Northern Ireland sportswear factory 

scrubs up in virus fight

AFP / Paul FaithA sportswear factory in Northern Ireland is now producing scrubs for local operations of Britain's health service

As other factories fall silent due to the coronavirus, the din of production continues at O'Neills sportswear factory in Northern Ireland, where staff have pivoted to making scrubs and facemasks for besieged healthcare workers.

"You always feel proud of your product," business development manager Orla Ward told AFP.

"But this is just on another level because you really are getting it to the people that need it most at this really critical time."

AFP / Paul FaithRanks of the skilled machinist staff are separated from each other under 'social distancing' guidelines

Around 750 staff at the factory in Strabane, which makes kits and leisurewear primarily for Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) sports, were temporarily laid off as the COVID-19 crisis unfolded.

Teams and groups playing GAA sports -- such as hurling and Gaelic football -- began to postpone events and matches as the British and Irish governments restricted gatherings in a bid to stem infections.

"Our business was just basically drying up," Ward explained.

AFP / Paul FaithThe news has been a small mercy for the town of Strabane, where the factory is the biggest employer

"Over the period of basically two weeks our order book went from extremely busy to practically nothing whatsoever."

But with the factory switching to produce scrubs for local operations of Britain's National Health Service (NHS), 150 staff have been able to return to work.

The news has been a small mercy for the town of Strabane, where the factory is the biggest employer.

- 'Tsunami' of patients -

It has also had an effect on a national scale, boosting Britain's efforts as it prepares for a "tsunami" of new coronavirus patients.

Healthcare workers across Britain have complained of a lack of protective equipment for staff, who are at higher risk of contracting COVID-19.

AFP / Paul FaithHealthcare workers across Britain have complained of a lack of protective equipment for staff, who are at higher risk of contracting COVID-19

"The managing director had been speaking to people here in the local hospital and realised that they were in desperate need of scrubs," said Ward.

Ranks of the skilled machinist staff were back at their stations on Thursday, separated from each other under "social distancing" guidelines designed to slow the spread of the virus.

 

AFP / Paul FaithThe Strabane factory is currently working to meet an order of 5,000 scrubs

Surrounded by spools of vibrant thread and wearing masks made in the factory, they sewed the maroon fabrics which will soon be worn by frontline NHS staff.

Production began at the O'Neills Strabane location on Wednesday after the fabrics were dyed, given antibacterial treatment and shipped from Dublin -- where the firm is headquartered.

The Strabane factory is currently working to meet an order of 5,000 scrubs -- consisting of a set of trousers, a top and a mask.

"I think there's absolutely a great sense of pride that we can do this," said Ward.

"When you're faced with a challenge, look how quickly and how well you can step up to the plate and really help."

CANCON
Robbie Robertson on the Power of ‘The Weight’ During the Pandemic

The Band’s 1968 classic has found a new audience in the wake of the coronavirus, thanks to a globe-spanning cover. “It’s good medicine,” says Robertson

By PATRICK DOYLE  ROLLING STONE

In 1968, the Band recorded “The Weight,” a song full of images and characters that Robbie Robertson said he had been storing in his imagination for years. Robertson admits in his autobiography, Testimony, that he struggled to articulate to producer John Simon what the song was even about, but it’s become the Band’s most well-known classic, and it still echoes loudly today. Playing for Change, a group dedicated to “opening up how people see the world through the lens of music and art,” recently spent two years filming artists around the world, from Japan to Bahrain to Los Angeles, performing the song. Robertson takes part, and so does Ringo Starr. Web traffic for the video has surged in recent days as the world confronts the coronavirus, and it has been a top story on RollingStone.com.

We spoke to Robertson, who called from his home in L.A., about the video, how he’s been self-isolating, plus other projects, including his work on the next Martin Scorsese film, a Stage Fright box set, and his recent appearance at a Last Waltz tribute concert in Nashville late last year.


Once Were Brothers, a film about Robertson’s life directed by Daniel Rohr, hit theaters just as they were shutting down. Now, the film will be available online earlier than planned, streaming on Apple and Amazon on April 3rd.

How have you been spending your time hunkering down?

I’m writing volume two of my autobiography. I’m somewhat buried in that. I have some artwork as well that I have to sort out. And although everything’s been delayed, I’ve even started some early discovery and thinking of the music for Martin Scorsese’s next movie, Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s an American Indian story, so I’ve got a lot to do on this. And the rest of it, I guess, is just really kind of adapting and dealing with being on house arrest.

I wanted to ask about the Playing for Change cover of “The Weight” that you performed on. It has 6 million views, and it’s been a top story on our site for the past few days, even though it’s been out for several months. Why do you think the song is resonating right now?
The number of people that I know that have responded to this, and some people that I barely know that have come out of the woodwork … it’s almost like it’s good medicine. And it’s so suitable right now. I thought to my myself, “This is definitely the ultimate in global self-distancing.” This is a way to protect yourself from anything: playing music with people around the world. My son, Sebastian, was behind this. When he mentioned this to me, I was kind of like, “Oh, OK, if you want to do it, of course I’ll cooperate.” But I didn’t know what they were going to do. One day they said, “Will you come and play a little bit?” So I took an hour and went over, and then it slipped my mind. And then they sent me a rough cut of it, and I got chills. The unity that it conveys, not only here but around the world, that is such good medicine.

The people in it are just fantastic. Ringo is such a great sport to be part of this. And Ringo doesn’t like to be a part of anything. He’s like, “Peace and love. Don’t bother me.” And he did this, and he did it with such charm.

When it came out, there was a really nice response to it, but it’s just grown and grown. In the last week or something, it got a million more views on it. And people are sending me messages from Cambodia. I’m just delighted it’s serving a purpose today. This was an idea that I had to write this song many years ago. And so it’s such a blessing that something like this can make a contribution this many decades later. I couldn’t be happier.


Ringo’s drumming sounds like an old friend, the same way Levon Helm’s drumming felt. They’re maybe the two greatest drummers in rock & roll.

In their own way, you’re absolutely right. There was something that Levon did in a stripped-down, simple but complex kind of manner that other drummers couldn’t do. There was a thing about his playing that was so straight between the eyes, that you thought, “Oh, it’s just that.” And then when you go to do that, it doesn’t have that quality. One of the people that understood that better than anybody else was Ringo. And Ringo has that quality as well. When he plays with that group, there is no acrobatics. He’s not trying to do anything. He’s playing the song. He is really there in service of the song. And they both had that to such a beautiful extreme, and they never, ever sounded like session drummers.

It’s amazing this song can translate to places around the world, onto instruments that a lot of people here have never seen before.

