cases of coronavirus in Cambodia announced Friday by health officials. All five cases involve people who had traveled from the United States. Three are Cambodians who arrived Wednesday via Taiwan, said a Health Ministry statement. The statement described the two Americans as senior diplomats who had flown from the US via South Korea and also arrived Wednesday. It said the two are being isolated at the US Embassy in Phnom Penh. An embassy spokesman declined to provide immediate comment or details. Cambodia banned virtually all new arrivals in March but last month eased the rules, allowing the repatriation of more Cambodians and the tightly restricted entry of foreigners. Cambodia has had 171 confirmed coronavirus cases with no deaths."
"Malaysia will make wearing masks mandatory in crowded public areas and on public transportation from August to prevent flareups in coronavirus infections. Defense Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob said Thursday that those who fail to comply will face fines of 1,000 ringgit ($235). He said virus cases appear to be creeping higher, with many people and businesses lax in observing social distancing and health safety measures. Daily infections have risen to double digits since Malaysia reopened its economy last month after weeks of lockdown. It has reported 8,840 cases, including 123 deaths."
"After a one-day respite, coronavirus cases in the Australian state of Victoria have risen again, prompting a move to make masks mandatory in metropolitan Melbourne and the nearby shire of Mitchell. Health officials on Sunday recorded 363 new cases in the past 24 hours. Two men and a woman in their 90s died, taking the national death toll from COVID-19 to 122. On Saturday, Victoria’s new cases fell to 217 from a record high of 428 the previous day. By Wednesday, masks or face coverings will be mandatory for people who leave their homes to exercise or to purchase essential goods. Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews said up to 3 million face masks are on order by the state government and the first batch of 300,000 is due to arrive this week."
All of a sudden, Australia is at a “really, really challenging phase of this pandemic.”
"Authorities in Thailand are urging nearly 1,900 people to quarantine themselves and get tested after a breakdown in screening allowed two foreigners with COVID-19 to pose a risk to public health. The agency coordinating Thailand’s coronavirus response also announced it is tightening regulations that had allowed the entry of some foreign visitors. Taweesilp Visanuyothin, spokesman for the Center for COVID-19 Situation Administration, said a contact tracing app showed that 1,882 people may have crossed paths with an infected member of a visiting Egyptian military team. The second case involves the infected 9-year-old daughter of a diplomat whose family returned from Sudan and stayed in their home in Bangkok."
One wonders why the above nations are locked down given the paucity of numbers as we now push through to the Indian Ocean and Britain's former empire:
"A record surge of 40,425 reported cases of coronavirus in the past 24 hours took India’s total to 1,118,043. The Health Ministry on Monday also reported another 681 deaths, taking total fatalities to 27,497. India has the third-most cases and eighth-most deaths in the world. A country of 1.4 billion people, India has been conducting nearly 10,000 tests per million population. More than 300,000 samples are being tested daily, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research, India’s top medical research body. With India’s national lockdown largely lifted, local governments have been ordering focused lockdowns on high-risk areas where new outbreaks are surging."
"More than one in five people in Delhi state have been infected with the coronavirus, according to a study released Tuesday, indicating that most cases in the Indian capital region have gone undetected. The National Center for Disease Control tested 21,387 people selected randomly across Delhi, the state that includes New Delhi, and found that 23.48 percent had antibodies to the virus. Adjusting for false positives and negatives, it estimated that 22.86 percent of the population had been infected by the virus, Dr. Sujeet Kumar Singh, who heads the institute, said Tuesday. Delhi, with a population of 29 million, has officially reported 123,747 cases and 3,663 deaths. The study, however, indicates more than 6.6 million likely cases, with most not identified or tested. The study was conducted between June 27 and July 10. With more than 1.1 million reported cases, India has the third-highest confirmed case load in the world after the United States and Brazil. The death toll rose to 28,084 on Tuesday and recoveries to 724,577."
"The Indian government has said that it will expedite visas and the possibility of long-term residency for Hindus and Sikhs who have been the target of bloody attacks in recent years amid Afghanistan’s raging war. In interviews, many welcomed the emergency option but said that they found themselves between a rock and a hard place. In Afghanistan, they have livelihoods — shops and businesses passed down through generations — but spend their days dreading the next attack. Making a new start in India would probably mean living in poverty, they said, particularly during an economic slump that has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Lala Sher Singh, a 63-year-old amulet writer near a Kabul temple that was attacked in March, said the community had shrunk so much that one of the concerns that occupied his thoughts was that the next assault might not leave enough people who can perform the final rituals for the dead....."
