AUSTERITY KILLS
Hospitals gird for coronavirus surge after years of cutbacks

By Dan Goldberg and Rachel Roubein,Politico•March 10, 2020


Hospitals for years have faced economic pressures to cut costs and reduce in-patient treatments as the nation tried to slow down health spending.

Now the hospital industry is facing a reckoning.

With a potential surge of coronavirus patients, there may not be enough beds, equipment and staff to handle an epidemic. Executives face tough decisions about who could have to be isolated and, in some cases, need oxygen, ventilators and protective gear that’s already in short supply.

“There are parts of the health care system that can be and should be lean but there are public health preparedness efforts that need to be ongoing.” said Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
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What brought this on? The industry has gone through long-term consolidation that’s put a premium on shortening patient stays, moving care outside the hospital to cheaper settings and investing in high-tech diagnostic tools and big-ticket items like proton beam treatments for cancer. Infectious disease prevention, emergency preparedness and primary care made do with less.

But with some projections of millions of hospital admissions in a full-blown coronavirus pandemic, the industry is forced to consider pivoting back to a hospital-centric, all-hands-on-deck approach featuring sick patients who may stay for weeks, labor intensive staffing and anything but a check in-check out mentality.

The industry says it's up to the challenge and readying contingency plans. Some operators, for instance, are trying to boost telehealth capabilities in an effort to keep potentially infected people who aren't very sick away from the most vulnerable patients — and to keep beds open for those who need in-person treatment.

But the outbreak is reinforcing the idea that preparedness is an ongoing process.

Over the last decade, the federal government, the nation’s largest insurer, has rewarded hospitals that reduced the number of patients who walked through the doors. One of the only pieces of Obamacare with broad bipartisan support is the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Innovation Center, which tries to provide better care at lower costs in part by pushing people into outpatient settings.

In 2015, scientists from HHS, CDC and the FDA warned that resources would be squeezed during a large scale public health emergency.

Since then the number of staffed beds in the United States has declined, dozens of hospitals in rural communities across the country have closed and President Trump, in his most recent budget, called for an $18 million cut to the hospital preparedness program.

Now that the coronavirus has arrived and is quickly spreading, hospitals and local public health officers are scrambling to keep up — and worried about a prolonged outbreak. At Providence St. Joseph Health, a multistate hospital system headquartered in Washington state, officials have created a way to monitor patients’ vitals at home.

In Island County, Wash., northwest of Seattle, small hospitals are coordinating with other regional facilities in case they need to transfer coronavirus patients. Other hospitals in the state, which has already seen 22 deaths, are conserving respirators, by scaling back on drills in which health care workers practice wearing them.

Across the country, NYU Langone in New York is trying to protect its staff and preserve gear by using telemedicine in the emergency room to diagnose patients who are suspected of having the virus.

“We remove the infection risk and a physician is still evaluating the patient,” said Paul Testa, the system's chief medical information officer.

In California, the public health department received a federal signoff to dip into its emergency stockpile of 21 million face masks for medical providers.

The hospitals have already worked through a bad flu season, which has some worried that there may not be enough beds should the coronavirus cases surge, as some models predict.

“This is not going to be a financial issue,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “If anything … it will be a capacity issue, the number of beds.”

There are no signs the health system is cracking under pressure, but that may change depending on the severity and duration of the epidemic.

“Surge capacity remains something that is not able to be sustained for extended periods of time,” Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois health department, told the House Homeland Security Committee last week.

Hospital industry executives contend that they routinely drill for complex public health cases.

“This is not an isolated event. Every discussion I’ve had with my hospital people is that they have vast experience from H1N1, to SARs, to MERS,” said Chip Kahn, president and CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals. “They’re in a heavy prep mode, and they feel pretty confident that they’re doing the drilling now and the prep now.”

But hospitals have reached breaking points. Just two years ago, during flu season, a hospital in Texas had to turn patients away, while some in California set up tents in the parking lot.

The coronavirus, which has already infected more than 100,000 people around the world and 600 in the United States, has the potential to be much worse.

“Given that we’ve had a month or more of prep time, we have created contingency plans and will have additional beds available … but the actual ICU beds and ventilators are somewhat fixed and those numbers are what they are,” said Mark Mulligan, director of NYU Langone Health’s division of infectious diseases and immunology.

The Trump administration continues to hold regular calls and meetings with health care providers, according to a spokesperson for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. Hospitals have shared concerns “about their readiness for a possible widespread outbreak with regard to personal protective equipment, infection prevention and control, diagnostic testing availability, and other medical supply shortages,” the spokesperson said.

Vice President Mike Pence announced the administration is working with a manufacturer to make 35 million more masks at a time when 86 percent of hospitals are concerned about the supply of personal protective gear, according to a recent survey of 300 hospitals. The administration also approved the use of masks in industrial jobs, like construction, for doctors and intends to buy 500 million more over the next 18 months.

But it's still unclear how quickly those will come and whether they’ll be enough.

“Every hospital has limited, finite ability to surge,” said NYU Langone's Mulligan.

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There’s every reason to be skeptical of Mike Pence’s Coronavirus prayer circle



By Chrissy Stroop, Religion Dispatches

Published March 3, 2020
This article was paid for by reader donations to Raw Story Investigates.

A plague is upon us. And white evangelicals, naturally, are on the scene—theologizing the COVID-19 outbreak, praying, scolding, and generally being counterproductive. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s response is being led by one of them—Vice President Mike Pence, a fellow Hoosier and one who, as governor of Indiana, allowed an HIV outbreak to blow up because his Christian extremist ideology prevented him from adopting sensible policy. There are reasons I’ve left that state.

