Italy's health workers on edge of exhaustion in virus fightFranck IOVENE, AFP•March 14, 2020




Nationwide Italy has more than 1,400 deaths from the virus and 21,000 infections, with a quarter of the country's intensive care beds taken up by those with the illness (AFP Photo/Miguel MEDINA)

Rome (AFP) - A worn-out nurse slumps over her keyboard in a widely shared image symbolic of the extreme fatigue that Italian healthcare workers are facing as they battle Europe's worst outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The picture is of Elena Pagliarini, a nurse in the northern region of Lombardy which has been worst hit by the disease.

Nationwide Italy has more than 1,400 deaths from the virus and 21,000 infections, with a quarter of the country's intensive care beds taken up by those with the illness.

In normal times Lombardy is the economic heart of Italy, equipped with one of the world's best health systems.

But those who staff it -- like Pagliarini -- have been put under enormous strain.

"On one hand I was annoyed to see my photo everywhere, I was ashamed of showing my weakness," Pagliarini told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

"But then I was happy because I got beautiful messages from people who empathised with my story," she said.

"I actually don't feel physically tired, I can work for 24 hours straight if it's necessary but I won't hide the fact that right now I'm anxious because I'm fighting an enemy that I don't know," she added.

She's just one of many healthcare workers who have expressed their concern at the toll that the outbreak is taking, on facilities and personnel alike.

"It's almost two weeks since I've seen my son or my family because I'm worried about infecting them," Daniele Macchini, a hospital doctor in the northern city of Bergamo, (also in Lombardy) wrote in a widely-shared Facebook post.

"I settle for some photos of my son which I look at through my tears, and a few video calls," he says.

- 'Psychologically tired' -

Further south in Tuscany, the health system is also starting to feel the pressure.

A nurse in the Tuscan town of Grossetto, Alessia Bonari, posted an image on Instagram of her face bearing marks from a long day of wearing a surgical mask.

"I'm worried because the mask might not be fitting right on my face, I might touch myself accidentally with dirty gloves, the glasses might not totally cover my eyes," she wrote in the caption.

She said that the protective gear staff had to wear meant that she couldn't drink or go to the toilet for six hours at a time.

To add to the physical fatigue she said she and all her colleagues had been "psychologically tired" for weeks from the workload.

The San Giovanni Bosco hospital in the northern city of Turin this week put a mental health team in place to help its staff counter the stress of the current situation, above all for those working in emergency departments and in intensive care.

"All those who need it can come forward, we're there for everyone," Monica Agnesone, one of the 20 psychologists in the team, told the La Stampa newspaper.

She explained that other doctors and hospital staff were suffering from the "fear of making mistakes, of being infected, of not being able to carry on in these conditions".

On Thursday Italian media reported that in the northern town of Bergamo alone around 50 doctors had tested positive for the virus.

Further south in a hospital in the Puglia region,local media reported that 76 employees had to go into quarantine after being in contact with patients who tested positive for the virus.

Six of them had to be admitted to hospital, with one needing intensive care.

Agnesone's strategies for coping with the stress will no doubt be increasingly called on in the weeks to come.

She recommends "carving out moments where you can detach, re-centre yourself, lowering the level of tension by using breathing exercises and focusing on other things."

Otherwise, she warns, "stress ends up wearing out your energy".

The NBA’s Coronavirus Cancellation and the Workers Left Behind

The season had to be put on hold, but the economic repercussions must be addressed.

By Dave ZirinTwitter MARCH 12, 2020

Fans leave the Golden 1 Center after an NBA game in Sacramento, California was postponed as a precaution against the coronavirus on March 11, 2020. (Rich Pedroncelli / AP

The National Basketball Association has acted with a speed that is putting other sports leagues, the NCAA, and particularly the federal government to shame. In the course of a single day, March 11—a day we will perhaps remember as the turning point when people began taking the coronavirus seriously—the NBA moved from planning to wait out the virus, only asking players to fist bump instead of high-fiving the fans, to calling for games to be played in empty arenas, to finally putting the entire season on hiatus.

The NBA made this unprecedented decision after Utah Jazz All-Star center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the virus. Earlier this week, in an act that will go down in history as a symbol of our own hubris, Gobert touched every microphone in the press room—mocking the very idea that there was a communicable virus in our midst. After his diagnosis, the Jazz game in Oklahoma City against the Thunder was canceled right before tip-off, with confused fans milling about the concourses and both teams quarantined back in their locker rooms. If there was one scene that speaks to how quickly we’ve gone from blasé to terrified, it was seeing Chris Paul, the All-Star point guard for the Thunder and a respected union leader, come over to the Jazz bench to see what the hell was going on and be waved away fiercely as if he was about to walk through hell in a gasoline suit.

The NBA had to make this decision, for the players’ safety as much as the public’s. Few professions involve more travel and interaction with literally millions of people than professional basketball. The league could have become a COVID-19 roadshow, infecting populations in city after city. Commissioner Adam Silver had no choice but to pull the plug.

The collateral damage will be stark. It’s not merely about the integrity of the 2019–20 season. That seems pretty irrelevant at the moment. The bigger concern is the pain this will cause communities, particularly the thousands of low-wage workers who labor in NBA arenas. For many families, one paycheck away from calamity, this loss of income is catastrophic. Only one NBA owner thus far, Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, has stepped forward and said that he is developing a plan for employees of the team and the arena, saying, “I reached out…to find out what it would cost to financially support people who aren’t going to be able to come to work.”

