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You may have a point there, the media has responsibilities, but it is the media's goal and in business to sell their news for a profit. The days of a paper boy yelling out extra, extra, read all about it with people clamoring to buy the announcement, has gone to the extreme situations of today and has created a very expensive environment for the media, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't situations. All along trying to make a profit and staying in business in a world where a big portion of the population is in a cult and threats from some in power on a constant basis. Look at what's on the other side to choose from, Faux, Newsmax, and other extreme right wing bs.
You're right is saying the media are responsible to attitudes created, but most important I think is for the reader to take more responsibility in actually reading beyond the headline or talking point and apply some critical analysis and realizations to political leanings, fact check and use common sense and holding at least some moral aptitudes. We all need to resist others controlling our amygdala and try to have full control over it ourselves. Easier said than done, but it is the reader where most of the responsibility lies. It's also, most importantly the so called leaders of our country to support the ideals of our democracy and what's good for the whole country even though there are wide differences of opinion of how to do that, but still task with honest intent to that purpose. What we have now is one party supporting only the goals of what's good for them (or good for him) supporting and instilling hatred, racism, fascism, and mafia type control. Causing death, destruction, and distance far from the stated democracy for most of the population.
This reminds me of a news blog that Ad Fontes Media put out a couple of days ago;
Left and Right Agree – We’re Definitely Biased to the Other Side
https://adfontesmedia.com/left-and-right-agree-were-biased-to-other-side/
This story is nowhere the first and have lost count of how many stories of traitorous and criminal acts that mentally disturbed asshole has done all the way from the beginning that has been front page on mainstream media. Pretty much every day for something with many, many reports of stuff as egregious as this one. I'd say the NYT has done above their fair share. I feel the poster is taking too small of sample by just comparing the two stories, better served to compare the total of Hillary's stories to the total of trump's stories.
Or just compare the time on the front page traitorous ones of trump with Russia, China, SA, US secrets against types of those with Hillary. If one does that, I don't think there is any comparison, at least the opposite of what the poster portrayed. There was only one or two stories with Hillary that the media could work with, with trump many more and much more egregious. The trump side is overwhelmingly more time on the front page (that's the way he likes it), just it has become somewhat normalized, inundated, and defended by the GOP. Remember J6 was mostly peaceful with just a few rowdy tourist and there were no Russian connections.
Trump is a traitor, insurrectionist, murderer, rapist, criminal gang leader, has defrauded the United States continuously, and just too many things to list but just an all around evil being. The more power he holds the worse and more dangerous it gets. But the GOP just go along and defend, continue to enable and maintain tfg power, and strengthen the cult. Really need to kick all of the crap to curb, there is no middle ground or working with this type of criminality.
It was on top "front page" with the NYT online version when I read it sometime in the morning. But they change the placement of those front stories several times a day. Sometimes a story will stay somewhere placed lower on home page all day, other times only hrs. Then the NYT put it on the "politics" tab right up top where it still is with the online version. Also all the main social media had and continuing multiple posts linking to it, so it probably getting pretty good coverage.
Blast from the past. More valid today as the article was five years ago.
There is no difference with who was or who it will be. It was always Traitor trump and will always be trump that is leader/speaker of/for the house. He tells them when to poop, what color, and how high to stack it (which stacks pretty deep). If any speaker doesn't tow the exact line of trump's or Putin, the extreme right wing will control any outcome to their will. As long as the GOP have control, traitor fg will be the true control, doesn't matter who is technically speaker or leader or what it does to most of the country or world for that matter. That is the only thing the dems have to consider and deal with.
Used to be one would watch for the magazine salesman, now it's aliens that will win you a million bucks.
ET Ring home? Amazon offers $1M for Ring footage of aliens
Amazon is offering $1M for Ring doorbell footage of an extraterrestrial
A $500 prize is offered for creative, non-authentic alien footage
Ring owners have until Nov. 3 to enter the contest.
https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/amazon-1m-ring-footage-aliens/
The forgotten legacy of Jimmy Carter
BY TARA D. SONENSHINE, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 10/05/23 10:00 AM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/4238157-the-forgotten-legacy-of-jimmy-carter/
So much has been said and written about Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and winner, in 2002, of the Nobel Peace Prize. As he celebrated his 99th birthday last weekend, there is still more to learn about him.
The old news is to talk about the problems during the Carter presidency — primarily the Iran hostage crisis and the oil crisis that doomed his chances of re-election. Less known is how Carter waged a campaign against climate change decades before it became a hot political crisis.
As a nuclear scientist by training, Carter understood the risks that pollutants posed to the environment. He came into office and immediately acted. He had solar panels installed on the White House — some three dozen — which the next president, Ronald Reagan, promptly had removed.
Carter wanted experts to tell him about threats to the environment; a key warning on climate change came shortly after he became president, reinforcing Carter’s concerns. The report, from Carter’s chief scientific adviser and head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Frank Press, underscored the “greenhouse effect” of fossil fuels in the atmosphere and its potential to induce a global warming climate crisis.
By the end of his first year in office, Carter had commissioned a series of reports on the environmental risks of global warming — the first American president to recognize the problem of climate change.
One of those reports, “Global 2000 Report to the President,” flagged the warming of the planet as a threat to sustainable development. It concluded that the United States needed to limit the world’s average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius. (This was close to 40 years before the United Nations reached an identical conclusion in the Paris Agreement.)
