Dow closes 730 points lower after spike in coronavirus cases forces Texas and Florida to close bars again, while bank stocks sink on stress tests

Social media stocks take a hit as more companies pull ad spending on hate speech concerns

HATE SPEECH IS NOT FREE SPEECH

HATE SPEECH IS VIOLENCE

Published: June 27, 2020 By Mark DeCambre and  Andrea Riquier

Rising cases rattle Wall Street GETTY IMAGES

U.S. stock indexes closed at their lowest levels in about two weeks Friday, after Texas and Florida were forced to backtrack on reopening their economies as coronavirus cases rose further and a record number of new cases were reported nationwide.

Meanwhile, investors were also parsing the results of the Federal Reserve’s bank stress tests which resulted in a cap on dividends and stock buybacks.
How did benchmarks perform?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average US:DJIA closed 730.05 points, or 2.8%, lower at 25,015.55; and the S&P 500 index US:SPX retreated 74.71 points, or 2.4%, to close at 3,009.05, with the S&P’s financial sector XX:SP500 sinking 4.3%, and the energy sector XX:SP500 3.5% lower. All 11 sectors of the S&P 500 closed deep into negative territory on Friday.

Meanwhile, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index US:COMP lost 259.78 points to reach 9,757.22, a fall of 2.6%.

For the week, the Dow lost 3.3%, the S&P 500 notched a 2.9% decline, and the Nasdaq fell 1.9% for the period.

What drove the stock market?

Investors have wrestled with rising daily rates of new U.S. coronavirus cases all week and that again cast a pall over the stock market on Friday.

U.S. states saw a single-day record rise of 37,000 in infections on Thursday, led by Florida, Texas, California and Arizona, surpassing the 36,188 level from April 24, according to analysis of data from Bloomberg.

That case count “blew out any of the previous records,” said Will Geisdorf, senior research analyst with Sarasota, Fl-based Allegiant Private Advisors. “I think the markets are looking at that and starting to discount the potential for a V-shaped recovery.”

As evidence mounts that consumers are losing confidence, there will be pressure on policymakers to deliver another round of fiscal stimulus, Geisdorf said in an interview. “That’s what markets need to get out of this period of consolidation and volatility and continue higher. We’ve had the best 50-day period in market history. Some sort of correction was needed to relieve excessive optimism.”

Governors in Texas and Florida ordered all bars to close again on Friday, making the states the first to reverse some reopening measures after months of lockdowns. Texas reported 6,426 new coronavirus cases Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins University data, and Florida reported over 8,900.


Overall, total cases in the U.S. have topped 2.4 million and that increase, notably in southern and western states in the U.S., has also resulted in business reopening plans being halted in North Carolina, Louisiana and Kansas. However, governors in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are proceeding with reopening efforts but imposing a 14-day quarantine for visitors from some hard-hit states.

“The market has been threatened by anything that jeopardizes the economic recovery,” Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial, told MarketWatch. “What you are seeing is the market react to the headlines,” she said.

The key for some investors is determining the degree by which the rise in cases results in hospitalizations and deaths, Krosby said. “It will give us a sense of whether the therapeutic treatments are working,” she said.

Investors are also digesting the results of the Federal Reserve’s annual bank stress tests which requires banks to preserve capital by suspending share repurchases and cap dividend payments in the third quarter based on average net income over the past four quarters.


Read: Opinion: The Federal Reserve’s bank stress tests put dividend payments at risk GOOD!DIVIDENDS ARE WAGE THEFT 

However, financial institutions got a boost on Thursday after the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said they are planning to loosen the restrictions imposed by the Volcker rule and allow banks to more easily make large investments into venture capital and similar funds, among other rule rollbacks.

BANKS CAN'T MEET THEIR CAPITAL REQUIREMENTS SO IT MUST BE THE REGULATION'S FAULT

(AYN RAND LOGIC)In U.S. economic data, consumer spending climbed in May to a record 8.2% after tumbling in April, as consumers used government stimulus checks to help Americans deal with job losses during the pandemic. However, personal incomes sank 4.2% last month, reflecting the mass unemployment.

“Consumer demand will probably look good in June as well, supported by the reopening in the Northeast and a still-elevated savings rate,” wrote Jefferies analysts Aneta Markowska and Thomas Simons. “However, stimulus payments are now shrinking and dragging down overall income growth,” the wrote.

In other economic reports, the final results of the consumer-sentiment survey in June slipped to 78.1 from an initial 78.9, the University of Michigan said Friday.

New U.S. COVID-19 cases surpass peak set in April as states rethink strategyNO MORE TYPHOID MARY NOW ITS CORONA-VIRUSA 

AKA COVID-TRUMP

Christopher Wilson Senior Writer Yahoo News•June 25, 2020

As the coronavirus pandemic is about to enter its seventh month, COVID-19 continues to surge in parts of the U.S. — even as it eases in some states and other countries — setting record highs and filling up hospitals across numerous states.

On Thursday, the governor of Texas, one of the hardest-hit states, said he would pause the process of reopening businesses and institutions.

According to tracking from NBC News, Wednesday saw the U.S.’s highest-ever single-day number of new cases, with more than 45,000. The previous peak was on April 26. There is positive news in that the death rate is declining, possibly reflecting the fact that many of the new patients are younger. But deaths lag new cases by several weeks to months, and there is a worrisome sign in the rise in cases requiring hospitalization. According to tracking numbers from Johns Hopkins University, the U.S. has had more than 122,000 deaths and 2.4 million positive cases, far more than any other nation. As cases in Europe fall, calls to ban travel from the U.S. until the virus is under control here have increased.

Among the states setting new daily records this week are California, Arizona, Texas and Florida. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention documents obtained by Yahoo News show that most counties in these states were on a downward trajectory a month ago but now are almost all showing the opposite. Another map, by the Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, shows that as of June 21, 19 states had at least partially reopened (or never had statewide closures in the first place) while cases were still rising, despite CDC guidelines calling for at least two weeks of falling case numbers before the process was started.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

At this point the virus is not spiking in places that were previously hit hard, such as New York state, where cases continue to drop — despite concerns earlier this month that the massive Black Lives Matter protests would result in a new spike.