The 29 other billionaires who own these teams, for public relations reasons alone, need to step up and tell the public how they are going to help the workers, particularly the low-wage workers who make arenas run, through this difficult time. Bob Myers, the president of the Golden State Warriors, did say, “We feel for the workers, mostly, the low-wage earners that count on working our games.” But workers need more than their sympathy. They need paid leave.

And even paid leave won’t help the people who sell bootleg goods outside the arenas, making their living through the underground, informal economy that surrounds sporting events around the world. I spoke to one of those workers last night, who said to me, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I need that money. Without it, my family is in hella trouble. And if we get sick, I don’t even know.”


We also need more NBA players’ using their platform to speak out during this difficult time. Monty Williams, coach of the Phoenix Suns, said earlier this week, “I heard the test costs like $1,400. Who can pay for that other than folks who have excess money? People are dying. That test should be free.”

That is step one. NBA players now affected by this could make a tremendous difference by spreading public awareness.

For now, given first the death of Kobe and Gianna Bryant and now the hiatus of the season, I think many fans echo the words of LeBron James, who tweeted, “Man we cancelling sporting events, school, office work, etc etc. What we really need to cancel is 2020!”

Dave ZirinTWITTER
Dave Zirin is the sports editor of The Nation.

Billionaire NBA Owners Have an Obligation to Help Suffering Arena Workers—Now

It’s unconscionable that half the teams are still dragging their feet.

By Dave ZirinTwitter 3/15/2020

A cleaning person works in the pro shop at TD Garden in Boston, Saturday, March, 14, 2020. (Michael Dwyer / AP Photo)


New Orleans Pelicans rookie Zion Williamson is about as exciting and interesting an NBA player as we’ve seen in years. The 19-year-old has stepped up in a crisis, offering to pay all wages for the stadium workers at the Smoothie King Arena where he plays while the NBA season is on hold because of the COVID-19 crisis.

In a post on Instagram, Williamson said,
some of the most special people I have met are those who work at smoothie King Center…. these are the folks who make our games possible, creating the perfect environment for our fans and everyone involved in the organization. Unfortunately, many of them are still recovering from long term challenges created by Katrina, and now face the economic impact of the postponement of games because of the virus. My mother has always set an example for me about being respectful for others and being grateful for what we have, and so today I am pledging to cover the salaries for all of those Smoothie King Center workers for the next 30 days.

Zion is not the only NBA player who has ponied up some of his own mega-salary to help those most hurt by the stadium closures. Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers, MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks, and the Detroit Pistons’ Blake Griffin have all donated $100,000 to arena workers. The Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry brought together players and management to pay $1 million in order to aid Chase Center employees in the Bay Area.

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President Obama gave them a backslap on Twitter, writing, “A shout out to Kevin, Giannis, Zion, Blake, Steph and all the players, owners and organizations who are setting a good example during a challenging time. A reminder that we’re a community, and that each of us has an obligation to look out for each other.”

Let’s unpack that term, “obligation.” What the generosity of individual players really highlights is just how few billionaire NBA owners have stepped up to aid the low-wage workers that make their stadium economies hum. So far, owners of only roughly half the teams have pledged to help.


NBA spokesman Mike Bass said in a statement: “NBA teams, arena owners and players are working together in partnership to support arena employees impacted by our season hiatus. Within the last day, many have already announced their plans while others are in the process of formulating them.”

They need to move faster. Credit to Mark Cuban of the Mavericks, for leading the way. And credit to Atlanta Hawks franchise owner Tony Ressler, who said,

We have a pretty clear set of priorities in this kind of remarkable time that we’re living through. Protecting our fans, protecting our employees, and protecting the reputation of our league, all of which is important, but let there be no confusion, that means taking care of all of our employees, our full-time, our part-time.

This commitment to “taking care of all of our employees, our full-time, our part-time” should be league wide. As Obama said, they have an obligation to do so. This isn’t about feel-good generosity, it’s about right and wrong. When NBA teams get hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to build new stadiums, it is always done with the promise of jobs. These promises are always problematic, since they often, when not unionized, don’t come with a living wage and of course by their nature comprise seasonal, as opposed to year round, work. The coronavirus response has shown just how precarious these workers’ jobs are.

Now is put up or shut up time. The ownership plutocracy must provide paid leave for these workers, because promises made have to be matched by promises kept. One team, my hometown squad the Washington Wizards. and team governor Ted Leonsis will be doing the right thing and funding salaries of arena workers during this crisis. I spoke to one, who said to me, “Paid leave means I can stay home, care for my kids when they’re home from school. That means groceries. That means everything.” It’s unconscionable that half the teams are still dragging their feet. It shouldn’t take a 19-year-old rookie to shame these cosseted billionaires into doing their duty and to make sure everyone can play a role in getting us through this pandemic in one piece.



Dave ZirinTWITTER

Dave Zirin is the sports editor of The Nation.

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Think Exotic Animals Are to Blame for the Coronavirus? Think Again.
Scientists have fingered bats and pangolins as potential sources of the virus, but the real blame lies elsewhere—with human assaults on the environment.

By Sonia Shah FEBRUARY 18, 2020


A fruit bat captured by CDC scientists Brian Amman and Jonathan Towner in Queen Elizabeth National Park on August 25, 2018. (Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

It could have been a pangolin. Or a bat. Or, as one now-debunked theory that made the rounds suggested, a snake.

