Elsewhere posts are what are often described as link round-up posts. Categorized, curated links to posts elsewhere with titles, brief descriptions, quotations, and sometimes, commentary. These are posts that I read and think others might find them interesting, possibly provocative, but worth the time and energy to read. They were in some ways why we started Floccinaucical.com in the first place; to curate and annotate posts that deserved some time, traffic and attention. The Elsewhere categories have changed and will likely continue to change with time, but books, language, history, art, and food are always present. Since the U.S. election of 2016, we have included a section regarding the antics of # 45. We hope soon to be able to stop including that section as it is soul-wearying.
The order, issued in Galveston on June 19, 1865, by U.S. Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, informed the people of Texas that all enslaved people were now free:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.
During the first month of lockdown, photographer and “lover of nature” Liam Prior began capturing the different birds that visited his north London garden for his project Birds on Lockdown.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of annual LGBTQ+ Pride traditions in the United States. The first Pride march was in New York on June 28, 1970, on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, the protests that occurred after a late-night police raid on the landmark gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village.
Kharis Mustafin, Irina Alborova, and Alina Matsvai of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology mapped the genome of a 2,600-year-old Scythian mummy discovered in a wooden sarcophagus in 1988. It had been previously thought that the well-preserved remains belonged to a prepubescent male warrior, based upon the array of weapons in the grave and the lack of beads and mirrors typically recovered from female burials. “This discrepancy in the norms of the funeral rite received an unexpected explanation: firstly, the young man turned out to be a girl, and this young ‘Amazon’ had not yet reached the age of 14 years,” said excavator Marina Kilunovskaya of the St. Petersburg Institute of Material History Culture.
When the ancient Greeks encountered the nomadic Scythians, who dominated the Eurasian steppe in the first millennium B.C., they recorded that they were deeply impressed by the spectacle of Scythian women riding into battle. Recently, a team excavating a fourth-century B.C. burial mound in western Russia found that it held the remains of four of these real-life Amazons. Two of the women were buried with horse tack and weapons, and one of them had her legs positioned as if she were riding a horse.
Cohn was a homophobic gay man and a Jew who persecuted other Jews during the anti-communist witch hunts of the ’50s. His most famous acolyte was Donald Trump, to whom Cohn attached himself as a mentor during the ’70s, teaching the budding real-estate mogul and future president his own personal code for winning: Dominate in every interaction, never admit wrongdoing or defeat, never pay your bills, and sue anyone who objects to your behavior into financial submission.
The Boston Public Library has a collection of letters that were sent to and from anti-slavery activists in the 19th century. The only problem: They’re handwritten, which makes them hard to read and impossible to search. This is where you come in.
The library is looking for volunteers to help transcribe the letters in its Anti-Slavery Manuscripts project.
This document was created to be used as a resource for anyone looking to broaden their understanding of anti-racism and get involved to combat racism, specifically as it relates to anti-Blackness and police violence. Within this guide, please find a variety of resources to explore practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity, white supremacy, police violence, and injustice.
I recommend two free email newsletters: Emerging Tech Brew and Morning Brew, a more general business/economy newsletter. Morning Brew and Emerging Tech Brew are well-written, interesting, and not over-the-top marketing drivel. I suggest trying Morning Brew first, which, by the way, might result in me getting some nifty stickers or even a coffee cup.
Something Wonderful
Bayeux Tapestry: Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, rallying Duke William’s troops during the Battle of Hastings in 1066 Image: Wikipedia
Two German students originally wrote the Historic Tale Construction Kit, with Flash. Sadly, their work isn’t available anymore, only remembered. This new application is a tribute, but also an attempt to revive the old medieval meme, with code and availability that won’t get lost.
This project is available for you to use and we hope you will enjoy playing with it as much as we enjoyed building it. We put the open source code on GitHub , so you can grab it, tinker with it or even help us by contributing.
We need to change our mind-set about what it means to “police” in America. At this moment of maximal national tension and outrage, when national leaders are calling the streets of America a “battlespace,” with police officers as warriors who should “dominate” and give “no quarter,” I am telling whoever will listen: Police are not warriors — because we are not and must not be at war with our neighbors.
[Sean Monterrosa was] fatally shot by Vallejo police as the city erupted in chaos Tuesday was kneeling outside a Walgreens and not carrying a firearm when an officer opened fire — sending five bullets through his own windshield.