What kind of ethnic cleansing imagery does that conjure up?
"The intensive care unit at the Afghan capital’s premier hospital for COVID-19 patients is a medical nightmare — and a stark warning how the country’s war-ravaged health care system risks collapsing. Family members, without protective equipment and only a few wearing face masks, help care for the patients lying in hospital beds. They say they have no choice because there are not enough nurses and other medical staff. The next-of-kin often guard their loved one’s oxygen tank, fearing it could be stolen because there is a shortage of just about everything, including oxygen cylinders. The 100-bed Afghan-Japan Communicable Disease Hospital in western Kabul is one of only two facilities for coronavirus testing and treatment in the Afghan capital. Newly graduated Afghan doctors have joined the 370-member staff after many of the hospital’s experienced physicians walked out a few months ago, fearing the virus. The 1,000-square-foot ICU ward has only 13 beds, and COVID-19 patients admitted here are in critical condition; few are hooked up to ventilators, some of the others rely on oxygen tanks. According to the Health Ministry, more than 1,700 medical workers — including 40 at the Afghan-Japan hospital — were infected while providing care; 26 have died. Afghanistan has so far recorded almost 35,000 cases of the virus, including 1,094 deaths."
And yet the war continues unabated, with Pakistan caught in the middle:
"Pakistan has threatened China’s TikTok and blocked the Singapore-based Bigo Live streaming platform, citing what the regulating authority called widespread complaints about “immoral, obscene and vulgar” content on the apps. The move was promptly decried by Pakistani rights activists who saw it as a potential precursor to an even greater censorship in this conservative Muslim nation. Both TikTok, a video-sharing app owned by Beijing tech giant ByteDance, and Bigo Live, a live streaming platform owned by a Singapore company, are popular among Pakistani teens and young adults. In 2008, Pakistan banned YouTube over videos depicting the Prophet Muhammad."
Sailing into the Persian Gulf and the Middle East now:
"The small, neighboring sheikhdoms of Bahrain and Qatar appear to have among the world’s highest per capita rates of confirmed coronavirus infections, a result of extensive testing and rapid, undetected spread through camps housing healthy and young foreign laborers, studies now show. In Qatar, a new study found nearly 60 percent of those testing positive showed little or no symptoms, calling into question the usefulness of temperature checks meant to stop the infected from mingling with others. In Bahrain, its government put the asymptomatic figure even higher, at 68 percent. Bahrain and Qatar have been able to test large portions of their small populations, allowing the two countries to find infections that other countries, with more limited testing, have not. A recent study in the United States, for example, found that about 10 cases are missed for every one that is confirmed. Qatar has found 37.4 coronavirus cases per 100,000 people, the highest rate of confirmed cases in the world, according to figures from the University of Oxford. Bahrain, at 22.1 confirmed cases per 100,000, is second. Other countries with high confirmed rates per population include San Marino, Chile, the Vatican, Kuwait, Oman, Panama, and Armenia. The United States is 10th."
"Syrians headed to polling stations in government-held parts of the war-torn country on Sunday, to elect a new parliament amid strict health measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The vote is the third to take place in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011. It has killed more than 400,000 people, displaced half the country’s population, and caused more than five million to become refugees, mostly in neighboring countries. This year’s vote follows a new wave of US sanctions that came into effect last month and a campaign to fight corruption that saw a wealthy cousin of President Bashar Assad come under pressure to pay back tens of millions of dollars to the state. The elections also coincide with Syria’s worst economic crisis and a currency crash, which has dragged more of the country’s population into poverty. No vote was held in the northwestern province of Idlib, the last rebel stronghold in Syria, or in the country’s northeast, which is controlled by US-backed Kurdish-led fighters. Voting in government-held areas passed without major incidents, but in the rebel-held north, a car bomb late Sunday killed five people and wounded dozens near a border crossing with Turkey, according to Syrian opposition activists and Turkey’s state-run news agency. Inside polling stations, all workers wore masks and gloves, and voters had to use their own pens in the sanitized booths. Once their ballots were cast, they had to leave immediately, as no gatherings were allowed inside. People also had to keep a safe distance as they waited to vote. As in previous elections in Syria, the vote will produce a rubber-stamp body loyal to the president....."
That's the a**holes at the AP prejudging the result.
