Hand sanitisers are flying off the shelf amid coronavirus - but are there greener alternatives?

NO

 THIS ARTICLE IS ANNOTATED BY ME AS A PROFESSIONAL CLEANER.
Jessica Jones
THE INDEPENDENT

iStock

With Coronavirus causing such a panic at the minute, it's no surprise that antibacterial products like hand sanitisers and soaps are flying off the shelves. I can see why hand gels are popular - they’re small, cheap and you can even get them in fun scents, colours and packaging. But antibacterial gels might not be as pretty as they first look. In the midst of a global pandemic are we profiting from convenience at the cost of the environment?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t clean our hands, in fact the World Health Organisation emphasises the importance of hand hygiene, saying that it's the most effective method of preventing the spread of harmful germs. It advises that hands should be frequently washed with soap and hot water, or hand sanitiser but only if hands are visibly clean.

I often use hand gels; they don’t take up space in my bag, they’re useful if I’m not eating lunch at home, they’re practical if there is no place to wash hands anywhere nearby or if the soap has run out.

However, there are environmental problems that come with using them. For a start, they come in small plastic bottles that contain roughly 30-50ml. On a mass scale, if everyone is using hand gels then these small plastic bottles could amount to a lot of waste, a large proportion of which will not get or be able to be recycled and will eventually end up in landfills.

YOU CAN REUSE YOUR BOTTLE BUY BUYING A LARGER CONTAINER FROM A CUSTODIAL OR JANITOR SUPPLY COMPANY. AS WELL PUBLIC SITES WILL HAVE 

HAND SANITIZERS AVAILABLE SINCE THE H1N1 PANDEMIC

ALWAYS DAB ONCE AND THEN DAB AGAIN TO DISINFECT

THE FIRST DAB CLEANS YOUR HANDS, THE SECOND DISINFECTS

Antibacterial soaps are no better. They contain the chemicals triclocarban (TCC) and triclosan (TCS), which are particularly harmful to the environment as they are washed down the sink and cannot easily degrade, contaminating our water systems. And according to the FDA, there is not even evidence proving that these antibacterial soaps are more effective than plain soap. 

IN ALBERTA AND ACROSS NORTH AMERICA THESE ARE BANNED PRODUCTS AS TCC/TCS ARE  KNOWN AS A FULL SPECTRUM BACTERIA KILLER, WHICH MEANS IT KILLS GOOD BACTERIA AS WELL AS BAD. BUGS DO NOT NEED DRUGS, IS THE MOTTO OF ALBERTA HEALTH SERVICES.

USE SOAP OR ALCOHOL BASED HAND SANITIZER NOT ANTI-BACTERIAL'S
ALCOHOL HAND SANITISERS EVAPORATE QUICKLY. AVOID HAND SANITISERS WITH QUATS/ WHICH AGAIN ARE A FULL SPECTRUM ANTI BACTERIAL AND IS A PESTICIDE

So this week I began searching for alternatives. I swapped the plastic bottle of antibacterial liquid soap in our bathroom for a plain bar of soap that came in paper wrapping (although like many other items in my uni house this has now mysteriously disappeared).

Bars of soap are cheap to buy, last longer than liquid soaps and are also relatively easy to make yourself if you have the right ingredients. Unfortunately, summative assessment season did not allow the time to make my own soap this week but it’s something I plan on doing over Easter. 

SOAP IS FINE BUT, IF IT IS DIRTY OR HAS NOT BEEN CHANGED, IT BECOMES INFECTED WITH BACTERIA, SAME WITH SOAP DISPENSERS OLD SOAP FEEDS 

BUGS.

WHEN CLEANING DURING A PANDEMIC START WITH FRESH SOAP.

I've been trying to limit my consumption of hand sanitiser, only using it when absolutely necessary and if there is no possible way of washing my hands with soap and water.

The traditional old method of soap and water is not always practical on the go or in public though and hunting for sustainable hand gel alternatives was a bit trickier. I looked into making my own hand sanitisers however a lot of the online advice warned against this due to the complex method and ingredients.

I had better luck exploring the high street, where I found several organic and natural options and even more online. These are only slightly more expensive than regular ones and are much better for your skin too. When I bought one I made sure it was a reusable bottle so that when it runs out I can refill it from a larger container.

Game on: How PlayStation 2 changed the entertainment industry forever


The PlayStation managed to dominate the market by redefining what a video games console could be – and its impact can be felt throughout modern culture, writes Ed Power

THE INDEPENDENT

PS2, I love you: these games are woven into the cultural fabric ( Alamy/Sony )

In December 2000, reports began to circulate within intelligence communities in the United States and Europe of a powerful new technology acquired by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. It would allow Saddam to upgrade his guided missile programme and place many targets in the west within reach, went the whisperings. The name of the technology was the Sony PlayStation 2.

Speculation that Saddam was “hoarding” hundreds of box-fresh PS2s in order to harness their extraordinary processing power was eventually debunked. But not before the Pentagon had thoroughly investigated the rumours. Sony, meanwhile, had to obtain a special permit from the Tokyo Trade Ministry to export a device that, in theory at least, “could be adapted for military use”. At that point, eight months after the PlayStation 2’s launch in Japan, it seemed the console could do virtually anything.

PlayStation 2 must certainly have felt like a weapon of mass destruction to Sony’s rivals when it was unveiled in Japan 20 years ago today. PS2 saw off Sega’s Dreamcast, selling $250m (£200m) worth of kit in its first day compared to the Dreamcast’s $95m. And it would trump Microsoft’s more technically advanced Xbox. The PS2 ultimately shifted 155 million units worldwide against Xbox’s 25 million (and Nintendo GameCube’s 22 million).

Twenty years on, it remains the best-selling console of all time. That achievement is even more impressive considering the next four highest-selling games devices are all cheaper hand-held machines from Nintendo (the DS is in second place, followed by the GameBoy). The PS2 re-shaped the face of gaming, home entertainment and even popular culture.

“It was a big game-changer,” says Richard Lee Breslin, editor of gaming website Push Start Play. “Going from the PS1 to PS2 really took it to the next level. Two of my favourite games from the PS1 were Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid.

“But Silent Hill 2 on PS2 was really something else. It was a massive leap in the quality of visuals. And while Metal Gear Solid 2 wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, it really excelled in terms of gameplay, not to mention Metal Gear Solid 3 that soon followed. Both Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid 2 set a benchmark in story-telling for videogames.”

Read more

20 best PS2 games ranked, from Final Fantasy X to GTA: San Andreas

How Sega conquered video games – and then threw it all away

The 20 best PS4 games, from Grand Theft Auto V to Marvel’s Spider-Man

Games were already part of the mainstream in 2000. But it was PS2 hits such as Grand Theft Auto III and Call of Duty that confirmed gaming’s evolution from a pastime, largely for kids and teenagers, into a juggernaut more lucrative than movies or music. The age of the blockbuster video game was also the age of the PS2.