But as the seminar progressed I learned that the book was packed with form-busting jokes and philosophical digressions, its catastrophically self-aware narrator (a thinly veiled alter ego for his creator) trying to set down his entire life’s experience and opinions, while shifting between self-congratulation and deprecation with each new chapter (of which there was one almost every page; ideal for an inattentive, quick-to-tire reader like me). It seemed, in short, to represent everything I had come to love about standup, everything I wanted my own act to be.
The court heard that Rosen, who owned the motion picture rights to Watership Down under his original 1976 contract, had entered into contracts worth more than $500,000 (£400,975) while claiming that he held all rights to the novel. Rosen also made $85,000 from an unauthorised licence for an audiobook adaptation, and also failed to pay the estate fees and merchandising royalties from the 2018 BBC/Netflix television adaptation, on which he served as an executive producer.
The Familial Language of Black Grief “Black people feel the pain and loss of black life as if it were our very own blood that had been brutalized—because it easily could have been.”
But of course Floyd did die by asphyxiation. That much is so obvious that the medical examiner’s report reads like systemic bureaucratic corruption, indicating more than simply the lethal indifference of a single “rogue” officer. Blaming Floyd’s death on “underlying health conditions” is a remarkably determined deflection of Chauvin’s agency.
The Guardian has since contacted five hospitals in Melbourne and two in Sydney, whose cooperation would have been essential for the Australian patient numbers in the database to be reached. All denied any role in such a database, and said they had never heard of Surgisphere. Desai did not respond to requests to comment on their statements.
Lancet editor Richard Horton told the Guardian: “Given the questions raised about the reliability of the data gathered by Surgisphere, we have today issued an Expression of Concern, pending further investigation. “An independent data audit is currently underway and we trust that this review, which should be completed within the next week, will tell us more about the status of the findings reported in the paper by Mandeep Mehra and colleagues.”
Data from MHA shows 42% of its staff members who recently tested positive were not displaying symptoms.
Nearly 45% of residents who had a positive test were also asymptomatic.
First, we call upon President Trump, elected officials, and political parties to commit our nation to a formal process of healing and reconciliation. Instead of calling for the use of aggressive tactics on protestors, the President must take the first step by disavowing white supremacists and nationalist groups that overtly support him, and by not using his Twitter feed to promote and normalize their ideas and agendas. The world is watching America’s response.
A beautifully preserved wooden saddle from Mongolia estimated to be nearly 1700 years old has provided researchers with valuable insights into the people who lived in the area all those years ago.
The saddle was among a trove of items found in the Urd Ulaan Uneet cave burial, which was first investigated in 2015.
As well as a bath house, theatre, shops and several temples, the team from the universities of Cambridge and Ghent have discovered a large public monument of a kind never seen before, which may relate to the religious practices of the people who lived in the area before the Romans.
The detailed scanning of the town of Falerii Novi, just over 30 miles (50km) north of Rome, has uncovered the layout of the city’s water system, offering new clues to how it was planned and laid out.
Meet the Sogdians, an ancient Silk Road people whose major influence on world art, culture, and trade has only in the last fifty years begun to be fully understood.
This site is about the current exhibit, but there’s a wealth of essays and images.
The Red Lion is thought to have been built around 1567 and probably played host to travelling groups of players. Its precise location has been the subject of conjecture and debate for a number of years, but archaeologists are as certain as they can be that they have found its remains at a site in the East End of London where a self-storage facility once stood.
The industry says it wants to improve the world, but its workers are so comfortable, and so entrenched, that they have a hard time finding a way out that doesn’t lead them right back in again.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ simulated paradise is said to have a dark capitalist underbelly. But a popular subreddit where players can donate items reveals the kindness – and generosity – of strangers
Women’s Work
The Congresswoman Pepper-Sprayed by Police “In that moment, Ohio Representative Joyce Beatty said, she was just another black American attacked while protesting injustice.”
Over almost four years, across board 💩🔥💰 has ground the government down to the most incompetent and reckless individuals. Whole sections of the governments are now run by people who never faced the constitutional advise and consent process in a Senate controlled by the President’s own party. Only the incompetent, obsequious and corrupt have survived the winnowing. And that’s the footing on which we confront the current moment.
It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump’s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent. Whatever Trump’s goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife, and risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces.
Researchers culled through more than 200 million tweets discussing the virus since January and found that about 45% were sent by accounts that behave more like computerized robots than humans.
It is too early to say conclusively which individuals or groups are behind the bot accounts, but researchers said the tweets appeared aimed at sowing division in America.
