More like the Meadows of page A13:
"Meadows pressed Justice to investigate election fraud claims" by Katie Benner New York Times, June 5, 2021
WASHINGTON — In Donald Trump’s final weeks in office, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, according to newly uncovered emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times.
I have yet to see the Fauci emails in print as he belatedly emphasizes the danger of airborne transmission and says there is ‘no doubt’ that US has undercounted its deaths from COVID-19 when they have been proven to be inflated.
In five emails sent during the last week of December and early January, Meadows asked Jeffrey Rosen, then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Trump had been the victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with U.S. voting machines and switch votes for Trump to votes for Joe Biden.
As opposed to the alleged Russian interference that never was.
None of the emails show Rosen agreeing to open the investigations suggested by Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so. An email to another Justice Department official indicated that Rosen had refused to broker a meeting between the FBI and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate, but the communications between Meadows and Rosen, which have not previously been reported, show the increasingly urgent efforts by Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results while he still had control of the government.
In the days before Christmas, as Trump pressed the lead investigator for Georgia’s secretary of state to find “dishonesty,” Meadows made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Georgia, to view an election audit in process. Local officials called it a stunt that “smelled of desperation,” as investigations had not found evidence of widespread fraud.
So does this. The fact that it appears in my paper at all means they have started themselves over the blatant election theft that is in plain sight.
Meadows also joined the phone call that Trump made Jan. 2 to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, in which Trump repeatedly urged the state’s top elections official to alter the outcome of the presidential vote, yet the newly unearthed messages show how Meadows’ private efforts veered into the realm of the outlandish and sought official validation for misinformation that was circulating rampantly among Trump’s supporters. Italygate was among several unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 elections that caught fire on the internet before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Those theories fueled the belief among many of the rioters, stoked by Trump, that the election had been stolen from him and have prompted several Republican-led states to pass or propose new barriers to voting.
The whole world saw it even if the pre$$ hysterically denies it.
The emails were discovered this year as part of a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into whether Justice Department officials were involved in efforts to reverse Trump’s election loss.
“This new evidence underscores the depths of the White House’s efforts to co-opt the department and influence the electoral vote certification,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairman of the committee, said in a statement. “I will demand all evidence of Trump’s efforts to weaponize the Justice Department in his election subversion scheme.”
Using the DoJ, among others, to spy on the opposing political campaign is a subversive weaponization and treason and thus must be covered up by a totally subservient pre$$ that has forgotten a concerning a practice that has persisted across multiple presidential administrations, [including] the Obama Justice Department under then-Attorney General Eric Holder, who alerted The Associated Press in 2013 that it had secretly obtained two months of phone records of reporters and editors in what the news cooperative's top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion" into newsgathering activities, but after blowback, Holder announced a revised set of guidelines for leak investigations, including requiring the authorization of the highest levels of the department before subpoenas for news media records could be issued, but the department preserved its prerogative to seize journalists' records, and the recent disclosures to the news media organizations show that the practice continued in the Trump Justice Department when it became of the utmost concern.
A spokesperson for Meadows declined to comment, as did the Justice Department. Rosen did not respond to a request for comment.
The requests by Meadows reflect Trump's belief that he could use the Justice Department to advance his personal agenda.
They have buried Hunter's laptop along with the one from Weiner .
On Dec. 15, the day after it was announced that Rosen would serve as acting attorney general, Trump summoned him to the Oval Office to push the Justice Department to support lawsuits that sought to overturn his election loss. Trump also urged Rosen to appoint a special counsel to investigate Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company.
There was a time when Democrats complained about Dominion before the double standards.
During the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, Trump continued to push Rosen to do more to help him undermine the election and even considered replacing him as acting attorney general with a Justice Department official who seemed more amenable to using the department to violate the Constitution and change the election result.
Throughout those weeks, Rosen privately told Trump that he would prefer not to take those actions, reiterating a public statement made by his predecessor, William Barr, that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Barr is a consigliere who is charged with protecting $wamp secrets and thus he didn't cause any ripples regarding the obvious voting fraud.
Meadows’ outreach to Rosen was audacious in part because it violated long-standing guidelines that essentially forbid almost all White House personnel, including the chief of staff, from contacting the Justice Department about investigations or other enforcement actions.
Well, he did it in hope.
Nevertheless, Meadows emailed Rosen multiple times in the end of December and on New Year’s Day.
On Jan. 1, Meadows wrote that he wanted the Justice Department to open an investigation into a discredited theory, pushed by the Trump campaign, that anomalies with signature matches in Georgia’s Fulton County had been widespread enough to change the results in Trump’s favor.
Meadows also sent Rosen a list of allegations of possible election wrongdoing in New Mexico, a state that Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani had said in November was rife with fraud. A spokesperson for New Mexico’s secretary of state said at the time that its elections were secure. To confirm the accuracy of the vote, auditors in the state hand-counted random precincts.
That's why federal investigators searched his apartment and office in an early morning raid, ostensibly stepping up a criminal investigation into Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine, three people with knowledge of the investigation said, and the FBI warning Giuliani received in late 2019 that he was the target of a Russian influence operation aimed at circulating falsehoods intended to damage President Biden politically ahead of last year’s election that was part of an extensive effort by the bureau to alert members of Congress and at least one conservative media outlets literally turned out to be fake news; nevertheless, a special counsel has been appointed to review material seized by the FBI to ensure investigators aren’t able to see records protected by attorney-client privilege — echoing the Justice Department’s pursuit of a criminal case against a previous attorney for former president Donald Trump, Michael Cohen.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is one of three entities looking into aspects of the White House’s efforts to overturn the election in the waning days of the Trump administration. The House Oversight Committee and the Justice Department’s inspector general are doing so as well.
Rosen is in talks with the oversight panel about speaking with investigators about any pressure the Justice Department faced to investigate election fraud, as well as the department’s response to the Jan. 6 attack, according to people familiar with the investigation.....
He's already preparing for his next role:
"At once diminished and dominating, Trump prepares for his next act" by Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman New York Times, June 6, 2021
GREENVILLE, N.C. — Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, commutes to New York City from his New Jersey golf club to work out of his office in Trump Tower at least once a week, slipping in and out of Manhattan without attracting much attention.
