https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTuccjQBYB4&ab_channel=TheHumanistReport
Saturday, November 7, 2020
Central America remains on high alert as Hurricane Eta wreaks havoc and kills dozens
Reports state that the devastating storm has claimed more than 70 lives, forced the evacuation of thousands of people and caused significant damage to infrastructure and homes throughout Central America
November 06, 2020 by Peoples Dispatch
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/11/06/central-america-remains-on-high-alert-as-hurricane-eta-wreaks-havoc-and-kills-dozens/
Central America has been severely affected by Hurricane Eta that has now weakened into a tropical depression, but heavy rains continue across the region. The governments of Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, the worst hit countries by the tropical storm, have issued a red alert warning about the potential risk of life-threatening flooding and landslides. The devastating storm has already claimed more than 70 lives, forced the evacuation of thousands of people and caused significant damage to infrastructure and homes throughout Central America.
Eta first hit Nicaragua as a Category-4 hurricane with winds of 140mph (225km/h) and torrential rains on November 3. It then weakened into a tropical depression as it moved into neighboring countries Honduras and Guatemala on November 4 and 5.
In Nicaragua, Eta has caused numerous large-scale damages. However, fortunately only 2 fatalities have been reported. Authorities in Nicaragua evacuated over 30,000 people in various departments on the Caribbean coast before the hurricane struck. The hurricane made landfall in Puerto Cabezas municipality, but no casualties were reported.
In Honduras, the National Police and the Fire Department reported that at least 13 people died due to the tropical storm. The state authorities reported that about 400,000 people have been directly affected by the storm. So far, nearly 3,000 were evacuated and another 3,000 headed to shelters. The northern region is the hardest hit and hundreds are stranded and awaiting rescue.
According to the Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Services, over 500 homes have been damaged, about 600 roads have been blocked and 15 bridges have been destroyed. Thousands of hectares of corn, beans, rice and other crops have also been destroyed, and there is also a significant damage to livestock. The government has declared an indefinite red alert in 18 departments of the country.
Likewise, on November 5, Guatemalan president Alejandro Giammattei reported that at least 50 people have been killed by landslides in different parts of the country due to the heavy rains caused by tropical depression Eta. Around half the deaths were in the town of San Cristobal Verapaz where a hillside collapsed, burying some 20 homes and leaving at least 25 dead. At least 1,500 people have been evacuated in the department of Izabal, one of the most affected regions. President Giammattei said a month’s worth of rain had fallen in less than half a day and an additional 48 hours of rain were expected.
Panama is also experiencing heavy rain and around eight people have been reported missing.
Disaster management and security officials in all these countries are carrying out rescue and relief operations. Volunteers from various human rights and social organizations are also distributing relief packages.
The impact of Hurricane Eta on the region is already shaping up to be severe and the longer-term impacts on the economy and people’s survival could be even worse. The storm hits in the middle of an already drastic health and economic crisis, which has been deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic but, in Guatemala and Honduras, has roots in years of neoliberal policies and widespread corruption.
The storm is expected to regain strength this weekend as it moves north-east towards Cuba and Florida, and possibly the Gulf of Mexico by early next week.
After “11 months of pain,” Bolivia returns to democracy
Luis Arce and David Choquehuanca will be sworn in tomorrow as president and vice-president of Bolivia, just one year after the coup d’état. Incoming senator Leonardo Loza speaks about the year of repression, and the steadfast resistance to it
November 07, 2020 by Zoe PC
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/11/07/after-11-months-of-pain-bolivia-returns-to-democracy/
On Sunday, November 8, Luis Arce and David Choquehuanca of the Movement Towards Socialism – Political Instrument for People’s Sovereignty (MAS-IPSP) will be sworn in as the president and vice-president of Bolivia. This will mark an end to a tumultuous and painful chapter in the country’s history following the coup of November 2019. Arce and Choquehuanca were elected in a historic election on October 18 which saw over 88% participation of the electorate, and an overwhelming victory for the MAS-IPSP, which won over 55% of the vote share. While far-right groups have attempted to provoke confrontations and violence ahead of the swearing-in and have demanded an audit of the results, the majority of Bolivia is preparing to welcome the change.