“It offered a new level of visuals, gameplay, and story-telling as it gave developers even greater tools to tell their story. And not only in-game. I also remember being blown anyway by the FMV [full motion video] cut-scenes,” says Breslin. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved the N64 and it told some great stories. But with the PS2 game being on DVD and not on a cartridge, I felt so many aspects of a game’s overall quality benefited.”

One surprise, as we look back, is just how obscure the origins of the PS2 and its predecessor, the original 1994 PlayStation, remain. The sense among many gamers is that the Sony hive-mind willed these extraordinary devices into existence from its bunker-style HQ in Tokyo’s Minato ward. And, hey presto, there they were on our shelves.

In fact, the PlayStation story is the story of one man and his vision. As with Apple and the maverick Steve Jobs, the PS2 and its forerunner were essentially the product of the force of will of a singular individual, Ken Kutaragi – known to his underlings as “Crazy Ken”.

Kutaragi had joined Sony as an engineer in its digital research labs in his twenties. By the early Nineties, when he was in his forties, he had become convinced gaming was the next big growth area for tech. He pushed his bosses towards an alliance with the king of the industry, Nintendo.

His big idea was for Sony to produce an accessory for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. There was a sense in the early 1990s that the SNES was limited by Nintendo’s reliance on game cartridges. These had a relatively puny capacity, maxing out at around four megabytes. The hot new trend was the CD-Rom, which could store upwards of 600 megabytes. This made it possible to include movie-style cut scenes and to flesh out the cinematic aspect of the gaming experience.

Nintendo was wary because CD-Roms could lag, for as long as 15 seconds, when loading data. This, it was felt, would detract from the slick experience that was part of the Nintendo brand.
Ken Kutaragi, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, aka Crazy Ken (AFP/Getty)

Kutaragi’s suggestion was that Nintendo outsource the problem. Sony would produce a SNES-compatible CD-Rom device. But Sony drove a tough bargain. It wanted a share of the profits from software sold for the device, excluding Nintendo from any cut (it got 30 per cent of all cartridge sales for the SNES).


Nintendo initially assented. But then, to Sony’s shock, it backed out at the final moment and instead announced an alliance with Philips at a 1991 press conference. Sony “had learned about the pending press conference 48 hours earlier, and were… stunned”, wrote David Sheff in his 1993 book Game Over.

Kutaragi was devastated. He was also convinced he had seen the future – a future in which Sony got into gaming independently of Nintendo. Sony had actually made a prototype device to show to Nintendo. It even had a name: the Nintendo PlayStation. What if Sony ditched the Nintendo angle and proceeded with the rest of the plan? What if it did PlayStation on its own?

Against considerable internal opposition, Kutaragi made his dream a reality. He even overcame the doubts of Sony founder Akio Morita, who saw the merit in video games but hated the name PlayStation. Fate intervened in the cruellest fashion when Morita suffered a stroke. By the time he recovered, it was too late. “PlayStation” had been copyrighted by Sony, and the project was too advanced to call a halt.


“We had to win the battle against Nintendo; we had to win over the internal opposition within Sony; we had to get this entire endeavour off the ground. I was swept away with this feeling and committed myself to succeeding,” recalled Shigeo Maruyama, former chair of Sony Computer Entertainment.

“Kutaragi was the main reason why. He’s an extremely charismatic individual ... and he forced his staff to comply with what he wanted, like a madman. I don’t think there was anything that the staff pushed back on and told him couldn’t be done.”
Part console, part discount DVD player, the PlayStation 2 became a record-breaking success (AFP/Getty)

Yet even as the original PlayStation became a smash, Kutaragi was looking to the future. It is said that the week the PS1 was released he was already drawing up plans for a second console.

It would have to be more powerful, he knew. With the PlayStation, Sony had produced a more accomplished package than the Sega Saturn or the N64. Sony had also won the marketing war with a savvy and often surreal advertising campaign.

But it couldn’t rest on its accomplishments, especially with rumours swirling that none other than software giant Microsoft was thinking of getting into gaming. Clearly, there was room for one newcomer in a sector historically dominated by Nintendo and Sega. But two?

As with the lead-up to the PlayStation launch, Kutaragi was not one for taking prisoners at Sony. Superiors recalled him speaking to them as if they worked for him, rather than the other way around. In one key meeting with Sony North America executives, two senior members of the company’s board, who had flown in from Tokyo, found themselves reduced to translating for Kutaragi as he laid out his vision for where the PS2 would take Sony.


His big idea – the one that arguably secured victory for Sony in this latest round of the console wars – was to bundle a DVD player with the PS2. At the time, DVDs were the hot new format. But players were horrendously expensive, with an entry-level device costing around £600.

At less than half that price, the PS2 was the perfect stealth technology. Now parents had a justification for shelling out on one for their kids. And kids had a legitimate cause to lobby their parents to spring for a games machine: it could play movies too!

Kutaragi also pushed the company to make a great fuss about the PS2’s “Emotion Engine” – a processing unit tailored to running sophisticated 3D games. The other unique selling point was backwards compatibility. With some exceptions, you could play your old PlayStation faves on the new console.

Gamers crowd outside a Japanese computer shop on 3 March 2000, waiting for the PS2 to go on sale (AFP/Getty)

“Backwards compatibility was a very cool feature,” says Oli Welsh, editor of Eurogamer. “It really helped make a purchasing decision on a new console if you knew you would still be able to use your old games on it. Unfortunately it set an expectation the games industry wouldn’t be able to meet. It’s been a very rare feature on games consoles since, and will only really finally become standard when PS5 and Xbox Series X launch later this year, 20 years after PS2 did it.

“Much more important to PS2’s success than backwards compatibility, though, was its ability to play DVDs,” he continues. “DVD was a relatively new format at the time and PS2 was competitively priced with standalone DVD players, but could play games as well. That made the purchase a no-brainer in a lot of households.

Still, it was by no means an entirely miraculous device. Under the hood, the PS2 was notoriously tricky to get a handle on. Developers found the vaunted Emotion Engine a nightmare to programme for. Which might explain the underwhelming slate of launch titles, of which only snowboarding simulation SSX is remembered fondly today.


“You are handed a 10-inch thick stack of manuals written by Japanese hardware engineers,” is how developer Cory Bloyd described coding for the PS2 in a Reddit post. “The first time you read the stack, nothing makes any sense at all. The second time you read the stack, the third book makes a bit more sense because of what you learned in the eighth book. The machine has 10 different processors and six different memory spaces that all work in completely different ways.”

Sony, however, had learnt from the success of its PlayStation marketing campaign. If its PS2 launch slate was wildly iffy, the pitch to gamers was laser-focused. It wasn’t just selling a console – it was selling an entirely new vision of what gaming could be.