The place is not as he left it. Many of his longtime employees are gone. So are most of the family members who once worked there with him and some of the fixtures of the place, like his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who have since turned on him. Trump works there, mostly alone, with two assistants and a few body men.
His political operation has also dwindled to a ragtag team of former advisers who are still on his payroll, reminiscent of the bare-bones cast of characters that helped lift a political neophyte to his unlikely victory in 2016. Most of them go days or weeks without interacting with Trump in person, but when he spoke Saturday night to the North Carolina Republican convention, in what was billed as the resumption of his rallies and speeches, Trump was both a diminished figure and an oversized presence in American life, with a remarkable — and many say dangerous — hold on his party.
Even without his favored megaphones and the trappings of office, Trump looms over the political landscape, animated by the lie that he won the 2020 election and his own fury over his defeat, and unlike others with a grievance, he has been able to impose his anger and preferred version of reality on a substantial slice of the American electorate — with the potential to influence the nation’s politics and weaken faith in its elections for years to come.
The New York Times is jealous that they can no longer do that with their lies.
Still blocked from Twitter and Facebook, he has struggled to find a way to influence news coverage since leaving office and promote the fabrication that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Fabricated like Iraqi WMD?
Some party leaders, like the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, are pretending he does not exist anymore, while being deferential when Trump cannot be ignored.
Others, like Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, have tried to curry favor by presenting Trump with made-up awards to flatter his ego and keep him engaged in helping Senate Republicans recapture a majority in 2022.
I doubt there will be any elections by then if Canada is a guide.
Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, said Trump had defied the model of ex-presidents who lose an election and tend to fade away, and the experience of Richard Nixon, who was treated like a pariah in the way that Trump has managed to avoid.
Just as Hillary and the Democrats defied a candidate losing an election and refusing to fade away.
As for being simultaneously big and small, Beschloss said, “He’s big if the metric is that politicians are afraid of him, which is one metric of power in Washington. Many Republican leaders are terrified of him and abasing themselves in front of him.”
Even in defeat, Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024 in every public poll so far. Lawmakers who have challenged his dominance of the party, like Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who implored her colleagues to reject him after the Jan. 6 riot by his supporters at the Capitol, have been booted from Republican leadership.....
It was House GOP leader McCarthy who amped up the pressure on her to leave, to tell the truth and shame the devil — but it is becoming increasingly clear that the former president Donald Trump no longer needs the social media platforms that nurtured his devoted following and rocketed him to the presidency in 2016 to exert an iron grip over his party or keep his lies about election fraud in 2020 percolating among his base [because] Liz Cheney, a daughter of the Republican establishment who has long commanded deep respect from her party, was expelled from party leadership over her refusal to go along with Trump’s lies about the election — showing Trump can still foment a mutiny in Congress even as his voice gets softer nationally.
The Globe says deposing her was the wrong move so it must have been right because after Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, his supporters concocted a series of false allegations and conspiracy theories asserting it had actually been stolen from him, and the disgraceful behavior culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, when rioters, acting at the president’s behest, stormed the Capitol in an effort to derail the lawful transfer of power and cast doubt on the election outcome.
Thus there is a new sheriff in town who acknowledges truth rather than embracing a lie like McCarthy, saying it was clear that he and his GOP colleagues “needed to make a change” by throwing Cheney overboard and abandoning the rule of law as Republicans decide to live and die with the Big Lie that says Biden's election was legitimate.
The latest is that Liz will launch a presidential bid because she refuses to subscribe to The Big Lie: the claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, even though there isn’t a shred of evidence that is true as the stark partisan divisions in D.C. refuse to die and legislation is barely approved along party lines and GOP leaders condemn Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene after the Georgia Republican compared a supermarket’s face-mask policy to the Nazi practice of labeling Jews with Star of David badges (hey, of the schu fits.....).
I was further told that Trump has been focused on his repeated, false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged,” but there is no legal mechanism for reinstating a president and the efforts by Republicans in the Arizona Senate to recount the votes in the state’s largest county have been derided as fake and inept by local Republican officials, who say the result is a partisan circus that is eroding confidence in elections, but nonetheless, Trump has zeroed in on the Arizona effort and a lawsuit in Georgia to insist that not only will he be restored to office but also that Republicans will retake the majority in the Senate through those same efforts, according to the people familiar with what he has been saying, and this time around, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law who oversaw his 2020 campaign operation, has mostly dropped out, telling the small circle of advisers around the ex-president that he wants to focus on writing his book and establishing a simpler relationship with Trump, where he is just a son-in-law while Donald Trump Jr. has stepped in as the most politically involved family member in his father’s life.
If you read between the lines(?), it looks like Trump will announce his future presidential plans after the 2022 midterm election while repeating the false claim that he won the 2020 election -- although it was an obscure Texas security company that helped persuade Americans that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, according to the Washington Post.
If anyone knows about false claims it is the New York Times since they make so many, and the turn to page A14 leads to page A1:
The Globe must be pooping bricks and I'm sure much of it has to do with Arizona audit of beleaguered local officials and legislation making it easier to purge infrequent voters, ignoring protests from Democrats and prominent business leaders who said the measure would suppress the votes of people of color and Republicans have only a single-vote edge in the Arizona House and Senate, so their legislation has been tougher to pass than in other states, and after that it is on to Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, and California, yes, California, to revisit the vote count and find Trump won the presidential race.
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They thought he was dead and buried, and I give the Globe a modicum of credit here for the front-page feature but will never be able to forgive them for continuing to push the fraud that resulted in these lost lives:
"At Dartmouth College, first-year suicides a grim reminder of a year of loneliness" by Laura Krantz Globe Staff, June 5, 2021
Beau DuBray felt at peace on his family’s ranch near the Missouri River in South Dakota, with its horses and roaming buffalo. Quiet and kind, the 18-year-old carried a deep respect for his Lakota heritage, his family said, and was troubled by American society’s rejection of Indigenous wisdom and destruction of the natural world.
Last fall, amid a global pandemic, DuBray took his dream of helping to bridge the cultural gap to Hanover, N.H., where he began his studies at Dartmouth College. In November, he took his own life.