TRUMP SABOTAGES TESTING
Multiple outlets reported Wednesday that the White House planned to close 13 federally funded testing sites at the end of the month. This news comes amid reports that testing capacity in some states is “overwhelmed.” The New York Times reported that last Friday the largest lab in Arizona received more than twice as many samples as it could process, and that hundreds of appointments at a large testing facility on the state fairgrounds are reserved within minutes of opening every morning.
Despite the rise in cases across the state, a couple of hundred demonstrators turned out in Scottsdale to protest the city’s new mandatory mask rule. A city councilman, Guy Phillips, removed his mask, saying, “I can’t breathe” — mocking both the public health order and the Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey called Phillips’s comments “just flat out wrong” and said that “despicable doesn’t go far enough” in describing them. Ducey has refused to mandate mask wearing, instead merely suggesting that citizens don them. He called it “an issue of personal responsibility” and “[asked] Arizonans to make responsible decisions to protect the most vulnerable in our communities.”

Scottsdale Council member Guy Phillips just addressed the crowd by saying, “I can’t breathe,” the last words of George Floyd before he died at the hands of Minneapolis police, before taking off his mask at this protest. @azcentral pic.twitter.com/jrxSUbHXi9
— Lorraine Longhi 🌵 (@lolonghi) June 24, 2020

Seven of the federal testing sites set to close are in Texas, which has been ravaged by the disease in recent weeks. As some of the state’s ICUs approach full capacity, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Thursday morning attempting to increase the number of hospital beds in the state’s largest counties by banning elective surgeries. While Abbott has urged Texans to both wear masks and stay home while allowing local authorities to require them for employees and patrons of businesses, he has not issued a statewide mandate.

The Texas Tribune noted that the test positivity-rate benchmark Abbott set when reopening the state in May has been breached, with more than 10 percent of tests coming back positive, a marker he had previously called a “warning flag.” Abbott began reopening Texas on May 1, making him one of the first governors to take that step. On Thursday he announced a “temporary pause” in reopening but will allow businesses already open — including bars, bowing alleys and amusement parks — to remain so.

“The outlook is not good,” said Rebecca Fischer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health. “We are in a super-dire situation.”

On Tuesday, Florida recorded 5,508 positive tests, shattering the previous single-day high by more than 1,400 and setting a record-high infection rate of 15.9 percent. The state’s hospital beds are beginning to fill. About 81 percent of adult intensive care unit beds were full as of Wednesday.

While the Palm Beach County commissioners voted to make masks mandatory, a clip from their meeting went viral Wednesday showing citizens opposing masks by promoting wild conspiracy theories. 

MODELING BAD BEHAVIOUR 

President Trump at a rally in Tulsa, Okla., last Saturday. 

(Go Nakamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images) 

Tulsa, Okla., also saw a record daily high of new cases on Wednesday, days after President Trump held an indoor rally in the city despite pleas by city health officials to postpone the event, which was held in a 19,000-seat arena that was two-thirds empty. Tulsa Health Department Executive Director Bruce Dart said it was too soon to know the full effect of the rally, but the Washington Post reported Wednesday that dozens of Secret Service officers will be quarantined after two tested positive for the virus.

Trump has taken to minimizing and joking about the pandemic, complaining — illogically, in light of the rising rate of positive tests — that the increase in cases is an artifact of doing more testing, and calling it the “kung flu” to call attention to its origins in China.

At a rally in Arizona Tuesday, he pretended, or admitted, he didn’t understand the name for the disease: “COVID. COVID-19. COVID. I said, ‘What's the 19?’ ‘COVID-19.’ Some people can’t explain what the 19 — give me the — COVID-19. I said, ‘That’s an odd name.’ I could give you many, many names. Some people call it the ‘Chinese flu,’ the ‘China flu.’ Right? They call it the ‘China,’ as opposed to ‘Chi-’ — the ‘China.’ I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The name is a contraction of “coronavirus disease 2019,” reflecting the year the first cases were discovered.

As he has continually done throughout the pandemic, Trump predicted that it and the resulting lockdowns would end soon — his first target date was Easter — and that the economy would bounce back. “But here’s the story: We are going to be stronger than ever before, and it’s going to be soon,” he said.

* Jana Winter contributed reporting.

Startling images reveal coronavirus forming tentacles in cells. It may help identify new treatments.

 OMG! 
ITS NOT A CORONAVIRUS IT'S A CTHULHU-VIRUS 

AKA CTHULHU-19

Mark Johnson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, USA TODAY•June 26, 2020

MILWAUKEE – Startling, never-before-seen images show that the new coronavirus hijacks proteins in our cells to create monstrous tentacles that branch out and may transmit infection to neighboring cells.

The finding, accompanied by evidence of potentially more effective drugs against COVID-19, published Saturday in the journal Cell by an international team of scientists.

Fluorescence microscopy image of human epithelial cells taken from the colon and infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus, that causes COVID-19. The infected cells produce tentacles, known formally as filopodia ( in white) extending out from the cell surface containing viral particles (M protein in red).

By focusing on the fundamental behavior of the virus — how it hijacks key human proteins and uses them to benefit itself and harm us — the team was able to identify a family of existing drugs called kinase inhibitors that appear to offer the most effective treatment yet for COVID-19.

"We've tested a number of these kinase inhibitors and some are better than remdesivir," said Nevan Krogan, one of more than 70 authors of the new paper, and director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at the University of California, San Francisco.

While remdesivir has yet to be approved for use against COVID-19, U.S. regulators are allowing "emergency use" of the drug in hospitalized patients.

Krogan said tests of kinase inhibitors showed some, including Gilteritnib and Ralimetinib, required lower concentrations than remdesivir in order to kill off 50% of the virus.