Testifying before Congress following the release of that report was one of its primary authors, James Gustave (Gus) Speth, who co-founded the National Resources Defense Council. Speth headed President Carter’s task force on the environment. He explained the global stresses on renewable natural resources and the critical importance of conserving them, warning that the next 20 years (meaning 1980-2000) would see an increasingly crowded world with diminishing supplies of things like water and fish.
Speth made clear to the members that day that the world was not destined to live with climate change if America and other nations could get ahead of the problem. “We revive these findings not as predictions of what will occur,” he testified, “but as projections as what could occur if we and other nations do not respond.”
Looking back, it is clear that Jimmy Carter and his aides were warning America about a future climate disaster. As Carter said in a speech to the nation, the “principle is that we must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems—wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both problems at once.”
Carter was never rewarded for his climate warnings.
In a 2020 biography of Jimmy Carter, scholar Jonathan Alter writes about how climate change permeated the former president’s thinking and became a topic of debate in the presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan over four decades ago.
Reagan had been quoted as saying that more than 80 percent of nitrogen oxide air pollution was caused by trees and vegetation. Carter believed otherwise, having studied the impact of human beings on climate years before that debate. But the public didn’t really care at that point in history about the warming of the planet.
With the benefit of hindsight, one wonders if we would be in a different climate situation today had Jimmy Carter’s warnings been heeded. Reagan had a landslide victory over Carter in 1980 and the issue of climate change was sidelined. Any legislation or executive orders on global warming were put on ice for years to come.
Each day the impact of climate change seems to grow, the most recent being the deadly rains in New York, where an unprecedented state of emergency was declared last week.
It is not too late the heed the warnings of our former president and get serious about climate, in what would be the ultimate birthday present.
Tara D. Sonenshine is a former U.S. undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and currently teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Hroza is east of Kharkiv near Shevchenkove which my battalion helped liberate last September. It’s tiny. There are only civilians there! This is a straight up TERRORIST ATTACK & WAR CRIME. Murder of Ukrainians is what Right wing extremists & Putin fluffers like @JackPosobiec &… https://t.co/Ovl52bsumE
— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) October 5, 2023
Americans are more likely to die before age 65 than residents of similar nations, despite living in a country that spends substantially more per person on health care than its peers, a year-long Washington Post investigation found. https://t.co/a3BR56zEEF pic.twitter.com/HDstusWlxT
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 4, 2023
War is not a moving picture on a screen. If we do not stop russia in Ukraine today, everything you have seen in war movies could become a reality in your country.
— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) October 4, 2023
🎥 Andriy Goopsa pic.twitter.com/2HJbja4IZG
Don't need to know anything about military weapons, just support as much violence as you can, support the main cause of death of pregnant or recently given birth women, and the main cause of death for all children and teens. Trying to look fake macho (running scared from any real fight) and pandering to extremist and the rightwing Republican party are more important than not being an accessory to mass murder.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/homicide-leading-cause-of-death-for-pregnant-women-in-u-s/ (68% percent of pregnant women homicides committed with guns)
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/152/3/e2023061296/193711/Trends and Disparities in Firearm Deaths Among Children
IDIOTS WITH GUNS: This is a BARRETT M82 (M107) .50 cal BMG Anti-material sniper rifle. It is meant to be a long distance precision weapon. This one has 1) No scope to properly aim it 2) A wasted stabilizing bipod and rear monopod 3) AN EYE PRO-LESS MORON DRIVING IT LIKE AN AIR… https://t.co/CrxkTLVXDM
— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) September 30, 2023
There was no paywall, didn't the link work for you? I don't have a subscription, worked fine for me. It was briefly noted on twitterx and I just searched for the source and rest of story and directed me right to it, no wall.
The Trump administration touted him as a victim of #MeToo. Now he’s accused of dismembering a girlfriend
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/alameda-murder-joseph-roberts-18380333.php?utm_campaign=CMS%20Sharing%20Tools%20(Premium)&utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral
Sep. 29, 2023
Updated: Sep. 29, 2023 3:03 p.m.
Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle
The gruesome discovery spoke to a ghastly crime.
On the afternoon of July 20, someone using a waterfront trail in Alameda spotted a large garbage bag wrapped in duct tape that smelled as if it was full of dead fish from the bay. When responding officers looked inside, they found the dismembered remains of a young woman whose head, hands and feet had been removed.
Investigators would extract a pair of DNA profiles from the duct tape on the bag. One belonged to Rachel Imani Buckner, a young mother and spoken-word poet who had just graduated from a San Francisco law school. The other, police now say, belonged to her killer — her boyfriend and onetime law school classmate Joseph Carl Roberts, suspected of using an electric saw to try to obscure his victim’s identity.
But as shocking as the crime was, the back-story was even stranger.
Roberts, it turns out, was once touted by the Trump administration as a poster child for the purported excesses of the “#MeToo” movement and the reckoning over sexual assault at American colleges. Kicked off the campus of Savannah State University in Georgia, the U.S. Navy veteran not only survived but turned the episode into a dramatic story about a different kind of victim: himself.