Six months later, his family and friends are still trying to understand the mental health struggles he faced, as are the loved ones of two other first-year students who also died of suicide this year at Dartmouth, an unusually high number of such deaths in a single year.
The deaths have devastated the small Ivy League campus of about 4,000 and sparked deep outrage among students, who say the school’s mental health resources have been woefully inadequate during an academic year blighted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In op-eds and makeshift memorials and red paint splattered on the driveway of the college president’s home, students are ending the year in grief-stricken protest, criticizing the school for what they say were overly strict social safety protocols that failed to take into account the deep toll they took on students’ psychological health.
“It was isolation like I’d never known isolation,” said Robert Abel, a Dartmouth first-year from New York.
Now, as the pandemic winds down and vaccination rates soar on campuses, Dartmouth and other schools are assessing the damage caused by pandemic distancing and taking steps to help students heal, but many undergraduates say it is too little — and, for some, too late.
Connor Tiffany, 19, a selfless and outgoing Dartmouth first-year from Virginia, died in Boston in March, in what friends say was also suicide.
Elizabeth Reimer, another first-year from Long Island, N.Y., killed herself in mid-May after the college sent her home involuntarily, following a previous suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. A competitive dancer known to burst into a gleeful cartwheel at family gatherings, Reimer, 18, had begged to stay on campus.
“How many times do I have to tell you that the worst thing for me would be getting sent home?!!” she wrote in a social media post a few weeks before her death, according to a copy of the post shared with the Globe by her friends at Dartmouth.
The day she died, her family said, Reimer had received an e-mail from the college’s assistant dean informing her that she might have to wait another year to complete her first year of college if she withdrew from a course in which she’d fallen behind, amid her struggle with anxiety.
“It just seems like mistakes were made, maybe not with intent, but unfortunately the conclusion is irreversible and horrific and the biggest hole in our world,” said Reimer’s aunt Linda McNicholas.
Research has begun to document the degree to which the pandemic has disproportionately devastated the mental health of young people. More than 60 percent of people ages 18 to 24 experienced anxiety or depression during the pandemic, according to research by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the highest rate of any age group. One in four seriously contemplated suicide, also the highest rate of any age group.
It is the CDC who is responsible for this crime thanks to their guidance.
“This age group, the sense of belonging and connectedness with peers and being part of a community is key to their identity,” said Nance Roy, a professor of psychiatry at Yale Medical School and the chief clinical officer at the Jed Foundation, which works to promote emotional health and prevent suicide among young people.
Colleges, however, have struggled to create policies that keep students safe without destroying the sense of community on campus. A candlelight vigil on the quad this month to remember the three first-years, as well as with a third year who died of a medical condition, was the first time all year the entire campus community had been invited to gather together.
Public health protocols varied among New England colleges and universities this year but many have been relatively stringent, like Dartmouth’s. Many students have been living in and rarely leaving single rooms; many classes are held on Zoom; and social gatherings in dorms and off-campus excursions were severely restricted or forbidden.
Amid a rise in virus cases this spring, Bates College, in Maine, forbade students from leaving their dorm rooms except to receive a COVID-19 test, pick up a meal, use the restroom, exercise alone outside, get a vaccine, pick up a prescription, or visit the doctor. All classes went remote during that time.
Last November, Wellesley College canceled all food at events on campus, except in the dining hall, to prevent extra instances where people would take off their masks. In December, it required students to resign from off-campus jobs, citing the rising infection risk.
The college experience has become that of a correctional facility.
No wonder the kids are offing themselves.
The remote setting of the Dartmouth campus, students said, and the many months of cold weather, made the isolation feel especially intense.
Roy said schools this year had no choice but to prioritize physical safety during the pandemic, but the majority have now turned their focus to mental health. For young people in particular, she said, closeness is crucial for healthy development.
To date there is no indication that the campus suicide rate has risen nationwide over the last year, but mental health on campus was already precarious before the pandemic; the suicide rate among young people has tripled since the 1950s, she said.
For many first year students, the year was particularly dispiriting. Many older students already had a network of friends to lean on, but first-years were often forced to adjust to college life and academics from a solitary dorm room, trying to make friends on Zoom or from behind a mask.
In the fall at Dartmouth, students moved in mostly alone, then underwent a two-week quarantine and attended orientation via Zoom. It was a full five weeks before Abel, the first year from New York, had a real face-to-face conversation with someone, he said. It was his resident assistant.
The college’s efforts to help, he said, seemed misdirected. Staff focused on ways for students to de-stress, at one point offering kits to make glitter jars, an arts and craft project distributed after students received a COVID-19 test, but didn’t focus enough on “addressing the root of the problems, which is intense loneliness, extreme academic stress,” he said.
Treating college students like kindergartners?
How condescending!
At Dartmouth, the severity of the pandemic’s toll on students has come into devastatingly clear focus just as the threat of COVID-19 has begun to recede, thanks to vaccinations. Two days after Reimer’s suicide, college administrators announced a series of steps to address mental health.
A Dartmouth spokesman declined to make an administrator available for an interview, but pointed to the letter President Philip J. Hanlon sent to students announcing the policy changes.
“The pandemic has exacerbated many problems, but foremost among them has been mental health. On this critical issue, we must do more to support our community,” Hanlon wrote in that letter.....
What if the kid doesn't want the shot and kills himself/herself to avoid it?
Then what?
Going hungry certainly didn't help their frame of mind, and the external investigation cleared the professor of wrongdoing(!).
Yeah, me, too.
I would say call a cop but it's out of my jurisdiction:
I'm told it may surpass the high-profile State Police overtime fraud debacle regarding the falsifying of time sheets in order to collect fraudulent overtime $$$.
Must be like being in A$pen, what with all the white people around, and White, who is fighting to keep his job, is charging that Janey’s move to oust him presents, in his lawyer’s words, “an all too familiar circumstance for a Black man. Any charge of violence against him is presumed to be true, allegations are made up to control and punish him, and he is not afforded due process when accused, and the Acting Mayor and City’s actions have deeply harmed him and his family.”
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"Finance Leaders Reach Global Tax Deal Aimed at Ending Profit Shifting" by Alan Rappeport New York Times, June 5, 2021
LONDON — The top economic officials from the world’s advanced economies reached a breakthrough on Saturday in their yearslong efforts to overhaul international tax laws, unveiling a broad agreement that aims to stop large multinational companies from seeking out tax havens and force them to pay more of their income to governments.