Just one year ago, on November 10, 2019, Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera announced their resignation following a campaign of threats, harassment, violence by right-wing groups, and finally a demand from the military that they step down. What followed was, “11 months of darkness, 11 months of tears, 11 months of pain, 11 months of anguish, 11 months of persecution, 11 months of human rights violations in Bolivia,” recalled Leonardo Loza. Loza is a trade union leader from the Trópico of Cochabamba, a coca growing region where former president Morales also hails from. In a conversation with Peoples Dispatch days after the October 18 elections, Loza pointed out that that in the Trópico, like other militant regions of Bolivia, “with our strength, our conviction and our force, we were able to put up with so much repression and intimidation from the Bolivian right during these 11 months.”
Leonardo Loza, who is the executive secretary of the Federation of Intercultural Communities of Chimoré and the former vice-president of the Six Federations of the Tropic of Cochabamba, will now take his place in the country’s Senate. He took the spot of Evo Morales in the candidacy for senator of Cochabamba in September after the Supreme Electoral Court disqualified the latter. The MAS-IPSP received 65% of the votes in Cochabamba, indicating the extent of support for both the presidential ticket and legislators like Loza.
Loza is one of three popular leaders from Cochabamba who will represent the MAS-IPSP in the Senate. Accompanying him will be Andrónico Rodríguez, the current vice-president of the Six Federations of the Tropic of Cochabamba, and Patricia Arce, the former mayor of Vinto, who suffered a brutal fascistic attack during the coup d’état last year. The three were on the frontlines of the resistance to the coup, organizing mass mobilizations, strikes, road blockades and legal challenges, and for this, paid a heavy price.
Loza is currently facing 12 different legal cases against him in Bolivia and one in the Hague, initiated by members of the de facto regime. The charges range from sedition, terrorism, drug trafficking, armed uprising and others. He knows that the reason they brought these charges was purely political. None of these charges have any basis, he said. On October 22, one of the cases against him and Patricia Arce was dropped, and he expects more to follow.
“I believe that it should not be a crime to be a leader, to be the spokesperson of the people. This is why they have brought charges against me,” Loza said, adding, “one day I would speak, and the next day they would present a new case against me, but I never stayed silent.”
In Loza’s case, the threats and repression he faced escalated to such a point that Evo Morales himself called him and suggested he head to exile in Argentina. He responded, “I am going to stay here with my people. If they want to kill me, then they can kill me here. If they want to put me in prison, then they can come here and put me in prison.”
Loza, when addressing a crowd of trade unionists and MAS-IPSP militants in the Trópico days after the election, said that this resilience comes from his upbringing. As the son of a woman who was not allowed to go to school and receive formal education because she was Indigenous and poor, he imbibed dignity and the spirit of resistance from a very young age. Today, he “does not let his guard down, even as much as they try to humiliate me, persecute me, threaten me, and blackmail me.”
He also said that the support of the people, in response to all of these charges, has been vital. “My people have protected me, taken care of me and sheltered me until now.”
From Sunday, Loza and the incoming government will take on new challenges. The coup regime did not just persecute popular leaders and repress protests. During its 11 months in power, it pushed through a series of neoliberal measures, embezzled millions of dollars through corrupt schemes amid the pandemic, and paralyzed Bolivia’s national industries. The attacks on the national economy coupled, with the challenges imposed due to the pandemic, have had a catastrophic impact on Bolivia’s working class that has been pushed further into instability and informality. Economic recovery is going to be one of the key focus areas of the MAS-IPSP.
Loza has pledged that he will work not only for his department of Cochabamba, but for all Bolivian people to “resolve the social problems in Bolivia, so that no one is discriminated against. So that in Bolivia, extreme poverty is diminished, and that we all have basic services guaranteed, whether you live in the city or in the countryside, like a mobile phone, clean water, sewage and many other things.”