I felt the same way. There’s a guy on a sitar! There’s a guy playing an oud, one of my favorite instruments. Those girls Larkin Poe did a song of mine, “Ophelia.” They’re in the video. Somebody sent me their version of my song “Ophelia” a while back. And they did a hell of a version of it. They’re from Tennessee or somewhere, I don’t know. Then I heard another track of theirs, and I thought “They’re really good.” And then they end up playing on this track. That made me feel good. And Lukas Nelson is terrific, an amazing musician. So anyway, I don’t know, it’s just pretty magical.



What does it feel like to have written that song? Do you feel like the person who wrote “The Weight,” or does it feel like it was around before you?

After I wrote it and we recorded it, it did have a sense to me of a timeless quality. Because it wasn’t obvious in the storytelling. It’s kind of lost in time in the most wonderful way. And when I heard this version of it, I thought, “This still sounds like that.” It doesn’t sound old. It just sounds like it’s got this quality to it, that it could be new, or from 100 years ago. And that was one of the signature things of the Band — that this music did live in its own time zone, and I was always proud of that. Consciously or subconsciously, I always reached for that in writing when I could.

What kind of music are you listening to right now? When something like this is happening in the world, what music do you turn to?

It’s all for me about discovery and research. So I was listening to some of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony earlier today, because of something that I’m writing. I was listening to some American Indian Western music from the 1920s a couple of days ago, thinking about Killers of the Flower Moon. I have a very curious ear, so I’m always interested in new stuff that’s going on. It’s scattered all over the place. I don’t have a playlist. I don’t have anything that I’m devoted to.

What impact do you think [coronavirus] will have on musicians? They’ve lost a couple of months of dates already. David Crosby said he might lose his house if this goes on any longer. It must be very difficult on anyone who makes a living as a performer.
Yeah, that’s very true. When this industry kind of went into a tailspin, everything led to live performance being a business that people could make a living at. And when it hits a wall like this, it’s going to be a realization, just like so many other millions of businesses. I’m hoping that it’s just like, “Wait a minute, we’re just on pause. We’re going to push ‘play’ here again as soon as we possibly can.” But right now, everybody has to take a deep breath and say, “We’re on pause. And don’t take my house right now, please.” You’re absolutely right. I don’t live in that zone of live performance. I’m in a different line of work. But I can certainly relate to that. I spent a great part of my life there as a road dog. But right know we’re just holding our breath.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. This is a throwback, and a poison has risen to the surface.”

Does our current moment remind you of any other time that you have lived through?
No. I’ve never seen anything like this. That’s why for a while I was thinking, “Well, somebody’s just going to have to wake me up in the morning and say, ‘Oh, my God, you were having a bad dream.’ ” And then after a few days, I realized that wasn’t gonna happen. So this is the unknown. And right now it’s just darkness. And at some point, we just want to see a light come shining through and get brighter and brighter.

That’s what I was getting at before: Right now, we can only see what this is preventing life from being, and trying our best to adapt to that. But out of these things, there’s always been something spiritual, magical, unsuspecting, that could possibly come from this. And I think that’s what we’re all secretly hoping for: that this could bring some people closer together. This country, I’ve never felt this kind of division. I’m from Canada, too, I look at it through just a little bit of a different eye. And I’ve never seen this kind of ugliness. I haven’t seen anything like this since George Wallace. This is a throwback, and a poison has risen to the surface, in these times, that we can’t can imagine, and it is everywhere. And it’s like, “Oh, no, this was there. It was just sleeping. And it ain’t sleeping anymore.” And it’s really, really sad to see this kind of regression, and this kind of fallback into such anger. It’s all built on anger, and that just leads us to the most ugly place. And so, maybe out of this thing, there can be some kind of feeling of unity. And that’s why the song, the Playing for Change [version of] “The Weight” — if anything screams of unity, that does. And I hope it spreads.

Are you are you thinking of doing a 50th-anniversary edition of Stage Fright in line with the Music From Big Pink and The Band box sets?

Yes, I am. I started on this, but there’s some things too that I’m trying to do, some artwork and some pieces of that period that I’m trying to put my hands on, and some stuff that I would like to do musically for this. And there’s some things that have been buried in the archive for a long time that fit with this really well. So, yeah, I’ve got ideas. Doing these these celebrations, doing the Music from Big Pink box set and doing The Band box set, and now doing this, it really feels good. I like the celebrating of the music, and doing something fresh, and doing things that we couldn’t do back then. I’m really enjoying that process.

Were you were you planning to play more Last Waltz shows before all the live music got shut down?

Well, they were talking about doing Jazz Fest. And they were asking me if I would participate in it. I went to the one in Nashville, which was the end of their last tour, that they had at the big arena in Nashville. And it was incredible. It was just an amazing array of talent. The guys putting together the show told me, “You’re not gonna believe the audiences that come to this.” So I thought, “Well that sounds good. It sounds like people are enjoying it and everything.” No, no no. It was like a religious experience, and so much fun. And so, anyway, at the end, I got up and sat in with them. The people were just so, so appreciative, and consequently so was I. So they asked me if I would do Jazz Fest, and I was like, “I don’t know. I’m not really looking to make this a part of my everyday life.” So I was thinking about it, and then the [coronavirus] came up. They were just about to announce whether I was going to participate in it, and then it had to get bumped. So we’ll have to see what happens in the fall.

It must be interesting for you, for people to be re-creating a concert you played 40 years ago.

And there’s people that do this around the world, in Scandinavia, Australia, and Japan, and all places. And I didn’t know, that’s pretty special. I don’t remember many concerts that people do that for.

I just was reminded of Bill Graham’s book. There’s an anecdote that said you did not want them serving Thanksgiving dinner during the filming of The Last Waltz. Is that true or false?

Well, you know, I was so busy thinking about playing music with all these different artists and not screwing up, and the filming of it with Marty. Marty was depending on me for so much in this. And so there was so much going on in an impossible period of time to pull this off. There was 100 things that could go wrong, and a few things that could go right. And Bill Graham comes to me and says, “I’ve ordered 5,000 pounds of mashed potatoes and turkey,” and I’m like, “You’re what? There’s gonna be gravy everywhere?” So in the beginning, I just thought, “This is just in the way of what I’m trying to do here.” And Bill said, “Don’t worry about it, I’ll handle it. I’m going to serve Thanksgiving dinner to 5,000 people. You don’t have to do a thing.” And I was like, “OK, let’s not talk about it anymore. But if you can do it …” And he says, “I know how to do this.” And I just had confidence in Bill. But you can imagine when he told me about how many gallons of gravy they were going to need, this was the last thing that I needed to hear.