He earned entry to law school, won elected office in San Francisco and was featured in sympathetic coverage by national media outlets including ABC and USA Today, who allowed him to explain how his life was nearly ruined due to women making false allegations against him...........cont
A common plan for organized crime prosecution. Start at the lowest and work up to the highest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/us/georgia-trump-scott-hall-guilty-plea.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20230929&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=headline®i_id=187523617&segment_id=146083&user_id=dc9937fdb3c27fa582d0aac44c41c444
Open AI exec warns AI can become ‘extremely addictive’
BY REBECCA KLAR - 09/29/23 11:09 AM ET
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4229972-open-ai-exec-warns-ai-can-become-extremely-addictive/
She's had a historic and honorable career. Rest in peace.
California county abuzz after far-right figure appointed for mosquito control
Store owner in Shasta county who has elevated conspiracy theories about mosquitoes and vaccines gets seat on local board
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/28/california-shasta-county-far-right-mosquito-vaccine
Dani Anguiano
@dani_anguiano
Thu 28 Sep 2023 21.12 EDT
Ever since the far-right movement in California’s Shasta county gained control of local government, they have sought to throw out voting machines in favor of hand counting and pledged to defend the second amendment using all “lawful means”.
This week they focused their efforts on a new target: mosquitoes.
The Shasta county board of supervisors appointed Jon Knight, a hydroponics store owner and prominent figure in the local far-right movement, to serve on the board of the public health agency responsible for managing the insects, instead of the county’s former public health director, an epidemiologist.
The move showcased the ultra-conservative movement’s growing foothold in local government. An appointment to a local government board typically attracts little attention, but in Shasta county, which became a hotbed for far-right politics and fringe-thinking in the pandemic years, it was the subject of extensive discussion at a recent meeting of the county’s governing board.
Some supporters of Knight’s shared mosquito conspiracy theories at the meeting, implying US officials planned to forcibly vaccinate people with the insects. “I don’t trust our government,” one woman said. “Bill Gates is a part of this … These mosquitoes are going to be flying syringes.”
The Gates Foundation has funded research into attempts to create mosquitoes that can deliver a malaria vaccine into humans, efforts that fringe groups have sought to paint as a nefarious campaign to inoculate people against their will.
Shasta county has been the center of controversy in recent years over its forceful defiance of Covid restrictions and resulting threats against public officials who followed state health rules and the election of the powerful far-right coalition to the area’s highest office.
This year, the board of supervisors, the region’s governing body, did away with the county voting system over lies about election fraud. County meetings have become dysfunctional, hours-long shouting matches in which speakers have been threatened with arrest and in some cases the public was ordered to leave. At a meeting earlier this year, a speaker used a racial slur, drawing outrage from a man in the audience who was then himself forced to leave.
At this week’s meeting, tensions were evident over the appointment to the Shasta mosquito and vector control district board. Donnell Ewert, the county’s former public health director, had sought the seat, but the board chair rejected his application.
Some residents, who espoused conspiracy theories about mosquitoes and were critical of Ewert, voiced support for the appointment. The board chair, Patrick Jones, echoed some of their sentiments.
“I would put my health in Jon Knight’s hands over Donnell Ewert’s any day of the week,” he said.
In his remarks to the board, Knight highlighted his background and knowledge of pesticides and mosquitoes, arguing that he is a good candidate for the volunteer position.
“I don’t know if anyone else in the room has been selling pesticides for 18 years,” he said. “I know a lot about this stuff. I know a lot about some of these Bill Gates programs. This is not a conspiracy, this is a fact. There’s Japanese scientists who have created flying syringes that will mass vaccinate populations.
“We live in an interesting sci-fi time. With my understanding of what’s going on with mosquitoes and my knowledge of pesticides, I think I could do a pretty darn good job.”
To the dismay of some officials and residents, the board appointed Knight, who co-founded Red, White and Blueprint, a local media company started by far-right activists, and was reportedly at the US Capitol on January 6.
“It’s almost laughable that you would disregard the application from probably the most qualified person in this county and basically try to appoint someone who got his education about mosquitoes on the internet,” said Mary Rickert, a moderate who voted against the appointment.
“Do you know how that makes us look as a county? It makes us look like idiots.”
In the same meeting, the board voted to preemptively oppose any new Covid restrictions.
Mosquitoes Are a Growing Public Health Threat, Reversing Years of Progress
Climate change and the rapid evolution of the insect have helped drive up malaria deaths and brought dengue and other mosquito-borne viruses to places that never had to worry about them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/health/mosquitoes-malaria-disease-climate-change.html?unlocked_article_gifted
By Stephanie NolenPhotographs by Malin Fezehai
Stephanie Nolen reported this story from five countries in Africa and Latin America, part of a special project looking at the fight against mosquito-borne disease.
Sept. 29, 2023
Updated 7:18 a.m. ET
Along hundreds of miles of Lake Victoria’s shoreline in Kenya, a squadron of young scientists and an army of volunteers are waging an all-out war on a creature that threatens the health of more people than any other on earth: the mosquito.
They are testing new insecticides and ingenious new ways to deliver them. They are peering in windows at night, watching for the mosquitoes that home in on sleeping people. They are collecting blood — from babies, from moto-taxi drivers, from goat herders and from their goats — to track the parasites the mosquitoes carry.
But Eric Ochomo, the entomologist leading this effort on the front lines of global public health, stood recently in the swampy grass, laptop in hand, and acknowledged a grim reality: “It seems as though the mosquitoes are winning.”
Less than a decade ago, it was the humans who appeared to have gained the clear edge in the fight — more than a century old — against the mosquito. But over the past few years, that progress has not only stalled, it has reversed.