The new study, which involved experiments using cells from humans and others from African green monkeys, shows that the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 is especially adept at disrupting vital communications. These communications take place both within cells and from one cell to another.

Electron microscopy image of cells from the kidney of a female African green monkey that have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Infected cells produce tentacles known formally as filopodia (orange) extending out from the cell surface to enable budding of viral particles (blue) and infection of nearby cells.

(SAME MONKEY SPECIES THAT THEY FIRST DISCOVERED HAD HIV)

"This paper shows just how completely the virus is able to rewire all of the signals going on inside the cell. That's really remarkable and it's something that occurs very rapidly (as soon as two hours after cells are infected)," said Andrew Mehle, an associate professor of medical microbiology and immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The communications system known as cell signaling, allows cells to grow, and to detect and respond to outside threats. Errors in cell signaling can lead to such illnesses as cancer and diabetes.

Mehle, who was not involved in the study, said the work shows that scientists are contending with a daunting enemy in the new conronavirus. "These are highly efficient, evolutionarily-tuned machines that will make it very challenging to develop therapeutics," he said.

A different approach

From early in the pandemic, Krogan and his colleagues have taken a different approach from that of many researchers seeking treatments for the new virus.

Many scientists have been screening thousands of drugs already approved for other uses to determine if they can also be used to treat COVID-19.

"We're not doing that," Krogan said. "We're saying 'Let's understand the underlying biology behind how the virus infects us, and let's use that against the virus.' "

In the search for treatments, many scientists have homed in on key proteins in the virus — especially the Spike protein, which allows the viral cells to attach themselves to human cells.

Fluorescence microscopy image of of human epithelial cells taken from the colon and infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Viral N protein (red) hijacks human Casein Kinase II (green; co-localization in yellow) to putatively produce branching filopodia protrusions (white outline boxes) to enable budding of viral particles and infection of nearby cells.

Krogan and his team looked in the opposite direction, focusing on the human proteins, instead of those in the virus. Dozens of human proteins play a critical role in the disease process because the virus needs them to infect people and to make copies of itself.

There is an important advantage to developing treatments aimed at the human, rather than the viral, proteins. Viral proteins can mutate causing them to develop resistance to the drugs targeted to them. Human proteins are far less likely to mutate.

In April, Krogan and his colleagues published a study in the journal Nature showing that 332 human proteins interact with 27 viral proteins.

Feixiong Cheng, a PhD researcher who runs a lab at Cleveland Clinic Genomic Medicine Institute, called the mapping of interactions between these proteins "a novel" and "powerful" strategy for finding existing drugs that might help COVID-19 patients.

In the new study, Krogan's international team looked deeper into the biology, focusing on how the new coronavirus changes a complex process called phosphorylation. This process acts as a series of on-off switches for different cell activities, including growth, division, death and communication with one another.

"What they've done is really a fantastic next step," said Lynne Cassimeris, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University, explaining that the work builds on the previous paper and applies knowledge of cell biology gained over the last 30 years.

"It's an amazing leap. We know that the virus has to be manipulating these human proteins. Now we have a list of what is changing over time."

Cassimeris said that mapping these changes allows researchers to seek drugs that can intervene at specific points.

The scientists found that on-off switches changed significantly in 40 of the 332 proteins that interact with the new coronavirus.

The changes occur because the virus either dials up or down 49 enzymes called kinases. The dialing up or down of kinases cause them to alter 40 of the proteins that interact with virus.

Imagine the kinases as guards protecting our health until the new coronavirus turns them against us. In each case, however, the new study identified treatments that can stop the virus from turning guards into assailants.

The virus most powerfully hijacks a kinase called CK2, which plays a key role in the basic frame of the cell as well as its growth, proliferation and death.

This led the scientists to investigate a drug called Silmitasertib. Tests found this drug inhibits CK2 and eliminates the new coronavirus.

Electron microscopy image of cells from the kidney of a female African green monkey, which have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Infected cells produce tentacles known formally as filopodia (orange) extending out from the cell surface to enable budding of viral particles (blue) and infection of nearby cells.

They also found that the virus has a dramatic effect on a pathway — a group of kinases that form a cascade a little like falling dominoes. The virus hijacks this cascade so that the end result becomes a dangerous overreaction by our immune system.

The study's finding on this pathway may help to explain the extreme overreaction — a cytokine storm — that causes the immune system to kill both healthy and diseased tissue, leading to more than half of the deaths from COVID-19.

Major COVID-19 killer: UW joins drug trial aimed at stopping haywire immune response

Here too, the scientists were able to identify treatments, including the experimental cancer drug Ralimetinib, which may prevent the immune system overreaction.

Authors of the new study also found that the virus harms a family of kinases called CDKs. These play roles in cell growth and in the response to DNA damage. An experimental drug called Dinaciclib may be effective in thwarting this viral assault.

Finally, Krogan and his colleagues found that the virus also hijack a kinase that helps cells stay healthy in different environments and cleans out damaged cells. A small molecule called Apilimod targets this kinase and has been able to hinder the virus in lab tests.

Krogan, who is also an investigator at the Gladstone Institutes at UCSF, said the strategy of examining the human kinases affected by the virus has proved fruitful.

"The kinases are a very druggable set of proteins in our cells," he said.

Follow Mark Johnson on Twitter: @majohnso

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Coronavirus grows tentacles inside cells, providing clue for treatment


#CTHULHU #CORONAVIRUS

Deportation airline secures $67 million in coronavirus bailout

Alexander Nazaryan National Correspondent, Yahoo News•June 23, 2020

WASHINGTON — Four days before the 2016 presidential election, Republican candidate Donald Trump arrived for a campaign rally at an airplane hangar in Wilmington, Ohio, that belonged to an aviation company called Air Transport Services Group, or ATSG. The company’s chief executive at the time, Joe Hete, was a reliable supporter of the Republican Party.

In his speech, Trump promised to “drain the swamp” and spoke at length about the deleted emails of Hillary Clinton, a favorite topic.