The race to finger the animal source of COVID-19, the coronavirus currently ensnaring more than 150 million people in quarantines and cordons sanitaires in China and elsewhere, is on. The virus’s animal origin is a critical mystery to solve. But speculation about which wild creature originally harbored the virus obscures a more fundamental source of our growing vulnerability to pandemics: the accelerating pace of habitat loss.

Since 1940, hundreds of microbial pathogens have either emerged or reemerged into new territory where they’ve never been seen before. They include HIV, Ebola in West Africa, Zika in the Americas, and a bevy of novel coronaviruses. The majority of them—60 percent—originate in the bodies of animals. Some come from pets and livestock. Most of them—more than two-thirds—originate in wildlife.

But that’s not the fault of wild animals. Although stories illustrated with pictures of wild animals as “the source” of deadly outbreaks might suggest otherwise, wild animals are not especially infested with deadly pathogens, poised to infect us. In fact, most of these microbes live harmlessly in these animals’ bodies.

The problem is the way that cutting down forests and expanding towns, cities, and industrial activities creates pathways for animal microbes to adapt to the human body.

Habitat destruction threatens vast numbers of wild species with extinction, including the medicinal plants and animals we’ve historically depended upon for our pharmacopeia. It also forces those wild species that hang on to cram into smaller fragments of remaining habitat, increasing the likelihood that they’ll come into repeated, intimate contact with the human settlements expanding into their newly fragmented habitats. It’s this kind of repeated, intimate contact that allows the microbes that live in their bodies to cross over into ours, transforming benign animal microbes into deadly human pathogens.

Consider Ebola. According to a 2017 study, Ebola outbreaks, which have been linked to several species of bats, are more likely to occur in places in Central and West Africa that have experienced recent episodes of deforestation. Cutting down the bats’ forests forces them to roost in trees in backyards and farms instead, increasing the likelihood that a human might, say, take a bite of a piece of fruit covered in bat saliva or hunt and slaughter a local bat, exposing herself to the microbes sheltering in the bat’s tissues. Such encounters allow a host of viruses carried harmlessly by bats—Ebola, Nipah, and Marburg, to name a few—to slip into human populations. When such so-called “spillover” events happen frequently enough, animal microbes can adapt to our bodies and evolve into human pathogens.
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Mosquito-borne disease outbreaks have been similarly linked to the felling of forests, although less because of the loss of habitat than to its transformation. As trees’ leaf litter and roots disappear, water and sediment flow more readily along the shorn forest floor, newly open to shafts of sunlight. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes breed in the sunlit puddles. A study in 12 countries found that mosquito species that carry human pathogens are twice as common in deforested areas compared to intact forests.

Habitat destruction also scrambles the population sizes of different species in ways that can increase the likelihood that a pathogen will spread. West Nile virus, a virus of migratory birds, is one example. Squeezed by habitat loss as well as other affronts, bird populations in North America have declined by more than 25 percent over the past 50 years. But species don’t decline at a uniform rate. Specialist bird species, like woodpeckers and rails, have been hit harder than generalists like robins and crows. That increases the abundance of West Nile virus in our domestic bird flocks because, while woodpeckers and rails are poor carriers of the virus, robins and crows excel at it. The likelihood that a local mosquito will bite a West Nile virus–infected bird and then a human grows.

Similarly, the expansion of suburbs into the Northeastern forest increases the risk of tick-borne disease by driving out creatures like opossums, which help control tick populations, while improving conditions for species like white-footed mice and deer, which don’t. Tick-borne Lyme disease first emerged in the United States in 1975; in the past 20 years, seven new tick-borne pathogens have followed.

It’s not only the fact of habitat destruction that ratchets up the risk of disease emergence, it’s also what we’re replacing wild habitat with. To sate our species’ carnivorous appetites, we’ve razed an area around the size of the continent of Africa to raise animals for slaughter. Some of these animals are then delivered through the illicit wildlife trade or sold in so-called “wet markets.” There, wild species that would rarely if ever encounter each other in nature are caged next to one another, allowing microbes to jump from one species to the next, a process that begot the coronavirus that caused the 2002–03 SARS epidemic and possibly the novel coronavirus stalking us today.

But many more are reared in factory farms, where hundreds of thousands of individuals await slaughter, packed closely together, providing microbes lush opportunities to turn into deadly pathogens. Avian influenza viruses, for example, which originate in the bodies of wild waterfowl, rampage in factory farms packed with captive chickens, mutating and becoming more virulent, a process so reliable it can be replicated in the laboratory. One strain called H5N1, which can infect humans, kills more than half of those infected. Containing another strain, which reached North America in 2014, required the slaughter of tens of millions of poultry.

The avalanche of excreta produced by our livestock introduces yet more opportunities for animal microbes to spill over into human populations. Because animal waste is far more voluminous than croplands can possibly absorb as fertilizer, it is collected in many places in unlined cesspools called manure lagoons. Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli, which lives harmlessly inside the guts of over half of all cattle on American feedlots, lurks in that waste. In humans, it causes bloody diarrhea and fever and can lead to acute kidney failure. Because cattle waste so frequently sloshes into our food and water, 90,000 Americans are infected every year.