“During the next five years, we are going to build up this country that unfortunately has been destroyed in such little time by the Bolivian right,” he vowed.
Sunday will be a historic day for Bolivia and for the world. According to Loza, in the elections on October 18, “the fate of the most humble, poorest, most humiliated, most marginalized people, not only in the past year but historically, was at stake. But we, these same people, we have won.”
Three days after the swearing in, Evo Morales is set to arrive in Chimoré in the Trópico, where one year ago he boarded a plane to Mexico amid the escalation of violence and threats to him and his family. While Morales does not have an official post in the government, his presence and political guidance will be of great importance in the transition process.
This Is Their Post-Election Plan — We Can & Must Stop Them NOW
David Sirota
Nov 7
The election is over and the good news is that Donald Trump will soon be gone — but mere hours after the election was called, we are already seeing signs that Republican operatives are trying to infiltrate the Democratic Party, invalidate the election mandate and push a Biden administration to the right. This would be a disaster — and the best way to stop it is to expose them and shame them.
[...]
This past week, The Daily Poster exposed how GOP operatives at the Lincoln Project set $67 million of liberals’ money on fire — now the group’s top GOP leader is publicly attacking us, all while they reportedly plan to launch a media empire that will likely try to push Biden to the right.
Meanwhile, former GOP Gov. John Kasich — who was given a speaking slot at the Democratic convention — is already insisting that Democrats shouldn’t first and foremost deliver results for the majority of voters who elected them, but instead “listen to what the other half of the country has to say.”
The best way to fight back against this propaganda — and prevent Biden from ignoring his progressive promises and cutting bad deals with a GOP Senate — is to build grassroots-funded media that does accountability journalism day in, day out.
[...]
Trump is gone and that is a big reason to celebrate. However, we cannot keep doing the same thing and expecting different results — we cannot keep holding elections, then going back to brunch and expecting corporate- and billionaire-owned media to fix the situation.
To actually make change and make progress, we have to build our own new media ecosystem that informs and empowers people to hold their elected officials accountable. That is what we’ve been doing at The Daily Poster — and we can make an even bigger impact with your help.
Thanks for considering this request.
Rock the boat,
Sirota
P.S. If you want to see the kind of impactful investigative reporting The Daily Poster has already done, click here, here, here and here for just a few examples. We hold both parties’ feet to the fire — and this is the kind of reporting your subscription will support.
Washington Supreme Court Decision Grants Farmworkers Overtime Pay
The decision offers more compensation for those laboring in hazardous conditions during the pandemic.
November 6, 2020 by Gabe Guarente EATER SEATTLE
https://portside.org/2020-11-06/washington-supreme-court-decision-grants-farmworkers-overtime-pay
In a huge victory for farm labor across Washington, the state’s Supreme Court (in a 5-4 decision) ruled Thursday, November 5, that dairy workers are eligible for overtime pay. This reverses a decades-old law that exempted agriculture workers in general from overtime pay and makes Washington the sixth state in the U.S. that allows such benefits to farmworkers. The ruling will, indeed, apply across the board, not just to the dairy industry, says Elizabeth Strater, director of alternative organizing for the United Farm Workers union. Washington is also the first state to enact such overtime pay through the courts.
The specific case concerned a 2016 class action lawsuit by around 300 milkers for DeRuyter Brothers Dairy in Outlet, Washington, led by Jose Martinez-Cuevas and Patricia Aguilar. The plaintiffs — who milk close to 3,000 cows per shift, 24/7, with three shifts a day — said that DeRuyter failed to pay minimum wage to its employees, did not provide adequate rest and meal breaks, failed to compensate pre- and post-shift duties, and failed to pay overtime. “The workers claimed that the agricultural industry was powerful while the agricultural workers were poor, and the exemption was racially motivated to impact the Latinx population, which constitutes nearly 100 percent of Washington dairy workers,” the case summary read. “Consequently, the workers argued, the agricultural exemption for overtime pay violates article I, section 12 of the Washington State Constitution because it grants a privilege or immunity to the agricultural industry pursuant to a law implicating a fundamental right of state citizenship — the right of all workers in dangerous industries to receive workplace health and safety protections.”