Finance leaders from the Group of 7 countries agreed to back a new global minimum tax rate of at least 15 percent that companies would have to pay regardless of where they locate their headquarters.
The agreement would also impose an additional tax on some of the largest multinational companies, potentially forcing technology giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google as well as other big global businesses to pay taxes to countries based on where their goods or services are sold, regardless of whether they have a physical presence in that nation.
It's part and parcel to the Great Re$et.
Officials described the pact as a historic agreement that could reshape global commerce and solidify public finances that have been eroded after more than a year of combating the coronavirus pandemic.
Rishi Sunak, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, announced the agreement and hailed it as a deal that would make the global tax system “fit for the global digital age” and would ensure “the right companies pay the right tax in the right places.”
Garnering wider support will not be easy. Ireland, which has a tax rate of 12.5 percent, has come out against the global minimum tax, arguing that it would be disruptive to its economic model. Some major countries such as China have been quietly tracking the proceedings but are considered unlikely to buy in. Finance officials believe that if enough advanced economies sign on, then other countries will be compelled to follow suit and they plan to exert political pressure on Ireland to join the agreement.
Expect bad things to start happening to Ireland and China.
The Biden administration has been particularly eager to reach an agreement because a global minimum tax is closely tied to its plans to raise the corporate tax rate in the United States to 28 percent from 21 percent to help pay for the president’s infrastructure proposal.
Business lobbyists and Republican lawmakers have warned that doing so will make American companies less competitive than their international counterparts and lead to more offshoring.
It's a viciou$, never-ending circle.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and other administration officials have said that getting other countries to go along with a base tax rate on overseas profits would minimize any disadvantage to American companies and make them less likely to move their operations to countries with lower taxes.
The Group of 7 delegations, which represent Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, negotiated late into Friday to hash out details of how the new tax systems would work and the language in the statement.
France, which had been pushing for a tax rate above 15 percent, wanted to ensure that there remains flexibility for the tax to be higher.
In case they are called upon to pay reparations.
To prevent individual countries from imposing dozens of digital taxes around the world, the agreement reached Saturday would apply a new tax to large businesses with a profit margin of at least 10 percent. The finance ministers agreed that the tax would be applied to at least 20 percent of profit exceeding that 10 percent margin “for the largest and most profitable multinational enterprises.”
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"Nigeria blocks Twitter after president’s tweet is deleted" by Ruth Maclean New York Times, June 5, 2021
DAKAR, Senegal — Nigeria has blocked Twitter after the social media site deleted a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari that threatened secessionist groups in the southeast of the country who had been responsible for attacks on government offices.
The government suspended Twitter, which is used by millions of Nigerians, on Friday night, after a government official called the microblogging platform’s presence in Nigeria “very, very suspect.”
The ministry of information posted the announcement of Twitter’s suspension — on Twitter.
Twitter users in Nigeria expressed outrage at the blocking of one of the main outlets that they have to criticize their government and try to hold it to account. Many circumvented the suspension by using virtual private networks to access the service, raising questions of how effective the ban will be.
In the tweet deleted by Twitter on Wednesday, Buhari drew a connection between Nigeria’s civil war decades ago and attacks on offices of the national electoral commission by arsonists and gunmen.
Most of the attacks have been in the southeast, which declared itself the Republic of Biafra in the 1960s and fought a devastating war for secession. Buhari, who has 4.1 million followers on Twitter, was a commander on the side of the Nigerian government during the war.
“Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Nigerian Civil War,” he wrote in the deleted post. Those “who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand.”
Some saw his words as a threat of genocide against the Igbo ethnic group that is in the majority in Nigeria’s southeast. Twitter said the tweet violated its “abusive behavior” policy.
Nigerian Twitter users have played an outsize role in trying to hold their government to account. The platform was one of the key forms of communication and publicity for protesters in EndSARS, a youth-driven movement that began with calls to abolish an abusive police unit and which led to much wider demands for better governance in West Africa’s biggest democracy.
In a news conference after Buhari’s tweet was deleted, the information minister, Lai Mohammed, compared Twitter’s actions in Nigeria to those the company took after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, including banning the account of former President Donald Trump.
The reason for blocking Twitter, Mohammed said later, was “the persistent use of the platform for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence.”
It sure looks like a “insurrection,” doesn't it not?
Time to set sail for Amsterdam:
"Amsterdam, with its scenic canals lined with picturesque, 17th- and 18th-century buildings, a major European tourist destination, is slowly crumbling. Sinkholes are appearing in its small streets, and nearly half its 1,700 bridges are rickety and need repairs. As a huge project to shore up the canal walls gets underway, the city is beginning to look like one gigantic construction site. The reconstruction will take at least 20 years and cost 2 billion euros, about $2.5 billion, and perhaps even more, experts have calculated. Engineers are trying to prevent the collapse of the canal walls the bridge is connected to, while at the same time disentangling a web of electricity and internet cables, phone lines and other services that use the bridge. “It’s a very complex intervention,” said Dave Kaandorp, a building contractor working on the renovations. He did see one upside, as the canals were suddenly being used for what they were intended for. “We bring a lot of the building materials over the water now.” Still, many mainly see the downside of all the work. “One would have hoped the municipality would have dealt with this earlier,” said Kadir van Lohuizen, a well-known Dutch photographer who focuses on climate change. He lives on one of the 2,500 houseboats in Amsterdam. “Instead they spent all their money on the new metro line.”
It was touted as a win-win, but so far, the benefit ledger favors China as the New York Times sinks even deeper into the hole.
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Time to hit the AP beach:
"Amid the coronavirus pandemic, this year's D-Day commemorations are taking place with travel restrictions that have prevented veterans or families of fallen soldiers from the U.S., Britain and other allied countries from making the trip to France. Only a few officials were allowed exceptions. While France is planning to open up to vaccinated visitors starting next week, that comes too late for the D-Day anniversary. So for the second year in a row, most public commemoration events have been cancelled. A few solemn ceremonies have been maintained, with dignitaries and a few guests only. Local residents, however, are coming in greater numbers than last year, as France started lifting its internal virus restrictions last month. Some French and a few other World War II history enthusiasts from neighboring European countries gathered in Normandy. On Saturday morning, people in dozens of World War II vehicles, from motorcycles to jeeps and trucks, gathered in a field in Colleville-Montgomery to parade down the nearby roads along Sword Beach to the sounds of a pipe band. Residents, some waving French and American flags, came to watch....."