The resonances continue to this day. Sam Mendes’s Oscar-nominated 1917, for instance, is essentially a first-person shooter as reimagined by Stanley Kubrick. Video games are in the DNA of mass-market entertainment and popular art. Without the PS2, that surely would never have come to pass.

“Sony’s marketing for PS2 was even more ambitious, really selling the idea of games as a cinematic, emotional storytelling experience,” says Welsh.

“The games weren’t quite there yet, but almost. Over time, though, as the machine racked up huge sales, the focus broadened into a very mass-market pitch, with family friendly software and poppy, non-traditional stuff like Singstar sitting alongside Sony’s ‘cool’ stock-in-trade.”

20 best PlayStation 2 games
Show all 20





Slowly but surely, developers got to grips with the knotty hardware. And soon the PS2, which created an industry standard with its vibrating “dualshock” controller, was redefining gaming. There was the ethereal Ico, the gaming-as-philosophical-treatise Shadow of the Colossus, the incredibly realistic Grand Turismo 3: A-Spec. Oh, and Grand Theft Auto III, a game about stealing cars and shooting people in the face. As the PS2 sold and sold, so did the games – in 2004 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas broke all records in moving 21.3 million copies, of which 17.3 million were for the PS2.

Some technologies serve their purpose and are forgotten. Then there are those so perfectly of the moment that they become woven into the cultural fabric. Examples include the original Volkswagen Beetle, the Sony Walkman, the Apple Macintosh, the indestructible Nokia 3310. To this club we must also add the PS2, which remained in production until 2013. It was only two years ago that Sony announced it was ending its PS2 repair programme. By then, its place in the annals of era-defining tech was assured.

“The most impressive thing about PS2 was that it did have a personality, despite its total ubiquity,” says Welsh. “Maybe it wasn’t as quirky as GameCube or Dreamcast, but one thing Sony has always excelled at is promoting creativity with image-defining in-house games, like Ico. That encouraged others in turn to take risks, and you found all sorts of amazing, off-the-wall stuff on PS2, from Katamari Damacy to Frequency to Rez to Manhunt. These all redefined what games could be in one way or another. The game that really defined the console was Grand Theft Auto III, though. Sony still owes Rockstar a few beers for that one.”

---30---

Why self-quarantine from coronavirus is a privilege only for the rich

by Evie Breese in news

Image: Getty

Are you one of the two million people who are too poor to self-isolate?

There are currently 51 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK, up from 39 confirmed yesterday, so there's inevitably been a lot of discussion about the best ways to stop the virus from spreading any further.

In a plan that was released this morning, Britons were warned that up to one in five people could be off work sick at the peak of a coronavirus epidemic. This could have a huge impact on workplaces, and entire industries, across the country.

People are starting to worry about the potential effect two weeks off work could have on their bank balance.

Self-isolation is important.

Something as simple as a trip to the shop by a person with the COVID-19 virus to pick up toilet paper could pass on the virus to elderly people and those with weakened immune systems.To properly self isolate, you should stay at home, ask delivery drivers to leave packages outside the front door, use separate towels to others in the house, and basically stay in your bedroom. And, whatever you do, DON'T go to work.

Some companies offer their employees sick-pay schemes, which is great for them. But what about everyone else?

Some employers don't offer anything more generous than the legal minimum statutory sick pay. This basic pay pack amounts to just £94.25 per week. And you don’t get anything for the first three days off, either.

With the period for self isolation set at 14 days, that could mean a budget of £188.50 to eat, pay bills, pay prescription fees, care for children or other dependents, entertain... And that's assuming that a person on statatuory sick pay doesn't have any dependants.

We’re predicting a lot of overdue rent and, in the worst cases, people might even struggle to feed themselves or buy basic necessities. Once again, poverty has more potential than any disease to kill.

But for some it could be even worse.

While Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) must be paid by employers to their sick employees, not everyone qualifies. Workers must have earned on average at least £118 per week (before tax) in the past 8 weeks before their sick leave to qualify.

With minimum wage for people aged 18 to 21 at just £6.15, a university student would have had to work on average 19 hours per week, for the last 8 weeks, to qualify.

A young mum in her early twenties earning minimum wage at £7.70, would have had to have worked 15 hours per week, and a cafe worker in their mid twenties or above waiting tables as a side hustle – 14 hours on average.

For those working in the gig economy, the situation is similarly bleak. In gig economy jobs, such as food delivery, pay is given per task.

So if you’re too sick to do the gigs, there won't be any pay for you.

Kimberly Hurd from Collective Benefits, an organisation working to extend benefits such as sick pay to self-employed people, told indy100:

Statistics on self-employment are sobering – with over 6M self-employed workers in the UK – 96 per cent without income protection and 93 per cent without critical injury or health cover and often with less than £500 in savings.

Gig and flexible working is here to stay and will account for more than 25 per cent of the workforce in the next five years. While it comes with a large amount of needed flexibility, it also leaves many vulnerable.

Issues like Coronavirus highlight this real and growing issue and a lack of protection. Often we see if a gig worker is out sick for a week or more and can’t work, this causes real financial difficulty for them and their families and the result is a reliance on the welfare state.

For millions of people, two weeks off work is simply not an option, meaning they will be forced to put themselves at risk of infection.

Trade Union Congress (TUC) highlighted this on Twitter in a post that has been shared 1500 times.

Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the Trade Union Congress, told indy100

The threat of coronavirus shows why sick pay should be a day one right for everybody. It’s not right that millions of UK workers miss out on this protection. The government must ensure everyone gets statutory sick pay regardless of how they earn.
Employers who aren’t paying sick pay from day one risk having staff coming in – especially if they don’t have symptoms.

The TUC are calling on people to sign a petition calling on the UK government to “guarantee sick pay for every worker from day one” which has so far gained over 11,000 signatures.

In this age of austerity and continuous cuts to public services, it’s the poor that suffer the most.

How unsurprising.

A spray painted mural of presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders on the side of a building in Kirby, Vernont

A poster for sale at a rally for Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday in Vermont
Getty

Democratic voter Le'ana Freeman poses for a photo after casting her ballot at a polling station in Bangkok
EPA


3/28 FOR MORE SEE 

Super Tuesday: Lively scenes as results flood in across 14 states

Democratic primary 2020: latest delegate count
Find out who is leading the race to become the Democratic nominee for the November election

Niko Kommenda
Wed 4 Mar 2020 

THE GUARDIAN

Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Mike Bloomberg are competing to become the Democratic nominee for the presidential election in November.

The primaries and caucuses are a series of contests, in all 50 US states plus Washington DC and US territories, by which the party selects its presidential nominee. In these votes, the goal for the Democratic candidates is to amass popular support that translates to a number of pledged delegates.

To secure the nomination, a candidate needs the support of 1,991 pledged delegates. If no candidate has reached this number by the party’s national convention in Milwaukee in July, it is known as a contested or brokered convention. The nominee is then chosen in a more complex voting system that also involves unpledged delegates – known as ‘superdelegates’ – who can vote their conscience.