If you find that Pence’s record of failing to pray disease away doesn’t inspire confidence in his ability to tackle coronavirus, you’ll most likely find the derision aimed at a picture of Pence and his (decidedly white and male) team in prayer that’s been going around perfectly reasonable.
https://twitter.com/thomaschattwill/status/1234252762055090176?s=20

However, if you’re a white evangelical or evangelical-adjacent commentator or pastor with pretensions to respectability, your response might instead be to put out a tone-deaf take in defense of the picture. And then to take umbrage, naturally couched in the rhetoric of holier-than-thouness, when people inevitably point out that your tone-deaf take is tone-deaf.

It is precisely this scene that’s been playing out on religion Twitter since Monday. In addition to culture warriors Franklin Graham and Robert P. George, the charge was also led by none other than award-winning religion writer Jonathan Merritt who scolded those critical of the VP’s public response to the Coronavirus outbreak:

Criticize Mike Pence all you want for being inept in his strategy to dealing with this. But mocking him for praying—like 79% of Americans have done in the past 3 months—is why so many regular Americans despise wine-and-cheese liberals.  https://t.co/LCHG5MhFxg

— Jonathan Merritt (@JonathanMerritt) March 2, 2020

Graham and George are clear proponents of a “Christian nation,” but Merritt should know better. Did he pause to consider the broader context, one wonders, before tweeting that “mocking [Pence] for praying—like 79% of Americans have done in the past 3 months—is why so many regular Americans despise wine-and-cheese liberals”?

For starters, the Coronavirus Task Force is a U.S. government effort. Unless the prayer was entirely without reference to any specific religion—and I’d be happy to take bets on whether or not a Mike Pence prayer was Christian—it is utterly inappropriate. I mean, does anyone seriously think that Graham and George defended Pence assuming that it wasn’t an explicitly Christian prayer?

Also, putting aside the fact that this godless liberal can only afford inexpensive wine, did Merritt stop to think about the relationship of the praying Pence image to the constant barrage of Christian nationalist imagery put out by the Trump regime, which might help explain the negative reaction?

Did he ask himself whether his use of the term “regular American” might not play directly into the nationalist Christian supremacism that’s fueling the destruction of American democracy, such as it was? Or that words like “regular,” “real,” and “normal,” in this context are often code for “conservative white Christians”?

Might Merritt have devoted a thought or two to the possibility that American criticism of “thoughts and prayers” responses to real-world problems have everything to do with the fact that right-wing Christians—white evangelicals above all—constitute the one demographic that stands in the way of us seriously addressing our gun violence problem? As Daniel Schultz wrote on RD two years ago, in the wake of the Parkland shooting, in his defense of prayers, “Praying for victims of violence and injustice without being changed by their grief is shit.” In other words, people aren’t mocking Pence’s prayer circle because they’re praying, they’re mocking it because it reflects a history of substituting prayer for action in situations that require material actions that the prayer-givers are powerful enough to take.

Alas, we cannot know what’s in Jonathan Merritt’s heart. We can be pretty sure, however, that something similar is taking place in the heart of Brian Zahnd, Christian author and head pastor of the non-denominational Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, MO. In response to author and “recovering fundamentalist” Marc Alan Schelske’s rather muted tweet in defense of those who criticized the Pence prayer image, Zahnd put forth what he imagines is a “high road” tweet:


What Jesus forbids is for *me* to pray in public from the motive of being seen praying in public.
Jesus does not authorize me to pronounce judgment on the motives of others who pray in public.
Judging the motives for the spiritual practices of other people is a dangerous thing.
— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) March 2, 2020

While Merritt is a gay man and Zahnd has refused to state his views on same-sex marriage publicly, both certainly share considerable white male privilege, which might just have something to do with how skewed their perspective can be when it comes to an image of nearly all white men more than likely engaging in Christian prayer as part of a U.S. government task force.

Zahnd has a curious understanding of what it means to be inclusive, to put it generously. The man, whose Word of Life church is non-affirming in LGBTQ policy and doesn’t disclose its policy on the inclusion of women in leadership, once tweeted with evident pride that his congregation, in its “culture of kindness,” included both ICE officers and undocumented immigrants, thus putting the latter immediately at risk for his moment of performative kumbaya.

I pastor a church, not a Twitter following. A real real church in Missouri…for 37 years. We have all kinds of people—from newborn to 99, Trumpers and progressives, ICE officers and undocumented immigrants (for real). What we have in common is JESUS…and a culture of kindness.
— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) November 22, 2018

I no longer have ICE officers in my church.
— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) June 23, 2019

In fairness, Zahnd has called for humane treatment of detained refugees and asylum seekers:

One ounce of Jesus tells you that children held in detention camps lacking basic hygiene—no matter what the reason—is an egregious evil. I know this, you know this, and @Franklin_Graham knows this.

So I call upon @SamaritansPurse to respond to this humanitarian crisis. #Retweet https://t.co/Xla4vmQgZA
— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) June 23, 2019

Nevertheless, it’s unsurprising that Zahnd came to Merritt’s (and, more or less, Pence’s) defense in the unfolding Twitter storm. It may be that pushback on this inspired Zahnd to later tweet a cryptic comment on how “the satan” seeks to divide us:

Us vs. Them is what the satan does.

And when you absolutely know you are on the right side of the issue (and you really on right side!), that’s when the satanic temptation to operate from a hateful Us vs. Them stance is most seductive.