This process of transforming animal microbes into human pathogens is accelerated today, but it is not new. It began with the Neolithic revolution, when we first cleared wildlife habitat to make way for crops and yoked wild animals into servitude. The “deadly gifts” we received from our “animal friends,” as Jared Diamond put it, include measles and tuberculosis, from cows; pertussis from pigs; and influenza from ducks. It continued during the era of colonial expansion. Belgian colonists in Congo built the railroads and cities that allowed a lentivirus in local macaques to perfect its adaptations to the human body; British colonists in Bangladesh cut down the Sundarbans wetlands to build rice farms, exposing humans to water-borne bacteria in the wetlands’ brackish waters.

The pandemics those colonial-era intrusions created plague us to this day. The macaque’s lentivirus evolved into HIV. The water-borne bacteria of the Sundarbans, now known as cholera, has caused seven pandemics so far, the latest churning just a few hundred miles off the coast of Florida in Haiti.

The good news is that, because we are not passive victims of animal microbes invading our bodies but fully empowered agents who turn harmless animal microbes into pandemic-causing pathogens, there’s much we can do to reduce the risk that these disease-causing microbes emerge at all.

We can protect wildlife habitat, so that animal microbes stay in their bodies and don’t cross over into ours, an approach championed by the “One Health” movement, among others.

We can conduct active surveillance in places where animal microbes are most likely to transform into human pathogens, hunting for ones that show signs of adapting to the human body—and squelching them before they cause epidemics. For the past 10 years, scientists funded by the USAID’s Predict program did just that. While the human footprint has continued to expand across the planet, Predict scientists have pinpointed more than 900 novel viruses around the world that emerged as a result, including new strains of SARS-like coronaviruses

Today, the shadow of the next pandemic looms. But that’s not just because of the novel coronavirus. The Trump administration’s liberation of extractive industries and industrial development from environmental and other regulatory constraints can be expected to accelerate the habitat destruction that brings animal microbes into human bodies. At the same time, the administration is reducing our ability to pinpoint the next spillover microbe and to contain it when it starts to spread. The administration decided to end the Predict program in October. Officials reportedly felt “uncomfortable funding cutting-edge science.” Last week, the administration proposed cutting funds to the World Health Organization too, by 53 percent.

The epidemiologist Larry Brilliant once said, “Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional.” But pandemics only remain optional if we have the will to disrupt our politics as readily as we disrupt nature and wildlife. In the end, there is no real mystery about the animal source of pandemics. It’s not some spiky scaled pangolin or furry flying bat. It’s populations of warm-blooded primates: The true animal source is us.

Clarification: A previous version of this article stated that E. coli lives harmlessly inside the guts of over half of all cattle on American feedlots. While the prevalence of E. coli in cattle can reach that high on particular feedlots, it is more complicated to calculate the figure nationwide, since the presence of E. coli varies according to geography and time of year. This post has been updated.

Sonia ShahSonia Shah is a science journalist and the author of PANDEMIC: Tracking Contagion from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016). Her fifth book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, will be published in June.

Prayer Will Not Stop the Coronavirus

The pandemic lays bare how American politicians have ignored the past and its injustices. It’s time for repentance, not just prayer.

By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

President Donald Trump speaks during a White House briefing on coronavirus. (Alex Brandon / AP Photo)

When President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and public health officials held a Saturday press conference on their plans to address the coronavirus, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson was a surprising addition to the line-up.

Yes, Carson is a medical doctor. But his specialty was neurosurgery, not epidemiology. A public health crisis will certainly impact Americans who live in public housing and are housing insecure, but Carson did not address those issues either. Instead, he stepped to the microphone to celebrate Trump’s call for a National Day of Prayer Sunday.

But America is not in trouble because people are not praying; we face an exacerbated public health crisis because this administration has spent more time preying on the most vulnerable than lifting all people.

As Christian ministers who are called to preach the truth to God’s people, we are deeply troubled by the way this president continues to hypocritically manipulate faith as a cover for his ungodly policies. Though he has used racism to stoke fears in the nation and pushed policies that exacerbate racial inequality, Trump called on a black man to whitewash his incompetence and corruption at precisely the moment when the harsh reality of a global pandemic has exposed him.

Carson drew on the language of religious nationalism to frame the Trump administration’s response to the present crisis for a reason. “Developing your God-given talents to the utmost so you become valuable to the people around you, having values and principles—those are the things that made America zoom to the top of the world in record time,” Carson said. “And those are the things that will keep us there too.”

By obscuring America’s original sin of race-based slavery and the Doctrine of Discovery, which claimed divine right to seize native land, the myth of Christian nationalism that Carson was parroting allows Trumpvangelicals to hope for a triumphant future to match their imagined past. “No matter where you may be,” Trump tweeted, “I encourage you to turn toward prayer in an act of faith. Together, we will easily PREVAIL.”

Public health officials have made clear that the weeks and months ahead will not be easy. For those of us who pray, our posture must not be one of ALL-CAPS CONFIDENCE, but of humble confession. The day of prayer we need is a day of repentance. And it should begin in the White House. The Trump administration got rid of the White House global pandemic office, played down the threat of the coronavirus, and continues to portray a disease spreading within US communities as a foreign threat that can be shut out at the border. He has also attacked the Affordable Care Act, cut food stamps, proposed a budget that would cut Medicaid and Medicare, and systemically worked to defund government programs we need now.

But Trump is not the only one who must repent. The extreme poverty and systemic racism that will be exposed by this public health crisis were here long before Trump. One hundred forty million Americans are poor and unable to afford basic supplies to prepare for quarantine, uninsured or underinsured at a moment when the health of food and service workers directly impacts all of us. The United States has the largest incarcerated population in the world, and the more than 2 million Americans who live in jails, prisons, and detention centers cannot practice social distancing or self-quarantine if they are exposed to the coronavirus.