Beyond JFK: 20 Historical References in Bob Dylan’s ‘Murder Most Foul’

The 17-minute epic touches upon obscure Civil War ballads, classic movies, and even songs by the Who, the Animals, and Billy Joel

By ANDY GREENE  ROLLING STONE

Dave J Hogan/Getty Images

Bob Dylan fans woke up this morning to the stunning news that the songwriter had released a 17-minute epic titled “Murder Most Foul.” “Greetings to my fans and followers, with gratitude for all your support and loyalty over the years,” Dylan wrote. “This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.”

It’s his first original song since 2012’s Tempest, though he has released three albums of cover songs associated with Frank Sinatra since then. The closest analogue to “Murder Most Foul” in Dylan’s vast catalog is Tempest’s title track, a 14-minute song about the Titanic.

“Murder Most Foul” centers around another historic tragedy: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It’s packed with references only JFK buffs will likely recognize, like the “triple underpass” near Dealey Plaza, the removal of his brain during the autopsy, and the “three bums comin’ all dressed in rags” captured on the Zapruder film that conspiracy theorists have been obsessing over for decades. Cleary, Dylan has spent a lot of time reading books and watching documentaries about this.

As the song goes on, however, it veers away from JFK and touches upon several other historic events of the era. It’s sort of like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” mashed up with the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” Dylan fans will be picking this one apart for years, but here are 20 non-JFK references in the song.

1. “Living in a nightmare on Elm Street”
Elm Street is the actual road in Dallas where Kennedy was assassinated. Fifteen years later, Wes Craven’s horror classic Nightmare on Elm Street, about a deranged psychopath who slaughters children in their dreams, hit movie theaters. The connection to JFK’s death is most likely not a complete coincidence, though Craven never commented on the matter.

2. “Frankly, Miss Scarlett, I don’t give a damn”
This comes straight from the mouth of Clark Gable’s character of Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. In the original Margaret Mitchell book, Butler says, “My dear, I don’t give a damn.” This was changed to, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” in the movie. In “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan puts yet another tiny spin on it.

3. “Tommy, can you hear me? I’m the Acid Queen”
These are two lines from the Who’s 1969 rock opera, Tommy, about a deaf, dumb, and blind pinball wizard. The Acid Queen is a woman hired by his family who tries to restore his senses, either by dosing him with LSD or having sex with him. The song isn’t quite clear.




4. “Wake up, little Susie; let’s go for a drive”
“Wake Up Little Susie” is a 1957 hit by the Everly Brothers, written by Felice Bryant and Boudleaux Bryant. After the assassination of Kennedy, it seemed like a relic from a distant, innocent past.

5. “I’m just a patsy like Patsy Cline”
Lee Harvey Oswald told the press he was “just a patsy” after he was apprehended. Patsy Cline is a country legend who also died tragically young in 1963.

6. “What’s new, pussycat? What’d I say?”
“What’s New Pussycat” is a 1965 Tom Jones hit written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. “What’d I Say” is a 1959 Ray Charles R&B classic. Their only real connection is that their titles both pose a question.

7. “Wolfman Jack, speaking in tongues”
Wolfman Jack was a raspy-voiced radio DJ whose popularity peaked in the early Sixties. In 1973, he portrayed himself in the George Lucas film American Graffiti as the cultural embodiment of the era in which the film took place.

8. “Take me to the place Tom Dooley was hung”
Tom Dula was a Confederate war veteran who was convicted of murdering a woman named Laura Foster. He was hanged in 1868, but questions linger to this day about his guilt. He was the inspiration for the folk song “Tom Dooley,” which was covered by the Kingston Trio in 1958. Dylan’s rise in the early Sixties made groups like them seem hopelessly passé.

9. “Play ‘Please, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ “
“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” is a 1964 Nina Simone song that the Animals turned into a rock hit the following year. Animals keyboardist Alan Price left the group shortly after it was recorded. He appears alongside Bob Dylan throughout the documentary Don’t Look Back.


10. “Play Don Henley, play Glenn Frey/Take it to the limit and let it go by”
Don Henley and Glenn Frey are the main songwriting team in the Eagles, and sang most of their hits. “Take It to the Limit,” however, features Eagles bassist Randy Meisner on lead vocals. He left the band in 1977, and the only time he’s performed with them since then was at their 1998 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

11. “Play it for Carl Wilson, too/Looking far, far away down Gower Avenue”
Carl Wilson was one of the founding members of the Beach Boys. In 1976, he sang background vocals on the Warren Zevon song “Desperados Under the Eaves,” which contains the line, “Look away down Gower Avenue, look away.” Dylan is a longtime fan of Zevon. In 2002, shortly before Zevon’s death, he played many of his songs in concert.

12. “Play Etta James, too. Play ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ “
Blues singer Etta James had a big hit with “I’d Rather Go Blind” in 1968, which she wrote with Ellington Jordan and Billy Foster.

13. “Play ‘Blue Sky’; play Dickey Betts”
“Blue Sky” is a 1972 Allman Brothers Band song from their album Eat a Peach. It’s one of the last songs that Duane Allman worked on before his death. But as Dylan notes, it was written by Dickey Betts.

14. “Play something for the Birdman of Alcatraz”
The Birdman of Alcatraz is a 1962 Burt Lancaster film about a real-life convicted murderer, Robert Stroud, who became fixated on birds after his arrest.Dylan may reference him in the song because he died one day before JFK. C.S. Lewis andAldous Huxley died on the same day as Kennedy, though their deaths receive almost no attention. 

 

15. “Play ‘Down In The Boondocks’ for Terry Malloy”
Terry Malloy is the dockworker who Marlon Brando portrayed in the 1954 classic On the Waterfront. “Down in the Boondocks” is a 1965 Billie Joe Royal song written by Joe South, who plays guitar on Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde.

16. “Play ‘Anything Goes’ and ‘Memphis in June’ “
“Anything Goes” is the title song from a 1934 Broadway musical, with lyrics by Cole Porter. “Memphis in June” is a 1945 Hoagy Carmichael song. Dylan previously referenced it in his 1985 track “Tight Connection to My Heart.'”
 
17. Play ‘Lonely at the Top’ and ‘Lonely Are the Brave'”
“Lonely at the Top” has been used as a title for songs by Randy Newman, Bon Jovi, Mick Jagger, and even Chamillionaire. The Randy Newman title is, by far, the most famous, and probably the one Dylan is referencing here. Lonely Are the Brave is a 1962 Kirk Douglas Western based on Edward Abbey’s novel The Brave Cowboy.