The insecticides used since the 1970s, to spray in houses and on bed nets to protect sleeping children, have become far less effective; mosquitoes have evolved to survive them. After declining to a historic low in 2015, malaria cases and deaths are rising.
Tiny Insect, Giant Menace
The fight against mosquitos has never been more urgent. Scientists are on an urgent hunt for weapons.
A GLOBAL BATTLE
Mosquitoes Are a Growing Public Health Threat, Reversing Years of Progress
A MYSTERY UNRAVELED
An Invasive Mosquito Threatens Catastrophe in Africa
THE GAMBLE
The Gamble: Can Genetically Modified Mosquitoes End Disease?
Climate change has brought mosquitoes carrying viruses that cause dengue and chikungunya, excruciating and sometimes deadly fevers, to places where they have never been found before. Once a purely tropical disease, dengue is now being transmitted in Florida and France. This past summer, the United States saw its first locally transmitted cases of malaria in 20 years, with nine cases reported, in Texas, Florida and Maryland.
“The situation has become challenging in new ways in places that have historically had these mosquitoes, and also at the same time other places are going to face new threats because of climate and environmental factors,” Dr. Ochomo said.
Scientists around the world are pressing hard for new solutions, including novel technologies that Dr. Ochomo is testing. They have developed some promising approaches, including a new generation of tools that modifies mosquitoes biologically, and genetically, to block disease.
But such efforts have been stymied by cost and regulatory hurdles. The process for getting any of these tools to the places where children fall ill with each new season of rain involves years of testing and regulatory reviews that are painfully slow and badly underfunded.
“It’s just ridiculous how much time we are wasting before we can get into the field and actually start saving lives,” said Bart Knols, a Dutch vector biologist who runs mosquito-borne disease elimination projects across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
The biggest killer
Malaria has killed more people than any other disease over the course of human history. Until this century, the battle against the parasite was badly one-sided. Then, between 2000 and 2015, malaria cases dropped by a third worldwide, and mortality decreased by nearly half, because of widespread use of insecticide inside homes, insecticide-coated bed nets and better treatments. Clinical trials showed promise for malaria vaccines that might protect the children who make up the bulk of malaria deaths.
That success lured new investment and talk of wiping the disease out all together.
But malaria deaths, which fell to a historic low of about 575,000 in 2019, rose significantly over the next two years and stood at 620,000 in 2021, the last year for which there is global data.
There were more cases of dengue in Latin America in the first half of this year — more than three million — than in all of 2022. Bangladesh is in the grip of its largest-ever dengue outbreak, with 120,000 cases by the end of August. Cases of and deaths from chikungunya and other mosquito-borne infections have started rising, too, in many regions of the world.
One of the main reasons is that mosquitoes are highly adaptable. As more and more people are protected by nets or sprays at home, mosquitoes have begun to bite more outdoors and in the daytime, instead of indoors and at night, the historic pattern of the malaria vector species in Africa. Because the genetic makeup of mosquitoes evolves quickly in response to changing environmental conditions, they have also developed resistance to the class of insecticides in wide use — while the malaria parasite itself is increasingly resistant to the once highly-effective drugs used to treat it.
And a new mosquito that thrives in urban areas has come from Asia to Africa, where the spread of malaria had always been confined largely to the countryside. That change has made more than 100 million additional people vulnerable to mosquito-borne infections, researchers at the University of Oxford recently estimated.
The multiplying risks, experts say, mean there’s an urgent need for a method to protect people from all mosquitoes — one that will help defend against malaria, but also dengue, yellow fever and whatever pathogen lurks around the corner. (Only female mosquitoes bite; they need the protein in blood to produce eggs.)
But it takes a decade or more to design, develop, test and produce a new technology or intervention. Contrast that with the six-week life spans of mosquitoes, which are constantly evolving to elude the ways we try to kill them.
The bulk of the money for these efforts to date has come from high-income nations and private philanthropists, but funding levels have plateaued. Multiple researchers said it was increasingly difficult to motivate the kind of investment they need for large-scale trials of new methods.
“Sooner or later, funding bodies are going to divert that money to other things,” Dr. Knols said. “They’re going to say, ‘We’re putting it into agriculture, or into schooling.’”
A new problem
In the towns and villages of Busia County in Kenya, the roads begin to fill while the sky is still the streaky purple of dawn, with farmers on the way to their fields, children in freshly pressed uniforms walking to school and moto-taxi drivers reporting to the market.
Dr. Ochomo’s research has found that the mosquito Anopheles funestus is feasting on them: The species, once thought to bite mostly sleepers in their beds at night, now bites outside in the daytime.
Four in 10 people on these red-dirt roads are carrying the malaria parasite, even if they don’t have symptoms, studies by Dr. Ochomo and his colleagues have found. Some outdoor and daytime biting was likely happening all along, but no one was really tracking it because the focus was on the vulnerable sleepers.
Twenty years ago, in the early days of the mass distribution of bed nets, malaria case rates plunged immediately, and there was an optimism that the nets might be enough, said Audrey Lenhart, the chief of entomology at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Instead, she said, they have helped to create a new problem.
“Think about it: You put bed nets everywhere, then the mosquitoes that bite people inside, they’re going to die out,” Dr. Lenhart explained. “The ones that are going to survive are the ones that are biting people sitting outside, biting livestock, the ones that aren’t in the houses, right? So then those are the ones that are reproducing and keeping the population of mosquitoes there.”