Us vs. Them is NEVER the Jesus way.
— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) March 2, 2020

The problem with Christians like Merritt and Zahnd who fancy themselves uniters is that their approach to “unity” is one that favors the already privileged at the expense of othered groups. Despite striving to be more inclusive than most conservative Christians, Merritt and Zahnd consistently call for those harmed by right-wing social politics and Christian nationalism to play nice with Christian nationalists, allowing their dignity and equality to be trampled on in the process.

Merritt and Zahnd are, to be sure, no Rick Wiles, the extreme anti-Semitic Christian TV host who recently declared that God would stop the coronavirus pandemic if China would convert to Christianity. Nor are they even Jason Seville, who in the face of the disaster wrote a self-aggrandizing piece for The Gospel Coalition on why he would be remaining in China, where he pastors a church.

Nevertheless, the Zahnds and Merritts of the world could do much better in helping America move past this era of empty “thoughts and prayers” if they would devote some of the former—and hell, perhaps even some of the latter—to the ways in which they’re still blinded to the realities of those Americans (and others) they don’t see as “regular.”

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In Mexico, here’s what a day without women looks like


Kevin Sieff, Gabriela Martínez WASHINGTON POST







MEXICO CITY —What does a country look like without women?

On Monday, in one of the world’s largest, busiest cities, it was a thought experiment that came to life, as women removed themselves from public view.

They didn’t go to offices, or restaurants or government buildings. They didn’t go to school. They didn’t ride in cars or buses or subways. For a day, they were gone.

Mexico has been shaken by an increase in femicides — women and girls killed for their gender — several of them particularly gruesome. In February, the body of 25-year-old Ingrid Escamilla was found skinned and disfigured. Then the body of 7-year-old Fátima Cecilia Aldrighett Antón, abducted outside her elementary school, was found naked in a plastic bag.

Those deaths invigorated this country’s long-standing women’s movement, which has clashed with successive governments that they say have done little to protect women. In recent weeks, protesters have marched outside the national palace; they scrawled the words “Femicide State” on its ornate doors. On Sunday, International Women’s Day, authorities estimate that at least 80,000 people marched through the center of the city.

But on Monday morning, after weeks of planning, women across Mexico protested by attempting to disappear completely. “On the 9th, No Woman Moves,” was one protest mantra. Organizers called it “A Day Without Us.”

Offices in both foreign and Mexican-owned businesses were half-empty. Many, in cities across Mexico, declined to open. Large employers such as Walmart and the baked goods giant Bimbo gave female employees the day off. Women at Google, WeWork and Hooters stayed home.

The Mexico City branch of Coparmex, an influential employers’ association, said the economic losses in the capital alone could hit $300 million.

The movement grew so big that even the government — a target of the protest — agreed to participate. Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo said female employees who stayed away would not be penalized. Women at the Foreign Ministry left pieces of paper with statements on their empty seats.

“By the end of the day, ten women will have been murdered. Stop killing us,” read one.

Public school teachers left signs in their classrooms explaining their absence.

“I didn’t come because I don’t want my female students or my daughter to be abused, humiliated or beaten,” a sign at a Mexico City school read.

At Bosque de Niebla, a small cafe in the Coyoacan neighborhood of the capital, Cecilia Lynn Sueños told her all-female staff days in advance that the shop would shut down Monday.

“The protest is an attempt to make visible the work of women and to unite behind the feminist demands of today,” Sueños said. She said it was partly aimed at the government — “because they should be the ones to ensure that laws really do protect the human rights of women.”

She and her employees would devote the day to reading about and discussing feminism, she said. She would pay them for a normal day of work.

Other women said they supported the protest, but couldn’t participate themselves — they weren’t offered the option of staying home with pay.

“I work because I need to pay rent,” said Nadia Iglesias, who plays a barrel organ near the city center. “I need to pay for my kids’ school.”

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday that he supported the protest. But he also suggested that the women’s movement harbored elements hostile to his presidency.

“This movement has various aspects,” he said during his morning news conference. “It’s a movement of women who legitimately fight for their rights and against violence, against femicides. But there is another part that is against us, and what they want is for the government to fail.”

He has said rising gender-based violence does not reflect the failings of his government, but rather a deepening “social decomposition” produced by previous Mexican leaders. He has blamed femicides on neoliberal values, and has expressed fatigue at addressing the issue publicly.

On Monday, he called some of the women “conservatives disguised as feminists,” and said they were hijacking the issue to destroy his government.

That response has left many women in Mexico unsatisfied. Some have been outspoken in their anger toward López Obrador.

“The president has been provoking us with his indifference, with his comments,” said Guadalupe Loaeza, a well-known Mexican writer and journalist. “He does not grasp that this is about feminism.” He misrepresents it, distorts it by saying that it is conservatism.”

Loaeza, too, stayed home.

“My husband already made me breakfast,” she said. “I am not going out. He already went out to buy food. He is going to take care of everything today.”

kevin.sieff@washpost.com

‘We’re going to have more deaths’: Influenza kills more people than the coronavirus so everyone is overreacting, right? Wrong — and here’s why

President Trump tweeted Monday that thousands die of the flu every year, and suggested that life should go on as usual — not so fast, experts say


Some cite influenza as a reason not to be worried about COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, but health professionals say that comparison misses some very important points. MarketWatch photo illustration/iStockphoto

Coronavirus. It’s just like the flu, isn’t it?