Researchers who examined the lungs of patients killed by covid-19 found evidence that it attacks the lining of blood vessels there, a critical difference from the lungs of people who died of the flu, according to a report published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
As we wrap up this school year with virtual graduations and drive-by celebrations, parents everywhere are asking: What will school look like in the fall? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) weighed in this week with a list of recommendations school leaders should consider as they reopen during the pandemic—but its advice reads more like “just do your best” than “here’s what you have to do.”
Food and Drink
Via Smitten Kitchen: Rhubarb Cordial Fresh rhubarb, gin, citrus peel, sugar; the perfect spring-into-summer tonic.
Here are two of our favourite versions: a sweet, young, fizzy and non-alcoholic mead that’s like Ethiopian tej, and a drier, more alcoholic mead that requires a little longer to ferment.
Sour dough bread loaves Image: Chris R. Sims (Simsc) Wikimedia Commons
Since its discovery in 1925, the meteoritic origin of the iron dagger blade from the sarcophagus of the ancient Egyptian King Tutankhamun (14th C. BCE) has been the subject of debate and previous analyses yielded controversial results. We show that the composition of the blade (Fe plus 10.8 wt% Ni and 0.58 wt% Co), accurately determined through portable x‐ray fluorescence spectrometry, strongly supports its meteoritic origin. In agreement with recent results of metallographic analysis of ancient iron artifacts from Gerzeh, our study confirms that ancient Egyptians attributed great value to meteoritic iron for the production of precious objects. Moreover, the high manufacturing quality of Tutankhamun’s dagger blade, in comparison with other simple‐shaped meteoritic iron artifacts, suggests a significant mastery of ironworking in Tutankhamun’s time.
Earlier this month, for the first time in recent memory, pronghorn antelope ventured into the sun-scorched lowlands of Death Valley national park. Undeterred by temperatures that climbed to over 110F, the animals were observed by park staff browsing on a hillside not far from Furnace Creek visitor center.
“This is something we haven’t seen in our lifetimes,” said Kati Schmidt, a spokesperson for the National Parks Conservation Association.
CNN disputed the state police characterization in a statement on Twitter.
“This is not accurate — our CNN crew identified themselves, on live television, immediately as journalists. We thank Minnesota @GovTimWalz for his swift action this morning to aid in the release of our crew.”
“We have a white reporter on the ground, and we have a brown reporter on the ground. They are a block apart. The brown reporter is arrested and the white reporter is telling us what’s happening,” Sellers said.
“There’s been a lot of invisible labor that women have done, that people, particularly men — even in the same household — haven’t been aware of or haven’t paid attention to,” she says.
When the history of the present times of this country is written, not only will it record the failure of the current regime in managing a crisis but will acknowledge the struggles of common people, the labourers, children and women who covered hundreds of kilometres on foot to return home in the absence of any help from the government.
One of many such stories of indomitable courage and persistence is that of Jyoti Kumari, a 15-year-old native of Bihar’s Darbhanga, who travelled on a bicycle carrying her wounded father and covered more than 1,200 km from Gurgaon in Haryana to her village.
She is credited with transforming Stonewall from an LGB charity to a fully trans-inclusive LGBTQ charity during her tenure.
Stonewall was founded in the UK as a response to Section 28 — a law passed in 1988 by Margaret Thatcher that stopped councils and schools “promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” Section 28 was repealed in 2003.
In a new episode of Mashable podcast History Becomes Her, Hunt discusses how this law affected people who went to school during the time this legislation was in effect. She also reflected on her own experience growing up in that era.
Here are some of them:
(1) The president of the United States quote-tweeted an avowed alt-right account that flirts with Holocaust denial,
(2) The president also texted supporters false allegations that he had been illegally spied on by the previous vice president.
(3) The president also fired another independent inspector general without providing cause.
(4) The official American death toll from COVID-19 inched close to 90,000 souls while the president spent his time live tweeting cable TV.
(5) One of the president’s large adult sons grotesquely suggested that Joe Biden is a “pedophile.”
(6) Another of his large adult sons claimed that the virus was a hoax perpetrated by the left and the media and that it will disappear after the election.
The label was imposed on two tweets 🤥🤥👖🔥 posted Tuesday morning falsely claiming that “mail-in ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent” and would result in “a rigged election.” The tweets focused primarily on California’s efforts to expand mail-in voting due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. On Sunday, the Republican National Committee sued California Governor Gavin Newsom over the state’s moves to expand mail-in voting.
I can almost remember what I used to keep in the little painted box. Seeing it now pulls at eight-year-old me, still there, deep in my memory under every day that has piled layers over that little girl out there in some quantum eternity, stashing her treasures in an empty candy tin her father sent her.