18. “Play ‘Love Me or Leave Me’ by the great Bud Powell”
Bud Powell was a wildly innovative jazz pianist of the Fifties and Sixties who died of tuberculosis in 1966, when he was just 41. “Love Me or Leave Me” is a 1928 Walter Davidson/Gus Kahn song from the Broadway play Whoopee! It was covered by everyone from Ruth Etting to Nina Simone to Ella Fitzgerald. It’s unclear, however, if there’s a version by Bud Powell. He certainly didn’t write it.

19 . “Play ‘Marching Through Georgia’ and ‘Dumbarton’s Drums’ “
“Marching Through Georgia” is a Civil War-era song about William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea, a brutal and destructive military campaign that crippled the Confederacy near the end of the war. “Dumbarton’s Drums” is a Scottish song dating back to the 18th century.

20. “Play ‘The Blood-Stained Banner,’ play ‘Murder Most Foul’ “
“The Blood-Stained Banner” is a nickname given to the third and final official flag of the Confederacy. It was unveiled just weeks before Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, ending the Civil War. “Murder Most Foul” is the title of this new Dylan song that is so long and epic, it wraps up with a reference to itself.

Hear Bob Dylan’s Absolutely Mind-Blowing New Song ‘Murder Most Foul’

Dylan’s first original song in eight years is about JFK’s assassination — but it’s really about so much more

By BRIAN HIATT

Bob Dylan, who hasn’t released an original song since 2012’s Tempest, unexpectedly dropped a previously unheard, nearly 17-minute-long new track, “Murder Most Foul,” late Thursday night.

Dylan didn’t say exactly when the song was recorded, but his delicate vocal delivery resembles the way he’s been singing in his live shows in the past couple of years. “Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty over the years,” Dylan said in a statement. “This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.”

This dizzying, utterly extraordinary song — as allusive as it is elusive — starts off seeming like it might be a straightforward recounting of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but expands into an impressionistic, elegiac, increasingly apocalyptic journey through what feels like the entire Sixties (complete with references to the Who’s Tommy, Woodstock, and Altamont) and then perhaps all of 20th-century America, especially its music.


The song’s structural freedom and mesmerizing arrangement — a dusting of piano, a lilting violin, distant percussion — feel like fresh territory for Dylan, occasionally evoking Van Morrison at his most mystical. Its themes of doom — and possible redemption — feel alarmingly in tune with our current moment, which may have prompted Dylan to choose it for release.

“The day they killed him, someone said to me, ‘Son, the age of the Antichrist has just only begun,'” Dylan sings. “The soul of a nation’s been torn away, and it’s beginning to go into a slow decay.… It’s 36 hours past judgement day.”

In its prayer-like final passages (the song is so structurally daunting that it’s hard to think in terms of verses), Dylan invokes the DJ Wolfman Jack before dropping a long list of songs and musicians, from John Lee Hooker to Guitar Slim to Bud Powell to Stevie Nicks to Don Henley to Dickey Betts to Thelonious Monk, and even mentions Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young.” Oh, and somewhere in there, he nods to Nightmare on Elm Street.

It’s unclear if the song is connected to a new album, though there were murmurs of such a project earlier this year.

How one Swedish teenager armed with a homemade sign ignited a crusade and became the leader of a movement

By STEPHEN RODRICK MARCH 26, 2020

There is persona and there is reality in Greta Thunberg. It is Valentine’s Day in her hometown of Stockholm, but there’s only wind, no hearts and flowers. A few hundred kids mill about, with a smattering of adults. If there were not signs reading “Our Earth, We Only Have One,” it could be mistaken for a field trip to the ABBA museum.

But where is Greta? I find a scrum of reporters interviewing a child in a purple puffer jacket, pink mittens, and a homemade-looking knit hat. It takes me a minute to realize that it’s Greta. She is 17, but could pass for 12. I can’t quite square the fiery speaker with the micro teen in front of me. She seems in need of protection.

Of course, this is emphatically wrong. Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s, which, she says, gives her pinpoint focus on climate minutiae while parrying and discarding even the smallest attempt at flattery. We stand near the Swedish Parliament house, where less than two years ago Thunberg started her Skolstrejk för klimatet, School Strike for Climate.


Back then, it was just Greta, a sign, and a lunch of bean pasta in a reusable glass jar. Then it was two people, and then a dozen, and then an international movement. I mention the bravery of her speeches, but she waves me away. She wants to talk about the loss of will among the olds.

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“It seems like the people in power have given up,” says Thunberg, taking her hat off and pushing back her mussed up brown-blond hair. She remains on message despite the tourists and teens taking her picture and mugging behind us. “They say it’s too hard — it’s too much of a challenge. But that’s what we are doing here. We have not given up because this is a matter of life and death for countless people.”

It was my second encounter with Greta in three weeks. Back in January, before the Coronavirus brought the world to its knees, forcing Greta to move her Friday protests online, she was in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual conference of the World Economic Forum, where billionaires helo into the Swiss resort town and talk about solving the world’s problems without making their lives any harder. Thunberg had appeared last year and made her now iconic “Our House Is on Fire” speech, in which she declared the climate crisis to be the mortal threat to our planet. Solve it or all the other causes — feminism, human rights, and economic justice — would not matter.

“Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t,” said Thunberg with cold precision. “That is as black or white as it gets. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.”

The speech made Thunberg the unlikely and reluctant hero of the climate crisis. She crossed the ocean in a sailboat — she doesn’t fly for environmental reasons — to speak before the United Nations. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, conjuring the manic jealousy of Donald Trump, who called the honor “so ridiculous” and suggested she go to the movies and chill out.

In Davos, the illuminati prattled on about planting a trillion trees, even as we are still clear-cutting actual trees from the Amazon all the way to Thunberg’s beloved Sweden. This did not amuse nor placate the hoodie-wearing Greta. She seemed irritated and perhaps a little sick; she canceled an appearance the day before because she wasn’t feeling well. She was in no mood for flattery and nonsense. So when Time editor Edward Felsenthal asked her how she dealt with all the haters, Greta didn’t even try to answer diplomatically.

“I would like to say something that I think people need to know more than how I deal with haters,” she answered, before launching into details from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report. She mentioned that if we are to have even a 67 percent chance of limiting global temperature change to under 1.5 C, the point where catastrophic changes begin, we have less than 420 gigatons of CO2 that we can emit before we pass the no-going-back line. Thunberg stated that, at the current rate, we have eight years to change everything.

Thunberg’s face was controlled fury. This was the persona: an adolescent iron-willed truth teller. The Davos one-percenters clapped and rattled their Rolexes. It has become a disconcerting pattern for Thunberg appearances that would be repeated at the European Commission: Greta tells the adults they are fools and their plans are lame and shortsighted. They still give her a standing ovation. A few minutes later, she was gone and the audience dispersed into a fleet of black BMWs and Mercedes, belching diesel into the Alpine sky.