"A Turkish banker was properly convicted of helping Iran evade US sanctions in a case that strained relations with Turkey, a federal appeals panel said Monday. The ruling by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan concluded that Mehmet Hakan Atilla received a fair trial after he was arrested in 2017 during a business trip to the United States. A three-judge panel said there was sufficient evidence to support the jury’s guilty verdict, including wiretapped conversations and hundreds of documents establishing that “Atilla was a knowing participant in the sanctions evasion scheme that involved routing hundreds of millions of dollars through the U.S. financial system.” Atilla’s arrest and prosecution drew an outcry from high-level Turkish officials, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For a time, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Michael B. Mukasey, a former attorney general in President George W. Bush’s administration, attempted to negotiate a resolution to the case with Erdogan and Trump administration officials. The talks in 2017 failed to produce a deal....."
He tried to escape to Cyprus, but the boat sank:
"Asylum-seekers infected with coronavirus could be seeping through the porous cease-fire line in the ethnically divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus, the country’s health minister warned Sunday. Minister Constantinos Ioannou pointed to “a problem” after a number of migrants who recently crossed from the breakaway north to seek asylum in the internationally recognized south have tested positive for COVID-19. Ioannou said the government had ordered two months ago that all migrants undergo testing for COVID-19 before they enter reception centers. At least eight Syrian migrants who crossed southward in the last week have reportedly tested positive. Ioannou said coronavirus checks are being conducted at several crossing points that dot the 120-mile, United Nations-controlled buffer zone, but migrants seek other, more remote routes to cross into the south, which is part of the European Union. The crossing points opened late last month after being shut down for three months due to coronavirus restrictions; however, the Cypriot government still bans crossings of foreigners because of uncertainty over the virus infection rate in the north. In the south, Cyprus has seen more than 1,000 infections and 19 confirmed virus deaths."
Up to Europe we go:
"Seeking to tug at the hearts of all European Union leaders, EU Council president Charles Michel implored them late Sunday to overcome their fundamental divisions and agree on an unprecedented 1.85 trillion-euro ($2.1 trillion) EU budget and coronavirus recovery fund to tackle the crisis. After three days of fruitless talks, Michel conjured up during an official dinner the vision of the 600,000 dead that COVID-19 has claimed around the world and the unprecedented recession it has wrought on the bloc. “Are the 27 EU leaders capable of building European unity and trust or, because of a deep rift, will we present ourselves as a weak Europe, undermined by distrust?’’ he asked the leaders at the end of another day of divisive negotiations. The text of the behind-closed-doors speech was obtained by the Associated Press. Heading into a fourth day of talks when the summit was meant to last only two, any compromise was still out of reach. An official close to Michel, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks, said leaders would work deep into the night if necessary. Even with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron negotiating as the closest of partners, the traditionally powerful Franco-German alliance could not get the bloc’s 27 quarreling nations in line."
Coming apart at the seams, huh?
"Violence erupted overnight in Frankfurt between police officers and youths who have been partying in a central city square on weekends, with bars and clubs shuttered to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. It was the latest outbreak of violence targeting the German police amid tensions over a national debate on racial profiling in police ranks. “The mood turned against us,” said Frankfurt’s police chief, Gerhard Bereswill, at a news conference on Sunday. “Certain groups feel encouraged — above all when they have been drinking — to attack police.” The violence in Frankfurt comes weeks after hundreds of young men attacked police and vandalized dozens of stores in Stuttgart, amid nationwide tensions over calls for German security officials to examine biases and racial profiling. Coverage of US protests against police brutality and systemic racism has received widespread attention across Germany, encouraging immigrant groups to speak up against what they say are years of being stopped by officers at random, based solely on their appearance or skin color. Last week, Horst Seehofer, Germany’s top security official, rejected calls for his ministry to conduct a study into structural racism among the country’s police officers, insisting that he saw no indications among the federal force that racial profiling was a problem. Instead, he said his ministry would follow through on an investigation of extremism and racism in the public sector that had already been commissioned. Opernplatz, the square outside Frankfurt’s opera house where violence broke out overnight, has become the scene of weekend parties all summer, with thousands of people gathering around a fountain to socialize, drink, and dance."
Trump better send in the troops:
"The governors of the four German states that are home to critical US military facilities are urging members of US Congress to try and force President Trump to back down from plans to withdraw more than a quarter of American troops from the country. The letter was sent to more than a dozen senators and representatives Friday, including members of security and foreign policy committees, and lawmakers who have spoken out against the move, according to Munich’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung....."