For decades now, we have invested the majority of our nation’s resources in arming ourselves with bigger and bigger weapons that could destroy the world hundreds of times over. But we have met an enemy that could be more deadly than any war this nation has ever fought, and we are ill-prepared to even test our citizens for infection.

We must be clear: It is not only Republicans who must repent. House Democrats passed a needed Families First Act to ensure access to coronavirus testing, paid family and sick leave, and economic protections as we all face uncertainty. But they allowed provisions that leave out millions of workers—many of them among the most vulnerable. We do not need prayer for protection. We need repentance and prayer for political courage and will to do justice. Then we need action because, as the Bible says, “Faith without works is dead.”
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TRUE RELIGIOUS FAITH DEMANDS AN UNWAVERING REBUKE OF TRUMPISM
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

In the Christian church, this is the season of Lent—a time when we confess the ways we have fallen short and turned away from God’s justice. Though many churches have canceled services to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the psalm appointed for this Sunday is a song of penance from ancient Israel (Psalms 95). It is not a song of triumph, but a pointed reminder that the potential for self-centeredness we see in corrupt leadership is in each of us. “Harden not your hearts as your forebears did,” the psalm says. The people who passed this song from one generation to the next also passed down the story of an evil ruler, Pharaoh, who had “hardened his heart” against their people during a plague and refused to grant them freedom. When we pray Psalms 95, we remember that Pharaoh’s have always triumphed at the expense of the poor and marginalized. But we also remember that the hard heart of Pharaoh is a temptation for each of us. We must repent in order to open ourselves to the needs of the most vulnerable among us.

As we face the uncertainty of a global pandemic, the lies of religious nationalism cannot save us. We cannot ignore the past and its injustices, which still shape our present. Nor can we put our faith in the false promise that our wealth and power will save us. No, we must humble ourselves and remember what every faith tradition reveals: that God is present among the most vulnerable among us, and that if we act now to protect those at the bottom we have the greatest chance of protecting us all.

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber IIThe Rev. William J Barber, II is co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. His latest book is Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing.


Jonathan Wilson-HartgroveJonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is author of the newly released Revolution of Values.

Dr. Ben Carson QUACK!!

Dr. Ben Carson talks power of prayer at coronavirus press briefing
By Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post Contributor| Sunday, March 15, 2020


Backing President Donald Trump’s decision to make Sunday a National Day of Prayer to address the coronavirus outbreak, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson on Saturday underlined the importance of prayer and faith in maintaining America’s greatness.

Talking about the coronavirus, or COVID-19, during President Trump’s press briefing at the White House Saturday, Carson said he hoped that Americans “can use this as an opportunity to pull together for good.”

“President Trump is going to be recommending a national day of prayer. And you know, we’ve gotten away from prayer and faith a lot in this country,” he said.

“There’s nothing wrong with godly principles, no matter what your faith is — loving your neighbor — caring about the people around you,” he continued. “Developing your God-given talents to the utmost, so you become valuable to the people around you. Having values and principles that guide your life. Those are things that made America zoom to the top of the world in record time — and those are the things that will keep us there too.”

On Friday evening, the president declared Sunday as a National Day of Prayer.

“It is my great honor to declare Sunday, March 15th as a National Day of Prayer. We are a Country that, throughout our history, has looked to God for protection and strength in times like these,” the president wrote on Twitter. “No matter where you may be, I encourage you to turn towards prayer in an act of faith. Together, we will easily PREVAIL!”

Since 1988, the first Sunday of March has been designated as a National Day of Prayer each year. Trump urged that the event be used this year to pray for protection from the coronavirus pandemic.

Responding to Trump’s call to pray for America’s safety, pastor Allen Jackson of World Outreach Church in Tennessee, the Christian nonprofit group My Faith Votes and pastor Rob Morgan of Donelson Fellowship, also in Tennessee, have announced that they will hold a joint service called “America, Its Time to Pray,” which will be live-streamed.

Congregations across the nation are invited, they said in a statement, to join them “in praying for faith over fear and God’s intervention in the spread of COVID-19.”

Speaking at the same press briefing on Saturday, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams encouraged the media to focus on dealing with the disease and not on criticizing the Trump administration’s efforts to combat the coronavirus.

“I want you all to understand — straight talk from the nation’s doctor — we really need you all to lean into and prioritize the health and safety of the American people,” he said. “No more bickering, no more partisanship, no more criticism or finger-pointing; they’ll be plenty of time for that. But we all need to hit the reset button and lean forward, the health and safety of the American people are top priority.”

Adams said the spread of the novel coronavirus “will get worse before it gets better but we are making progress to flatten the curve. We are making progress.” He also assured that almost all who get infected will recover, “98, 99 percent of the people will recover.”

Also on Saturday, the Trump administration extended the existing ban on travel from Europe to include the U.K. and Ireland. The travel restrictions will come into force midnight on Monday, the administration said.

Excluded from the ban are American citizens, legal permanent residents, and their immediate families, among others.

During Saturday’s press briefing, Trump said he’s also considering domestic travel restrictions. “If you don’t have to travel, I wouldn’t do it. We want this thing to end. We don’t want a lot of people getting infected,” he said.

Is America’s largest evangelical denomination about to get even more conservative?