Greta Thunberg illustration by Shepard Fairey.
Based on a photograph by Markus Schreiber/AP Images/Shutterstock

My Greta travels featured a Vancouver-Zurich round trip and then an L.A.-Stockholm trip. In between, I fly from Vancouver to L.A. for another story. It’s the job, but I take stock in horror and calculate that my three flights burn more carbon than the yearly usage of the average citizen of more than 200 countries. I torch the atmosphere so I can hear others praise the girl who won’t fly.

“The phrase ‘A little child shall lead them’ has come to mind more than once,” Al Gore tells me in Davos, before sharing his favorite Greta moment. It was at the U.N. summit last fall. “She said to the assembled world leaders, ‘You say you understand the science, but I don’t believe you. Because if you did and then you continue to act as you do, that would mean you’re evil. And I don’t believe that.’” Gore shook his head in wonderment. “Wow.” He then gives a history lesson: “There have been other times in human history when the moment a morally-based social movement reached the tipping point was the moment when the younger generation made it their own. Here we are.”

Activist-actress Jane Fonda was so inspired by Greta that she has been hosting a series of Fire Drill Fridays. “I was just filled with depression and hopelessness, and then I started reading about Greta,” Fonda tells me one winter afternoon in Los Angeles. “She inspired me to get out there and do more.”

But in Stockholm, the world of presidential taunts, former vice presidents slathering praise, and Oscar winners rhapsodizing seems far away.

Outside of the Parliament building, Greta tells me she doesn’t worry about her safety despite Trump and others speaking cruelly about her on social media. (According to her mother, locals have shoved excrement into the family mailbox.) Later in February, she would march in Bristol, England, and be met by social media posts suggesting she deserved to be sexually assaulted.

“It’s just the people with 10 accounts who sit and write anonymously on Twitter and so on,” Greta says. “It’s nothing you can take seriously.”

Still, all is not rotten. America has come up with the Green New Deal. In Trumplandia, that seems like a beacon of hope, right?

Nope.

“If you look at the graphs to stay below the 1.5 degree Celsius global average temperature and you read the Green New Deal, you see that it doesn’t add up,” says Thunberg with some impatience. She references her Davos speech about how the world only has 420 gigatons of CO2 to burn over the next eight years or the 1.5 goal becomes impossible. “If we are to be in line with the carbon-dioxide budget, we need to focus on doing things now instead of making commitments like 10, or 20, 30 years from now. Of course, the Green New Deal is not in line with our carbon-dioxide budget.”

Meanwhile, the main criticism of the Green New Deal at home is that it moves too fast in getting the United States to zero carbon emission by 2050. But Greta doesn’t do politics.

“At least it has got people to start talking about the climate crisis more,” says Thunberg in a tone that suggests the slightest of praise. “That of course is a step in the right direction, I guess.”

There’s more to say, but now it’s time to march. The children’s crusade forms into a regimented mob. Greta moves to the front and holds a Skolstrejk för klimatet banner with some other teens. The taller kids lift it too high, and she nearly vanishes. All you can see is Greta’s winter hat and her gray eyes. That’s enough.

Al Gore was right. A child leads us.

Technically, Greta Thunberg’s childhood continues for another year. But she hasn’t been a kid for some time. She is one of two daughters of Malena Ernman, an opera-singer-turned-Eurovision-contestant, and Svante Thunberg, an actor. According to the family’s book, Our House Is on Fire, the bohemian clan has endured a scroll of psychological disorders beginning with Malena, who suffered from bulimia and still deals with ADHD. Greta’s younger sister, Beata, was diagnosed with OCD and ADHD, and has an acute noise sensitivity, which has meant at times the rest of the family eating in a guest room with plastic plates to keep noise to a minimum. When Beata went to dance class, Malena wasn’t allowed to move during the two-hour session lest Beata have a tearful meltdown.

Greta battled her own life-threatening demons. When she was 11, she stopped eating and rarely spoke to anyone outside of her family for months. Sometimes she would come home after being bullied at school — recess was spent hiding out in the bathroom — and either spend hours petting her dogs or crying at her own pain. She lost 20 pounds as her parents chronicled her food intake. (“Five pieces of gnocchi in two hours.”)

Somehow, it was Greta turning her weakness into strength that made her a global icon. According to Malena, Greta fell silent after seeing a film in school depicting floating armies of plastic infesting our oceans. Other students were horrified, but quickly returned to their iPhones and talk of upcoming ski trips. Not Greta. She fell silent and obsessed over the climate’s demise.

“I felt very alone that I was the only one who seemed to be worried about this,” Greta tells me in Stockholm. “I was the only one left in this sort of bubble. Everyone else could just continue with their lives as usual, and I couldn’t do that.”

Greta read all she could and sometimes went online and battled with climate deniers, oft exclaiming triumphantly, “He blocked me,” to her parents. She eventually wrote an essay on the climate crisis for a Swedish newspaper. Eco-activists contacted her, and Greta mentioned the inspiration she took from the school strikes after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, and suggested a climate version. The activists showed little interest. Greta didn’t care and slowly broke out of her cocoon.

"I thought what the Parkland students did was so brave,” says Thunberg. “Of course, it was not the only thing that got me out of that feeling. I did it because I was tired of sitting and waiting. I tried to get others to join me, but no one was interested and no one wanted to do that. So I said, ‘I’m going to do this alone if no one else wants to do it.’ ”

So in August 2018, Greta and her father bicycled down to the Swedish Parliament, across the cobblestone street from where Greta and I now stand. She propped up the first Skolstrejk för klimatet sign, which she’d made from scrap wood. Greta also wrote up an information sheet with climate data and a hint of the defiant humor that eventually led her to make her Twitter profile read, “A teenager working on her anger management problem,” after Trump told her to chill out. Her bio was simple:

“Because you grown-ups don’t give a damn about my future, neither do I. My name is Greta, I am in ninth grade, and I am going on strike from school for the climate.”

Photograph by Jack Davison for Rolling Stone

Her dad left, and she sat alone. She posted a couple of images to Instagram. It was passed on by a few of her followers. Then a reporter noticed. And then local activists from Greenpeace. Within two months, there were hundreds of fellow travelers, and the news spread through Scandinavia to Europe and on to America. Within a year, climate student strikes attracted tens of thousands, from London to New York.