Insecticides that don’t work
Most of the current insecticides in use are pyrethroids, which were developed in the 1970s and derived from the chemical compounds in an ancient mosquito deterrent made by crushing aster flowers. They have been used for everything, including bed nets and for spraying on walls.
With mosquitoes around the world now highly resistant to them, there is an urgent search for something new.
In 2005, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $50 million in a project called the Innovative Vector Control Consortium to search for effective insecticide compounds. The consortium asked large agrochemical companies to look in their chemical libraries for molecules that might affect mosquitoes in novel ways and be safe and durable enough.
“We started with four-and-a-half-million compounds, and we’re down to four,” said Nick Hamon, who recently retired as the consortium’s chief executive.
To work as a new insecticide, compounds have to be safe for humans, come in solid form and not be water soluble. And they have to kill mosquitoes in a substantively different way than pyrethroids do, because mosquitoes develop resistance not just to an individual chemical, but to the way the chemical kills them.
Companies must now complete the safety and testing process on the only four compounds that tick all those boxes. It is intensely costly and slow, said Susanne Stutz, the chief chemist at the German chemical company BASF.
“It’s always a race with the mosquito, who is faster: Usually, the mosquito wins because it develops the resistance much faster than new products come out,” she said.
The World Health Organization requires two large randomized clinical trials, carried out in two different geographic and epidemiological settings, showing a significant positive impact on public health in both, before it will recommend use of a new intervention against mosquitoes. The organization says the policy is designed to make sure that countries with limited means are making the best decisions about where to spend their money and to ensure that products are backed by rigorous evidence. Yet the world’s multiplying mosquito problems increasingly require solutions tailored to specific situations: What works to protect children in the African Sahel won’t be what works to protect loggers in forests in Cambodia.
Dr. Ochomo is the principal investigator on two large randomized clinical trials of mosquito interventions. In one $33 million project, researchers are testing the effectiveness of spatial repellents — squares of plastic film that can be hung on the walls inside homes and that dispense low doses of a chemical that confuses mosquitoes and prevents them from biting — in both dengue and malaria risk areas.
S.C. Johnson & Son Inc., the Wisconsin-based company that developed the spatial repellent being tried in Kenya, has donated millions of dollars in products for testing. Such largess is unusual — and not a sustainable pathway for vector control research, said John Grieco, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame who coordinates the multicountry spatial repellent trial, which is also running in countries including Mali and Sri Lanka.
The spatial repellents and most other new tools are commodities: items that have to be bought, then bought again six months or a year later. The protection they offer is temporary, as is the funding that allows for their purchase.
The Gates Foundation, the major backer of most of the clinical trials of the commodities, has also had to cover most of the cost of BASF’s testing of new chemicals for use on bed nets, because there is not sufficient profit incentive for a private firm to do it, Dr. Stutz said.
“How do you keep the companies that know how to innovate in this space?” Dr. Hamon asked. The Innovative Vector Control Consortium lost one of its key industry partners in 2017.
“They just said, ‘We can make more money somewhere else,’” Dr. Hamon said.
Some experts believe the emergence of dengue fever, and now malaria, in middle- and high-income countries could generate new funding because it creates a wealthier market that may spur new corporate investment.
Skeptics in the entomology world look at the race for new commodities, and suggest it ignores a lesson from history: They say that only the same strategies that high-income nations used more than a century ago will once again give humans the edge over mosquitoes. In southern Italy and the American South in the early 1900s, and in Brazil in the 1950s, it was large-scale environmental management that made a difference, said Silas Majambere, a Burundian vector ecologist who has worked all over Africa and Asia.
That means draining breeding sites, spraying larvicides (which are biological toxins and don’t cause resistance) on water that can’t be drained and moving homes out of swampy areas. Those steps won’t help combat urban mosquitoes. To protect against them, people need screened windows and solid roofs: better houses.
“If we had spent the last 40 years doing these things, with the same budget, where would we be today?” Dr. Majambere said.
Hope and challenges
While malaria cases are far lower than they were 20 years ago in the Busia area, the stalled progress means the disease continues to erode family health, income and futures.
“When there is a malaria case in the house, it suspends life,” said Mary Oketeti, a farmer who lives about an hour’s drive outside the town of Busia. She gets malaria three times a year, and her 12-year-old daughter twice as often as that. The family then has to spend what is needed for treatment.
“If there’s a chicken in the house you sell it,” she said.
A chicken might be worth 600 Kenyan shillings, or $5; a trip to the medical clinic, with transport, a diagnostic test and drugs for malaria, will cost at least that much. Repeated bouts of malaria keep children out of school and adults from working; they wipe out savings. Ms. Oketeti said she must stay home from the fields she farms to care for a sick family member for a few days every month.
Dr. Ochomo and his team recently received data from the midpoint of the clinical trial of spatial repellents. Malaria cases were significantly lower in families that had them compared to those that had devices that used placebo repellents. If that trend holds, the next challenge will be convincing the W.H.O. to endorse the use of spatial repellents, then the Kenyan government to buy them.
It won’t be hard to convince people in Busia to use them, though, he said.
“People already know that nets are not enough, they need something more, and they’re happy to see us,” he said. “They say, ‘Finally, someone is coming to try to help with this.’”