The nominee will eventually face Trump in the general election on 3 November.

ALSO SEE

https://ballotpedia.org/Super_Tuesday_primaries,_2020

Texans don't want their land taken for Trump's border wall — and that's playing into Bernie Sanders' hands

'Texas is turning blue, but it's turning blue slowly'

Sierra Juarez Texas

Beto O’Rourke, Wendy Davis, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders. All of them — or at the very least their campaign supporters — swore to turn Texas blue. That’s not unique. For the last two decades, Democrats have vowed to flip the state, and leading up to Super Tuesday, liberals are once again promising success.

A University of Texas and Texas Tribune poll released in February showed Sanders placing first in the state among Democrats with about 24 per cent of the vote. Behind him is former Vice President Joe Biden with 22 per cent. Although the poll was released before moderate candidates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out and threw their support behind Biden, bets are still on Sanders.

With Sanders projected as the favored Democratic candidate, some are wondering: Is 2020 the year Texas actually turns blue? Surely, they say, a democratic socialist advocating for Medicare for All in the lead means the state is more liberal than most might think.

They’re right in some ways, but the reality is that even if Sanders sweeps up the most votes in Texas and later becomes the Democratic nominee for president, he will almost certainly lose to President Donald Trump in the state when the general elections roll around.

“I think there tends to be an over-interpretation of primary results and general election performance. There’s really not much of a link here in Texas,” said Joshua Blank, the manager of polling and research at UT’s Texas Politics Project. “It’s not like we’re going to wake up on Wednesday morning and Texas is going to be blue. It doesn’t work that way.”

The Texas Democratic Party disagrees. As evidence, the party points to 2018, when Democrats won huge victories in the midterm elections. Communication director Abhi Rahman said issues like the border wall have mobilized Texans.

“[Donald Trump] wants to take away Texans’ land and build a border wall, and Texans don’t like that,” Rahman said. “That’s why his approval rating is so much lower in Texas than in other battleground states, and that’s why we’re going to beat him in 2020, no matter who the candidate is.”

One of the things propping up Sanders for Super Tuesday is his active base, even in Southern states, Texas political expert Cal Jillson of Southern Methodist University told me.

“He just narrowly lost the nomination in 2016, so [he has] all of that experience, all of that fundraising expertise, all of the volunteers, all of the Bernie Bros, and others who were waiting for the return of Bernie,” Jillson said.

Sanders also performed well with Hispanic voters. And in a state like Texas that’s growing at the rate of nine Hispanic residents for every white resident, Sanders may have fertile territory to get ahead. 

The Vermont Senator also owes thanks to the moderate Democratic candidates who divided the field. Their voters have been split between several choices. To put it bluntly – and very Texan – votes for moderates like Michael Bloomberg are “coming out of Biden’s hide,” as Jillson puts it. The divided playing field is making Sanders look more successful in Texas than he actually is.

So despite the Democratic Party’s gusto, political experts say they shouldn’t get their hopes up just yet. In Texas, Trump still out-polls all of the potential Democratic nominees, including Sanders, sometimes by as much as 10 points.

It comes down to the fact that Sanders is too left-leaning for most of the state. Political analysts don’t imagine him doing well with some voters like white suburban women.

“Everything we know about the policy preferences of Texas voters would suggest that Bernie Sanders is notably to the left of the median Texas voter,” Rice University political scientist Mark P Jones says.

While a potential Sanders win and a high Democratic turnout could make for international headlines about Texas turning blue, the results won’t be exactly what people think. Texas is not the new California or New York.

“Texas is turning blue, but it’s turning blue slowly,” Jillson says.

What people should keep their eyes on is how Sanders will stack up in comparison to Trump in November if he wins the nomination. That’s the national race that will expose whether conservatives are really losing ground in Texas. As of now, all of this support for Bernie might not turn Texas blue. But keep an eye out: there’s a chance the state could swing purple one day.

Texas too close to call as Biden sees Super Tuesday surge – live

Super Tuesday: Protesters storm stage during live Joe Biden speech

The protesters, from the group Direct Action Everywhere, are opposed to the dairy industry, and have reportedly been seen across the state of California.

Mr Biden's speech was one of victory, and came just days after he won the South Carolina primary, thus reversing a narrative that his campaign had faltered and had all but died.



"Let Dairy Die," read the posters held up by the protesters, who were pulled off the stage.

The former vice president then continued on with his speech, in which he seemed quite pleased and took a swipe at Bernie Sanders, criticising the Vermont senator's call for a political revolution.

"It's a good night," Mr Biden said, before continuing: "and it seems to be getting even better."

He also reiterated that his campaign is still very much viable.

"We are very much alive," he said.

An anti-dairy protester is led away after storming the stage at Joe Biden's Super Tuesday event in Los Angeles, California     EPA

Super Tuesday: Elizabeth Warren loses in home state Massachusetts to Joe Biden

Warren has struggled to attract voters in recent weeks, after leading in the polls months ago



Clark Mindock New York @ClarkMindock THE INDEPENDENT Wednesday 4 March 2020 


AT LEAST IF SHE LOST TO BERNIE THE PAIN WOULD NOT BE AS GREAT

Elizabeth Warren has lost her home state to Joe Biden, in a stunning Super Tuesday defeat for the Massachusetts senator as she has struggled for viability in a race that is quickly boxing her out.

Ms Warren's loss in Massachusetts is a stinging defeat for the race's most prominent female candidate, and comes to a candidate who had largely been written off by pundits and political observers just one week ago.

The loss is sure to fuel further calls for her to drop out of the race, with progressives already arguing that she should step aside and endorse Bernie Sanders in his bid to make history in this primary.



So far, Ms Warren has repeatedly insisted that she will not drop out of the race, and that she plans on bringing her candidacy all the way into the Democratic convention this summer.

A path to the Democratic nomination appears to be all but non-existent at this point, however, and it would take an incredible show of force at a contested convention for her to be the candidate to go up against Donald Trump this fall.

Even with that poor showing in Massachusetts, though, Ms Warren did manage to amass some delegates on Super Tuesday, which would give her further leverage in such a contested convention.

She has steadfastly refused to say she would support the idea of ensuring that the nomination goes to the candidate with the most delegates in the race even if the candidate missed the necessary delegate threshold to win the contest outright.


Super Tuesday: Warren called on to drop out and back Sanders after bruising defeat

Progressive fails to win her home state of Massachusetts to cap night of dismal results

Adam Withnall @adamwithnall
Wednesday 4 March 2020  

THE INDEPENDENT 

After a disastrous set of results on Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren is facing mounting pressure from her progressive backers to step aside and throw her support behind Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

Once leading in the polls and considered a frontrunner at debates, Ms Warren’s campaign for the Democrat nomination was in tatters on Wednesday morning as partial results showed she had failed to win the primary in her home state of Massachusetts, trailing to Joe Biden.