One was made for a 96-year-old Penobscot Native American from Indian Island, Maine, the lone presence that is all the more poignant as the number of survivors of the epochal battle dwindles as the pandemic and its lockdowns left Omaha Beach in Normandy largely deserted for the observance of the D-Day anniversary when allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, on “D-Day” as they began the liberation of German-occupied Western Europe while suffering heavy casualties as they launched their eventually successful counteroffensive against German troops in France.
Fortunaltey, the AP also swept the beach clean of mines:
"After five years of sniffing out land mines and unexploded ordnance in Cambodia, Magawa is retiring. The African giant pouched rat has been the most successful rodent trained and overseen by a Belgian nonprofit, APOPO, to find land mines and alert his human handlers so the explosives can be safely removed. Last year, Magawa won a British charity’s top civilian award for animal bravery — an honor so far exclusively reserved for dogs. “Although still in good health, he has reached a retirement age and is clearly starting to slow down,” APOPO said. “It is time.” While many rodents can be trained to detect scents and will work at repetitive tasks for food rewards, APOPO decided that African giant pouched rats were best suited to land mine clearance because their size allows them to walk across mine fields without triggering the explosives — and do it much more quickly than people. Magawa is part of a cohort of rats bred for this purpose. He was born in Tanzania in 2014, and in 2016, moved to Cambodia’s northwestern city of Siem Reap, home of the famed Angkor temples, to begin his bomb-sniffing career. In retirement, Magawa will live in his same cage as before and follow the same daily routine, he’ll be fed the same food, have playtime every day and get regular exercise and health checks. He eats mostly fresh fruit and vegetables supplemented with small sun-dried fish for protein and imported pellets for vitamins and fiber. For 20-30 minutes a day, he is released into a larger cage with facilities such as a sandbox and a running wheel....."
That's how I feel reading a Globe every morning, and he missed one.
"Tensions rise in Memphis as slave trader’s remains are removed" by Maria Cramer New York Times, June 5, 2021
Traditionally, residents of Memphis, Tennessee, celebrate Juneteenth at Robert R. Church Park, named for the city’s first Black millionaire, but this year, residents and city officials plan to celebrate the end of slavery 1 mile away, at a park where the remains of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and leader of the Ku Klux Klan who owned and traded enslaved workers, have been buried under a marble base since 1905.
In a land $teeped in white $upremacy?
No more GUMP then, right?
Workers hired by the Sons of Confederate Veterans are digging up and removing the copper coffins that hold the remains of Forrest and his wife, Mary Ann. The remains and a statue of Forrest that had towered over the park, once named after the general, will be moved 200 miles away, to the National Confederate Museum in Columbia, Tennessee.
The excavation may take several weeks, according to Lee Millar, a spokesman for the group, which represents direct descendants of Confederate soldiers and promotes a revisionist view of the Civil War, but even if the process is not completed by June 19, the Juneteenth celebration will take place at the park, now known as Health Sciences Park, according to Michalyn Easter-Thomas of the Memphis City Council.
“Having him there was like having him dance on our graves, the graves of our ancestors,” she said. “You can go quietly. We won’t miss you.”
The exhumation follows years of protests at the site, decades of demands from the city’s Black residents to remove the statue and the remains, and numerous court fights over what should happen to the burial site.
Tensions have erupted at the site since the excavation began. Debris from the burial site was dumped on a Black Lives Matter mural that had been painted around the base where Forrest’s statue had stood.
On Tuesday, Tami Sawyer, a Shelby County commissioner who had led a campaign to remove statues of Confederate leaders around Memphis, was heckled by a Sons of Confederate Veterans volunteer as she spoke to reporters at the site.
That is what communists do!
The volunteer, waving a Confederate flag, loudly sang “Dixie” (“I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten”) as Sawyer described how her ancestors picked cotton.
Might as well be Natick.
Sawyer said in a statement that since then, she had been threatened on social media.
“As a public official, Commissioner Sawyer is not opposed to critique and heckling, but these messages are racially violent and threatening to her physical safety,” her office said in the statement.
Sgt. Louis Brownlee, a Memphis Police Department spokesman, said in an email that the department was investigating her complaints. No arrests have been made, he said.
Millar said a green security fence had been placed around the excavation site to keep the area secure and “to keep spectators away so no one would get involved and get hurt.”
He said that the volunteer began singing because Sawyer was disrupting the workers by holding a “press spectacle.”
The statues of Forrest and Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, in Memphis Park were removed Dec. 20, 2017, the same night the City Council voted to sell both parks to the nonprofit organization Memphis Greenspace for $1,000 each.
The move allowed the city to skirt the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, a state law that prohibits the removal, relocation or renaming of memorials on public property and that state officials had used before to keep the city from removing the statues.
Last June, Black legislators left the Capitol in tears and anger after proposals to remove the bust of Forrest and other divisive figures failed. In March, the Tennessee Historical Commission voted to remove the bust at the statehouse.
In Memphis, the monument to Forrest “was one of constant pain to the majority African American community,” Councilman Jeff Warren said. “The vast majority of our citizens are glad to see the statue and the remains go.”
Defenders of Forrest’s legacy said that detractors fail to recognize his military skills and that toward the end of his life, he called for racial reconciliation in a speech before the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association, a fraternal organization of Black men, but William Sturkey, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has written about Forrest’s enduring hold on many white Southerners, said Forrest was “the most unrepentant soldier of maybe the entire conflict [and] at least Black kids won’t have to look at it.”
They are cancelling the very history they should be seeking to preserve since it is their brave and noble struggle, their Roots if you will, and what people forget is it was the Southern Democrats who were the party of slavery and now dependence.
So who is next to be dug up, Robert Byrd?