A map of U.S. states showing the percentage change in hospital admissions with COVID-19 in the week ending September 16, 2023, compared to the week prior. Dark orange denotes states where hospitalizations have increased in excess of 20 percent; light orange where they have increased more than 10 percent; yellow were hospitalizations are "stable"; light green where there has been a 10 percent decrease; and dark green where there has been more than a 20 percent decrease.
CDC
https://www.newsweek.com/covid-map-12-states-new-hospital-admissions-cdc-1829781
Supreme court rejects Alabama’s plea and allows drawing of new congressional map
The new map in place will create a second majority-Black district that will give political power to voters in the Black belt
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/supreme-court-alabama-reject-map-black-voters
Sam Levine
Tue 26 Sep 2023 11.24 EDT
The US supreme court has rejected a last-ditch request from Alabama to continue to use a congressional map that diluted the influence of Black voters in the state, a significant decision signaling the justices are not backing away from a surprise ruling in June that upheld the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The court’s brief, unsigned order on Tuesday offered no explanation, which is typical in cases that come to the justices on an emergency basis. It had no noted dissents.
Black voters comprise about a quarter of Alabama’s population but only had a majority in one of the state’s seven congressional districts.
A three-judge panel struck down the map last year, deciding the state could have easily drawn a reasonably configured district that gave Black voters a majority in a second district. The supreme court agreed with that determination in June, with chief justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joining the three liberal justices to form a majority.
In response, the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature drew a map that again only gave Black voters a majority in one district. A three-judge panel again struck the map down, saying it was “disturbed” by the way lawmakers had defied its orders. It ordered a court-appointed special master to draw the map.
Alabama made an emergency request to the court, asking it to step in and block the redrawing of the map. The court’s ruling on Tuesday rebuffed that.
“It has been a long and frustrating battle holding the Alabama legislature accountable, but today it is a rewarding one,” lawyers from a coalition of civil rights groups, which represented the plaintiffs in the case, said in a joint statement. “Even after the highest court in the land sided with Black voters in June, our elected officials still chose power over people by outright defying multiple court orders and the loud cries of their constituents to do the right thing.
“Despite these shameful efforts, the supreme court has once again agreed that Black Alabamians deserve a second opportunity district.”
The new map in place will create a second majority-Black district that will give political power to voters in the Black belt, a rural swath stretching across the middle of the state that has been marked by extreme poverty.
“This additional representation in Congress will undoubtedly change lives, especially for the hundreds of thousands of Alabamians residing in the Black Belt who suffer from lack of healthcare access, job opportunities, and crumbling infrastructure,” the civil rights lawyers said. “We look forward to a new era in our state’s history, in which power is shared and Black voices are heard.”
Voting in Alabama is also extremely racially polarized, with Black voters tending to prefer Democrats in general elections and white voters preferring Republicans. A second majority-Black district, therefore, is likely to add another Democratic seat in the US House.
Off-duty Texas police officer shoots Black neighbor through closed door
There have been several recent incidents in the US in which people have been shot after approaching the wrong residence
Edwin Rios
@edwin_d_rios
Tue 26 Sep 2023 09.22 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/texas-police-officer-shoots-black-neighbor
Early on Monday, an off-duty Texas highway patrol officer thought someone was trying to break into his apartment in Houston, according to authorities. He pulled his gun out, shot the person behind his shuttered door – and realized it was his neighbor, officials said.
The latest case of an off-duty law enforcement officer encountering and shooting a member of the public took place after midnight at an apartment complex just outside Minute Maid Park, where Houston’s professional baseball team, the Astros, plays.
Yasar Bashir, assistant Houston police chief, told reporters that it was unclear why the man who was shot had gone to the apartment. But the highway patrol officer feared the neighbor was trying to gain entry.
The trooper reportedly gave “several commands” for the man to step away from the door before the trooper fired his gun.
The neighbor, a 35-year-old Black man who also lived in the building, was hit in his right shoulder but survived.
No charges had been immediately filed in the shooting. The case echoed other similar encounters in which people shot others who went near their residences without understanding why those who were shot had approached.
Those cases have often sparked debate over race and gun policies in the US, especially off-duty police officers’ use of force.
Perhaps most notably, in 2018, a Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, mistakenly entered Botham Jean’s apartment after a work shift when Jean, 26, was eating a bowl of ice-cream. Guyger, who was white, believed Jean, a Black accountant from St Lucia who lived a floor above her, was a burglar and shot and killed him.
Guyger, who was fired from her job, argued that she feared for her life. She was convicted of murder and is serving a 10-year prison sentence.
The killing led the Texas legislature to pass the Botham Jean Act, which prohibits police officers from turning off body cameras during investigations they are a part of.
In her appeal to a state court, Guyger’s attorneys argued that her mistake in entering Jean’s apartment instead of her own and her subsequently shooting him were reasonable and therefore she should be acquitted of murder or have her sentence reduced to criminally negligent homicide. The US supreme court upheld her conviction in 2022.
Meanwhile, in April, 84-year-old Andrew Lester shot the Black teenager Ralph Yarl in the head at Lester’s Missouri home after Yarl mistakenly knocked on Lester’s door.
Yarl was trying to pick up his younger brothers from a friend’s house, which was nearby. Lester claimed self-defense, arguing that – at his old age – he was startled by the evening door knock. Lester stands trial on first-degree assault charges and armed criminal action.
Pretty bad, the poor kid.
https://twitter.com/mhdksafa/status/1706294998356861419
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/gymnastics-ireland-racism-simone-biles-b2418058.html
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/family-of-girl-snubbed-at-medal-ceremony-want-public-apology-from-gymnastics-ireland/a726462541.html
Trump et al is already a mass murderer and it wasn't any accident.