While the two parties agreed to a settlement on most of the main complaints, the overtime pay issue remained unresolved. In 2018, an appeal was filed and the Washington Supreme Court began considering the remaining claim. The defense, which included the Washington State Dairy Federation and Washington Farm Bureau, argued that instituting overtime pay would put too much economic burden on businesses. But, after an impassioned hearing in October 2019, the court eventually sided with the workers, citing Washington’s Minimum Wage Act and the promise of equal protection under the law.
“The [overtime] exemption denies an important right to a vulnerable class, and defendants have not demonstrated it serves important governmental objectives,” wrote Justice Steve Gonzalez (the full case brief can be found here). “The exclusion of farmworkers from overtime pay deprives them of an important health and safety protection that is afforded to other workers.”
The ruling could be a landmark decision for the agriculture industry in Washington, where scrutiny over working conditions has only increased during the pandemic. In April, several labor organizations filed a lawsuit in Skagit County, urging officials to immediately update its health and safety standards in the agriculture industry after reports emerged of unsanitary practices at farms and warehouses in Central Washington.
A month after that lawsuit was filed, Gov. Jay Inslee issued a proclamation meant to address the COVID concerns. Among the announced safety standards: employers must provide four times as many handwashing stations on work sites, supply masks for employees who aren’t working alone at no cost to workers, and improve transportation safety by sanitizing vehicles properly and promoting social distancing.
Now, it seems that compensation has been addressed to some degree, and it could provide a path for similar legal action in other states where overtime protections for agriculture workers have not yet been issued. “This ruling shows that when farmworkers refuse to accept the racist exclusions in labor protections, they can win,” says Strater. ‘Workers across the country will be looking at this. Where will this historic injustice be resolved next?”
Nasal Spray Prevents Covid Infection in Ferrets, Study Finds
Scientists at Columbia University have developed a treatment that blocks the virus in the nose and lungs, is inexpensive and needs no refrigeration.
November 6, 2020 Donald G. McNeil Jr. NEW YORK TIMES
https://portside.org/2020-11-06/nasal-spray-prevents-covid-infection-ferrets-study-finds
A nasal spray that blocks the absorption of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has completely protected ferrets it was tested on, according to a small study released on Thursday by an international team of scientists. The study, which was limited to animals and has not yet been peer-reviewed, was assessed by several health experts at the request of The New York Times.
If the spray, which the scientists described as nontoxic and stable, is proved to work in humans, it could provide a new way of fighting the pandemic. A daily spritz up the nose would act like a vaccine.
“Having something new that works against the coronavirus is exciting,” said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, the chairman of immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved in the study. “I could imagine this being part of the arsenal.”
The work has been underway for months by scientists from Columbia University Medical Center in New York, Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands and Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Columbia University Medical Center.
The team would require additional funding to pursue clinical trials in humans. Dr. Anne Moscona, a pediatrician and microbiologist at Columbia and co-author of the study, said they had applied for a patent on the product, and she hoped Columbia University would approach the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed or large pharmaceutical companies that are seeking new ways to combat the coronavirus.
The spray attacks the virus directly. It contains a lipopeptide, a cholesterol particle linked to a chain of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. This particular lipopeptide exactly matches a stretch of amino acids in the spike protein of the virus, which the pathogen uses to attach to a human airway or lung cell.Refer someone to The Times.
They’ll enjoy our special rate of $1 a week.
Before a virus can inject its RNA into a cell, the spike must effectively unzip, exposing two chains of amino acids, in order to fuse to the cell wall. As the spike zips back up to complete the process, the lipopeptide in the spray inserts itself, latching on to one of the spike’s amino acid chains and preventing the virus from attaching.