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Time to repent with a pilgrimage:
"Committing to the pilgrim’s path has for centuries been a source of renewal for those willing to put their lives on hold and spend days, weeks or even months crossing Spain along the Camino de Santiago, a journey that takes hikers to the reported burial place of the apostle St. James, but after a year of being kept off the Way of St. James due to pandemic-related travel restrictions, soul-searchers hoping to heal wounds left by the coronavirus are once again strapping on backpacks and following trails marked with a seashell emblem to the shrine in the city of Santiago de Compostela. Some travelers taking to the Camino are like Laura Ferrón, whose marriage ended during Spain’s lockdown and who fears she might lose her job because the bank she works for plans massive layoffs. She and two lifelong friends flew from their homes in Spain’s North Africa enclave of Ceuta to spend a week walking the final 100 kilometers (62 miles) of the pilgrimage route. “This helps you let it all go. This pandemic has taught us to give more importance to what we have and to take a good long look at yourself,” Ferrón, 33, said while resting on a climb near Arzúa. The Camino de Santiago is actually a series of paths that fan out beyond the Iberian Peninsula and spread across Europe. Whichever route one takes, they all end at the Santiago’s baroque cathedral, where believers can visit what is said to be the tomb of James, the apostle who, according to Catholic tradition, brought Christianity to Spain and Portugal....."
At the end is “the reward of a cold beer, which is divine.”
I thought it was wine that was divine, but anyway.
The beer is free for many as the U.S. passed the milestone of administering more than 300 million Covid-19 vaccine doses while the U.K. could start vaccinating children as soon as August with Health Secretary Matt Hancock warning that children make up a “huge proportion” of the latest cases so it’s too early to say whether a planned easing of coronavirus restrictions on June 21 can go ahead as the liar totally contradicts the accepted science!
Also see:
"Improved access to coronavirus vaccines and other tools needed to fight the pandemic are vital to crushing the pandemic and hastening a recovery, officials said Saturday in an online meeting of Pacific Rim economies. The unprecedented crisis brought on by COVID-19 requires a coordinated, cooperative response, said New Zealand’s Trade and Export Growth Minister Damien O’Connor, who hosted the meeting. The 21-member APEC gathers economies all along the Pacific Rim, from tiny Brunei to the United States to Chile and New Zealand. One of its long-term aims is to promote a free trade area of the Asia-Pacific region. The focus Saturday was on “the most pressing problem our region faces, getting people vaccinated against COVID-19 as quickly as possible,” O’Connor said, adding he would be asking his counterparts how they could speed up trade in vaccines and other needed goods. “The successful distribution of vaccines across our region will be critical to our recovery,” he said. APEC has long focused on dismantling trade barriers, and many of its members are still struggling to obtain and deploy enough COVID-19 vaccines to vanquish coronavirus flare-ups. In much of the Asia-Pacific region, the share of people vaccinated so far is in the low single digits. That includes places like Thailand and Taiwan that initially managed to avoid initial massive outbreaks but have seen cases rebound recently. APEC members Japan, South Korea and New Zealand are ranked among the worst among all developed nations in vaccinating their people for COVID-19, below some developing countries such as Brazil and India. Australia is also performing comparatively poorly....."
That's why cases are allegedly exploding in Brazil and India and why Australia(?) locked down again in what can only be described as terrori$t extortion.
Populations are being held hostage if they don't take the Pharma kill shot.
Related:
"Most of California’s coronavirus restrictions on businesses and public gatherings will end June 15, but Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday that he’s not ready to give up the broad powers he has to impose those rules, saying he will keep a statewide state of emergency declaration in place. Newsom first declared a state of emergency on March 4, 2020. He has the power to do that under the California Emergency Services Act, a series of state laws designed to help the government act quickly in times of crisis. The declaration means California can be reimbursed from the federal government for many of its pandemic-related expenses, but it also gives Newsom authority to suspend state laws and impose new rules. Since declaring this emergency, Newsom has issued at least 58 executive orders to alter or suspend hundreds of laws because of the virus. Those included suspending a law requiring employers to post notices in the breakroom because everyone was working from home. He altered public meetings laws to let local governments and the state parole board meet remotely. Other changes were more significant, including issuing a statewide stay-at-home order that forced many businesses to close and halted public gatherings like concerts, sporting events, graduations and weddings. Friday, Newsom reiterated his commitment to lifting most coronavirus restrictions on June 15, but he noted variants of the virus are still spreading that, combined with varying vaccination rates in other states and countries, could require him to issue new restrictions in the future. “This disease has not been extinguished. It’s not vanished; it’s not taking the summer months off,” Newsom said. Newsom has the authority to end the state of emergency himself.
[That lying tyrant should be recalled, he should be swinging from a lamppost as he proves they have no intention of giving up any power at all]
The state Legislature can also end it by passing a concurrent resolution. Republicans in the state Senate, led by Sen. Melissa Melendez, have tried repeatedly to force a vote on such a resolution, but Democrats, who have a majority of seats, have blocked it. “California’s vaccination rate is high and the COVID infection rate continues to decrease,” said Melendez, a Republican from Lake Elsinore. State law requires the governor to end the state of emergency as soon as conditions warrant, but the effects of disasters can linger for years. California is still under a state of emergency declaration for a wildfire in 2018 that killed 85 people and destroyed most of the town of Paradise. While the fire is no longer burning, the state is still cleaning up and rebuilding.
[Paradise has turned literally into a $hithole]
The California Emergency Services Act gives the governor power to suspend laws, but recent court rulings have also given the governor authority to impose new laws, according to Keith Paul Bishop, an attorney with the Allen Matkins law firm who was deputy secretary for the now defunct California Business, Transportation, and Housing Agency during the Northridge earthquake in 1994. “It’s a much bigger expansion of authority if you can make laws,” he said.
[What a tyrannical pos and no one says anything!]
Anger over some of Newsom’s executive orders issued during the pandemic prompted more than 1.6 million voters to sign a recall petition, meaning the governor will likely face an election later this year to determine whether he can stay in office for the remainder of his term. Since the recall effort gained steam, Newsom and the Legislature have authorized $2.3 billion in cash payments for low-income adults, with plans to give another $8.1 billion in rebates to most taxpaying adults later this year, and he has pledged to give out more than $100 million in incentives for people to get vaccinated. Friday, Newsom answered criticism that those decisions were driven by a desire to build goodwill among voters and avoid an early exit from office. “Every single decision I have made is consistent with the work I’ve done for decades and what I campaigned on,” Newsom said, noting that he has instituted a “health first” approach. State Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk scoffed at that sentiment, saying that if Newsom believes the state is safe enough to reopen on June 15 “then it’s safe enough for people to be able to make decisions for themselves without his arbitrary and capricious rules.” “I believe it is time for him to hang up his crown and restore our democracy,” he said....."