Article I posted to that last Thurs.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172866675&txt2find=taylor%20swift
Hope most of them vote the Republican frauds out.
Whoa.
— S.V. Dáte (@svdate) September 25, 2023
HuffPost has obtained a list of SHELL COMPANIES. Pages and pages; hundreds and hundreds of SHELL COMPANIES.
Wait till Jordan and Comer find out about *this* guy... pic.twitter.com/OusuYYA0tt
Free gov Covid tests again.
Federal government relaunches free at-home COVID test program
Americans are able to order the tests at CovidTests.Gov beginning Monday.
ByCheyenne Haslett
September 25, 2023, 9:57 AM
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/federal-government-relaunch-free-covid-tests-program/story?id=103347741
https://www.covid.gov/tests
Former President Jimmy Carter makes an appearance at Georgia festival days before his 99th birthday
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/former-president-jimmy-carter-makes-appearance-georgia-festival-days-9-rcna117008
Can y’all see who is in this car? God Bless Former President Jimmy Carter and Former First Lady Carter for making the #plainspeanutfestival parade this year!!! Happy early birthday to him! #JimmyCarter99 pic.twitter.com/fu3vpQcgsb
— Yes. It has two k’s. (@erikka2ks08) September 23, 2023
"Decorum" has long left the Congress. Most of the GOP Congress belong on the playground and not in Congress. Don't really give a shit what they wear now and makes no difference to the mess the maga hats and GOP have made politics currently. Fetterman said he would be fine wearing a suit and tie if the GOP would get their act together and do their job and be professional and decent human beings. What they're doing now, a hoodie or a suit has no effect.
Kind of a stupid discussion and complaint in today's world. Decorum is a lot more than just dress apparel. Properness, decency, and "prescribed limits of appropriate social behavior within set situations" are a couple of other descriptions beyond what someone wears. It doesn't matter what the apparel is, its who is wearing it that makes proper decorum (a hoodie really isn't the playground as much is it represents a certain culture of a very large chunk of the adult population now). Styles change and acceptance to those changes evolve and in some way circle back again over time. There was a time that Congress's decorum was men wearing wigs.
Colonial Fashion Trends: What the Founding Fathers Wore
https://www.constitutionfacts.com/founders-library/founders-fashion/
John Hancock's Powdered Wig
Ralph Earl in Breeches
Personally I would worry more about the fossil fuel caused climate crisis, our democracy, and some world peace than wasting my time fretting about someone wearing a hoodie.
It seems the booze was most of it (and maybe a dash of bs). Admittingly airport food is "airway robbery", but if one want's to get drunk there, it's really going to cost. Follow the thread.
I think we all sense that Mr. Brooks claiming he paid $78 for a burger and fries meal at Newark Airport is quite misleading, but how can we prove it? I had the time this early Thursday morning and decided to investigate.
— Charlotte Clymer 🇺🇦 (@cmclymer) September 21, 2023
Here's what I found.
(thread) https://t.co/q5A6xejWtR
Taylor Swift call to action drives 13,000 people every 30 minutes to voter registration site
Singer urged US fanbase to use their ‘powerful’ voices by taking action on National Voter Registration Day
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/taylor-swift-voter-registration-day-b2415569.html
Inga Parkel
6 hours ago
Taylor Swift managed to drive record-breaking numbers to voter registration website Vote.org after urging her 232 million followers on Instagram to take action.
On Tuesday (19 September), hours after the pop star, 32, called on her US fanbase to register to vote in honour of National Voter Registration Day, Vote.org’s communication director, Nick Morrow, announced that “our site was averaging 13,000 users every 30 minutes”.
“Fun fact: after @taylorswift13 posted on Instagram today directing her followers to register to vote on @votedotorg, our site was averaging 13,0000 users every 30 minutes,” Morrow wrote on X/Twitter.
“13! Let’s just say her reputation for being a mastermind is very well-earned.”
Earlier that day, the “Anti-Hero” singer had posted to her Story, asking followers: “Are you registered to vote yet?
“I’ve been so lucky to see so many of you at my US shows recently,” she continued, referring to her ongoing Eras Tour, which wrapped up its first leg of North American dates in August.
“I’ve heard you raise your voices, and I know how powerful they are. Make sure you’re ready to use them in our elections this year!” Swift added, sharing a link to Vote.org.
Taylor Swift
After Russia voiced its opposition to Zelensky speaking at the United Nations Security Council, Albania’s President Edi Rama told the Russians that there is any easy solution to issue:
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 20, 2023
“Get out of Ukraine and Zelensky won’t have to take the floor” pic.twitter.com/luH4wUga4n
New: this is crazy. The top Google image search result for "tank man" right now is an AI-generated "selfie" of the man. Shows that as AI content becomes more and more widespread, the platforms we use to surface content don’t have a good way to identify it https://t.co/vi2hxkH9Uh pic.twitter.com/6mfaUsdXbj
— Joseph Cox (@josephfcox) September 20, 2023
Menswear experts on Fetterman’s style: ‘More politicians should look like that’
Rightwingers are blaming the Pennsylvania Democrat for Senate’s dress code change
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/20/john-fetterman-hoodie-senate-dress-code
Alaina Demopoulos
Wed 20 Sep 2023 07.00 EDT
Does it matter what politicians wear? It’s an issue pundits have long debated – especially when the subjects are women. This time, though, the target is John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, whose wardrobe is drawing ire, as rightwingers seek to blame him for recent relaxation of the Senate dress code policy.