Hundreds of thousands of people die of the flu every year, and people need to calm down, some say. Everyone should wash their hands for 20 seconds, elbow bump, stop buying face masks because they don’t protect against the virus, note that airplane air is filtered 20 to 30 times an hour, avoid cruise ships, and just relax — right?

That appears to be the accumulated advice of exasperated Americans on Twitter and Facebook FB, -6.40% in recent days who despair at the long lines at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods AMZN, -5.28% (where people apparently have been stocking up on oat milk) and the panic buying and empty shelves at Costco COST, -3.00%. “Toilet paper is golden in an apocalypse,” one customer told MYNorthwest.com.

‘This is additive, not in place of. Yes, the flu kills thousands of people every year, but we’re going to have more deaths.’— Amesh Adalja, Infectious Diseases Society of America

Studies, however, suggest the differences between the flu and coronavirus are more nuanced than some people suggest. In fact, health professionals point out important distinctions between the COVID-19 illness and other viral sicknesses like the flu. For a start, there is no vaccine for COVID-19 and it could take many months or years to get one to market. What’s worse, doctors fear the virus will mutate.

Why? The first known person was reported to have contracted the virus on Dec. 1 in China. Today, it’s spread to nearly 100 countries. Experts advise changing your behavior to limit its spread. Public officials in New York have said people should avoid taking mass transit, if possible. Italy has effectively quarantined its entire population. Israel has closed its land borders with Egypt and Syria.

But some government representatives have urged people not to overreact, and compared COVID-19 to the flue. Ben Carson, a cabinet secretary and a former neurosurgeon, appearing on an ABC DIS, -9.47% morning new program on Sunday, said, “This virus is like other viruses. It should be treated the same way. ... We have flu seasons that come up frequently.”

President Trump echoed the sentiments of his secretary of housing and urban development on Twitter TWTR, -2.98% on Monday, noting that “last year 37,000 Americans died” from the flu: “Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on.”

“It’s a little simple to think the novel coronavirus is just like flu,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the John Hopkins Center for Health Security and a spokesman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told MarketWatch. “We don’t want another flu. This is additive, not in place of. Yes, the flu kills thousands of people every year, but we’re going to have more deaths.”

Recommended:Will coronavirus spread? What we can learn from the misinformation during those critical, early days in China

There are reported to be some 1 billion influenza infections worldwide each year, with up to 45 million cases in the U.S. per year, tens of thousands of U.S. deaths, and 291,000 to 646,000 deaths worldwide. Seasonal flu has a fatality rate of less than 1%; Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently said the figure is closer to 0.1%.

Influenza and COVID-19 come from different virus families. COVID-19, also called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV-2, is brand new. Influenza has likely been around for more than 2,000 years. Scientists say the “novel influenza A viruses” in humans lead to a pandemic approximately once every 40 years. But, again, flu vaccines exist.

Flu has likely been around for 2,000 years. This coronavirus is 3 months old.

“The flu has been with us since the birth of modern medicine,” said Adalja.

Hippocrates, the Greek physician who was born around 460 BC, mentioned what we now know as the modern influenza virus in his writings, some historians say. He called it the “fever of Perinthus” or the “cough of Perinthus.” Others have debated whether this is flu or some other illness, or a combination of illnesses.

“In the years 1173 and 1500, two other influenza outbreaks were described, though in scant detail. The name ‘influenza’ originated in the 15th century in Italy, from an epidemic attributed to the ‘influence of the stars,’” which, according to historical documents, “raged across Europe and perhaps in Asia and Africa,” a 2016 paper in the Journal of Preventive Medicine and Hygeine reported.

“It seems that influenza also reached the Americas. Scholars and historians debate whether influenza was already present in the New World or whether it was carried by contaminated pigs transported on ships,” it added. “Some Aztec texts speak of a ’pestilential catarrh’ outbreak in 1450-1456 in an area now corresponding to Mexico, but these manuscripts are difficult to interpret correctly and this hypothesis seems controversial.”

There is an advantage to coming down with a virus that has been around for hundreds, if not a couple of thousand, years. We typically have more natural defenses to fight it. “There is population immunity to many strains of the flu,” said Adalja. “There are four other strains of the coronavirus, but the attack rate of this virus is relatively high as there is no immunity to it.”

To put that in perspective: In 2017–18, the worst flu season on record in the U.S. outside of a pandemic, approximately 80,000 Americans died. The 4 other coronavirus strains that already exist are responsible for around 25% of our common colds, Adalja added. “But it doesn’t seem like there is cross-immunity with this coronavirus as there are with the other coronaviruses.”

“While both the flu and COVID-19 may be transmitted in similar ways, there is also a possible difference: COVID-19 might be spread through airborne transmission, meaning that tiny droplets remaining in the air could cause disease in others even after the ill person is no longer near,” Lisa Maragakis, senior director of infection prevention at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, wrote.

Of course, there are similarities between influenza and COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Both viruses are untreatable with antibiotics, and they have almost identical symptoms — fever, coughing, night sweats, aching bones, tiredness and, in more severe cases of both viruses, nausea and even diarrhea. They can be spread by touching your face, coughing and sneezing.

Also see:U.S. State Department warns passengers NOT to go on cruises — says there’s ‘increased risk of infection’ on cruise ships


Neither the flu nor COVID-19 viruses is treatable with antibiotics, and the two illnesses have roughly identical symptoms. MarketWatch photo illustration/iStockphoto

Worldwide, there were 113,605 COVID-19 cases and 4,012 deaths as of Monday evening, according to data published by the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering. In the U.S., 26 people have died, and there are approximately 605 confirmed cases. It has spread to nearly 100 countries in just over three months.