Trump has not been back to Wilmington since then. But his administration has not forgotten about ATSG. Last month, an ATSG-owned charter airline company, Omni Air, secured a $67 million bailout as part of the congressional coronavirus relief package. That came on the heels of a $77.65 million contract with the Department of Defense for “international charter airlift services.”

An Omni Air International Boeing 767. (Liam Allport via Flickr)

In addition, Omni Air has charged the federal government exorbitant prices for “high risk” deportation flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency tasked with addressing the plight of millions who live within the United States without proper documentation. The expense was related to the unwillingness of airlines other than Omni Air to conduct such flights.

The case of Omni Air illustrates what the president’s critics have feared would happen with the CARES Act, the $2 trillion relief package passed by Congress in March.

“This brazen betrayal of CARES Act intent needs immediate strong scrutiny,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told Yahoo News. “Congress intended CARES Act grants to keep airline workers on the job, not bankroll the Trump administration’s unconscionable anti-immigration crusade. Trump officials are exploiting a loophole to misuse taxpayer money and continue deportations during a pandemic. Congress should act to help stop it.”

Passenger airlines were devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, which essentially stopped all global travel for several months. Sympathy for airlines did not run especially high, though, in part because Americans were chronically frustrated by the discomfort of flying amid relentless cost cutting and seat shrinking. And in recent years the major carriers had used their profits for stock buybacks, which benefit investors but not employees.

A pilot wearing a protective mask walks through Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Va., on June 9. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The language of the coronavirus relief bill affords Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin a high degree of discretion in the airline-assistance effort, for which Congress allotted $32 billion. “The amount to be received by each air carrier or contractor is based on its payroll expenses” from 2019, the Treasury Department explains on its website.

There are limited details about how those funding determinations were made. The main conditions stipulated by Congress were that airlines receiving coronavirus relief funds could not engage in share buybacks or lay off employees until the end of the current fiscal year on Sept. 30.

“Treasury has not released any details on the process of how they determined award amounts for the airline companies,” says Sean Moulton, a senior policy analyst with the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight. (After this article was published, a Treasury spokesperson emailed to say that Moulton’s assertion “has no grounding in fact,” noting that Treasury has, in fact, issued a guidance to airlines.)

So far, 427 aviation companies have received coronavirus-related support from the Treasury. Recipients include well-known giants like Southwest ($3.2 billion) and many much smaller companies like Catalina Flying Boats ($569,176). Of those 427 companies, 407 received less money than Omni Air. And of those that did receive more, most are large passenger carriers. And even some of those, including JetBlue, Alaska Airlines and Spirit, received less per aircraft than Omni, which operates only 15 airplanes (it does not appear that fleet size figured into Treasury's calculation, with a spokesperson telling Yahoo News that the $67 million award was based on $88 million of salary and benefit expenditures reported by Omni Air for the relevant period).

Among nonpassenger airlines, the largest grant went to Atlas Air, a cargo carrier that like Omni Air works closely with the Pentagon. It received $406 million from the Treasury Department, even though it also appears not to have lost any business during the pandemic.

“The Trump administration’s idea of saving the economy is giving tens of millions in free tax money to a private airline [like Omni] that already profits massively from doing ICE’s deportation dirty work,” said Kyle Herrig, president of the progressive government watchdog group Accountable.US, which has been tracking how the administration spends coronavirus funds.

“Every dollar wasted like this is a dollar not being spent to help small businesses and workers struggling to make ends meet,” Herrig added. “The White House has reached a new low in their disastrous response to this crisis.”

Paul Cunningham, director of corporate communications for ATSG, the Omni Air parent company, sent Yahoo News a statement confirming the $67 million grant. The statement said the airline, which employs more than 800 people, “must refrain from conducting involuntary furloughs or reducing employee rates of pay or benefits,” while limiting executive compensation and maintaining regular services.

Donald Trump speaks in front of his plane during a campaign event at an Air Transport Services Group hangar in Wilmington, Ohio, on Nov. 4, 2016. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

“I cannot answer questions related to flights or customers,” Cunningham wrote. He also declined to answer questions about the company’s finances, in particular whether Omni Air was experiencing hardship at the time of its request to the Treasury Department.

No aviation expert contacted by Yahoo News had any insight into why Omni Air did so much better than significantly bigger counterparts that employ many more people.

ATSG donates exclusively to Republican candidates through its political action committee. One of its lobbyists is Kevin DeWine, formerly the head of the Ohio chapter of the GOP and second cousin to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican.

The Trump administration has repeatedly vowed that politics has played no part in either this or any other coronavirus-related funding decision. “Political affiliation has absolutely no bearing on the Payroll Support Program, including applicant eligibility, the amount of assistance provided or use of funds,” a Treasury spokesperson told Yahoo News.

Democrats were infuriated by Mnuchin’s recent refusal to reveal who has benefited from a $600 billion small-business loan program (Mnuchin eventually relented and said he would make the information public). Like the airline bailout, the small-business loan program is part of the CARES Act, a complexly cobbled-together set of grants and loans meant to stimulate spending by consumers and keep businesses from laying workers off.

Democrats worry that Trump and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill have used the coronavirus crisis to justify the transfer of millions of taxpayer dollars to well-connected companies like Omni. Republicans, meanwhile, have argued that distributing money as quickly as possible was their sole objective. What their Democratic opponents see as instances of corruption, Republicans regard as nothing more than the natural outcome of an immense effort to rescue the American economy.

A United Airlines plane prepares to land at San Francisco International Airport on June 1. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

But even though the Omni grant may have adhered to the Treasury’s opaque guidelines, the airline and other coronavirus-bailout recipients have faced scrutiny from Congress, in particular the Democratic-controlled House. “It’s troubling, if not surprising, to see a company behave this way,” Jennifer Ahearn of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told Yahoo News. “This kind of behavior is the reason Congress built oversight into the structure of the CARES Act.”