Across the 15 states and territories voting on Super Tuesday, Ms Warren was projected to have won just seven delegates, compared to at least 178 for Mr Biden and at least 153 for Mr Sanders. Mike Bloomberg, who has spent the better part of half a billion dollars on his campaign, was also struggling on eight delegates.

The disappointing Super Tuesday results come after Ms Warren failed to finish higher than third in any of the first four contests - Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

Ms Warren and Mr Sanders have both campaigned on progressive policies and providing universal public healthcare, but the long-time friends have clashed publicly in their respective drives to be named the leading candidate of the Democrat left.

Speaking to Politico before the Super Tuesday results came out, Aimee Allison, founder of the progressive organisation She the People, noted that after the drop-outs of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, the moderates had coalesced behind one candidate in Mr Biden.

“If a candidate pulls ahead after [Tuesday], we need to put aside our differences and unite on behalf of economic and racial justice,” Ms Allison said in reference to Ms Warren and Mr Sanders.

“The country is ready for new ideas, and we have two leading progressive campaigns that have so much to offer millions of Democrats. The moderates are playing to win. It’s time we rose up as a movement to play to win as well.”

Evan Weber, director of the Sunrise Movement which has been actively pro-Mr Sanders, said the two progressives “should publicly commit to grouping their delegates together at the convention in order to ensure that a progressive can win against the establishment”.

And Alexandra Rojas, executive director of the left-wing group Justice Democrats, accused Ms Warren of “attacking” Mr Sanders and urged her to “give her delegates to him if he has more votes to ensure a progressive wins the nomination”.

With Super Tuesday's results unfolding, there were mounting calls on social media for Ms Warren to step aside - and criticism of her failure to do so previously.

But Ashlee Marie Preston, the prominent trans rights activist and Warren campaign surrogate, wrote on Twitter: “Stop saying Warren should’ve dropped out for Bernie. He could have done the same when she was leading and he saw her robust plans/body of work she brought. If he supposedly encouraged her to run—he should have dropped out & supported her knowing she could materialize his vision.”

In spite of the latest poor results, Ms Warren appeared set on remaining in the race, at least for now.

Speaking to supporters in Detroit ahead of next week's Michigan primary, she introduced herself as "the woman who's going to beat Donald Trump."

The senator encouraged supporters to tune out the results and vote for the person they believed would be the best president, saying: “Prediction has been a terrible business and the pundits have gotten it wrong over and over.

“You don't get what you don't fight for. I am in this fight,” she said.

With a defeat in her home state, the humiliation of Elizabeth Warren is complete. So what now?

She predicted the future correctly — and it backfired

Holly Baxter New York @h0llyb4xter
THE INDEPENDENT 

Warren said she'd stick it out to the convention in Milwaukee, 

but surely this result is a step too far ( AP )

Poor, talented Elizabeth Warren. Mere months ago, we thought she was a shoo-in for president. Remember the four-hour selfie lines; the early endorsements from Julian Castro, Scarlett Johansson, John Legend and Chrissie Teigen; the impressive, uncompromising debate performances? We thought she might throw Bernie a bone and make him her VP when he floundered in the polls. We thought “I have a plan for that” was 2020’s answer to “Yes we can”.

But then her much-vaunted ability to predict the future backfired. On Tuesday night, she came away without first or even second place — those honors were reserved for Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders respectively. Donald Trump tweeted a mocking racial slur about her in response.
It was, to put it bluntly, a humiliation. And it shouldn’t have ever happened.

When Warren saw where the race was heading, she dealt with it in the most infuriating way. She stopped talking about the revolutionary universal healthcare system known as Medicare for All at the same time as she began distancing herself from Bernie, the man who “wrote that damn bill”. Once, Sanders supporters cheered as loudly for her as they did for their own candidate.

Then she started saying she’d expand Obamacare in her first year in office — which was basically Joe Biden’s pitch — and did a Buttigieg-esque waffle about how people with private insurance “enjoy having a choice”.

It looked like she was creeping away from her principles before she even hit the Oval Office. The people who had thought she was going to deliver a revolution began to melt away. They started talking, again, about how she used to be a Republican; how she once falsely claimed Native American ancestry.

Trump poisoned the well, and Democrats began to drink from it. Warren’s past mistakes were no longer old faux pas — they were evidence of her flakiness, her unreliability. How could anyone trust her to stand for anything any more? She’d refused to shake her old friend Bernie Sanders’ hand in front of the nation. She’d co-opted his ideas for popularity points and now she wanted to cast him aside.

Almost all of this is monumentally unfair. Warren is a talented politician with a long history of standing up for the little guy. She stuck it to Wall Street when it wasn’t cool, and she did it from within. She was more energetic, more on-the-ball and more articulate than her fellow septuagenarians Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. She had more to say about women’s rights and a more coherent policy on gun control. She was also free from the baggage of either a former VP or a former independent who spent most of his career shouting from the sidelines at every passing Democrat. Indeed, Warren had the whiff of electability about her, and no doubt Trump’s team were glad to see his “Pocahontas” jibes take effect.

Warren could have been a unifying candidate, one who successfully bridged that wide chasm between Biden and Bernie. But she overthought it. She clearly predicted, correctly, that everyone bar Sanders would coalesce around a single moderate candidate. Too late and too awkwardly, she tried to make herself into that candidate.

What happened to the righteous, relatable anger channeled by a woman who had specialized in bankruptcy law and had her Republican foundations shattered when she realized the system was rigged against the people? It became subdued as time went on, as healthcare and punishing the bankers — lines which echoed Sanders — stopped appearing so often in her speeches.

That anger did return, briefly, when Bloomberg made an appearance on the Democratic stage in Nevada. “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians’,” she said at the time. “And I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.” It was Warren at her best. But a lot of primary votes had already been cast early, and she didn’t benefit from her performance in the way she would have in a more just system.



Where does Warren go now? Does she make a joint-ticket agreement with Joe Biden, thus sealing the deal on her centrist conversion? Does she throw it all in with Bernie, back the revolution and risk being cast out in the cold by the DNC for the rest of her career? Does she retire back to Massachusetts and regroup, re-strategize, at the age of 70? Time is not on her side — although it’s still two presidential cycles until she’s the same age as Bernie is now.




Tonight, she may, for the first time, be left without a plan. Not long ago, she said she would stick it out to the Democratic convention in Milwaukee, come hell or high water; but failing to even win her home state is surely a humiliation too far.

Perhaps she can still pull some strings in a cabinet position which befits her energy and experience, under either a President Biden or Sanders. Perhaps a miracle will happen and she’ll make it to the White House anyway. Perhaps she’ll run away with the nomination in 2024 and finally oust Trump in a landslide victory, long after both Uncle Joe and Bernie are shown to be inadequate bulwarks against the rising tide of Keep America Great.