Weekly unemployment benefits vary by state, ranging from $190 in Puerto Rico to $823 in Massachusetts. Even the most generous isn’t enough to make ends meet anywhere in the country — with or without the pandemic stimulus supplement. When you subtract federal and state withholding taxes, the amount left over to take care of bare minimums — rent, food, health insurance and job-hunting expenses — just doesn’t add up.
I want to recommend two free email newsletters: Emerging Tech Brew and Morning Brew, a more general business/economy news letter. Both are well-written interesting, and not over-the-top marketing drivel. I’d suggest trying Morning Brew first, which, by the way, might result in me getting some nifty stickers or even a coffee coup.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the Internet has become home to a growing number of these self-published chronicles, comics, and how-to guides for everything from cutting your hair to building emergency hand washing stations. Often published on Instagram with hashtags such as #quaranzine and #stayhomemakezines, they draw on a tradition first established in the 1930s, when self-published, hand-made “fanzines” provided a forum for sci-fi fans to reflect on the genre as well as the nature of fandom itself.
In 20 January, KK Shailaja phoned one of her medically trained deputies. She had read online about a dangerous new virus spreading in China. “Will it come to us?” she asked. “Definitely, Madam,” he replied. And so the health minister of the Indian state of Kerala began her preparations
The second day I was sick, I woke up to what felt like hot tar buried deep in my chest. I could not get a deep breath unless I was on all fours. I’m healthy. I’m a runner. I’m 33 years old. […]
I am one of the lucky ones. I never needed a ventilator. I survived. But 27 days later, I still have lingering pneumonia. I use two inhalers, twice a day. I can’t walk more than a few blocks without stopping.
I want Americans to understand that this virus is making otherwise young, healthy people very, very sick. I want them to know, this is no flu.
Toronto-based artist Micah Adams uses a jeweler’s saw to cut out the embossed animals, figures, and objects from coins of different sizes and denominations. The metal cut-outs are used to create tiny readymades and fun collages. From a growing pile of copper leaves taken from Canadian pennies, to intricate birds and flowers borrowed from foreign currency, each of Micah Adams works are hand cut using the same basic tool.
Via NPR: Trump Received Intelligence Briefings On Coronavirus Twice In January President Trump was warned in January briefings that the coronavirus was going to “spread globally,” according to a White House official. Five days after that initial briefing, the official says Trump was briefed again.
The question of what Trump knew about the coronavirus, when he was aware of it and the tenor of those conversations have come under heavy scrutiny, as the administration faces criticism that it was slow to respond to early warnings about the virus. In the time since the president’s January briefings, the U.S. has reported more than 1.1 million cases of the coronavirus — more than any other nation. In all, more than 66,000 Americans have died.
In response, [St. Andrew’s Episcopal in Maryland, Brentwood School in Los Angeles] came up with lists of reasons they would not be returning the money. The primary reason was simple enough: The schools had qualified for the loan, and they needed to pay their workers like any other business. But the board of Sidwell Friends School, the private, hyper-selective alma mater of the Obama and Clinton children in Washington, D.C., argued that it should keep the $5 million it had received for a different reason: “The Board determined that accepting the loan was appropriate and fully consistent with its fiduciary responsibilities, as well as our Quaker values.”
“The majority of the protesters were white,” Anthony said. “I’m still not exactly sure on the connection between confederate flags and Nazi symbolism. They just had no connection to the stay-at-home orders. The fact they were carrying guns openly while we voted was unnerving.”
As nearly half of all Americans cancel their summer plans to help stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, US president Donald Trump will be escaping to New Jersey.
According to federal spending data, the Secret Service has ordered bullet-resistant glass and party tents to be used in Bedminster—home to the 535-acre Trump National Golf Club,
Taxpayers are footing a $42,350 payment to a party rental company in Jackson, New Jersey, as well as a $9,600 bill for ballistic glass installation and removal, awarded to a small business in Westbury, New York. The tent rental is projected to be slightly less expensive than one the Secret Service rented in 2018 for the holiday season at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm beach, which cost taxpayers $54,000. The Secret Service uses the tents primarily as screening areas for vehicles and visitors.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is telling people across the US that they should only travel outside their local area if it’s for “essential” reasons, such as providing “medical or home care to others,” or “for a job considered an essential service.”
Yet Pence and Trump by and large refuse to wear masks, despite a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that face coverings be used to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
“So many of us are struggling in isolation during the lockdown,” he said.