In addition to disputing suggestions of political influence, the Treasury Department spokesperson explained that the “standard for determining air carrier eligibility was set by Congress on a bipartisan basis, and each applicant’s eligibility is verified by the Department of Transportation before any funds are disbursed.”

A Transportation Department spokesperson said his agency only verified that “carrier applicants” had the proper federal credentials to apply for relief funds, and referred questions back to the Treasury Department. “DOT reported its findings to Treasury, which is responsible for administering the financial assistance provisions of the CARES Act,” the spokesperson told Yahoo News.

Omni Air is hardly a stranger to government funding. The Pentagon contracts the airline to fly uniformed personnel around the world. Omni is also part of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, whose participants — including major civilian airlines like American and Delta — agree to work with the federal government as needed. During the war in Iraq, Omni was one of several airlines to benefit from the constant movement of people and cargo between the United States and the Middle East.

To this day, Omni Air continues to benefit from Defense Department contracts. Last fall, the Pentagon awarded Omni a contract for $77.7 million, which was to go toward “airlift services.”

The airline’s more controversial operations, however, have involved deportation of immigrants.

In March 2018, Omni flew 110 Kenyan, Somali and South Sudanese immigrants from the United States to Nairobi, Kenya, according to press reports from that time. Later that year, Omni earned the ire of the Cambodian-American community when it participated in the expulsion of 46 Cambodian immigrants from the United States. At the time, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance called that “the largest deportation flight of Southeast Asian refugees in United States history.” In August 2019, Omni flew 40 deported Ghanaians back to their native country, on the western coast of Africa.

An Omni Air DC-10 military charter from Hawaii at Long Beach Airport in California. (John Murphy via Flickr)

According to documents obtained by news outlet Quartz, Omni specializes in “special high-risk charter” flights. The passengers on those flights are immigrants who potentially have significant criminal records.

Other airlines have refused to engage in such transports because outrage over Trump’s hard-line immigration policies has resulted in boycotts of companies that contract with ICE.

Because of this effective monopoly, Omni Air has been able to charge astonishingly high prices, according to reporting by Quartz, which obtained internal ICE records to that effect. Last year, a single Omni flight carrying 163 “high risk” deportees back to Asia cost the federal government $1.8 million, Quartz reported. In May, Omni flew 167 Indian immigrants from the United States to Amritsar, a city in the northern region of Punjab.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment about its work with Omni.

News of Omni’s coronavirus relief package outraged Asian-American organizations, some of which had denounced the airline when it deported the Cambodian immigrants in 2018. “It’s shameful that funds are being diverted from frontline communities on the ground to businesses, like Omni Air International, who are profiting from separating families,” said Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus.

But with a low public profile and few disclosures about its operations, the “murky” airline — as Omni has been described by the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington — has suffered no ill effects from participating in one of the most controversial policies of the Trump administration.

To the contrary, Omni has proved a profitable entity for ATSG. When the parent company released its first-quarter earnings in May, it noted that “revenues were up 12 percent, or $41.1 million, to $389.3 million.” The increased revenue was the result “mainly from growth in Omni Air” and another subsidiary, Air Transport International.

Two weeks later, ATSG got more good news when the Treasury Department announced that Omni Air would be awarded its $67 million grant. That means that in the last eight months it has received more than $140 million from Washington, not counting the millions it continues to charge for deportation flights no other airline is apparently willing to conduct.

_____

New study examines recursive thinking

A multi-institutional research team found the cognitive ability to represent recursive sequences occurs in humans and non-human primates across age, education, culture and species

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: A U.S. ADULT PARTICIPATING IN THE STUDY ON RECURSION. view more 

CREDIT: CANTLON LAB

Recursion -- the computational capacity to embed elements within elements of the same kind -- has been lauded as the intellectual cornerstone of language, tool use and mathematics. A multi-institutional team of researchers for the first time show this ability is shared across age, species and cultural groups in a new study published in the June 26 issue of the journal Science Advances.

"Recursion is a way to organize information that allows humans to see patterns in information that are rich and complex, and perhaps beyond what other species see," said Jessica Cantlon, the Ronald J. and Mary Ann Zdrojkowski Professor of Developmental Neuroscience at CMU and senior author on the paper. "We try to trace the origins of our complex and rich intellectual activities to something in our evolutionary past to understand what makes our thinking similar to and distinct from other species."

The team set up a series of experiments with U.S. adults, adults from an indigenous group in Bolivia that largely lacks formal education, U.S. children and non-human primates. After training on the task, the researchers provided each group with sequences to order. They studied how each group conducted this task, either in a recursive or non-recursive way (listing) and looked to see which order they naturally chose.

The researchers found that the human participants from all age and cultural groups spontaneously ordered content from a recursive approach by building nested structures. The non-human primate subjects more commonly used a simpler listing strategy but with additional exposure began using the recursive strategy, eventually ending up in the range of performance of human children.

"This ability to represent recursive structures is present in children as young as three years old, which suggests it is there even before they use it in language," said Stephen Ferrigno, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University and first author on the paper. "We also saw this ability across people from widely different human cultures. Non-human primates also have the capacity to represent recursive sequences, given the right experience. These results dispel the long-held belief that only humans have the capacity to use this rule."

The team found that working memory was an important factor affecting the sequencing abilities of participants. A strong correlation exists between working memory and the use of the hierarchical strategy.

"Some of the errors were due to working memory, because participants had to remember which objects went first and relate that to other objects later in the list," said Ferrigno. "Children and non-human primates had more errors, which may be due to lower working memory capacity."

The authors note that this work offers a simplified version of a recursive task using visual cues. A more complex series of tasks may not yield the same results.

"There is something universal of being a human that lets our brains think this way spontaneously, but primates have the ability to learn it to some degree," said Cantlon. "[This research] really gives us a chance to sort out the evolutionary and developmental contributions to complex thought."

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Cantlon and Ferrigno were joined by Samuel Cheyette and Steven Piantadosi at the University of California, Berkeley on the study titled, "Recursive sequence generation in monkeys, children, US adults, and native Amazonians." This work received support from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the University of Rochester.