The most outspoken were Democratic Senators Chris Coons and Mitt Romney.
"European regulators could approve the first vaccine against COVID-19 this year, after a flurry of trials by drugmakers leading the race showed promising results. ‘‘We are preparing ourselves for that possibility so that we as regulators will be ready,’’ Marco Cavaleri, head of antiinfectives and vaccines at the European Medicines Agency, said Tuesday. ‘‘It will be a matter of seeing whether this data could be sufficient for allowing any kind of approval by the end of 2020.’’ The agency will start working with drug makers on a rolling review after the summer, Cavaleri said. Trial data, manufacturing, and clinical decisions will be assessed by the regulator in real time. The approach should allow any successful vaccine to be approved within days once submitted, Cavaleri said. Optimism over prospects for COVID-19 jabs is growing after the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca published promising results from early human tests of a shot on Monday. Vaccine partners Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, as well as China-based CanSino Biologics Inc., also announced early positive data from their vaccine trials."
The Poles are going to hate the shot, God bless 'em!
Time to bless the rains down in Africa:
"Ethiopia’s prime minister said Tuesday his country, Egypt, and Sudan have reached a “major common understanding, which paves the way for a breakthrough agreement” on a massive dam project that has led to sharp regional tensions and led some to fear military conflict. The statement by Abiy Ahmed’s office came as new satellite images show the water level in the reservoir behind the nearly completed $4.6 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is at its highest in at least four years. Ethiopia has said the rising water is from heavy rains. Ethiopia has said it would begin filling the reservoir of the dam, Africa’s largest, this month even without a deal as the rainy season floods the Blue Nile, but the new statement says the three countries’ have agreed to pursue “further technical discussions on the filling . . . and proceed to a comprehensive agreement.” The statement did not give details on Tuesday’s discussions, but the talks showed the critical importance placed on finding a way to resolve tensions over the storied Nile River, a lifeline for all involved."
"Global hot spot South Africa is seeing a “huge discrepancy” between confirmed COVID-19 deaths and much higher excess deaths from natural causes, while Africa’s top health official says the coronavirus is spreading there “like wildfire.” A new report by the South African Medical Research Council, released late Wednesday, shows more than 17,000 excess deaths in South Africa from May 6 to July 14 as compared with data from the past two years, while confirmed COVID-19 deaths are 5,940. The council’s president, Glenda Gray, said in a statement the excess deaths could be attributed to COVID-19 as well as to other widespread diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis while many health resources are redirected toward the pandemic. South Africa now has the world’s fifth-largest caseload. It makes up more than half the confirmed cases in Africa with 394,948, and the toll was expected to surpass 400,000 by the end of Thursday. Africa’s 54 countries now have more than 750,000 cases."
"There is growing concern that South Africa’s hospitals may not be able to cope with the numbers of COVID-19 patients expected in the next two months. The number of confirmed cases continues to climb in South Africa, which accounts for more than 50 percent of cases in Africa and now has the fifth-highest number of infections, at 373,628, in the world. South Africa has suffered 5,173 deaths, according to figures released by the health minister. The rapid rise in the rate of infections has raised concerns about whether the country’s hospitals will be able to cope with the influx of patients when the peak of cases is expected in August and September. Many hospitals in the Gauteng province, the country’s virus epicenter that includes the largest city of Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria, are already feeling the pressure. Health Minister Zweli Mkhize warned earlier this month that there would not be enough hospital beds throughout the country."
I just realized it is winter down there.
Across the Atlantic we go:
"The number of people around the world who have died as a result of the coronavirus has passed the 600,000 mark as countries from the United States to South Africa to India struggle to contain infections. Concerns are rising that the pandemic has found fresh legs over the past few weeks, with Johns Hopkins University and the World Health Organization both recording daily highs in newly reported infections. While the United States leads global infections, South Africa now ranks as the fifth worst-hit country in the pandemic with more than 350,000 cases, or around half of all those confirmed on the continent. Its struggles are a sign of potential trouble to come for nations with even fewer health care resources. India, which has now confirmed more than a million infections, on Sunday reported a 24-hour record surge of 38,902 new cases. Confirmed global deaths from or with COVID-19 rose to more than 602,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins. The United States tops the list with over 140,000, followed by more than 78,000 in Brazil, 45,000 in the United Kingdom, and 38,000 in Mexico. The number of confirmed infections worldwide has passed 14.2 million, with 3.7 million accounted for by the United States alone. Brazil has witnessed more than 2 million while India has recorded more than 1 million."