By Chrissy Stroop, Religion Dispatches March 9, 2020


There is perhaps no easier way to illustrate the history and present realities of white evangelicals’ pluralism problem than by turning to the Southern Baptist Convention. These days, the range of acceptable political opinion among white Southern Baptists ranges approximately from very right-wing to ultra right-wing. But even as the SBC struggles to come up with an effective response to numerous cases of abuse and coverups that have come to light in recent years, some of the prominent ultra-right-wingers are clamoring to suppress the merely very right-wingers, whom they disdain for being “too liberal” and blame for declining finances in the SBC’s central structures.

The primary target of the ultras’ ire is Russell Moore, head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, a body that was formed on the foundations of the older Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (with which the SBC cut all ties in 1991) and the Christian Life Commission. The ERLC’s founding was part of the culmination of the SBC’s so-called “conservative resurgence,” a purge of liberals from SBC leadership and institutions that dominated SBC life in the 1980s and 1990s. The hostile takeover was led by men like Paul Pressler, who stands credibly accused of molesting boys over decades, and Paige Patterson, who was disgraced in 2018 when audio surfaced of him counseling an abused wife to stay with her husband and to try to change him through prayer.
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As Boston University Professor emerita Nancy Ammerman and the SBC moved in divergent ideological directions in the 1980s, she became a scholar of the denomination she grew up in. As a young sociologist, Ammerman sought to understand the processes that fuel a denominational split, and her efforts yielded critical documentation of how the “conservative resurgence” played out.

On her telling, the Baptist Joint Committee and the Christian Life Commission “were the prime whipping boys for the conservatives in the 80s.” The question thus inevitably presents itself: might the ERLC now, in the continuation of a toxic trajectory that began decades ago, be the target of a purge of the SBC’s very right wing carried out by its ultra-right wing? RD turned to Ammerman for insights into parallels between the 1980s and the present and where the SBC may be headed from here.

Tensions are clearly brewing again. Hardliner William Harrell, a retired SBC leader who oversaw the denomination’s break with the Baptist Joint Committee, has publicly accused Moore and the ERLC of ceasing to represent the interests of the general SBC membership. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, in a certain sense, he’s right. Moore has criticized Christian support for Donald Trump, but, Ammerman notes, “Like the rest of white evangelicalism, [the SBC leaders have] hitched their star to Trump, and so long as he is dominating the conservative landscape, that’s where they will fit in the larger American landscape. And that’s a niche that is increasingly defined by white privilege and by race.”

Moore is well known for his advocacy of “racial reconciliation,” an approach that some critics find falls short of robust anti-racism. Even so, Moore managed to bring a number of non-white churches into the SBC fold, a legacy that is now in question as the SBC is largely defined by Trump support. Ammerman says that from what she can see, the conservatives who are looking to remove Moore are “pretty explicitly pro-Confederate South.” The racism in the SBC, she contends, is closer to the surface now than it was even in the 1980s. Per Ammerman:

A big question for me is what the African-American churches that have come into the SBC in the last twenty years are making of this allegiance to Trump and to the conservative Republican Party. And it’s up for grabs also what the younger and better educated members of the denomination are going to make of it.

Moore’s right-wing bona fides include defining pluralism and feminism as “problems in the church.” Even so, there are many in the SBC who find Moore’s criticism of Donald Trump, and, it seems, even Moore’s willingness to insist publicly that abused spouses should leave their homes and call the police, unforgivable. Says Ammerman of Moore’s response to the SBC’s domestic violence scandal, “He knew it would get him no acclaim with conservative Baptists and that it might get him into trouble.” Indeed, some pastors are defying SBC President J.D. Grear’s recommendation by extending speaking invitations to Patterson, who clearly remains a hero to some Southern Baptists, despite his mishandling of sexual assault in Southern Baptist seminaries and the abusive theology he spouted to survivors of domestic violence.

Meanwhile, Moore’s ERLC is facing an investigation that SBC Executive Committee Chair Mike Stone claims is not aimed at removing Moore from his position. At the same time, however, Stone said that the investigation will most likely look into the question of whether the ERLC has outlived its usefulness. The ERLC’s Executive Committee’s response thus far is one of defiance.

Where will the SBC go from here? As America’s largest Protestant denomination, representing about 14.8 million people, this is a critical question as the SBC heavily influences evangelical publishing and institutional life, which in turn has an outsize effect on American politics.

The last time Ammerman attended an SBC annual meeting as a Southern Baptist messenger (that is, an official representative of her congregation) was in 1984. In 1985, when the fireworks really started, she attended as a scholar engaged in ethnographic participant-observation. “’85 was the first time that both sides really mobilized to get supporters to the convention,” she recalls, noting that the typical attendance of close to 10000 more or less quadrupled that year. If the forces arrayed against Moore want to force the issue, one path they can take is to draft a resolution for the annual meeting and then make sure their supporters attend en masse. Should they make preparations to do so, Moore and his supporters will have to mobilize their own backers for the showdown.

It’s impossible to say at this point exactly how likely this scenario is, but Ammerman considers it within the realm of the possible. Asked whether the SBC’s current response to its abuse crisis is adequate, Ammerman replied, “It can’t be, partly because of the independence of local Southern Baptist churches,” which makes it impossible to address abuse with “adequate coordination.”. Critically, this lack of coordination has thus far prevented the decentralized SBC, with its Byzantine administrative structures, from publishing a database of known sex offenders in SBC churches.