“While times are tough, I want to take you on one of the greatest fantasy adventures ever written, a 12-hour armchair marathon across Middle Earth whilst raising money for two amazing charities which are doing extraordinary work right now to help those most in need.”
Something Wonderful
Jer Thorp @blprnt made a game called 🐦🎶🎲 You can learn the calls and songs of the birds in your area. It’s made with data from eBird and sounds from Xeno-Canto.
Sabrina Orah Mark in The Paris Review: Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over. Read this. It’s about life, truth, fairy tales, bread, and academic circuses.
Man dressed as grim reaper to visit Florida beaches that reopen too early
Amazon tech workers are calling out sick in protest over COVID-19 response “Amazon tech workers are calling out sick today in protest of the company’s treatment of workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The action, which will consist of a live streamed series of speakers in lieu of a physical rally, is a sign that the protests at Amazon’s warehouses have galvanized portions of the company’s white-collar workforce.”
A software engineer in Seattle who asked to remain anonymous “given Amazon’s recent history of retaliation” checked his email after receiving the invitation, only to have it vanish ten minutes later. He had found the earlier panel “eye opening,” particularly the disparity in how tech workers and warehouse workers are being treated during the pandemic: while he and his colleagues were sent home immediately after a coronavirus case was confirmed at Amazon’s headquarters, warehouse workers aren’t being informed when coworkers test positive and social distancing is haphazardly enforced.
“We can’t figure out a way to make the numbers work to sustain business and pay rent and pay everybody to go back and risk their lives,” he told me. “If we tried to open on Monday, we’d be closed in two weeks, probably for good and with more debt on our hands.”
Georgia’s brash reopening puts much of the state’s working class in an impossible bind: risk death at work, or risk ruining yourself financially at home. In the grips of a pandemic, the approach is a morbid experiment in just how far states can push their people. Georgians are now the largely unwilling canaries in an invisible coal mine, sent to find out just how many individuals need to lose their job or their life for a state to work through a plague.
An estimated 70 percent of coronavirus deaths in Minnesota have been linked to long-term-care facilities. In at least six states, these fatalities account for half of all COVID-19 deaths, and according to the World Health Organization, half of all coronavirus fatalities in Europe have been traced to nursing homes too. Some of this mortality is linked to long-term-care facilities that are shoddily run or that violate health standards. But most of them are doing the best they can with what they have. And they don’t have much.
If your plan is to begin reopening as soon as possible, or engaging in curbside soon, then I want to see the library director and administrators on the front lines of service. I want them to be the ones to take books out to the cars, handle materials, and empty book drops.
Remember, when people say “That’s why you make the big bucks” (they don’t say that too often in libraries), this means you. Our lower-paid employees are often our most vulnerable in terms of being able to handle sickness and unplanned financial setbacks.
But instead of frying them right away, you brush them with oil, sprinkle them with scallions, and roll the pancake into a tight cigar, and then the cigar into a snail. This snail of wound dough is left to rest again, and then rolled into the final pancake. The hidden layers of flour and oil help the layers lift and separate into flaky layers as you fry the pancakes.
Scientists think that the badger-like creature, known as Adalatherium, would have burrowed – helping it to evade predatory dinosaurs. This could explain how it evolved to such a size.
The romance between Terry and Pat never seems to have gone stale. Terry was a pioneering sportswoman, a baseball player in the professional women’s league that inspired the Penny Marshall movie A League of Their Own. She was 22 in 1947 when she met the love of her life, Pat, then 18. They’ve kept the early love letters, the bottoms ripped off in case they were caught by the authorities.
Women’s reputation as nurturing homebodies who left warfare to men in long-ago societies is under attack. Skeletal evidence from hunter-gatherers in what’s now California and from herders in Mongolia suggests that women warriors once existed in those populations.
In the end, Treasury cannot show us USPS is actually losing money on its contract with Amazon, as Trump claims. It can assert only that USPS does not know whether it makes a profit.
he Washington Post reports that the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, an intelligence report on national-security threats, mentioned the coronavirus “more than a dozen” times in January and February, a period during which the Trump administration was doing little to prepare for a pandemic, and when the president himself was often downplaying the threat the virus posed to the United States. The oversight would come as a surprise if not for the long line of warnings that the president is known to have ignored.
Here’s a partial timeline:
How New Jersey’s Governor Figured Out Trump “Phil Murphy discusses the state’s efforts to mitigate its coronavirus infections and lower its death rate, the second-highest in the country.”