While estimates of coronavirus fatality rates vary, they remain far higher than those for the flu. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, recently said that COVID-19 has a fatality rate of 3.4%. That’s more than previous estimates of between 1.4% and 2%, although some observers say his estimates were skewed by a higher death rate in China.

Also see:Trump disputes WHO’s coronavirus fatality rate: ‘3.4% is really a false number — now, this is just my hunch’

‘Because there’s no proven therapy or vaccine, as coronavirus spreads it threatens to put a much greater burden on health systems than flu does.’— Antigone Barton, ScienceSpeaks

COVID-19 rates may fall closer to those of the flu, assuming many more people are infected. JAMA released this paper analyzing data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention on 72,314 COVID-19 cases in mainland China last month, the largest such sample of this kind. The sample’s overall case-fatality rate was 2.3%, in line with the earlier estimates.

Fatality rates varied dramatically depending on the age of the individual. No deaths occurred in those 9 and younger, but cases in those aged 70 to 79 carried an 8% fatality rate, and those aged 80 years and older had a fatality rate of 14.8%. The rate was 49% among critical cases, and elevated among those with pre-existing conditions, to between 5.6% and 10.3%, depending on the condition.

Other differences between coronavirus and flu lie in what we don’t know. Adults with the flu, which has an average incubation period of two days, can infect others 24 hours before symptoms develop and 5 to 7 days after becoming sick. Novel coronavirus has a median incubation period of 5.1 days, longer than that other human coronaviruses (3 days) that cause the common cold.

Coronavirus appears to be transmitted with ease to around 2.3 people by each person infected in the community and those who are asymptomatic, said Antigone Barton, editor of ScienceSpeaks. “Because there’s no proven therapy or vaccine; as coronavirus spreads, it threatens to put a much greater burden on health systems than flu does, and greater than most or many are prepared for.”

How COVID-19 is transmitted

GOOD NEWS
Canada introduces bill to ban 'conversion therapy'
The Canadian government on Monday announced a bill to ban so-called "conversion therapy," which tries to change the sexual orientation of young LGBT people.

© Ian Willms Canada plans bill to ban gay "conversion therapy", including prohibiting subjecting a minor to the practice, either in Canada or abroad

The bill would create five new offenses in the Canadian criminal code, including prohibiting subjecting a minor to the practice, either in Canada or abroad.

An adult would also not be able to undergo conversion therapy against his or her will, and no one would be allowed to profit from or advertise it.

If the bill passes, Canada's laws on conversion therapy would become some of the "most progressive and comprehensive in the world," David Lametti, the minister of justice, told reporters while presenting the bill to parliament.

Two adults who had been forced to undergo conversion therapy in childhood testified on about their experiences.

"I'm a survivor of conversion therapy," said Erika, a trans woman.

"My body is a prison because of what my conversion therapist did to me, and I live with that every day," she said in a vehement denunciation of the practice.

The bill's adoption by parliament appears all but assured, even though Justin Trudeau's Liberal government is the minority in the House of Commons. The left-wing New Democratic Party has already announced it intends to back the bill.

The bill states that conversion therapy causes harm not only to the victims but also to society, particularly because the practice is founded on and helps spread myths and stereotypes about sexual orientation and gender identity, including the myth that sexual orientation and gender identity can and should be changed.

The law would define conversion therapy as "any service, practice or treatment designed to change a person's sexual orientation to heterosexual, gender identity to one that matches the sex assigned at birth, or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviors."

According to a recent official survey, 47,000 Canadian men who identify as part of a minority sexuality group had been subjected to conversion therapy.

The preventable death of an asylum seeker in a solitary cell

CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

By NOMAAN MERCHANT, Associated Press



In this Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2020 photo, Yarelis Gutierrez Barrios holds up a cell phone photo at her home in Tampa, Fla., of herself with her partner Roylan Hernandez Diaz, a Cuban asylum seeker who hanged himself in a Louisiana prison. An Associated Press investigation into Hernandez’s death last October found neglect and apparent violations of government policies by jailers under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara) 4 SLIDES © Provided by Associated Press


Roylan Hernandez Diaz’s long journey ended inside a white-walled cell in the solitary confinement wing of a Louisiana prison.

Nearby were the last of his belongings: a tube of toothpaste, a few foam cups, and a sheet of paper explaining how he could request his release from immigration detention. He had already been denied three times.

The Cuban man had been placed in solitary six days earlier because he told his jailers he would refuse all meals to protest his detention. The jailers put him there even after medical staff had referred him for mental health treatment three times and documented an intestinal disorder that caused him excruciating pain.

And for at least an hour before he was found to have hanged himself, no one had opened the door to check whether he was alive.

His death might have been prevented. An Associated Press investigation into Hernandez’s death last October found neglect and apparent violations of government policies by jailers under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at a time when detention of migrants has reached record levels and new questions have arisen about the U.S. government’s treatment of people seeking refuge.

ICE requires migrants detained in solitary confinement to be visually observed every 30 minutes. Surveillance video shows a jail guard walking past Hernandez’s cell twice in the hour before he was found, writing in a binder stored on the wall next to his cell door. She doesn’t lift the flap over the cell door window or try to look inside. The last person to look in the window was an unidentified jail employee, 40 minutes before Hernandez was found.

A person who works at the jail and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity says the jail later discovered Hernandez couldn’t be seen from the window.