Greta’s rise was the activist version of a perfect storm. Her ascension from bullied Swedish student to global climate icon has been driven by both a loss and a regaining of hope. It is not a coincidence that her ascent happened immediately in the aftermath of the election of Trump. It’s impossible to see a Greta-like phenomena emerging during the Obama-driven run up to the Paris climate talks, when it actually looked like nations of the world were getting their shit together to deal with global warming. It became obvious after Trump and the Paris implosion that 30 years of rhetoric and meetings had created very little except more talk.

And then you had the natural disasters. California could not stop burning. Floods ravaged Europe. We now watch glaciers melt and collapse in real time. The dawn of 2020 brought the Australian calamity, with images of scorched earth, koalas and kangaroos burned alive, and the death of a way of life.

The irony of the Greta Age is that we now have options, but refuse to take them. Clean-energy technology has evolved to a point where old arguments that fossil fuels remain the cheapest way to create energy are now obviously nonsense. The cost of clean energy is no longer a barrier to change. Over the past decade, it became an obvious truth: Burning fossil fuels no longer made economic sense anywhere, anytime. What remains is the power and influence of the energy conglomerate superpowers to maintain the status quo. No politician has the courage to face them down. By 2018, it became even clearer that politicians could not be trusted. Talk was wasted. Companies would continue to put profits before nature. We were on our own.

And that’s when Greta came along.

Thunberg’s perceived psychological weakness became her superpower. Her flat, affectless, blunt voice was the perfect counterpoint to the bureaucratic bullshit of the climate negotiators. It cut through all the gobbledygook about offsets and the economic necessity of coal and cost curves of solar power. She put it in simple human language: We are losing our planet. Unlike many activists before her, she is not political. She is not interested in reforming the process. Her voice is unabashedly and explicitly moral — “How dare you.”

“I think she is extraordinary in her determination,” says Eva Jones, an American high school senior who recently spent a week protesting for climate justice in Davos. “When you hear her speak, she doesn’t do vanity interviews. It’s never like, ‘So what do your friends think about this?’ She’s like, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about my friends, I want to talk about the crisis.’ She’s absolutely insane about getting reporters and getting politicians and getting whoever’s talking to her back to the subject.”

All of this from a teenager who sometimes still wears her hair in pigtails.

Thunberg and her fellow protesters head toward Medborgarplatsen (Citizen Square), in central Stockholm. They pass over a bridge by the harbor, where massive renovations are being done so the city can host even more waste-multiplying mega cruise ships. The kids chant in Swedish, “What do we want? Climate justice! When? Now! When? Now, now, now!” At the square, the squirrelly tweens play tag and are entertained by a rapper in a ski mask (some things don’t translate).

Eventually, Greta takes the stage. She speaks in her native Swedish, and her tone is faster and more emotional than in English. She mentions that temperatures in Sweden have been 5 to 10 degrees Celsius above normal this winter, and how globally 19 of the past 20 years have been the warmest on record.

“I have been on the road and visited numerous places and met people from all over the globe,” says Greta. “I can say that it looks nearly the same everywhere I have been: The climate crisis is ignored by people in charge, despite the science being crystal clear. We don’t want to hear one more politician say that this is important but afterward do nothing to change it. We don’t want more empty words from people pretending to take our future seriously.”

She pauses, and her face goes grim. “It shouldn’t be up to us children and teenagers to make people wake up around the world. The ones in charge should be ashamed.”

The crowd chants, “Greta, Greta, Greta.…”

She must hate that.

Greta keeps moving. In January, it was Davos. This week it is Stockholm. Next Friday is Hamburg. It’s a debilitating schedule since she doesn’t fly. Greta says it won’t go on forever. And she’s right. Within a few weeks, the world would shut down for the coronavirus, with Greta and her father both falling ill (neither of them was tested for the virus, but she said she thought it was “extremely likely” that they had it, given her schedule). Besides, she is nearing the end of her gap year, between high school and university. “I really hope that we can solve this thing now because I want to get back to studying,” says Thunberg, shivering a bit in the Stockholm wind. I can’t tell if she is joking or is having a rare moment of optimism.

Still, she is so small, and the world is so big. I wonder how she continues forward as the world pays lip service and not much else.

For the first time, Thunberg softens.

“I’m very weak in a sense,” says Thunberg quietly. “I’m very tiny and I am very emotional, and that is not something people usually associate with strength. I think weakness, in a way, can be also needed because we don’t have to be the loudest, we don’t have to take up the most amount of space, and we don’t have to earn the most money.”

A friend comes over and whispers in her ear. It’s time to go, maybe home for a silent walk with her two dogs, Moses and Roxy. But she isn’t quite finished.

“We don’t need to have the biggest car, and we don’t need to get the most attention. We just need to…”

Mighty Greta’s voice trails off as if she is lost in thought or searching for the right word in English. Then, she looks up, locks eyes, and smiles for the first time.

“We need to care about each other more.”

DOJ Wants to Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency


The Department of Justice has secretly asked Congress for the ability to detain arrested people “indefinitely” in addition to other powers that one expert called “terrifying”

By PETER WADE  ROLLING STONE

Attorney General William Barr participates in a news conference with Justice Department officials.
MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

The Trump Department of Justice has asked Congress to craft legislation allowing chief judges to indefinitely hold people without trial and suspend other constitutionally protected rights during the coronavirus and other emergencies, according to a report by Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan.

While the asks from the Department of Justice will likely not come to fruition with a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, they demonstrate how much this White House has a frightening disregard for rights enumerated in the Constitution.

The DOJ has requested that Congress allow any chief judge of a district court to pause court proceedings “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation,” according to draft language obtained by Politico. This would be applicable to “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil processes and proceedings.” They justify this by saying currently judges can pause judicial proceedings in an emergency, but that new legislation would allow them to apply it “in a consistent manner.”

But the Constitution grants citizens habeas corpus, which gives arrestees the right to appear in front of a judge and ask to be released before trial. Enacting legislation like the DOJ wants would essentially suspend habeas corpus indefinitely until the emergency ended. Further, DOJ asked Congress to suspend the statute of limitations on criminal investigations and civil proceedings during the emergency until a year after it ended.

Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told Politico the measure was “terrifying,” saying, “Not only would it be a violation of [habeas corpus], but it says ‘affecting pre-arrest.’ So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.”

“That is something that should not happen in a democracy,” he added.

DOJ also asked Congress to amend the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to have defendants appear at a hearing via videoconference instead of in person with the defendant’s consent, although in a draft obtained by Politico, the sections about requiring consent were crossed out. But it’s not just Americans’ rights the DOJ wants to violate. They also asked Congress to pass a law saying that immigrants who test positive for COVID-19 cannot qualify as asylum seekers.