The key to piadine is eating them while they are really hot. This means gathering everyone around and having all the fillings ready: slices of salami, prosciutto or ham, soft cheeses such as stracchino, gorgonzola or cream cheese, also some greens, such as rocket or watercress. As soon as your piadina comes out of the pan, fill and spread one half, then fold the other half over. Eat immediately, ideally with a cold beer or glass of lip-staining dry lambrusco.
Their usual method is to attack established conservative groups from the right, including the National Rifle Association, and then make money by selling memberships in their groups or selling mailing lists of those who sign up, according to some conservative politicians and activists who have labeled the efforts as scams.
President Trump on Friday threatened to block an emergency loan to shore up the U.S. Postal Service unless it dramatically raised shipping prices on online retailers, an unprecedented move to seize control of the agency that analysts said could plunge its finances into a deeper hole.
Several administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said Trump’s criticism of Postal Service rates is rooted in a desire to hurt Amazon in particular. They have said that he fumes publicly and privately at Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, for news coverage that Trump believes is unfair.
Amazon already delivers close to half of its own shipments. Before the pandemic, it was on pace to deliver more packages annually than either UPS or FedEx by 2022, according to Morgan Stanley.
The Postal Service has not taken federal funding since 1970, operating instead from revenue it raises from stamp sales and other products.
Tired of being cooped up? Want to entertain yourself and your kids? The British Museum has lots of ideas: How to Explore the British Museum form Home Virtual tools, online exhibits and galleries, podcasts, short films, digital galleries and collections . . .
Later that day, the two officials released their letter to the press. That public disclosure forced Smithfield’s hand.
The next day, the company announced it was closing the Sioux Falls plant, which the company says accounts for 4% to 5% of all U.S. pork production, for an indefinite period of time. Other meat processing plants are also closed due to the coronavirus, although none has reported as many sick workers as the Sioux Falls plant.
In the ensuing debacle, Trump talks over her, raising his voice and calling Reid disgraceful – a pattern he seems to follow when taking to female journalists, and female journalists of color particularly. Earlier this month, the PBS journalist Yamiche Alcindor had a similar interaction with Trump, during which he told her to “be nice”. Alcindor stood her ground and held her line of questioning.
Reid does what all journalists who are facing Donald Trump should do: she demands an answer, she holds him to account, and she remains steadfast and unfazed while he ignores her questions and insults her instead.
Paula Reid of CBS and Yamiche Alcindor of PBS need to have backup from their colleagues. Work together journalists; you’re smarter and stronger than 🤥🤥👖🔥.
What Nurses Want You to Know “Preexisting staffing shortages and dismal pay are colliding with a crisis that’s testing the limits of the people caring for the sick and elderly.”
Nursing-home employees, nurses, and home health-care workers—the majority of whom are women—are at the forefront of the coronavirus crisis, and they have long been underpaid, overworked, and under-resourced. Registered nurses can expect to make less than $72,000 annually at the median; home health- and personal-care aides earn just $24,000 a year. A quarter of home care workers are uninsured.
Asked on CNN’s State of the Union why the administration did not act when he and other officials advised, Fauci said: “You know … as I have said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint. We make a recommendation. Often, the recommendation is taken. Sometimes, it’s not.
“…It is what it is. We are where we are right now.”
No White House briefing was scheduled on Sunday but Trump continued to attack the Times and its article, in one tweet appearing inadvertently to confirm it, writing: “the Fake News Opposition Party is pushing, with all their might, the fact that President Trump ‘ignored early warnings about the threat’.”
But it may explain why the familiar dynamics of Trump’s unhappiness with underlings—first the retweets of criticism, then the “Behind you 1,000 percent!” show of public support, then the dismissal, then the anger and insults from Trump—could take a different course this time.
he common theme that connects these people is that, one way or another, they have seemed afraid of Donald Trump. I am sure many of them would deny that if asked directly. But their actions are consistent with their being fearful of what would happen if they don’t do what Trump wants, or tell him what he so desperately wants to hear.
There aren’t many politicians out there who are quick to hold up their hands and admit when they’ve made mistakes, especially in these unprecedented times. But although there’s mounting proof the White House was warned about the threat of a pandemic but did not act, Donald Trump is in a whole other league of pointing the finger.
The Daily Show compilation above mashes together various clips of the president blaming other people and organisations for their decisions relating to the coronavirus — from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to the Obama administration, from the World Health Organization to China.
The USPS has not received taxpayer funds since 1982, with its entire budget coming through the sale of stamps. So if you do want to help, buying stamps—and then waiting to use most or all of them until after the pandemic has passed and mail volume begins to recover—is a good way to support to USPS right now.