“I think they let him die,” said Yarelis Gutierrez Barrios, his partner.

Hernandez spent most of his 43 years rebelling against Cuba's Communist government and spent years traveling South and Central America with Gutierrez before arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in May 2019.

After presenting himself legally at a border bridge in El Paso, Hernandez was taken into custody and eventually transferred to the Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana.

Looking to fill prisons emptied by criminal justice reform, rural Louisiana communities filled jail beds with asylum seekers and other migrants. At one point last year, Louisiana had about 8,000 migrants in detention, second only to Texas and up from about 2,000 migrants at the end of the Obama administration.

Louisiana also has become notorious for the broad denial of parole to migrants, particularly large populations of Cubans, Venezuelans, and people from South Asia. A federal judge in September ruled that ICE’s New Orleans field office was violating the agency’s own guidelines by failing to give each migrant a case-by-case determination of whether they could be released

.

© Provided by Associated Press In this Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2020 photo, Yarelis Gutierrez Barrios poses for a photo at her home in Tampa, Fla. Her partner Roylan Hernandez Diaz, a Cuban asylum seeker, hanged himself in a Louisiana prison last October. An Associated Press investigation into Hernandez’s death found neglect and apparent violations of government policies by jailers under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)

Hernandez had irritable bowel syndrome. People who knew him remember seeing him in constant pain. The syndrome also has been associated with anxiety and depression.

He was placed in solitary confinement for threatening a hunger strike after being denied parole and told by a judge that he would have to wait months longer to press his asylum case.

The interior of the cell where Hernandez was held when he died did not have video surveillance, according to the Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office, the local law enforcement agency called to investigate soon after he was found dead.

But the sheriff’s office obtained video from the hallway outside his cell that captures the last hour before his body was found. This is what it shows:

--1:19 p.m.: A guard walks up to Hernandez’s door. She takes a binder from the wall next to the door, writes in it, then puts the binder back on the wall. She never looks into the window of Hernandez’s cell door.

--1:26: A man in street clothes walking by the cell stops to open the flap over the cell door window and looks inside. The sheriff’s office says the man was a jail employee but doesn’t have his name in its records.

--1:54: The female guard comes back. Again, she takes the binder, writes in it, and puts the binder back without looking into the cell.

--2:04: Three staff members and what appears to be a jail trusty walk past the cell, filling most of the hallway. Going around the small crowd, a jail captain walks closer to the wall and comes next to Hernandez’s cell door. The captain, identified by the sheriff’s office as Gerald Hardwell, later told investigators he had noticed a “strong odor” emanating from the cell.

He had discovered that Hernandez hanged himself with a bed sheet tied to the post of his bunk bed.

Photos taken of his body show that Hernandez may have been dead for several hours before he was found, based on how the blood had pooled in his hands, according to an analysis done at AP’s request by Dr. Nizam Peerwani, the medical examiner for Fort Worth, Texas, and a forensic expert with the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights.

ICE declined to answer most questions for this story. Spokesman Bryan Cox said ICE “holds its personnel, including contractors, to the highest standards of professional and ethical behavior.”
Scott Sutterfield, a development executive for LaSalle Corrections, the prison company that runs Richwood, declined to answer any questions “due to pending litigation.” “I can say that LaSalle Corrections is firmly committed to the health and welfare of all those in our custody,” Sutterfield said.

Aside from Yarelis Gutierrez, Hernandez left behind two daughters and a son, as well as his mother and father.

When he left home for the last time, his family knew he hoped to get to America with the intention of making money to support them. Now, they have many questions about his death: How someone so strong in his convictions could have taken his own life? What happened to him in the jail, and why?

“He had struggled to get to this country, because he loved this country, he loved it with all his life,” Gutierrez said. “He gave his life for this country.”

22-year-old Guatemalan asylum-seeker dies in ICE custody

CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY


A 22-year-old asylum-seeker from Guatemala detained by U.S. immigration authorities died at a Texas hospital Sunday, becoming the eighth immigrant to die in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in fiscal year 2020. Maria Celéste Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez, whose death was first reported by BuzzFeed News, had been hospitalized since February 18.

According to officials, Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez died of "autoimmune hepatitis, complicated by septic shock and acute liver failure" at a hospital in Fort Worth.


Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez had family in the U.S. and passed her credible fear interview, the first step for migrants to request humanitarian protection in the U.S. Traditionally, these factors have allowed migrants with no criminal records to continue their immigration proceedings outside of a detention center, but the young Guatemalan woman was in U.S. immigration custody for more than six months.

Since fiscal year 2020, which began last October, seven other immigrants have died in ICE custody. With Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez's death, there have now been as many deaths in fiscal year 2020 as there were in the entirety of fiscal year 2019. Like Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez, some of them, including a Cuban asylum-seeker who died by apparent suicide in October, were seeking humanitarian protection at the time of their death.

"ICE is firmly committed to the health and welfare of all those in its custody and is undertaking a comprehensive agency-wide review of this incident, as it does in all such cases," the agency said in a statement Monday.

Conditions at detention facilities used by ICE, which oversees the main component of the largest immigration detention system in the world, have come under severe scrutiny by immigration advocates and Democrats. They've accused the agency of not having adequate medical standards in its facilities and have called on officials to allow asylum-seekers who do not pose threats to public safety to fight their deportation outside of detention centers.

ICE has repeatedly maintained that deaths in the agency's custody "are exceedingly rare and occur at a fraction" of the national average.