As coronavirus spreads through the country, activists are calling on politicians in office to release prisoners and immigrants held in detention centers, both of which can be a hotbed of virus activity with so many people in close quarters and limited or non-existent supplies of soap, sanitizer, and protective equipment. Some states have already begun to do so. But with this, the Trump administration is taking steps to hold more people in prisons for an undetermined amount of time — showing their priority is not saving lives but giving themselves more power.

Trump Suggests States Need to Bribe Him With Praise to Get Federal Assistance for COVID-19

“But, you know, it’s a two-way street,” the president said of states desperate for equipment. “They have to treat us well, also.”

By RYAN BORT  ROLLING STONE 3/27/2020

President Trump speaks with Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer during 

a Fox News virtual town hall, at the White House, on March 24th.
Evan Vucci/AP/Shutterstock

President Trump adjusted his strategy against the coronavirus on Monday, tweeting his desire for Americans to endanger themselves and others by going back to work far ahead of what has been recommended by public-health officials. But on Tuesday, the president made clear that there’s one thing he isn’t changing about his approach to the outbreak: blaming his administration’s incompetence on others, particularly New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

During a Fox News town-hall event in the White House Rose Garden, Trump ramped up his attacks on the governor, who has been a vocal critic of the federal government’s sluggish response to the outbreak. In doing so, Trump said the quiet part out loud about how he views his relationship with states. “It’s a two-way street,” he said. “They have to treat us well, also. They can’t say, ‘Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.'”

On Governors asking for help, Trump says, "It's a two way street they have to treat us well too." …. (realized i had wrong clip before) pic.twitter.com/gXM83TCUZR
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 24, 2020

In other words, if governors want the federal government to help them combat the coronavirus, they’re going to need to “be nice” to the president first.

As of Tuesday, 50,000 people in the United States have tested positive for COVID-19, and just more than half of those cases are in New York. According to Gov. Cuomo, the state’s case count is doubling every three days. “We haven’t flattened the curve. And the curve is actually increasing,” he said during a news conference Tuesday. “The apex is higher than we thought, and the apex is sooner than we thought. That is a bad combination of facts.”

So far, the federal government has sent the state 400 ventilators, although Vice President Pence said on Tuesday that 4,000 more are on the way.

“You want a pat on the back for sending 400 ventilators,” Cuomo said of the shortage. “What are we going to do with 400 ventilators when we need 30,000 ventilators? You’re missing the magnitude of the problem, and the problem is defined by the magnitude.”

Trump isn’t too sympathetic to New York’s equipment problems. In the Rose Garden on Tuesday, he attacked Cuomo for not buying his own supply of ventilators, even pulling out a news story about the governor declining to purchase ventilators … in 2015.

"He’s supposed to be buying his own ventilators” — Trump is now attacking Andrew Cuomo for saying the federal government should do more to provide New York with needed medical gear pic.twitter.com/qPGd6diWm1
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 24, 2020

Later, as Dr. Deborah Leah Birx was explaining why there are so many positive cases in New York as opposed to other states — she mentioned population density, the subway, and people returning from Asia over the holiday season — Trump cut in to try to get her to blame Cuomo.

“Do you blame the governor for that?” he said with a smirk.

“Do you blame the governor for that?” — with a smug smirk on his face, Trump tries to pin blame for New York’s coronavirus outbreak on Gov. Cuomo because he allowed people to travel from Asia back to New York City during the holidays pic.twitter.com/6syuTlbWdB
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 24, 2020

Stay classy, Mr. President.

How ‘Contagion’ Suddenly Became the Most Urgent Movie of 2020

Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 pandemic procedural has turned into the go-to movie for the coronovirus age — here’s why

By DAVID FEAR  ROLLING STONE 3/27/2020

Jennifer Ehle in Steven Soderbergh's 2011 movie 'Contagion'

It starts with a cough. You’ve heard the sound a million times before, in the same way you’ve seen people grip a subway pole, hand over a credit card, pass someone else their phone a million times before. Only this slightly hoarse, barking noise plays out over a black screen, it’s currently the sole object of your focus, and vaguely ominous. Oh wait, no worries, it’s coming from Gwyneth Paltrow. There she is, sitting in an airport, talking to someone on her cell (the voice on the other end belongs to director Steven Soderbergh), telling them that she’s glad they connected before she heads home. Just an Oscar winner chatting about an illicit tryst while eating beer nuts from a bowl at the bar. All good.

She does seem a tad pale and sweaty, however. So, for that matter, does that Ukrainian model in London, that Tokyo-based businessman, and the man on the train in Kowloon. He’s got a fairly nasty cough as well. You start to notice all of the tiny interactions they have with other people: hugging loved ones, nestling themselves into crowded elevators, using public transit, walking through an open-air fish market. They’re so innocuous, you’d hardly register them at all. Later on, however, you remember all of the little everyday points of contact with folks they have. You also recall the population numbers of the cities they are all in, stats which accompany those introductory scenes and number in the millions. The death toll will be substantial. Time is already running out.

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This is how Contagion starts, not with a bang but with a whimper, and the future Goop founder hacking up a lung. If you saw Soderbergh’s all-star disaster movie when it came out back in 2011, you’d have recognized it as a particularly intense type of entertainment. You wouldn’t call it escapism — it’s a bit too bleak for that. But there’s a momentum to it that you associate with a night at the multiplex, with movie stars looking tense and thoughtful while their crusty-mouthed co-stars drift about in cadaverous makeup. Soderbergh knows how to shoot a thriller. Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns knows how to construct one. Cliff Martinez’s synth score couldn’t be more propulsive or more perfectly John Carpenter-esque. It’s a movie that never stops moving.

But while there are lots of films about battling viruses, ranging from the prestigious to the pulpy, Contagion has become the go-to viewing choice for people trying to make sense of the moment we find ourselves in right now. Back in January, The Hollywood Reporter noted that the almost-decade-old drama was the 10th-most-rented movie on iTunes. Go to the service’s charts right now, the day after a handful of major cities declared a state of emergency, and it’s currently in the No. 4 slot. (Should you open up the iTunes app on your laptop or your Apple TV, you’ll notice it’s listed as second in rentals, just behind Bombshell.) Speaking to Slate a few days ago, Burns noted that “whether on social media or in conversations with friends … people will say to me, ‘This is uncanny how similar it is.'” By “it,” he’s not talking about the film’s fictional virus MEV-1, which has a 72-hour incubation period and a much higher fatality rate than the present predictions regarding the coronavirus. He’s talking about the sense of watching things fall apart as everyday life grinds to a halt. Listen to experts talking about fomites and hand-washing techniques on TV — not the monitors framed in the film, but on real-life TV — and it’s as if you have stepped through the looking glass.