She would have made a better president than either of the two frontrunners. She deserved better than this. But Elizabeth Warren changed what she was selling too late for people to buy it — and in the end, she was left with not very much at all. Not even Massachusetts.

World's biggest meat company linked to 'brutal massacre' in Amazon

Investigation traces meat sold to JBS and rival Marfrig to farm owned by man implicated in Mato Grosso killings  

Protests against the illegal timber trade in Brazil have highlighted the number of people killed while defending the forest. Photograph: Eraldo Peres/AP

Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Published on Tue 3 Mar 2020

A new investigation has linked the world’s biggest meat company JBS, and its rival Marfrig, to a farm whose owner is implicated in one of the most brutal Amazonian massacres in recent memory.

The report by Repórter Brasil comes as JBS faces growing pressure over transparency failings in its Amazon cattle supply chain.

On 19 April 2017, nine men were brutally murdered in what became known as the “Colniza massacre”. The men had been squatting on remote forest land in the state of Mato Grosso when their bodies were found, according to court documents. Some showed signs of torture; some had been stabbed, others shot.

According to charges filed by state prosecutors in Mato Grosso, the massacre was carried out by a gang known as “the hooded ones”. The aim, they said, was to terrify locals, take over land they lived on and extract valuable natural resources. The first reporter to reach the lawless, far-flung region only got there a week later.

 

House of farmer and evangelical pastor Sebastião de Souza in Taquarussu do Norte, Brazil, one of the men murdered in the Colniza massacre. Photograph: Fabiano Maisonnave/Courtesy of Climate Home

On 15 May 2017, prosecutors said they had charged Valdelir João de Souza, a farmer who owned two timber companies on neighbouring land, and four others with homicide and forming or being part of an illegal paramilitary group. Prosecutors said de Souza had ordered the massacre, although he had not been present when it occurred.

Since then de Souza has been a fugitive. But in April 2018 two adjacent areas of land – Três Lagoas and Piracama farms - in nearby Rondônia state were registered under his name (one of the oddities of the Brazilian property system is that landowners register their own land and boundaries). The two farms covered 1,052 hectares (2,599 acres) in an area set aside by the government for low-income agricultural workers. Satellite images show extensive deforestation on the Três Lagoas farm in 2015.


Meat company faces heat over ‘cattle laundering’ in Amazon supply chain

Government sanitary records seen by Repórter Brasil show that on 9 May 2018 143 cattle were sold by the Três Lagoas and Piracama farms to a farm owned by Maurício Narde.

Minutes later Narde’s farm sold 143 animals of the same sex and age – 80 female cattle between 13– 24 months old and 63 female cattle over 36 months old – to a JBS meatpacker.

In June 2017, according to court documents in a separate case, Narde worked at a sawmill owned by de Souza in Machadinho d’Oeste in Rondônia state. He still works at the same sawmill, although it has since changed its name and is no longer controlled by de Souza. Reached by telephone by the Guardian, Narde confirmed the transaction but did not explain why he had sold the cattle after buying them minutes beforehand.

“We buy and sell, just to keep things moving,” he said, before deciding not to answer any more questions and concluding the interview.

Cattle laundering involves the selling on of cows raised illegally on deforested land to ‘clean’ farms. Photograph: Bruno Kelly/Greenpeace

The quick sale of the cattle suggests what environmentalists call “cattle laundering” – when cattle from a farm that has environmental issues sells cattle to a “clean” farm. This gets around monitoring systems because meat companies including JBS do not monitor these “indirect suppliers”.

“This series of coincidences suggests a common practice, which is the triangulation of animals,” said Mauro Armelin, director of Friends of the Earth Brazil. “It is a practice that could indicate cattle laundering.”

On 25 June 2018, according to government sanitary records, Três Lagoas also sold 153 head of cattle to the Morro Alto farm in Monte Negro, Rondônia, owned by José Carlos de Albuquerque.

In the following months de Albuquerque sold dozens of head of cattle to JBS and Marfrig slaughterhouses.

De Albuquerque told Réporter Brasil that the sale had never been completed – but the report cited sanitary records showing the cattle had, in fact, entered the Morro Alto farm. Contacted by the Guardian by phone and email, he declined to answer questions.

The Repórter Brasil investigation highlights the difficulties that Brazil’s big meat companies have in monitoring their supply chains.

JBS and other big companies such as Marfrig committed to not buying from farms involved in illegal deforestation in two separate agreements signed with Greenpeace and Brazilian prosecutors in 2009 and subsequent years. Under the Greenpeace deal, the companies also promised to remove producers accused of land grabbing or convicted in rural conflicts from their suppliers lists. The deal with federal prosecutors similarly bans farms that have been convicted of involvement in rural conflicts, or that are being investigated.

Greenpeace quit their deal in 2017, after JBS was fined for buying cattle from farms in illegally-deforested areas in the Amazon state of Pará. An audit by federal prosecutors found that 19% of the cattle JBS purchased in the state in 2016 had “evidence of irregularities”.

  

Large meat companies have promised not to buy cattle from farms that encroach on indigenous lands. Photograph: Paulo Pereira/Greenpeace


In the years following the cattle agreement, JBS made enormous progress in improving its monitoring of Amazon suppliers and the company defended its sustainability in a statement.

“We monitor over 280,000 square miles, an area larger than Germany, and assess more than 50,000 potential cattle-supplying farms every day, as well as conducting daily checks of all purchases to ensure compliance with strict standards. To date we have blocked more than 8,000 cattle-supplying farms due to noncompliance,” it said.

But while the company now has a complex system in place to monitor its direct suppliers, it is still unable to monitor its indirect suppliers – those farmers who sell to farms that then sell on to JBS.

Revealed: fires three times more common in Amazon beef farming zones

De Souza’s case has yet to be concluded. Ulisses Rabaneda, a lawyer representing de Souza, told the Guardian that he had decided not to reply to questions from the media at this stage in the court proceedings.

In an interview with the Gazeta Digital in 2019, de Souza said he was innocent of all charges, had never been involved in death squads, and remained a fugitive because he was scared he would be murdered by the real killers if he handed himself in.

“I never went around armed, so why at my age of 41, with solid companies, a peaceful life, no debts, without any problems, would I do something so barbaric?” de Souza said in the interview. “I built everything with the honesty and effort of my family. Why would I throw it all away?”

JBS told Réporter Brasil that de Souza was not a supplier and that it does not “acquire cattle from farms involved in deforestation of native forests, invasion of indigenous reserves of conservation, rural violence, land conflicts, or that used slave or child labour”.

“JBS reiterates that any attempt to link the company to the person mentioned in the report, who was never on its list of suppliers, is irresponsible,” the company told the Guardian.

Marfrig declined to comment on the investigation and sent the statement it had previously sent to the Guardian in December in which the company recognised that 53% of its Amazon cattle comes from indirect suppliers.