The continuing state of emergency means the vote fraud can continue!
Hopefully, the law will zero in on him and then the people can celebrate:
"A birthday party invitation that went viral on TikTok brought hundreds of people to a raucous celebration on a Southern California beach Saturday night, prompting police to declare an unlawful assembly and arrest nearly 150 people after they refused orders to disperse. The massive gathering began with a now-deleted video posted on the popular social media app from a user named adrian.lopez517, who invited anyone to his birthday party by Huntington Beach’s fire pits Saturday night, The Orange County Register reported Sunday. The hashtag “AdriansKickBack” received more than 180 million views on TikTok. One partygoer told a New York Times reporter: “It’s the first lit party since COVID.” At least 400 people showed up to a pre-party Friday evening around a lifeguard tower, police Lt. Brian Smith said. When people in the crowd began to launch fireworks near the fire pits, he said, officers declared an unlawful assembly and the partygoers scattered. Huntington Beach’s police department announced the next day that they were preparing for a surge of visitors due to the promoted party and warned that they will enforce local rules, including no alcohol or drug use on the beach and no fireworks, but an even larger crowd overtook the beach Saturday evening. Police estimated that at least 2,500 people gathered at the beach before moving to the downtown area. Videos posted on social media showed fistfights breaking out, people jumping from the Huntington Beach Pier’s pedestrian bridge to a cheering crowd below, people jumping atop slow-moving cars and shooting more fireworks. Officers again ordered the crowd to disperse and issued an overnight curfew....."
Video footage apparently showed officers dressed in riot helmets shutting streets to control the crowd and, in some instances, firing less-lethal rounds as some people threw bottles, rocks and fireworks at officers as they received backup from other law enforcement agencies.
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Look, up in the SKY:
"Enduring mysteries trail US report on UFOs" by Nomaan Merchant and Calvin Woodward The Associated Press, June 5, 2021
WASHINGTON — Is it a bird? A plane? Super drone? An extraterrestrial something?
A frog?
The U.S. government has been taking a hard look at unidentified flying objects. A report summarizing what the U.S. knows about “unidentified aerial phenomena” — better known as UFOs — is expected to be made public this month.
There won't be an alien unmasking. Two officials briefed on the report say it found no extraterrestrial link to the sightings reported and captured on video. The report won't rule out a link to another country, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss it.
The psyop is a worthless diversion due to its ubiquitous on TV.
While the broad conclusions have now been reported, the full report may still present a broader picture of what the government knows. The anticipation surrounding the report shows how a topic normally confined to science fiction and a small, often dismissed group of researchers has hit the mainstream.
They are no longer tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists as they smash the stigma.
Worried about national security threats from adversaries, lawmakers ordered an investigation and public accounting of phenomena that the government has been loath to talk about for generations.
“There is stuff flying in our airspace,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, one of the senators who pressed for the probe, recently told Fox News. “We don't know what it is. We need to find out.”
This feels like a repeat of the 1970s when the PTSB were losing their grip on society and trotted out Close Encounters along with Nessie and the Bigfoot BS, and ironically enough, they had a botched vaccine rollout that was halted after only 50 deaths.
The chief concern is whether hostile countries are fielding aerial technology so advanced and weird that it befuddles and threatens the world's largest military power, but when lawmakers talk about it, they tend to leave themselves a little wiggle room in case it's something else — whether more prosaic than a military rival or, you know, more cosmic.
“Right now there are a lot of unanswered questions,” Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California told NBC this week. "If other nations have capabilities that we don’t know of, we want to find out. If there's some explanation other than that, we want to learn that, too.”
Luis Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, said he didn't believe that the sightings were of a foreign power's technology in part because it would have been nearly impossible to keep that secret. Elizondo has accused the Defense Department of trying to discredit him and says there's much more information that the U.S. has kept classified.
“We live in an incredible universe,” Elizondo said. “There’s all sorts of hypotheses that suggest that the three dimensional universe which we live in isn’t quite so easy to explain,” but Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, is skeptical.
The science historian, a longtime analyst of UFO theories and other phenomena, said he’s seen too many blurry images of supposed alien encounters to be convinced by still more blurry footage of blobs from airplanes. This is a time, he notes, when several billion people worldwide have smartphones that take crisp images and satellites precisely render detail on the ground.
“Show me the body, show me the spacecraft, or show me the really high quality videos and photographs,” he said in an interview, “and I’ll believe.”
Mick West, a prominent researcher of unexplained phenomena and debunker of conspiracy theories, said it was right for the government to investigate and report on the potential national security implications of sightings captured in now-declassified videos.
Pilots and sky-watchers have long reported sporadic sightings of UFOs in U.S. airspace, seemingly at unusual speeds or trajectories. In most cases, those mysteries evaporate under examination.
In 1960, the CIA said 6,500 objects had been reported to the U.S. Air Force over the prior 13 years. The Air Force concluded there was no evidence those sightings were “inimical or hostile” or related to "interplanetary space ships," the CIA said.
Reports of UFOs have, of course, persisted since then. Some people who study the topic argue investigations have been limited by the stigma of being linked to conspiracy theories or talk of little green men storming Earth. They note that the government has a history of stonewalling and lying about the unexplained.
But they are telling the God's honest truth about CVD!
It took 50 years for the government to offer what it hoped was a full debunking of claims that alien bodies were recovered at a crash site in New Mexico in 1947. In 1997, the Air Force said the Roswell "bodies″ were dummies used in parachute tests, recent ancestors of the car-crash dummies of today.
Retired Air Force Col. Richard Weaver, who wrote one of the official reports on the Roswell rumors, tried to assure the public that the government isn’t competent enough to cover up a genuine alien sighting. “We have a hard time keeping a secret," he said, “let alone putting together a decent conspiracy.”