Fetterman is known for dressing in oversized hoodies, sweatsuits, and shorts. Rightwingers have been blaming him for Senator Chuck Schumer’s introduction of a new dress code last week: lawmakers no longer have to don formalwear before entering the chamber.
“The Senate no longer enforcing a dress code for Senators to appease Fetterman is disgraceful,” wrote Marjorie Taylor Greene on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Dress code is one of society’s standards that set etiquette and respect for our institutions. Stop lowering the bar!”
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida used the news as a talking point on the campaign trail. “We need to be lifting our standards up in this country, not dumbing down,” he said. Senator Susan Collins of Maine joked that she would wear a bikini to the floor.
John Fetterman gives two thumbs up while walking to eat dinner in Washington, wearing a familiar loose and short-sleeved shirt.
Fetterman dresses down critics of US Senate dress code reform
Read more
Political fashion has long followed a familiar formula – at least when it comes to men. It’s the bipartisan uniform: black suit, blue or red tie, American flag pin. Since he won his seat last year, Fetterman’s wardrobe has been the subject of praise from constituents who find it relatable, and scorn from those who wish he would try harder.
“I say this with tremendous respect: he looks like he might be an electrician,” says Tres Dean, a menswear editor whose work has appeared in GQ and New York magazine. “More politicians should look like that. It’s more accurate when you think about who he represents.”
The Senate’s new protocol comes at a time when workers in various sectors are rewriting the rules on what’s appropriate for the office. Since the height of the pandemic, many workers have continued to prioritize comfort over formality.
“Dress codes everywhere are relaxing,” Dean says. “It’s cool that if the people who represent us choose to take advantage of these new rules, it will potentially better reflect the people they represent.”
fetterman talks to reporters while wearing short sleeve collared shirt
The Senate’s new protocol comes as workers in various sectors rewrite the rules on what’s office-appropriate. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
The discourse over suits squarely fits in with culture war narratives in the US that pit tradition-loving conservatives against progress-minded liberals. Are sweatsuits in Congress a sign of the country’s eroding morals?
“Forcing people into a very specific type of suit ties back into a greater story of privilege and classism,” says Noah Zagor, a fashion and culture consultant based in Chicago. “I think it’s important to dress for the environment you’re in, and that these boundaries help us function. But those boundaries are being debated right now, and we agree on so little as a country.”
Fetterman has been open about his battle with depression, receiving in-patient care at a hospital this spring. There is a sense of shelter in baggy, comfortable clothing, and voters may associate those visuals with Fetterman’s past struggles.
Fetterman understands the value of sartorial messaging. This is the same man who appeared in a Levi’s ad while serving as the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, in 2010. The town was attempting to revitalize after years of economic decline, partnering with the denim company for a campaign that used residents instead of models. Billboards with taglines such as “ready to work” underscored the point.
For Erik Maza, executive style director of Town & Country, conservative outrage about Fetterman’s sweats feels performative and is reminiscent of the controversy that came with Obama wearing a tan suit at a White House press briefing. The former congressman Peter King, a New York Republican, said Obama’s outfit pointed to a “lack of seriousness”.
Almost 10 years later, the so-called scandal has become a punchline, a symbol of out-of-touch politicians clutching their pearls to distract from real problems.
It is in this spirit that Fetterman has fielded the recent accusations that his proclivity for hoodies has precipitated the downfall of American political fashion. He responded to Greene with a tweet about conservative hypocrisy, after the Republican displayed nude photos of Hunter Biden at a hearing this summer. “Thankfully, the nation’s lower chamber lives by a higher code of conduct: displaying ding-a-ling pics in public hearings,” he wrote. He issued a similar riposte to a Fox news story blaming him for dress code “fury”, tweeting: “I figure if I take up vaping and grabbing the hog during a live musical, they’ll make me a folk hero.”
“Washington DC is not exactly a sartorial mecca,” Maza says. “Voters care much more about the legislation lawmakers pass than if they wear shorts or sweats.”
“I guess I’m just wondering, Mr. Attorney General, has anyone at the department told President Biden to knock it off? With Hunter?”
— The Recount (@therecount) September 20, 2023
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to AG Merrick Garland pic.twitter.com/mdEgUNKwBl
“I am not the president’s lawyer. I will add: I am not Congress’ prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people.”
— The Recount (@therecount) September 20, 2023
— Attorney General Merrick Garland, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee pic.twitter.com/EyUyDYS2TQ
Seems like paywall still up or they took it back, so I gift it again;
https://www.wsj.com/tech/justice-department-probe-scrutinizes-elon-musk-perks-at-tesla-going-back-years-3493e321?st=cub0q11h2sukm37&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Elon: ADL is to blame for X advertising failures!
— Nancy Levine Stearns 🇺🇦 (@nancylevine) September 15, 2023
Ben & Jerry’s: Hold my cone. 🍦 pic.twitter.com/4B8IjYbcNS
Life under Putin.
A Russian military truck kills a man at a pedestrian crossing in occupied Lugansk. 12.09.2023https://t.co/PcGSlxzUQ5 pic.twitter.com/pHj4eFKMhK
— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) September 15, 2023