"Desperation is growing in one of Latin America’s poorest countries, which seems overwhelmed by the virus even as it endures political turmoil stemming from a flawed election and the ouster of president Evo Morales last year. A plan to hold elections in September, seen as a key to stabilizing its democracy, is increasingly in doubt....."
"Bolivia’s highest electoral authority on Thursday delayed presidential elections by more than a month due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal moved the election from Sept. 6 to Oct. 18, the third time the vote has been delayed. Bolivia has more than 64,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and more than 2,300 deaths, a toll that is overwhelming its hospitals and other infrastructure."
"A string of recent deaths across Nicaragua — including mayors, judges, police officials, sports figures, university rectors, and government bureaucrats — is pointing to the chilling reality that the coronavirus is devastating the Central American country, although the government is not publicly acknowledging it. To critics of the government, the deaths are a result of President Daniel Ortega’s haphazard and politicized response to the pandemic — with no encouragement of wearing masks or social distancing measures, and little testing and no stay-at-home orders or shutdowns. Instead, the government has encouraged large gatherings. That response seems to have hit members of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front party the hardest. Several young epidemiologists, virologists, and related specialists said in the medical journal Lancet that Nicaragua’s handling of the coronavirus “has been perhaps the most erratic of any country in the world to date.” Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, a former Nicaraguan ambassador to Washington, said the deaths of the public officials were strikingly obvious looking at the National Assembly and seeing a lot of empty chairs in the Sandinista side. Officially, the government reports that just 99 people have died from the virus, although the Citizens COVID-19 Observatory, an anonymous group of doctors and activists in Nicaragua, has registered 2,397 probable deaths."
Who would want to get rid of them?
Finally, the search for a patch of sand and some peace of mind ends on the shores of the state:
"Coronavirus ‘cluster’ identified in Chatham; 10 people tested positive after party" by Travis Andersen and Matthew Berg Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent, July 23, 2020
At least 10 people who were at a party attended by area restaurant workers earlier this month in Chatham have tested positive for the coronavirus, prompting some local eateries to temporarily close or scale back service and authorities to launch a public health campaign to identify everyone the partygoers have been in contact with.
Should have went to a city-destroying protest instead.
Robert Duncanson, Chatham’s director of health and natural resources, said in a telephone interview that the state Department of Public Health recently informed the town of the cluster of cases, which “appear to be related to the same event.”
Oh, this is starting to stink like the labs in Florida!
Officials were told that a number of people who attended the party work in the restaurant industry, Duncanson said.
After the news about the cluster of positive cases was released, several restaurants said on their Facebook pages that they had temporarily closed or were scaling back service and some had similar messages on their phones.
Who would ever want to eat there again?
Duncanson said officials were told between 30 and 50 people may have attended the party and that contact tracing is underway. Any restaurant whose employee or employees were at the party should close for at least 24 hours to conduct cleaning and disinfecting, he said. He said the town health agent on Wednesday informed local restaurants of the cluster and told them to advise staffers to be on the lookout for anyone with symptoms and to take “appropriate precautions.”
All the OCD disinfecting is also weakening our immune systems. That's how evil this is!
Duncanson said nine of the 10 party attendees who have tested positive do not live in Chatham.
“This was definitely our first cluster, absolutely,” Duncanson said.
He's like a proud Papa!
At Tuesday’s meeting of the Chatham Board of Selectmen, Duncanson addressed the cluster.
“There was apparently a house party in Chatham back in the second week of July attended by a large number of individuals who were not wearing masks,” Duncanson told the board.
PFFFFT!
The cluster, he told the selectmen, “just highlights the fact that these large parties where people are not practicing social distancing and not wearing masks can have significant impacts.”
He told the board members that “these kinds of events are really problematic, and they are hitting home now on the Cape. We’ve all heard them in other parts of the country but it can, in fact, happen here.”
If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the risk to coworkers and patrons who may have come into contact with an infected restaurant employee depends in large part on whether the employee wore an appropriate face covering.
“If folks who might have been affected were waiting tables without wearing masks, and the patrons were not wearing masks while they were eating, it’s certainly something that could have been passed in that way,” Walensky said. Those who think they could have been exposed to an infected person should quarantine for 14 days, she said.