According to ICE, Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez was first apprehended by Border Patrol in early September after she crossed the southern border without documents near Hidalgo, Texas. Two days later, she was transferred to ICE custody, which initially detained her at the El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondville, Texas.

In early October, Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez was given a notice to appear before an immigration judge after she proved to an asylum officer that her fear of returning to Guatemala was credible. Sometime before February, Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez was transferred to a detention center in Oklahoma, according to Guatemala's Foreign Ministry.

Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez was hospitalized on February 7 and underwent gallbladder surgery two days later. She then returned to the detention center in Oklahoma. On February 13, she was transferred to the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, according to ICE.

On February 18, ICE took Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez to a hospital near the detention center. The Guatemalan Foreign Ministry said this occurred because she was suffering from abdominal pain. Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez remained there until February 28, when she was transported to the Forth Worth hospital, where she died on Sunday.

Ochoa Yoc de Ramírez's family in Guatemala has requested help from the government there to repatriate her remains.

CBS

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Jury hung in case of CIA coder accused of cyberweapon leak


AFP

A New York federal judge declared a mistrial Monday after a jury failed to convict a former CIA programmer accused of passing the agency's most valuable hacking tools to WikiLeaks, deeply hobbling its online spying operations.© SAUL LOEB The 2017 leak of the CIA's cyberwar tools was the most damaging leak ever for the US syp group

The government had said that Joshua Schulte gave the anti-secrecy group the "Vault 7" collection of hacking tools, malware, viruses, trojans, and "zero day" exploits which comprised the CIA's most valuable tools for tapping into adversaries' computers.


The March 2017 breach was the largest-ever leak of classified information at the US spy agency, allowing hackers in other countries, government and non-government alike, to use the tools for criminal activity, and helping the CIA's targets close vulnerabilities.

But in an embarrassing defeat for the Justice Department, after a four-week trial the jury remained divided on whether there was proof that Schulte had in fact provided the files to WikiLeaks, and failed to convict him on the eight most serious charges in the case.

They did find him guilty on lesser charges of lying to the FBI and contempt of court.

Schulte was arrested in August 2017 and charged initially with multiple counts of possessing child pornography on his computer, with no suggestion that there was any national security issue involved.

Ten months later the Justice Department filed additional charges accusing him of stealing and transmitting classified "national defense information" to give it to WikiLeaks.

Schulte had already left the CIA when WikiLeaks published the information in March 2017, but testimony indicated that investigators quickly focused on him as the prime suspect.

But defense lawyers appeared successful, based on questions submitted by the jurors, in raising doubt over whether the government had proof it was Schulte who stole and transmitted the materials to WikiLeaks.

The judge, Paul Crotty, set a new conference for both sides in the case for March 26, in which the government could demand a new trial.

Trump Jr denies profiting his from father's presidency as he challenges Hunter Biden to debate him 
ROFLMAO
With the presidential election looming ever closer the prospect of Donald Trump and Joe Biden locking horns is looking more and more likely, should the Democrat overcome Bernie Sanders in what remains of the race.

If Biden and Trump do end up going head-to-head then it is sure to be an interesting affair as both men have shown a tendency to fly loose with the facts and have a unique grasp on the English language.

While most eyes are likely to be on the men vying for the White House, the more interesting conflict might be between their sons and who has benefitted the most from having their very famous surname.

This isn’t a prediction but something that Donald Trump Jr actually wants to happen. While speaking to Jim VandeHei, the co-founder of Axios on HBO, Trump Jr laid out a challenge to Hunter Biden about his overseas dealings, which were a big part of Trump’s impeachment trial.

"Listen, I think it's got to be a big part. I was an international business person before my father got into politics 

That's what we did. I'm not going to say I haven't benefited from my father's last name, just like Hunter Biden did. I'd be foolish to say that. But I haven't benefited from my father's taxpayer-funded office, OK? 

We stopped doing any new international business deals when my father won the presidency. So you know what would be great? I'll let you host it 

You moderate a debate between Hunter Biden and myself. Come on. Let's do it. No, no, seriously. We can go full transparency.

We show everything, and we can talk about all of the places where I'm supposedly grifting but Hunter Biden isn't. 

I would love to do it. As it relates to the grifting, they're saying we're profiting off of the presidency. Let's talk about it."

VandeHei then attempted to switch the conversation by asking if Trump Jr had profited from the fact that his father is the current president of the United States of America, which he, of course, denied.

Trump Jr said:
I don't know that I've profited off of the presidency.

VandeHei then pointed out that Trump Jr, who oversees the Trump Organisation with his brother Eric, has in many ways benefitted from his Dad's ascension to the oval office.

You have a bestselling book. You do paid speeches. Don’t you co-own the Trump Hotel?

Trump Jr tried to argue that he had done speeches for more than a decade and doesn't make any more money from them than he had before.

[I've] done paid speeches for over a decade. I do a lot. I don't even do the international ones anymore.

And again, if you looked at my tax returns, which maybe we could talk about in this debate.

When pressed if he would release his tax returns, a subject which has been a constant thorn in this side of his father, by saying that he would be more than happy to talk to Biden about who had profited the most from their father's public service.

I'd 100 percent debate him. Let's talk about who profited off of whose public service. Happy to do it. Let's make it happen.

HT The Hill

Donald Trump Jr. swears he’s not a grifter — even after the RNC and conservative groups bought out his book in bulk

A grifter is generally defined as someone “engages in petty or small-scale swindling.”