See also: Hoping To Save The Postal Service, People Rush To Buy Stamps The USPS, its establishment enshrined in the Constitution, works for all Americans, old, young, rich, poor, rural or urban. As a kid growing up in rural N.H. the Post Office was my gateway to the world. That’s true for so many of us even now. We vote by mail, we receive our social security and pension and dividend checks by mail, we keep in touch with friends and family with cards and letters, we depend on Media Mail for our books and tapes for the blind. Don’t let 🤥🤥👖🔥 kill the USPS.
The Devon council voted to return the items to the Siksika Nation, in Canada, after guidance from curators at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), which holds the sacred relics that once belonged to Crowfoot, a Blackfoot leader who signed a treaty in 1877 with forces of the Crown.
The return of the regalia, which include a buckskin shirt, leggings and a knife bought for £10 in 1904 from the family of an English-born member of the Canadian mounted police, followed a formal request made for the repatriation in 2015. It resolves a drawn-out dispute that has beenacrimonious at times.
They have instead allowed the release of a week’s worth of their chants https://www.neumz.com/ for the six days Christians refer to as holy week, preceding Easter Sunday, the highlight of the religious calendar, when the chants have a particular importance. The rest is to go live next month.
Malvolio’s a sharp-tongued, po-faced joykiller, but he can’t have started out that way. He runs the household with meticulous precision. And while he’s unpleasant, he never does enough to provoke the wicked prank the rest of the household pulls on him, to be left imprisoned and losing his marbles.
Thankfully we no longer find someone being bullied as hysterical as people used to. I decided that if I could get the audience to laugh at him being bullied and then feel very guilty about it in the last scene, then I would have won … comedy and pathos are brilliant bedfellows. Discuss.
Twelfth Night will premiere on Marquee TV on 11 April, with a watchalong on Twitter starting at 7.15pm.
Unfortunately, however, while in the early 18th century the focus on protecting and enhancing the rights of authors was intended to facilitate the growth of public discourse around those ideas, today that same focus on authors’ rights does the exact opposite. With so much emphasis now being put on the rights of the author as owner of the work to control it, at the expense of the public benefit the system is supposed to impart, it has had the effect of choking off what discourse these works might spawn. Through needlessly lengthy monopolies and overly-expansive interpretations of the reach of these rights, history seems to be repeating itself, returning us to the discourse-choking limitations of the licensing era and forsaking the promise of the Statute of Anne to promote its spread.
According to Pritzker, the US military planes airlift the PPE and other medical supplies to the US and then hand them over to the major medical supply distributors the White House taskforce is working with. That part was clear from the discussion April 2nd. What Pritzker confirmed is that the states then have to bid against each other to purchase the supplies from those distributors.
These pronouncements and pledges have turned out, again and again, to be a description of the administration’s aspirational response to the pandemic, not the one doctors, nurses and stricken families are reporting from the front.
That is where emergency responders and hospitals are dangerously low on protective gear, and where widespread, rapid testing for the virus in retail parking lots is not, in fact, a reality. Where millions of small-business owners are struggling to get federal assistance they need to stave off collapse and where millions of people are newly unemployed and fearing ruin.
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While all crisis leaders have to chart a delicate course between comforting the nation and providing reliable information to its citizens, the president and his top political aides have repeatedly used the nationally televised briefings to describe efforts and actions that have not panned out.
Read this New York Times article Ma href=”https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage”>He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus “An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response.” Then read this Twitter thread: from Eric Lipton @EricLiptonNYT with texts sent in early March.
By the last week of February, it was clear to the administration’s public health team that schools and businesses in hot spots would have to close. But in the turbulence of the Trump White House, it took three more weeks to persuade the president that failure to act quickly to control the spread of the virus would have dire consequences.
Thankfully, a home baker and journalist Stuart Thompson created Bread Scheduler, a scheduling tool that helps you plan all that rising and resting with precision. Just choose one of six recipes provided and pick a start time, and Bread Scheduler will spit out timed, step-by-step instructions, along with timer reminders and helpful photos.
Three-toed skinks are one of a handful of species capable of bimodal reproduction, meaning that some populations are oviparous while others are viviparous. However, it is the only species that has ever been seen employing both modes during the same pregnancy, which demonstrates an unprecedented example of reproductive versatility.
The terms of the loan included in the last funding bill could give control of large parts of the agency to the Treasury Department, and Dimondstein says the Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to eventually privatize the Postal Service. “It’s in writing,” he says. “That’s their plan.”