“Marfrig is fully aware of the challenges related to the livestock production chain and recognises its role as an important transformation agent to ensure production vis-à-vis the conservation of Brazilian biomes, especially the Amazon,” the company said.

  

Marfrig has recognised that over half of its Amazon cattle comes from indirect suppliers. Photograph: Ricardo Funari/Greenpeace

It detailed measures including a supplier monitoring platform and its Request for Information (RFI) tool, in which suppliers voluntarily list the farms they may have acquired animals from. The company says a third of the cattle it sources in the Amazon come with an RFI, and it is now working to improve the process with World Wildlife Fund.

In 2017, a Greenpeace report published after the Colniza massacre said a company owned by de Souza, called Madeireira Cedroarana, had accumulated around $150,000 (£116,000) in unpaid fines over a decade from Brazil’s environment agency, Ibama.

Between January 2016 and October 2017 the company exported thousands of cubic metres of timber to the US and Europe. In 2018 it changed its name to Colmar Madeiras; it continues at the same address, but de Souza is no longer its controlling partner. In the interview with Gazeta Digital, he said his company had challenged fines it had received.

JBS IS ALSO IN ALBERTA AND OTHER PROVINCES IN CANADA  

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2019/12/all-news-that-fits-washington-post.html

Can Biden beat Trump? The truth is he's just as much of a risk as Bernie

The 'sensible, establishment choice' is just as likely to garner votes from former Republicans as a populist with a bold new plan
Holly Baxter New York @h0llyb4xter  THE INDEPENDENT 

Both Biden and Sanders put in a strong performance on Super Tuesday ( AFP via Getty Images )

As the dust settles on Super Tuesday, Democrats are left with two clear frontrunners: former vice president Joe Biden and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Biden, who was only a couple of weeks ago seen as dead in the water, benefited from a flurry of endorsements just before 14 states went to the polls. Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke (remember him?) all turned up in Texas to profess their belief in former President Obama’s old running-mate. And most of them were talking about electability.

“I’m voting for Joe Biden because he can defeat Donald Trump,” O’Rourke wrote in an email that hit my inbox early Tuesday morning. “Having him at the top of the ticket will help our down-ballot candidates, especially in Texas,” he added. “… Joe can beat Donald Trump because he is the clear contrast to Donald Trump. Joe Biden is kind and decent. Empathetic and caring. He will reassert our moral standing in the world at a moment that it’s been called into question.” A couple of paragraphs later, Beto added that he also admired the “integrity” of Elizabeth Warren, the way in which Michael Bloomberg had “used his wealth for good”, and the way in which Bernie Sanders has “consistently and successfully pushed this country to think big”.

“Thinking big” never means “being electable” — everybody knows that. But is it really true that Bernie Sanders’ big ideas — those calls for full structural and systemic reform — make him less likely to appeal to American voters than steadfast, sensible Uncle Joe? I’m not convinced

The problem with calling someone unelectable while thousands of people turn out to vote to them is it can make you look a bit foolish. Whether or not the DNC thinks that Sanders will speak to the entire US population in November’s general election, it’s undeniable that his rallies have been well-attended and have translated into real-life voters turning up to the ballot box. And the simple fact is that there is overlap between Sanders voters and Trump voters; they’re just not the same Trump voters who might be tempted over by Biden.

In 2016, Trump asked Americans to vote for a revolution with a maverick at its helm. Democrats chose a safe, establishment candidate. This wasn’t the year to mess around, they said. They needed someone guaranteed to knock an inexperienced idiot like Trump out of the park. We know how that strategy ended up. Yet we are being sold the same reasoning again, as if 2016 — and the midterms in 2018, where a surge of young progressives won it for the Democratic Party — never happened.

There are a lot of swing voters in the United States. For better or worse, they tend to vote on issues that directly affect them, such as healthcare, personal taxation and gun rights. They made it loud and clear in 2016 that they wanted to drain the swamp, stick it to the establishment and bring the troops home from endless wars. Trump hasn’t held Wall Street or any of his billionaire buddies to account, but Bernie promises he will in no uncertain terms. An impeachment and a Mueller report later, some who believed in Trump back then may well be ready to believe in Sanders now.

Then there’s the other side. Biden is a household name who stood beside one of the most beloved presidents in American history. There’s no denying he knows how it all works and that he already has a working relationship with some of the world’s most powerful leaders. The “Never Trump” movement, comprising Republicans embarrassed by what The Donald has done to their Grand Old Party, has been growing in ranks over the past four years. Some of those “Never Trumpers” have been saying that they would be willing to vote for Biden. They consider the situation within their party so dire that they’d rather press the reset button and start again in 2024. But those people — people for whom “socialism” is the dirtiest of dirty words — could never countenance voting for Bernie Sanders. If Sanders was the Democratic nominee, they’d either hold their noses and vote for Trump or fail to turn up to vote at all. That’s a powerful argument in favor of Biden.

The problem is that those people might fail to turn up even if Biden is the nominee. Can we really count on dedicated, life-long Republicans to switch allegiances and vote for someone so emblematic of a previous Democratic administration? Would a group of “Never Bernie” Democrats seriously go to the ballot box for Dick Cheney? Counting on this group of voters to come out for Biden is just as risky as counting on disillusioned former Trump evangelists to ditch Make America Great Again and hop on board the Medicare for All train. Both strategies make for an uphill struggle. This polarization is what such a ridiculously overstuffed race for the nominee gave us.

Consider what the young, enthusiastic backers of Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke might do when faced with the choice between Biden and Trump. In their hearts, they will most likely be “blue no matter who”. But will that get them out to vote early in the morning or late at night on election day? More than a few former Mayor Pete campaigners told me this week that they’d been left confused by his quick endorsement of Biden — only five minutes ago, weren’t they backing a millennial touting “a new kind of politics”? And wasn’t Biden offering a kind of optimistic nostalgia, a return to the good old days? It seemed like a bait-and-switch of the cruelest kind.

We can’t know whether Biden would unseat Trump in November in the way moderate Democrats hope he will — but we can learn the right lessons from the past four years. Nothing is guaranteed, and electability doesn’t always mean what you think it means. If we’re to move towards a Trumpless future, we first have to admit that the “safe choice” in the Democratic race dropped out a long time ago.

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DARPA’s competition to find a rapid rocket launch provider ends without a winner

Astra came super close

ONCE UPON A TIME DARPA WAS KNOWN AS THE JASONS

By Loren Grush@lorengrush Mar 3,  2020

Astra’s rocket on the launchpad in Alaska. Image: DARPA

DARPA’s competition to find a rocket company that can rapidly send satellites to space ended without a winner on March 2nd when the final team failed to launch by the contest’s deadline. Rocket startup Astra came within less than a minute of launching its brand-new rocket for the competition out of Alaska, but it had to halt the mission due to some bad data from the vehicle. As a result, the company lost out on winning up to $12 million — and now, no one will win the money prize.