Gas cooker exposure can lower blood pressure, study finds

GIVES NEW MEANING TO THE DRUG ADDICTION 

KNOWN AS SNIFFING GAS 

KING'S COLLEGE LONDON

The study, published recently in Circulation Research and led by a team from King's College London, has investigated how nitrogen dioxide can impact the cardiovascular system.

The study examined the blood chemistry and cardiovascular changes of 12 healthy volunteers. They sat next to a domestic gas cooker for ninety minutes followed by ninety minutes with normal background nitrogen levels. On another occasion, the volunteers were exposed to normal background nitrogen dioxide levels for three hours.

The period next to a gas cooker increased nitrogen dioxide levels in the air 10-fold and subsequently lowered blood pressure by 5 mm Hg from 45 minutes onwards. The study also found that blood levels of the substance nitrite increased by 15% after 15 minutes.

Previous studies have shown nitrite, which can be converted from dietary nitrate following the ingestion of green leafy vegetables and beetroot, can lower blood pressure. This study suggests nitrite can also be made when the body processes nitrogen dioxide and makes a link between previous research focusing on dietary nitrate and studies of inhalation of nitrogen dioxide for the first time.

Air pollution contributes to illness and death in the general population, but it is a complex mixture of airborne particles and gases, including nitrogen dioxide. Working out the individual effects of each is challenging and there has been a running debate about how to distinguish between the independent effects of nitrogen dioxide and respirable particles in the air.

While the evidence linking nitrogen dioxide to a worsening of symptoms in respiratory disease is well established, its short-term impact on the heart and circulation is less clear. Notably, people with domestic gas appliances or people working in kitchens with gas cookers may be exposed to higher levels of nitrogen dioxide, but with less particulate matter, than that found on the street.

This unique study helps to shed light on some of the rapid effects of nitrogen dioxide on the heart and circulation. Looking at previous air pollution studies, it had been unclear whether the nitrite in the blood came from nitrogen dioxide or from particulate matter causing inflammation and generation of nitric oxide, which is converted to nitrite. This study suggests that it is the nitrogen dioxide that causes nitrite to be formed in the blood.

Crucially, while this effect of short-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide in healthy volunteers may be beneficial, there are other studies of adverse effects of long-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide, and on adverse effects of short-term exposure in asthmatics.

Further research will confirm these findings in larger studies and examine the effects on a more varied cohort.

Dr Andrew Webb, Clinical Senior Lecturer at King's College London, said: "High blood pressure is the biggest single contributor to deaths around the world. Therefore, if exposure to nitrogen dioxide from gas cookers contributes to lowering blood pressure, this could be beneficial per se, and in the context of general air pollution may partially offset the adverse cardiovascular effects of short-term exposures to elevated particulate matter concentrations.

"The mechanism by which nitrogen dioxide lowers blood pressure appears to be through linking into the same pathway as dietary nitrate (found in green leafy vegetables and beetroot): both result in an increase in blood nitrite levels. Therefore, it is not just what you eat, but how you cook it that matters."

Neuromarketing of taste

Taste similarity of food products can be compared with the help of electroencephalography

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

 

Marina Domracheva and Sofya Kulikova, researchers from HSE University's campus in Perm, have discovered a new approach to analyse the perceived similarity of food products, based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals. They note that the power of gamma oscillations can reflect similarities in a cross-modal approach. Their paper was published in the journal Food Quality and Preference.

The most common tools used to understand people's perception of food products are hall tests, surveys and observations. There is a general assumption that consumers can evaluate and express their real preferences, but it is not uncommon when a consumer's expressed opinion of the product does not comply with their behaviour. In addition, such research can be costly for companies.

Neuromarketing may help to eliminate these troubles. To analyse consumers' preferences, neuromarketing specialists can apply neuroimaging technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electroencephalography (EEG).

The researchers from HSE University used a cross-modal approach to study how food product similarity is assessed. This approach is based on the integration of senses from different modalities (taste, smell, and visual appearance) in an integral image of an object. For this experiment, 18 participants tasted multi-cereal candies, and then looked at images of similar objects, such as cookies, cereal bars or oatmeal. The respondents evaluated the similarities of each of these products with the candy they had just tried. While this was happening, their brain activity was recorded using EEG.

Two EEG-based metrics were considered as a potential measure of product similarity: the power of induced gamma oscillations during a 400-600 ms period after the presentation of a visual stimulus and an amplitude of N400 evoked response potentials.

In EEG-registered brain activity, oscillations of varying frequency and amplitude can be detected, which are related to various psychological processes. Gamma oscillations have frequency over 30 Hz and are detected when the brain is solving tasks that require focusing the attention and exchanging the information between different brain areas.

Evoked gamma oscillation with a power of 30-80 Hz is thought to ensure the distributed processing of information in various areas of the brain to form a common consistent perception of a given object on the basis of its various characteristics - visual, audial, and taste. For example, if the vocalization of an animal is congruent with the animal's image, the power of the evoked gamma oscillations grows. The researchers also assumed that a similar effect may be observed when food products are compared. And indeed, when the respondents looked at products that were similar to multi-cereal candies (such as cereal bars), the power of the gamma oscillations was at their highest.

'The amplitude of the N400-like negative difference component is registered by EEG when we see a minor error or incongruency: e.g, between a taste feeling and the visual perception of the product,' says Sofya Kulikova. 'When an experiment participant tasted the candy and then viewed an image of broccoli or fried potatoes, the amplitude was at its highest.'

The N400-like component is a wave that appears on the EEG at about 400 ms after the onset of the stimulus and has a negative amplitude polarity.

It turned out that both approaches are reasonable, but the N400-like component amplitude displayed a high variability among the respondents. Therefore, in a perceived similarity assessment, it is better to rely on the power of gamma oscillations.