A recent turning point came in December 2017, when The New York Times revealed a five-year Pentagon program to investigate UFOs. The Pentagon subsequently released videos, leaked earlier, of military pilots encountering shadowy objects they couldn’t identify.
They just confirmed the psyop!
Rubio, top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee and its former chairman, said it is important for investigators to follow up on the reports of its pilots and make the findings public. “I am going off what our military men and their radars and their eyesight is telling them,” Rubio said.
It was also on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” so who you gonna believe, the government and the pre$$ or your lying eyes?
Well, you don't know what we can find, why don't you come with me little girl, on a magic carpet ride?
I'm sure the government will be as transparent as possible and welcome the aliens when they land:
A child who tested positive for COVID-19 joined his mother in an ambulance headed for the hospital after he was first kept in a community isolation area for residents of the Klong Toey slum, in Bangkok, May 8, 2021 (Adam Dean/NYT).
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I'm sure if we stand together we can chase away the coronavirus and build a world based on universal love:
"Voters at Nantucket’s Annual Town Meeting on Saturday overwhelmingly rejected a measure that would have sharply restricted short-term rentals on the island. By a more than two-to-one margin, island residents shot down a proposal that would have barred many property owners from leasing homes to tourists for more than 45 nights a year, or for less than a week at a time. Advocates said the plan would help rein in an onslaught of short-term rentals they say is squeezing the island’s already scarce housing stock, but many in Nantucket’s business community said it risked squelching the tourism that drives much of the island’s economy and would do little to reduce housing costs in a place where the typical home last year sold for more than $2 million....."
Also see:
"One of two police officers injured in a shootout in Braintree on Friday was released from the hospital Saturday while the other officer remains hospitalized in stable condition, officials said. The two officers were shot while responding to a domestic disturbance Friday afternoon. They were met with gunfire while searching the woods behind an apartment building where they were told a suspect had fled. Authorities said officers were responding to a call reporting a domestic disturbance on McCusker Drive at 12:45 p.m. Friday. The alleged victim told police that the suspect, identified as 34-year-old Andrew Homen, had fled into a wooded area behind their building. Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey said Friday the three officers entered the woods with the dog leading the search. They made it about 75 yards before coming under fire. “They came under fire from an individual in a defensive position, some would say lying in wait in an ambush for the officers to come into the wooded area,” Morrissey said. Governor Charlie Baker said Saturday he spoke with Braintree Police Chief Mark Dubois on Friday night to offer support. He described the scene in Braintree as a “gun battle” and said based on what he was told, the officers were “lucky they were only injured because they both were hit multiple times.” “We should all take a minute and step back and recognize that these are very dangerous jobs and potentially deadly jobs,” he said....."
Related:
"Governor Charlie Baker on Saturday toured a vaccination site at Prince Hall Grand Lodge in Dorchester, where he highlighted the state’s efforts to get more shots in arms as the state reported more than 8 million shots administered so far. About 79 percent of adults in Massachusetts have received at least one dose, he said. On Saturday, the state reported four new confirmed deaths, bringing the state’s death toll to 17,544. It also reported 216 new confirmed cases, bringing the state’s total to 662,028. The state Department of Public Health also said 4,486 people were estimated to have active cases, and 181 confirmed coronavirus patients were in the hospital. Data reported by the state has shown a decline in daily averages of new deaths and cases that are among the lowest since the start of the pandemic more than a year ago....."
Two women were stuck while he was there before he headed over to Belmont for the horse race, and you know what you feed a dray horse in the morning if you want a day's work out of him?
Just enough so he knows he's hungry.
Also see:
Was celebrating his birthday.
Meanwhile, they are readying the prison camps in Connecticut (to be or not to be?) as a four-day heat wave hits the region.
"In 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy died at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, 25 1/2 hours after he was shot by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan."
I covered that black swan event yesterday, and there were others in 1982, 1989, and 2001 when Democrats formally assumed control of the US Senate after the decision of Vermont Republican James Jeffords to become an independent (paging Joe Manchin), and I thin took a peek(?) at Dubai while catching up with Rick Weitzman.
We will win in the end, readers, even if it takes more than 100 years. It may seem like a weird dream, but the “new normal” is also a beacon of hope at a time when evil objectives are advanced and good people are prevented from acting on their idealism and rainbow symbolism that means little as the Equality Act languishes in the Senate and state laws attack trans youth and endanger lives nationwide during the Cultural Revolution in AmeriKa:
"Miriam Modricamin, who spent part of Sunday trimming a honeysuckle bush in her front yard, said she thought keeping the outdoor mask mandate in place was “not logical.” She said she would continue wearing her mask on walks with her husband, though she may lower it if she doesn’t see anyone else around.....
OMG!
How pathetic!?
Keep the face diaper on and stay away from me!!
I must be crazy to keep spinning my wheels reading the Globe, especially when the bike shop in town has permanently closed.
Hey, that's life, right, and experts now say the virus is changing too quickly with new more contagious variants spreading too easily, and vaccinations are happening too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon:
"Almost half of Americans have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, but the U.S. vaccination story varies widely across regions, with New England surging ahead of the national average and much of the South lagging far behind. In five of the six New England states, more than 60% of residents are at least partly vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a different story in the South, where Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Tennessee have the country’s lowest rates of residents who have received at least one shot. The rates in those states are all below 40%, with Mississippi, at 33%, at the bottom of the list. The White House and state governments, after relying on mass vaccination sites for months, are turning their focus to more-targeted, smaller-scale efforts to vaccinate underserved, harder-to-reach communities. The low rate in the South worries Thomas LaVeist, an expert on health equity and dean of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University in New Orleans. LaVeist said the incentive that would work fastest for adults would be mandates by employers, who are uniquely positioned to require large numbers of Americans who otherwise would not receive a vaccination to do so because their employment depends on it. The federal government has issued guidance that says employers can require workers to get a COVID vaccine and bar them from the workplace if they refuse....."
Meanwhile, Gottlieb wants kids to stay masked in the classroom despite the scientific evidence regarding spread!
Gee, I have been doing this all day after being up late because of the hockey game.
The fans make all the difference and they were not disappointed as the NFL is struggling to convince enough players to get vaccinated.