Patriarchy, too, is at the root of the problem, as the SBC does not allow women in leadership. Asked whether a theology of “biblical patriarchy” is inherently abusive, Ammerman hedges. “It is certainly a contributing factor in allowing men to get away with abusive behavior,” and, she adds, “Having women in the pulpit would probably change things.” Moore is opposed to allowing women in the pulpit. Yet that may not be enough to keep Moore and his ERLC safe from the ultra right-wingers.

The SBC’s “conservative resurgence” was essentially an authoritarian coup. Indeed, since the 1980s authoritarianism has arguably become a defining feature of white American evangelicalism. Since authoritarianism is characterized by a paranoid need to identify both internal and external enemies, the vicious trajectory of an empowered authoritarian movement rarely if ever stops after a single round of purges. Meanwhile, the ends justify the means for the zealous adherents to a particular authoritarian ideal, who protect their reputations and that of the organizations they represent above those who inevitably fall victim to abuse in authoritarian environments.

Despite holding some inherently inhumane positions, Russell Moore has attempted to be a humane person in his leadership role in the SBC. If he is purged, this will be another clear indication that humaneness toward members of othered groups, and those on the lower rungs of the Christian Right’s preferred social hierarchy, is utterly unwelcome in today’s American evangelicalism.

Mike Pence’s secret Christian empire is now in charge of public health

March 9, 2020 By Heather Digby Parton, Salon - Commentary


If you’ve been following the latest news on the coronavirus outbreak, you probably saw at least some snippets of President Trump’s visit to the CDC last Friday. It will stand as one of the most astonishing appearances by this or any other president — and that’s saying something. When asked if he regretted firing the entire staff of the Office of Pandemic Preparation, Trump said, “This is something that you can never really think is going to happen.” He said that everyone who wants to be tested for this virus can get tested, which is not even close to true. He called Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington state, who is on the front lines dealing with this epidemic, a “snake.”He made it clear that he wants to cook the numbers so it doesn’t look as if the nation is in the midst of an epidemic. This has been obvious from the outset, but for the president to come out and say it is something else again:

"I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship" — Trump explains that he doesn't want to let people off the Grand Princess cruise ship because he doesn't want the number of coronavirus cases in the country to go up pic.twitter.com/ELhZDjiZW9
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 6, 2020

Mostly, however, he patted himself on the back:

You know, my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like a record number of years. He was a great super genius. Dr. John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.

As Wired science reporter Adam Rogers wrote

As a reporter, in general I’m not supposed to say something like this, but: The president’s statements to the press were terrifying. That press availability was a repudiation of good science and good crisis management from inside one of the world’s most respected scientific institutions.

Let’s put that another way: The CDC was considered one of the world’s most respected scientific institutions. It has not been covering itself in glory during this crisis.

The most unnerving aspect of the government response so far has not been Trump’s gibberish. He’s in over his head and it shows, as usual. And we know from his response to Hurricane Maria and other natural disasters that his only concern in a crisis is for his own political well-being. But I wouldn’t have expected to hear the director of the CDC, Robert Redfield, laud Trump like a Fox News pundit

"First I want to thank you, for your decisive leadership … I also want to thank you for coming here today … I think that's the most important thing I want to say" –CDC Director Redfield slathers Dear Leader-style praise on Trump during his tour of CDC headquarters pic.twitter.com/erxQxbYh1x
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 6, 2020

It’s a full-blown ritual at this point for members of the Trump cabinet and Republicans in Congress to genuflect to the president as if he were a 15th-century pope. And we know that public health experts have had to tread very softly in order not to upset him.

Still, it was surprising to hear such a slavering tribute from a scientist in the midst of a global health crisis. Likewise, it was strange to hear the highly esteemed U.S. global AIDS coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, make similar comments when she was introduced as part of the coronavirus task force back on March 2:

It is clear the early work of the president over travel restrictions and the ability quarantine has bought us the time and space to have this task force be very effective. I have never worked with such incredible scientists and thoughtful policy leaders

It seemed just a bit over the top. But these two weren’t the only ones:

Here's Surgeon General Jerome Adams telling Jake Tapper that President Trump "sleeps less than I do and he's healthier than what I am."

pic.twitter.com/bDpQWWAgUU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 8, 2020


There’s something important happening under the surface here. It may not simply be that these health policy professionals are trying to keep the kooky president happy so they can do their work on behalf of the country. They may be Trump true believers.

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, for instance, is a Mike Pence crony who previously served as the Indiana state health commissioner. He was intimately involved in the horrific HIV outbreak in that state, where Pence refused to authorize a needle exchange program until a number of people had died unnecessarily. Naturally, Trump appointed him surgeon general.

Redfield and Birx are both evangelical Christians who have been associated with HIV research for many years, going back to the 1980s. Birx runs PEPFAR, George W. Bush’s global AIDS initiative, and both she and Redfield have been involved with Children’s AIDS Fund International, which lobbies for abstinence-only sex education around the world.

The Washington Post reported back in 2018 that they belong to a network run by an important power broker in the evangelical world:

Evangelical activist Shepherd Smith has spent more than three decades cultivating relationships with leading AIDS researchers and policymakers to promote abstinence-only sex education and other programs. Those connections now could influence government programs and funding within the Trump administration. Among the most prominent: Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

[His wife] Anita Smith is now a consultant within PEPFAR to Deborah Birx, a physician and ambassador at large who oversees the program’s estimated $5 billion annual budget. Birx is also a former board member of Children’s AIDS Fund International and served until she was hired by the CDC in 2005, a PEPFAR spokesman said.