“The big lesson here, for the people who are nowhere near Chatham, is we have every possibility of this hitting very close to home again,” she said. “Just because it looks like it’s somewhere else right now, I promise you there are still cases in this state, and we still have to keep up our vigilance.”
That looks like a THREAT!
Chatham Town Manager Jill R. Goldsmith described the pandemic Wednesday as a “storm” in her regular community update posted to the town’s official website.
Noting that a “rare tornado” hit the region in July 2019, Goldsmith wrote that this year, “we face a storm of much longer duration with impacts not to trees and powerlines but to lives and livelihoods. I don’t know how long we will have to endure this public health emergency, but I am confident we will support each other for as long as it takes to see our community through it.”
On Monday, Goldsmith said, the town Board of Health voted to extend the hours mandating wearing masks downtown by one hour, until 10 p.m.
“The request for this extension was made by several downtown merchants in recognition that more people are utilizing Main Street later in the evenings than was initially expected,” she said. The board clarified that those removing masks to eat or drink should be seated and/or socially distanced from non-family members when doing so.
I give up on you people.
According to the order from the Board of Health, the town is “concerned that ... the combination of large crowds and narrow roads and sidewalks will make it difficult to maintain social distancing” as required by Governor Charlie Baker.
Unless it's a race riot protest.
Anyone who violates the order is subject to a written warning for the first offense, a fine of $100 for a second infraction, and a $300 levy for a third or subsequent violation.....
That is FA$CI$M!
--more--"
Did you see what they found buried in the sand?
Related:
"A great white shark was seen swimming next to a boat off of Sandwich Saturday, officials said. The 8-foot long shark circled the vessel for 15 minutes before it swam away, according to a confirmed sighting on the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy’s shark sighting app. The boaters wrote in their report on the app that the sighting was a “lifelong memory made for all the kids on board (adults too)!” There were six confirmed great white shark sightings off Cape Cod over the weekend, the Conservancy said. One great white shark that spanned between 10 and 16 feet long was seen near Brown’s Bank in Plymouth on Sunday....."
That will provide an undercurrent of nervousness as you daydream about the snack baskets available for pickup, so let's go to the zoo instead:
"The National Zoo will reopen to the public later this week with restrictions to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The Smithsonian, which runs the zoo, announced Monday that it will reopen with limited hours starting Friday. The National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., will also reopen, but the rest of the museums in the Smithsonian network will remain closed."
Look out, the bulls are loose!
"A man suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries when he was gored by one of two bulls loose in Brentwood, New Hampshire Saturday night, prompting police to shoot and kill the animals — an incident authorities said could have been avoided. Josh Jennings, owner of Meadows Mirth Farm told WMUR he was notified around 8 p.m. that two bulls were on his property. He said the bulls appeared agitated, and he calmly led them away from his crops before first responders could get to the scene, according to the station. The owner of the bulls was able to lead them home while police blocked the nearby roadway, WMUR reports. According to authorities, the group was only yards away from where they were going when a bystander got involved. “A third party inserted himself into the situation and he was told to stay back, and he took hold of one of the bull’s horns, and he ended up being gored,” Brentwood police Sgt. Daniel Wicks told WMUR. “There were multiple people within five feet of the two bulls. They appeared (to be) getting ready to attack again.” That’s when officers shot the bulls. “To have that happen, it was very sad,” Jennings said. “It’s not what any of us wanted. I know the owner is devastated about it.” Wicks said the incident was “very tragic.” “I just saw the farmer,” he said. “He’s very upset about it, and it was probably avoidable if the person had avoided the bull and did was he had been told to do.” A man at the property where the bulls were from told the news station that, given the circumstances, he thinks authorities did a good job."
They couldn't herd them to a pen instead?
"Months after he was elected as speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives last year, Larry Householder began an aggressive campaign to bail out two of the state’s nuclear power plants. The $1.3 billion initiative was controversial and jammed through at the last minute, but Householder amassed just enough support among a bipartisan group of colleagues to save the facilities. When a referendum effort threatened to overturn the law, the 61-year-old GOP legislator allegedly organized a massive effort to quash the petition. Prosecutors now say his push for the bailout was the result of a sprawling, $60 million bribery scheme that prompted many of Ohio’s top Republicans to call for Householder’s resignation. Prosecutors accused him and four others of spinning up a ‘‘criminal enterprise’’ that collected the $60 million in dark money from a struggling energy company....."
I say you dig a hole on the beach and see what grows in it.