Kate Winslet in ‘Contagion’

Contagion has, perhaps a little surprisingly, become the flashback film of the moment precisely because it’s not an outrageous worst-case scenario but an eerily realistic one. When a notable actor dies very early on, said A-lister does not return from the dead, arms outstretched and craving the taste of brains. Aliens are not responsible for the virus attacking humans; nor, for that matter, is it the result of foreign agents disrupting the American way of life, despite what fearmongers on a particular conservative news network would have you believe. What may be the single most chilling aspect of Soderbergh and Burns’ heavily researched scenario is how random the MEV-1’s creation is. “The wrong pig met up with the wrong bat,” a scientist notes after the genetic makeup of the virus is discovered. It’s almost a throwaway statement, until you get to the end and the film shows you exactly how “Day 1” played out. A bat happens to defecate in a pig pen. A little porcine fellow happens to consume it. He’s brought to a casino in Macao to be prepared for someone’s dinner; the chef happens to shake the hand of a visiting businesswoman. She happens to blow on the dice of the businessman playing next to her at a craps table. All it takes is the right series of wrong moves.

It’s everything that happens after that narratively/before that scene chronologically, however, that has likely made Contagion the single most urgent movie of the moment, and thus the most (re)viewed. It’s a disaster movie, but it’s also a pandemic procedural, one devoted to charting the how, when, where, why — and most important, what happens next. The film’s CDC and WHO representatives are competent, intelligent, and organized; they have mobilized to the best of their collective abilities. Kate Winslet’s doctor puts her life on the line; a San Francisco medical professional (played by Elliot Gould) does defy direct orders to destroy his samples but ends up uncovering a key piece of the puzzle. The Centers for Disease Control researcher who first charts the when-bat-meets-pig origins ends up testing a vaccine on herself, willfully ignoring protocol … but voila, she now proves there’s a workable vaccine. For every scene involving blogger Jude Law cashing in on the chaos or Matt Damon’s dad staving off people in the throws of extreme prepare-anoia, there are several sequences in which our better angels are on display, and there’s a sense that there are actually adults in the room.

And that last bit in particular is something we really aren’t getting right now when we hear about travel bans in lieu of testing, delayed responses instead of determination to make up for lost time, past leaders being defensively blamed rather than current ones acting with accountability. In that sense, maybe Contagion really is escapism. Despite the gruesome scenes of people dying and overall sense that society is just one viral video away from sheer anarchy, it’s a hopeful movie. Trust in scientists, and the innate decency in people, and we will prevail. Things fall apart, and then you put them back together again. Use common sense. Pray to your respective gods but also, y’know, wash your hands. It will get bad, the movie tells us. But it will also get better. People are probably flocking to this movie to see what may be in store for us in the next month or so. That last bit of optimism it offers us couldn’t have come at a better time.
Watch it here

Influencer who claimed he'd discovered a cure for coronavirus arrested by the FBI
Moya Lothian-McLean in news

Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

For fans of Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film, Contagion, life seems to be mirroring art a bit too well.

And it just got even more close to home – in the movie a central character ends up being arrested by the FBI for falsely claiming they’ve got a cure for a deadly virus that’s caused a pandemic.

Now, guess what?

Yes, the FBI has just arrested an influencer for… falsely claiming they’ve got a cure for a deadly virus that’s caused a pandemic.

A Californian actor called Keith Middlebrook told his 2.4 million followers on his now-suspended Instagram page, that he’d developed pills that could prevent coronavirus and a “patent-pending” cure for those already infected.

Middlebrook – who describes himself as a “super entrepreneur” – on his YouTube channel, also advised people to protect themselves via taking mineral supplements and eating lean protein like chicken and eggs, to ward off Covid-19.

According to the FBI, Middlebrook created a business called Quantum Prevention CV Inc (QP20) and was fraudulently attempting to attract investors.

He told potential partners that for a $1 million investment, they would get up to $100 million in returned profits.

Middlebrook also said that basketball legend, Magic Johnson was a shareholder.

In response, Magic Johnson said that he had no knowledge of Middlebrook or his company confirming to authorities that he’d made no type of investment in the company.

Unfortunately, Middlebrook was caught out when he tried to court an FBI agent posing as an interested investor.

He’s now been arrested and charged with wire fraud, which could land him up to 20 years in federal prison

“While this may be the first federal criminal case in the nation stemming from the pandemic, it certainly will not be the last,” U.S. attorney Nick Hanna told Forbes.

I again am urging everyone to be extremely wary of outlandish medical claims and false promises of immense profits.

Basically: if it’s too good to be true or involves giving away vast sums of money in exchange for medical care that should be free, it’s probably a scam

A Brexiteer tried to claim universal basic income led to the fall of the Roman Empire and it massively backfired

Picture: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

THE INDEPENDENT 3/27/2020

The government is facing increased pressure to introduce a universal basic income for those in the UK facing financial uncertainties as the coronavirus crisis continues to spread, forcing many out of work.

This has so far been rejected as the chancellor has argued that they have already introduced enough measures to help those, including the self-employed, who may have found themselves compromised but a basic income may help people through the pandemic.

This issue is likely to rumble on for however long this period will last and it is bound to divide politicians across the board. One politician who is not too keen on introducing universal basic income is former Tory and Ukip MP Douglas Carswell, who came up with a very strange reason against its introduction.

In a tweet posted on Thursday afternoon, the Brexiteer claimed that the Romans tried to introduce a form of universal basic income in 123BC and it effectively caused the collapse of the empire.

Unfortunately for Carswell, his take was potentially a bit disputable and was basically torn to shreds by Classics scholar Mary Beard, who corrected the mistake.

Soon, Carswell's tweet found itself attracting a lot of interest and judging by the consensus, he hadn't got this correct in the slightest.

There were also plenty of jokes.

Still, it looks like Carswell has taken it well and took the opportunity to promote his history book on trade and economics.

Disputing the economics of the Roman Empire in the midst of a pandemic is the last thing that we expected to be writing about but here we are.

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Dec 15, 2015 - SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard Liveright ... was appointed to the Order of the British Empire for “services to Classical Scholarship.” A prolific authority on Roman culture, she construes those services broadly.

  

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Universal basic income is a concept that would give all members of society an unconditional, guaranteed cash payment. As lawmakers look for ways to soften the economic blow of the outbreak, one idea is to give qualified Americans a lump sum of money.2 days ago

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Mar 20, 2020 - A few members of Congress recently have suggested that the United States government institute an emergency Universal Basic Income (UBI) ...