Anita Smith was hired by Birx to “improve prevention programs aimed at preteen girls.” I’m pretty sure we know what she recommended.

Redfield and Birx both served in the military doing AIDS research in the mid-1980s. Redfield is well-known for recommending measures that were considered extreme even within the Reagan administration, including the forced quarantine of AIDS patients. He later had a financial interest in an HIV vaccine that didn’t work, but which he continued to push. Birx, on the other hand, has maintained a stellar reputation.

To be clear, none of this means that these people aren’t qualified for the jobs they hold. They both have medical degrees and relevant experience. But they seem to be part of a conservative subculture of evangelical Christians who have found a foothold in the Trump administration clustered around Mike Pence’s office. Along millions of other evangelicals, it appears they really believe in Donald Trump.

Setting ideology aside, however, what Trump wants these people to do — cover up his own ignorance and incompetence — is totally at odds with what they must know is best for the health of the American public. Is their worshipful admiration for this man blinding them to the need to communicate honestly with the American people about this crisis? Because that would explain a lot

3 human traffickers sentenced to 125 years in death of Syrian boy
THE FAMILY WERE TRYING TO COME TO CANADA UNDER

THE HARPER CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT

CBS News•March 14, 2020


Three people believed to be organizers of a human trafficking ring were sentenced Friday in a Turkish court to 125 years each in prison for the death of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, Turkish state media reported. The lifeless body of three-year-old Aylan lying on a beach in Turkey was captured in a photograph that became a symbol of the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis.

The Bodrum High Criminal Court in Mugla sentenced the defendants for the crime of "killing with eventual intent."

The traffickers, fugitives from justice, had been captured by Turkish security forces this week in the southern province of Adana, according to state news agency Andalou.

A number of Syrian and Turkish defendants were found responsible for the accident and were sentenced to prison time. The three defendants sentenced had fled trial, Andalou reported.

Aylan was one of 14 Syrian refugees, including eight children, who took a boat that sank in the Aegean Sea while en route to Greek islands. Aylan's brother Galip, 5, and mother Rihan, 35, also died. His father, Abdullah, survived.

"The waves were so high, and the captain panicked and jumped into the sea," Abdullah said. "I took my wife and children in my arms, but they were all dead."

The family was fleeing the Syrian town of Kobani, which was decimated when ISIS tried to seize it, leaving nearly everyone there homeless.

KOBANI WAS KURDISH TERRITORY ATTACKED BY TURKEY AND SYRIAN FORCES

Trump flicked a Google statement onto the floor during a live press conference in an apparent rebuke of a botched coronavirus website rollout

Business Insider•March 15, 2020

President Donald Trump lets go of a piece of paper containing a Google statement, during a press conference at the White House, March 15, 2020.

The White House


President Donald Trump bemoaned the news coverage about the confusion behind his unveiling of what was purportedly a Google-led effort to develop a coronavirus-screening website.


Trump held in his hand what appeared to be a Google statement, in tweet form, that he claimed vindicated his prior remarks.


"As you know this is from Google, they put out a release," Trump said, holding the statement in his left hand before flicking it to the ground.


"You guys can figure it out yourselves, and how that got out," Trump added. "I'm sure you'll apologize. It'll be great if we can really give the news correctly.

President Donald Trump on Sunday afternoon bemoaned the news coverage about the confusion behind his unveiling of what was purportedly a Google-led effort to develop a nationwide website that screened people for the coronavirus.

"I want to thank the people at Google and Google Communications, because as you know, they substantiated what I said on Friday," Trump said of the remarks he made in the Rose Garden just two days prior.

"The head of Google ... called us and he apologized, I don't know where the press got their fake news, but they got it some place," Trump added.
trump before

Trump held in his hand what appeared to be a Google statement in tweet form on how the company was partnering with the federal government to develop "a nationwide website that includes information about COVID-19 symptoms, risk and testing information."

"As you know this is from Google, they put out a release," Trump said, holding the statement in his left hnd. He then flicked the paper onto the floor.

—David Choi (@choibboy) March 15, 2020

"You guys can figure it out yourselves, and how that got out," Trump added. "I'm sure you'll apologize. It'll be great if we can really give the news correctly.

On Friday, Trump claimed that Google had 1,700 engineers working on a coronavirus-related website, one that would allow people to "to determine if a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location."

"Google is going to develop a website — it's going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past," Trump said on Friday.

The project, however, was being developed by Alphabet-affiliated Verily, which reportedly employs 1,000 employees. The Verge reported that the 1,700 engineers Trump mentioned were Google workers who would volunteer for the project.

Despite Trump's statement that it had made "tremendous progress" in the nationwide effort, a Google communications representative told The Verge that the company was still "in the early stages of development" for the San Francisco area.

A Verily representative reportedly added that the "triage website" was initially expected to go out for health care workers and that after the announcement, it was going to roll out to the entire public.

Google later announced in its statement that the company was "fully aligned" and would "continue to work" with the government to combat the coronavirus.

Trump followed up his press conference by retweeting a statement from Google Communications, which laid out that the company's goals to expand the project "more broadly over time."

—Google Communications (@Google_Comms) March 13, 2020

President Trump railed against news reports that shed light on his comments on Sunday, alleging that the media "never called Google" to verify his distinct description of the project.

"Even in times such as these, they are not truthful," Trump said on Twitter. "Watch for their apology, it won't happen. More importantly, thank you to Google!"

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