The approach discovered by the researchers may be applied to neuromarketing studies of food taste perception. In particular, this method can be a useful tool to study the perception of new innovative products manufactured with the use of innovative technologies, or from unconventional ingredients, to which consumers might be unaccustomed.

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Repeated head impacts associated with later-life depression symptoms, worse cognitive function

Largest study to date on living patients lends insight into the differences between the consequences of traumatic brain injury or concussion and repetitive subconcussive head impacts.

BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

 

(Boston) -- Scientists have long believed that a single traumatic brain injury (TBI) earlier in life may contribute to problems with memory, thinking and depression later in life. In most previous studies, however, research failed to examine the possible role of having a history of exposure to repetitive head impacts, including those leading to "subconcussive" injuries, in these later-life problems. In the largest study of its kind, an association has been found in living patients exposed to repetitive head impacts and difficulties with cognitive functioning and depression years or decades later.

Scientists from the Boston University (BU) Alzheimer's Disease and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Centers, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and San Francisco VA Healthcare System teamed up to analyze the records of 13,323 individuals age 40 and older (average age 62) who participate in the internet-based Brain Health Registry. Of those, 725 or 5 percent of participants reported exposure to previous repetitive head impacts through contact sports, abuse or military service. In addition to repetitive head impact history, the scientists also examined the effects of having a TBI with and without loss of consciousness.

Along with self-report questionnaires of repetitive head impact and TBI history, participants completed measures of depressive symptoms and computerized cognitive tests. The findings, published in the journal Neurology, reveal that participants with a history of both repetitive head impacts and TBI reported greater depression symptoms than those who did not have such history. In addition, when repetitive head impacts and TBI were examined separately, a history of repetitive head impacts had the strongest effect on later-life symptoms of depression. The findings were independent of age, sex, racial identity and education level.

"The findings underscore that repetitive hits to the head, such as those from contact sport participation or physical abuse, might be associated with later-life symptoms of depression. It should be made clear that this association is likely to be dependent on the dose or duration of repetitive head impacts and this information was not available for this study," said Michael Alosco, PhD, associate professor of neurology at BU School of Medicine (BUSM) and co-director of the BU Alzheimer's Disease Center Clinical Core.

There was a dose-response-like pattern between head trauma and depression symptoms. Specifically, participants without any history of either TBI or repetitive head impacts had the fewest symptoms. While depression symptoms increased when a history of TBI alone was present, depression symptoms were highest for the groups who had a history of both repetitive head impacts and TBI. Indeed, the group that had a history of repetitive head impacts and TBI with loss of consciousness reported the most depressive symptoms.

A similar cumulative effect was seen among those exposed to repetitive head impacts and TBI on tests of memory, learning, processing speed, and reaction time. Participants with a history of repetitive head impacts or TBI had worse performance on some of the tests compared to those without any head trauma history, and those with both a history of repetitive head impacts and TBI with loss of consciousness had worse performance on almost all of these computerized cognitive tests.

"These findings add to the growing knowledge about the long-term neurological consequences of brain trauma," said Robert Stern, PhD, professor of neurology, neurosurgery and anatomy & neurobiology at BUSM and director of clinical research at the BU CTE Center. "It should be noted that not all people with a history of repetitive hits to the head will develop later-life problems with cognitive functioning and depression. However, results from this study provide further evidence that exposure to repetitive head impacts, such as through the routine play of tackle football, plays an important role in the development in these later-life cognitive and emotional problems," added Stern, one of the senior authors of the study.

A major limitation of the study is that the researchers did not have access to measurements or estimates of the degree of repetitive impact exposure nor TBI frequency. In October, BU researchers reported a dose-response relationship between the number of years of exposure to tackle football (regardless of the number of concussions) and the presence and severity of the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In a sample of 266 deceased football players, each year of exposure to tackle football was associated with 30 percent increased odds of having CTE and 17 percent increased odds of having severe CTE. It is unknown if any subjects in this study have CTE or any other neurodegenerative disease.

The research team plans to extend their work through continued collaboration between BU and UCSF investigators utilizing data from the Brain Health Registry. "We are excited to partner with BU on this important study that used the Brain Health Registry to increase our understanding on the long-term effects of repetitive head impacts and TBI," said Michael Weiner, MD, PI of the Brain Health Registry and professor-in-residence in radiology and biomedical imaging, medicine, psychiatry and neurology at UCSF. "The Brain Health Registry is a novel and exciting resource for both the scientific community and the general public. It allows for large-scale recruitment, screening and study of dementia, and more than 60,000 individuals across the world are enrolled. It offers a way for the general public to track their thinking, memory, mood, and behavior over time, and also serves as a readiness registry for future research and clinical trials of prevention and treatment." You can visit the BHR here: http://bit.ly/brainhealthreg.

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The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, grant numbers U01NS093334; K23AG046377; K23NS102399; P30AG013846.

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for 

SYSTEMIC RACISM

SNAP work requirements put low-income Americans at risk

Work requirements will disproportionately affect Black working-age adults and harm people with disabilities, new study says

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

 

WASHINGTON, DC (June 26, 2020) - When work requirements for a federal food safety-net program start again, many low-income Americans will lose benefits - and Black adults will be hardest hit, according to a study published today. In addition, some disabled people will lose these crucial food assistance benefits.

The authors point out that the loss of food assistance would damage the health of low-income people, who suffer from high rates of COVID-19 and other serious health conditions.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in record rates of unemployment. SNAP benefits are critical to help people who have lost work get the food they need," said lead author Erin Brantley, PhD, MPH, a senior research associate at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH). "When work requirements for SNAP start again, history shows we can expect to see a disproportionate impact on black families."

Work requirements for Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly called the food stamp program, are temporarily paused under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act but are set to resume when the federal public health emergency ends. Separate from this action, the Trump administration issued a new rule to limit the ability that states traditionally have had to waive SNAP work requirements when unemployment is high, although a federal court has temporarily stopped implementation.