March 8, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris


In an interview with Axios, Donald Trump Jr. swore that he isn’t a grifter, a complaint often lodged at the president and his children for profiting off of President Donald Trump’s time in office.

“We can go full transparency, we show everything, and we can talk about all of the places where I am supposedly grifting, but Hunter Biden isn’t,” said the younger Trump.

Neither Don Jr. nor Hunter Biden is running for elected office. It’s unclear why the president’s son is trying to make the campaign an issue between the children of the politicians instead of the officials themselves. The last living Biden son has also never worked for his father’s company.

Don Jr.’s sister and brother-in-law are both loosely employed by the White House, which is generally seen as against nepotism laws. The president got around it by not paying them from the federal government.

It was revealed Thursday (March 5) that Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka would profit about $25 million to 50 million from the president’s tax bill, for a provision that benefited the Kushner development projects. After two years, Kushner said he would be happy to divest from the company. It comes only now that the profits are so high.

In the case of the president’s son, it was revealed that his recent book Triggered was purchased in bulk by the Republican Party and nine other conservative groups. As a result, it drove the pre-sales up, so it appeared on the New York Times Bestseller list. It’s unknown how many total copies of the book were bought out by conservative groups and how many individuals actually purchased the book.

A grifter is generally defined as someone “engages in petty or small-scale swindling.”

Axios reporter Jim VandeHei asked if the younger Trump meant he was willing to turn over his taxes.

“If we do it both, 100 percent,” Don Jr. said. “Let’s talk about who profited off of whose public service. Happy to do it. Let’s make it happen.”

It’s an odd pledge, given his father has refused to do the same and ultimately could make his father look bad because it appears that he’s hiding something when his own son is willing to publish his taxes.

See the clip below:

STD/STI FOUND AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

Dozens of kinds of chlamydiae discovered two miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean 

- the first time bacteria is found to be living without first infecting a host

Scientists exploring a hydrothermal vent in the Atlantic Ocean found chlamydia

They believe it's the first form of the bacteria capable of living outside a host 

The discovery was made halfway between Norway and Greenland

By MICHAEL THOMSEN FOR DAILYMAIL.COM 9 March 2020

In sediment two miles below the surface of the ocean, researchers have stumbled on a treasure trove of chlamydiae.

The discovery was made by a team of scientists from the Uppsala University and the University of Bergen, who had traveled to a region of the Mid-Atlantic Ocean to study the chemical composition of sediment on the ocean floor.

They made the discovery while analyzing samples near a hydrothermal vent named Loki’s Castle, halfway between Norway and Greenland on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.


A team of scientists discovered several new kinds of chlamydiae in the sediment around a hydrothermal vent in the Atlantic Ocean halfway between Norway and Greenland

‘The discovery of this expanded diversity in deep marine sediments was rather surprising, because we did not expect to find Chlamydiae in this type of environment,’ Thijs Ettema from Uppsala University, told Newsweek.

‘All previous studies have pointed out that Chlamydiae need a host organisms in order to survive, and these host organisms are absent in the marine sediments we sampled.’

‘Our work would represent the first indication that Chlamydiae are able to survive outside of a host organism.’


While chlamydia is most widely known as a sexually transmitted disease among humans, the bacteria also affects cows, chickens, sheep, pigs, and koalas.

The team still isn’t clear how to classify the new form of chlamydiae, but the samples collected so far point to the existence of dozens of new strains, and potentially even new species of the bacteria.

‘We found a wide diversity of new Chlamydiae, perhaps well over a hundred. It is a bit hard to pinpoint this number exactly, as the definition of 'a species' is rather difficult,’ Ettema said.

‘The discovered Chlamydia-related bacteria are only distantly related to the human pathogens.’

‘They share a common ancestry that dates back several hundred million years, and perhaps well over a billion years for some of the discovered lineages.’


Chlamydiae is a bacteria that infects humans, cows, sheep, koala, and chickens, but according to the team the new kinds discovered in the ocean are the first examples of the backteria capable of surviving independent of a host

While the newly discovered chlamydiae can live outside a host, unlike the kind that infects humans, the researchers have so far been unable to grow any of them in a laboratory setting.

This suggests they may still be dependent on the presence of other microbial life in the undersea sediment to thrive and survive the extreme pressure and lack of oxygen.

‘We have found that the group Chlamydiae is much more diverse that previously assumed, and they also have a more diverse lifestyle than previously thought—being able to live outside of a host organism,’ Ettema said.

‘Given their abundance in some of the samples we examined, these Chlamydiae might have a significant ecological impact on the environment they live in.’

WHAT IS CHLAMYDIA?

Chlamydia is a sexually-transmitted disease.

It stems from bacteria called chlamydia trachomatis. It is passed through contact, via vaginal, anal or oral sex.

If left untreated it can damage a woman's fallopian tubes and cause infertility. In very rare cases it can cause infertility in men too.

What are the symptoms?

The majority of people do not feel symptoms of chlamydia. Doctors recommend getting regular STD tests (urine test or swab) to detect it.

However, some do experience some side effects.

Symptoms in women:
Abnormal vaginal discharge
Burning feeling when you urinate
Pain in the eyes
Pain in the abdomen
Pain in the pelvis
Pain during sex
Vaginal bleeding

Symptoms in men:
Discharge from the penis
Burning feeling when you urinate
Pain and swelling in one or both testicles (rarely)

How is it treated?

The infection is easily treated with antibiotics.

Doctors typically prescribe oral antibiotics, usually azithromycin (Zithromax) or doxycycline