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Congressman Connolly says the next coronavirus rescue bill should provide a cash infusion of $25 billion to the Postal Service and forgive the agency’s debts, which House Democrats had pressed for but failed to get in the last funding package, after objections by Senate Republicans and the White House. He notes that lawmakers provided about $50 billion in that bill to help the airline industry.
The whistleblower that reported President Trump’s inappropriate conversation with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky saw their report buried by the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel. So much for the proper channels. President Trump himself asked for the whistleblower to be outed, undermining the protections the federal government has established to ensure wrongdoing is reported.
The only party receptive to the whistleblower’s complaints has now been fired by President Trump, closing the loop on the White House’s retaliatory actions.
President Donald Trump on Friday fired Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who had told Congress about the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment, the President told Congress in a letter obtained by CNN.
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Color Our Collections Free downloadable coloring books and sheets from various museums, based on their collections.
Returning to the above chart, Washington state, despite being the site of the earliest cluster of confirmed cases in the U.S., has contained its outbreak better than any state, and many other sub-national regions as well. This simply must be because Governor Inslee started testing earlier, implemented clampdown measures earlier, and tightened them earlier.
The US state of New Hampshire, with its mountains, lakes and foliage, is used to being a tourist destination for urbanites from nearby Boston and New York. But as out-of-towners flock to their summer homes to escape coronavirus in the cities, locals are begging them to stay away.
TPM Reader BW flagged something to me from this evening’s White House press conference that strikes me as pretty remarkable. The US has established an airbridge of flights from abroad to bring in supplies of masks, gowns, all the supplies we’re hearing are in short supply. But in answer to a question from Weijia Jiang of CBS News, the Admiral in charge of this effort explained that those supplies mainly are not going to FEMA or the states. They’re going to private sector distributors. And that seems to be one of the big reasons why states are having to fight amongst themselves over them, bidding up the price along the way.
“If I’m blunt about it, it’s a joke,” said Michael Dowling, the head of Northwell Health, New York’s largest hospital system. “Everyone can say, ‘Thank you for putting up these wonderful places and opening up these cavernous halls.’ But we’re in a crisis here, we’re in a battlefield.”
Mr. Dowling said he has had to tear his hospitals apart, retrofitting any unused space, including lobbies and conference rooms, into hospital wards. His facilities now house 2,800 so-called Covid patients, up from 100 on March 20, he said. About 25 percent of those are in serious conditions in intensive care units.
Across the city, hospitals are overrun. Patients have died in hallways before they could even be hooked up to one of the few available ventilators in New York. Doctors and nurses, who have had to use the same protective gear again and again, are getting sick. So many people are dying that the city is running low on body bags.
From the comfort of your home, you can tour the International Space Station or even explore the inside of a human eye. We’ve also included ten worlds from our Marketplace creator community! Thanks to creators Everbloom, Jigarbov, Lifeboat, Razzleberries, The World Foundry, Blockworks, and Imagiverse you can explore renewable energy, marine biology, Greek history, and more! The worlds include lesson plans like creative writing activities, build challenges, and tricky puzzles.
Connoisseurs will know that Tennessee whiskey is also made with at least 51% corn before being aged in new charred oak barrels, but Tennessean producers go an extra step. They must filter the whiskey through sugar maple charcoal in a step that mellows the spirit.
Zoom has come under fire in recent days due to security issues with the platform. A zero-day vulnerability has recently been disclosed, and numerous users have noted that Zoom bombers are joining open meetings and sharing undesirable content. Zoom has also been found to overshare data with Facebook via their iOS app, a problem now fixed. BleepingComputer recently reported about a newly found vulnerability in Zoom that allows an attacker to steal Windows login credentials from other users.
Jared Kushner’s shadow coronavirus task force appears to be violating both the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) by using private email accounts with no assurance their communications are being preserved and by meeting in secret, according to a letter sent today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The failure of the White House to comply with any of the PRA and FACA requirements leaves the public in the dark about the work the shadow task force has done and the influence of private industries on the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
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No paywall in the chicken coop: A fast-food chain is paying to take down 16 Canadian newspapers’ paywalls this month “On April 1, Postmedia announced it is partnering with Mary Brown’s Chicken & Taters, a Canadian fast-food restaurant with 170 locations, to drop its paywall on all content for the entire month. “We’re pleased and gratified by this generous vote of confidence in our journalism,” wrote Lucinda Chodan, senior vice president of editorial, on the National Post’s website.”
Fox News falls for Monty Python joke in report criticising Seattle protesters
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