The study is the first to find that SNAP work requirements lead more Black adults to lose food assistance compared to white adults. It is also the first published research to show that SNAP work requirements cause disabled adults to lose benefits. Although SNAP work requirements exempt some people with disabilities, others may not qualify for an exemption, despite facing substantial health challenges. In some cases, disabled people may lose SNAP benefits because they cannot navigate the paperwork requirements, the authors point out.

Brantley and her colleagues at the Milken Institute SPH analyzed the impact of the requirement that low-income Americans prove that they are working - or lose SNAP benefits. The study examined what happened when many states put work requirements for SNAP into place between 2013 and 2017. The researchers found that:

• Food stamp work requirements for adults aged 18 to 49 led to a 21 percent drop in participation in the program overall;
• Black adults experienced a 23 percent loss in food assistance during that time, much larger than the 16 percent decline for white adults, likely because black workers have fewer work prospects;
• Even though the law exempts some with disabilities, there was a significant 7.8 percent drop in participation for these Americans.

The authors point out that although work requirements are paused during the public health emergency, the economic fall-out, high rates of unemployment and food insecurity could last long after the crisis is declared over.

"Our study suggests that even when the economy was strong such work requirements created disparities that harmed low-income people, especially in Black communities and people with disabilities," said Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at Milken Institute SPH and co-author of the study. "The harm will be far worse when jobs are scarce during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, since high unemployment is expected to persist."

The findings also have implications for health insurance coverage. The Trump administration has encouraged states to introduce work requirements to Medicaid. Although federal courts have blocked implementation of Medicaid work requirements in some states, several states have continued to develop plans for new policies.

SNAP provides an estimated 37 million Americans with electronic vouchers to help pay for groceries. Low-income people who receive SNAP benefits have improved food security and that leads to better health, Ku and Brantley say.

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The paper, Association of Work Requirements with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Participation by Race/Ethnicity and Disability Status, 2013-2017, was published June 26 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Open Network. The Commonwealth Fund supported the research.

Sexist views on education within families affect future academic choices

A UOC study has analysed academic sexism in baccalaureate programmes at Spanish secondary schools

UNIVERSITAT OBERTA DE CATALUNYA (UOC)

 

According to senior researcher at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya's Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) Gender and ICT (GenTIC) research group, Milagros Sáinz, "In those cases where families have very sexist attitudes in relation to education and life, their opinions in terms of academic and other skills which boys and girls are ideally supposed to have may hold even more weight."

Despite the current lockdown being a temporary event, the researcher suggests that such circumstances may influence the decisions being made by young people with regard to their educational path in terms of their choice of courses for post-compulsory secondary or university education.

"There is a risk that young people, especially those from certain socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, will be more likely to be swayed by the opinions and experiences of their parents than they would have been prior to the health crisis," says Sáinz, who went on to add that, "They are not socializing with others, such as teachers or members of their peer groups in the same way as they were before quarantine."

In a study published in the International Journal of Social Psychology, the researcher with José Luis Martínez and Julio Meneses, also from the UOC, analysed the differences corresponding to gender in the response mechanisms of secondary school students with regard to scenarios related to academic sexism. The researchers explain that "girls are particularly likely to encounter this kind of situation, as they are more frequently faced with sexist attitudes about their abilities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects than boys."

According to the study, students whose parents had completed intermediate or higher level academic studies showed a greater predisposition to actively confronting sexist situations. "Interestingly, we observed that boys tend to use avoidance in response to scenarios of academic sexism, whereas girls are more likely to confront them or seek help from people in authority, such as teachers or family members, when it comes to this type of situation," the expert pointed out.

Boys are also affected by sexism

The study sampled 954 first-year baccalaureate students across ten schools in the metropolitan areas of Madrid and Barcelona. Sixty per cent of the students described their parents' level of academic achievement as intermediate, while 30% said that it was high and the final 10% reported a low level of education. In terms of origin, 80% of the student's parents were born in Spain.

Students were asked to complete a questionnaire in which they were presented with a series of different scenarios involving sexist attitudes towards their academic abilities and they had to state whether they would respond by: confronting the situation, asking for help or avoidance.

The students also had to indicate to what extent they agreed with five sexist statements about the academic abilities of boys and girls. In terms of their own personal experience, they also had to say whether anyone around them had ever made discouraging remarks about their abilities in STEM fields, such as mathematics, technology and physics (in the case of girls), or in languages and biology (in the case of boys).

In the words of Milagros Sáinz, "Our society tends to undervalue women's abilities with regard to highly prestigious and socially valued subjects and fields, such as science and technology. Boys, however, are used to their skills being valued above those of girls, which is also an example of sexism, albeit positive in this case, as it works in their favour."

According to the expert, this type of sexism does not mean that all boys have a greater affinity for those subject areas and they also feel frustrated and suffer its negative effects because many "do not comply with that ideal of masculinity".

The influence of parental academic achievement

In addition to gender being influential in determining the way young people tackle academic discrimination, the study also emphasizes an impact corresponding to levels of parental education.

As pointed out by Sáinz, "Gender explains the different ways of coping with academic sexism per se but the educational level of parents helps us understand the degree to which groups of students are predisposed to actively respond to such situations."

Girls whose parents had completed post-compulsory secondary education or university studies tended to respond to sexist scenarios by confronting the relevant person, whereas in boys with a similar family background, the response was often avoidance.

The study also reveals that, in some cases, the students themselves are not aware of having personally witnessed or experienced this kind of discrimination. "Girls are often exposed to academic sexism that questions their technological competence but they perceive this as being based on their own personal lack of ability and rule out pursuing it as a result," explained Sáinz, adding that, "They don't realize that this is a stereotypical belief applied to women based solely on the fact that they are women." The opposite is true for boys: their decisions and behaviours are also strongly conditioned by social and cultural expectations related to masculinity.

To prevent these kinds of imbalances, the expert stressed the importance of educating boys and girls on issues related to equality and how to deal with different academic or other types of sexist scenario; a programme that would also need to be extended to teachers and families.

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