The competition, known as the DARPA Launch Challenge, began about two years ago with the goal of finding a rocket launch provider that could quickly respond to a request to launch any payload from the military. To win the competition, eligible teams had to demonstrate that they could launch small national security satellites from practically any launch site in the US with very little heads-up. A company had to launch at least two rockets carrying DARPA payloads within two weeks of each other during very specific windows.

DARPA originally selected three teams to compete in the challenge, including Virgin Orbit’s subsidiary Vox Space and former small-satellite launcher Vector, which went bankrupt in December. Both dropped out, leaving Astra, a company that had been in stealth mode for years until early February. Astra has been testing its new vehicle over the last couple of years and has had a few launch failures, including one that led to soil contamination at Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island.
ASTRA WAS THE ONLY COMPANY REMAINING IN THE COMPETITION

However, Astra remained in the competition, and on February 18th, DARPA publicly revealed the dates and locations for the company’s launch attempts. In order to win, Astra had to first launch its rocket from the Pacific Spaceport Complex between February 17th and March 1st and then again sometime later in March. For the first launch, DARPA gave details about what payloads Astra would be launching on January 22nd, and the company only saw the satellites when they arrived at the launch site in Alaska to be added on top of the rocket. The initial payloads consisted of three small satellites as well as one that was supposed to remain attached to the rocket in space.


After experiencing some weather delays, Astra was finally set to launch on Monday, March 2nd — the last day in the window, which had been extended by a day due to the poor weather. With its rocket on the launchpad, the company counted down to T-53 seconds but ultimately stopped the countdown when engineers saw some bad data coming from the rocket. The engineering team tried to fix the problem before the launch window ended at 6:30PM ET, but it didn’t figure out the issue in time.

“Fundamentally, safety is our top priority, and winning the challenge would have been fantastic today, but our objective really is to reach orbit in as few flights as possible,” Chris Kemp, Astra co-founder and CEO, said on the live stream broadcasting the mission. “So we really want to use this rocket, and we want to get out there again when we know everything is perfect. And unfortunately, that wasn’t today.” The flight would have been the company’s debut flight to orbit.

If Astra had been able to launch to orbit successfully yesterday, the company could have won a $2 million prize and been eligible to win an additional $10 million if it could launch a second time just a few weeks later. Now, no one will win that prize money, and DARPA plans to remove the payloads from Astra’s rocket. “It was a hard challenge,” Todd Master, the project manager for the DARPA Launch Challenge, said during the live stream. “We set it to be achievable. But certainly, DARPA holds a bar for really hard tests that we asked competitors to do. So they got almost there, almost made it to the finish line. Just didn’t quite make it.”

In the meantime, Astra says it’s already working toward its next launch attempt, which could occur out of Alaska as soon as March 15th. Kemp says he’s unsure what the company will fly on the mission, if anything. But there are apparently a lot of customers who want the opportunity to fly on the vehicle. “We were frankly bombarded with interest from folks that want to fly on it,” Kemp told The Verge after the launch. “The DARPA payload was removed because that was part of the challenge, and so we’re trying to decide whether we will revive the license to fly without a payload, or if one of our many customers can be ready for us.”

With this next launch, Kemp says the company will still consider things a success even if the vehicle doesn’t reach orbit. In fact, the goal is to get to orbit within the next three upcoming launches. “We’re going for a birdie here,” Kemp said. “We’re not going for a hole in one.”

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It’s going to take a lot longer to make a COVID-19 vaccine than a treatment
Scientists have a head start on treatments

By Nicole Wetsman Feb 28, 2020
   

Photo by Sylvain Lefevre / Getty Images

Scientists and drug companies are racing to develop and test treatments and vaccines that address COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Work on both is progressing at an unprecedented speed — but researchers are starting essentially from scratch on vaccine development, so the process is going to take a long time. Treatments, on the other hand, were further along when the outbreak started and might be available sooner.

“They’re in vastly different situations right now,” says Florian Krammer, a professor and vaccine development expert at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Both treatments and vaccines are important for a robust and effective response to the outbreak. Treatments help people after they already have a disease; in the case of COVID-19, researchers hope to treat the around 15 percent of COVID-19 patients who have non-mild symptoms. Vaccines, on the other hand, help prevent people from getting sick in the first place.

Scientists started work on drugs to treat coronaviruses during the SARS and MERS outbreaks, but because the outbreaks died down, the job was never completed. Now, they’re able to dust off that old research and start building on it. The leading candidate is a drug called remdesivir, which was developed by the pharmaceutical company Gilead. Research showed that it could block SARS and MERS in cells and in mice. In addition, remdesivir was used in a clinical trial looking for treatments for Ebola — and therefore, it had already gone through safety testing to make sure it doesn’t cause any harm.

That’s why teams in China and the US were able to start clinical trials testing remdesivir in COVID-19 patients so quickly. There should be data available showing if it helps them get better as soon as April. If it proves effective, Gilead would presumably be able to ramp up production and get the drug in the hands of doctors fairly quickly, Krammer says.

The vaccine development process will take much longer. Experts say that it will be between a year and 18 months, or maybe longer, before they’re available to the public. One of the strategies for creating a vaccine involves making copies of one part of the virus (in this case, the bit that the novel coronavirus uses to infiltrate cells). Then, the immune system of the person who receives the vaccine makes antibodies that neutralize that particular bit. If they were exposed to the virus, those antibodies would be able to stop the virus from functioning.

The pharmaceutical company Moderna is the furthest along in the process; it already has that type of vaccine ready for testing. A trial in 45 healthy people to make sure that it’s safe will start in March or April and will take around three months to complete. After that, it’ll have to be tested in an even larger group to check if it actually immunizes people against the novel coronavirus. That will take six to eight months. And then, it’ll have to be manufactured at a huge scale, which poses an additional challenge.

Making vaccines is always challenging. Developing this one is made more difficult because there has never been a vaccine for any type of coronavirus. “We don’t have a production platform, we have no experience in safety, we don’t know if there will be complications. We have to start from scratch, basically,” Krammer says.

It was much easier to make a vaccine for H1N1, known as swine flu, which emerged as a never-before-seen virus in 2009. “There are large vaccine producers in the US and globally for flu,” Krammer says. Manufacturers were able to stop making the vaccine against the seasonal flu and start making a vaccine for this new strain of flu. “They didn’t need clinical trials, they just had to make the vaccine and distribute it,” he says.

There won’t be a vaccine done in time to hold off any approaching outbreak of COVID-19 in the US or in other countries where it’s still not widespread. That’s why treatments are so important: along with good public health practices, they can help blunt the impact of the disease and make it less of an unstoppable threat. The best experts can hope for is that a vaccine can help prevent other outbreaks in the future if the novel coronavirus sticks around.

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