“It is like you are zipping a zipper but you put another zipper inside, so the two sides cannot meet,” said Matteo Porotto, a microbiologist at Columbia University and one of the paper’s authors.
The work was described in a paper posted to the preprint server bioRxiv Thursday morning, and has been submitted to the journal Science for peer review.
Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said the therapy looked “really promising.”
“What I’d like to know now is how easy it is to scale production,” he said.
In the study, the spray was given to six ferrets, which were then divided into pairs and placed in three cages. Into each cage also went two ferrets that had been given a placebo spray and one ferret that had been deliberately infected with SARS-CoV-2 a day or two earlier.
Ferrets are used by scientists studying flu, SARS and other respiratory diseases because they can catch viruses through the nose much as humans do, although they also infect each other by contact with feces or by scratching and biting.
After 24 hours together, none of the sprayed ferrets caught the disease; all the placebo-group ferrets did.
“Virus replication was completely blocked,” the authors wrote.
The protective spray attaches to cells in the nose and lungs and lasts about 24 hours, Dr. Moscona said. “If it works this well in humans, you could sleep in a bed with someone infected or be with your infected kids and still be safe,” she said.
The amino acids come from a stretch of the spike protein in coronaviruses that rarely mutates. The scientists tested it against four different variants of the virus, including both the well-known “Wuhan” and “Italian” strains, and also against the coronaviruses that cause SARS and MERS.
In cell cultures, it protected completely against all strains of the pandemic virus, fairly well against SARS and partially against MERS.
The lipoprotein can be inexpensively produced as a freeze-dried white powder that does not need refrigeration, Dr. Moscona said. A doctor or pharmacist could mix the powder with sugar and water to produce a nasal spray.
Other labs have designed antibodies and “mini-proteins” that also block the SARS-CoV-2 virus from entering cells, but these are chemically more complex and may need to be stored in cold temperatures.
Dr. Moscona and Dr. Porotto have been collaborating on similar “fusion inhibitor” peptides for 15 years, they said in a conference call. They have developed some against measles, Nipah, parainfluenza and other viruses.
But those products aroused little commercial interest, Dr. Porotto said, because an effective measles vaccine already exists and because the deadly Nipah virus only turns up occasionally in faraway places like Bangladesh and Malaysia.
Monoclonal antibodies to the new coronavirus have been shown to prevent infection as well as treat it, but they are expensive to make, require refrigeration and must be injected. Australian scientists have tested a nasal spray against Covid-19 in ferrets, but it works by enhancing the immune system, not by targeting the virus directly.
Because lipopeptides can be shipped as a dry powder, they could be used even in rural areas in poor countries that lack refrigeration, Dr. Moscona said.
Dr. Moscona, a pediatrician who usually works on parainfluenza and other viruses that infect children, said she was most interested in getting the product to poor countries that may never have access to the monoclonal antibodies and mRNA vaccines that Americans may soon have. But she has little experience in that arena, she said.
“I’ve always been a basic scientist,” she said. “I’ve never done drug development or taken anything to the F.D.A. or anything like that.”
Donald G. McNeil Jr. is a science and health reporter specializing in plagues and pestilences. He covers diseases of the world’s poor and wider epidemics, including Covid-19, AIDS, Ebola, malaria, swine and bird flus and Zika.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
'They Had One Job and They Blew It': Progressives Fire Back as Centrist Democrats in House Blame Left for Election Failures
"Don't blame myself and others who are fighting for issues that matter to our communities," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
by
Jake Johnson, staff writer
[Pelosi must go! --vanishingmediator]
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/06/they-had-one-job-and-they-blew-it-progressives-fire-back-centrist-democrats-house
Reeling in the wake of a poor election performance that will likely leave House Democrats with a significantly smaller majority than expected next year, powerful Democratic leaders and rank-and-file centrist lawmakers used a caucus call Thursday to blame members of the party's left flank and their popular policy proposals for the disappointing outcome—a narrative progressives quickly rejected as an obvious and damaging fiction.
Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), a former CIA operations officer who is clinging to a 1.2% percentage point advantage over her Republican challenger, led the centrist charge during the heated two-hour call Thursday, attributing losses by moderate members to GOP attack ads tarring them as "socialists" and accusing them of wanting to "defund the police." The ads, according to Spanberger, were made possible by the rhetoric of progressive lawmakers.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) delivered a message similar to Spanberger's, warning on the private call that if "we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we're not going to win," despite Election Day exit polling showing that 72% of voters favor transitioning to a "government-run healthcare plan.""We need to not ever use the word 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again," Spanberger said, arguing that Democrats should watch Republican ads and adjust their messaging accordingly—advice that ignores the GOP's long record of labeling Democrats, including Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and other centrists like Barack Obama, as socialists regardless of how stridently they disavow the label.
Progressives during the caucus call—and subsequently on social media—forcefully pushed back against the notion that the Democratic Party's energetic left flank is responsible for losses by centrists who did not run on any of the policy proposals they are now criticizing.
Angered by the attacks on progressive policies during the Thursday call, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—a self-described democratic socialist who, along with other members of "the Squad," easily won reelection Tuesday—reportedly accused her centrist colleagues of "only being interested in appealing to white people in suburbia," neglecting policies that would drive turnout among and disproportionately benefit people of color.
"Don't blame myself and others who are fighting for issues that matter to our communities," said Tlaib.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also spoke out against the centrist finger-pointing, warning that House Democrats could see even bigger losses in 2022 and 2024 if they don't engage voters motivated by ambitious progressive policy platforms.
"Don't be so quick to blame the progressive members who have been responsible for energizing these groups who will ultimately save the day for the race for the White House," said Jayapal.
Longstanding ideological tensions between House Democrats' dominant moderate faction and the smaller but growing progressive wing are exploding to the surface after the party fell far short of expectations in Tuesday's highly anticipated election, likely losing seats in the chamber after Democratic leaders predicted major gains.
"Look at the toss-up seats on the Cook Political Report," one anonymous Democratic lawmaker told HuffPost. "I'm not sure we won a single fucking one.""Democrats expected to pick up multiple seats in Texas. Instead, it looks like Democrats may lose a seat there," HuffPost's Matt Fuller reported Thursday. "They expected to pick off seats in New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey, Virginia, even GOP strongholds like Arkansas and Missouri. But it looks like Republicans may have held Democrats off at every turn."
Alexandra Rojas, executive director of progressive advocacy group Justice Democrats, said House Democrats have only themselves to blame for the election results after one lawmaker singled out the grassroots progressive organization for criticizing centrist members.
"They had one job and they blew it," Rojas told the Washington Post. "We need a Democratic Party that stands for something more than just being anti-Trump."
Frustrations with House Democrats' abysmal performance—which one unnamed Democratic lawmaker bluntly called a "dumpster fire"—were compounded by the party's worse-than-expected showing in Senate races it hoped to win. Barring Democratic victories in both Senate run-offs in Georgia, Republicans are on track to retain control of the chamber.
In response to the blame being hurled at progressives, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) argued in a series of tweets Friday that moderate House Democrats who lost or are at risk of losing their seats should take a closer look at the shortcomings of their own campaigns instead of baselessly claiming left-wing lawmakers are culpable.
"There are folks running around on TV blaming progressivism for Dem underperformance. I was curious, so I decided to open the hood on struggling campaigns of candidates who are blaming progressives for their problems," said the New York Democrat. "Almost all had awful execution on digital. During a pandemic. Underinvestment across the board."
"Ideology plus messaging are the spicy convos a lot of people jump to but sometimes it's about execution and technical capacity," Ocasio-Cortez continued. "Finger-pointing is not gonna help. There's real, workable, and productive paths here if the party is open to us. After all, I got here by beating a Dem who outspent me 10-1 who I knew had bad polling."
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