Officials raid home of Diego Maradona’s doctor, probe death as manslaughter case


By Jorge Fitz-Gibbon
November 29, 2020 

Diego Maradona (right) and Leopoldo LuqueDiego Maradona press office/AFP

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Argentine investigators raided the home of Diego Maradona’s doctor on Sunday as they probe a possible case of involuntary manslaughter in the soccer legend’s death.

The blitz comes after Maradona’s lawyer last week called for a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of the 60-year-old former soccer phenom, who died Wednesday after suffering a heart attack, the Mirror reported Sunday.

Investigators converged on the home of the doctor, Leopoldo Luque, 33, around 8:40 a.m. Sunday and are expected to question him as they probe possible medical negligence in Maradona’s death, the outlet said.

“As Luque was Maradona’s personal physician the decision was taken to search his house and surgery (office) to look for documents that could determine whether, during Maradona’s treatment at home, there were any irregularities,” a law enforcement source told Argentina’s La Nacion.

The soccer star’s lawyer, Matias Moria, raised questions about his death Thursday.

“The ambulance took more than half an hour to arrive, which was criminal idiocy,” he said, according to the Independent Online.

On Saturday, Maradona’s daughters — Dalma, Giannina, and Jana — spoke to investigators and also raised questions about Luque’s potential involvement in their father’s death, the Mirror reported.

Maradona’s family was already incensed after a funeral worker last week released a selfie alongside the icon’s body.

Funeral worker Claudio Fernandez was fired over the incident.

Maradona is considered one of the sport’s all-time greats, scoring 34 goals in 91 international appearances, including four World Cups.

AUSTRALIA

Sydney records hottest November night as heatwave sweeps city


November 29, 2020
By Agence France-Presse

  

A fiery sunset over the Members' Stand during the one-day cricket match between India and Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground in the sweltering city -- via AFP

Sydney recorded its hottest November night as Australia’s largest city suffered through a weekend heatwave that saw daytime temperatures peak above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).

The overnight temperature did not drop below 25.3 degrees Celsius Saturday into Sunday in central Sydney, according to the meteorology bureau, making it the hottest November night since records began.

The temperature had already hit a scorching 30 degrees Celsius by 4:30 am Sunday, before reaching above 40 degrees for the second consecutive day.

“New South Wales is in the midst of a severe heatwave with very warm conditions already being experienced yesterday, and today being a repeat of some of those conditions,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s Agata Imielska.

Daytime records for November fell elsewhere in Australia’s southeast, with the outback towns of Griffith and Mildura reaching 43.2 and 45.7 degrees Celsius respectively on Saturday.

The heatwave saw bans on lighting fires imposed across large swathes of New South Wales (NSW) state, which was badly hit by catastrophic bushfires during the last southern hemisphere summer.

A number of blazes broke out Sunday, including one on Sydney’s western outskirts that the NSW Fire and Rescue Service said damaged a property.

More than 60 bushfires were still burning across the state, but most had been brought under control by firefighters as a southerly wind change led to a rapid drop in temperatures.

It was the first burst of significant bushfire activity since the devastating 2019-2020 fires, which burned an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom and left 33 people dead as tens of thousands fled their homes.

The fire season also killed or displaced nearly three billion animals and cost the economy an estimated US$7 billion.

The latest heatwave comes just two weeks after government scientists warned the fossil-fuel reliant country should brace for worse to come, predicting climate change will continue to exacerbate bushfires, droughts and cyclones in Australia.

Conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison has repeatedly played down the link between climate change and the bushfires, and has committed to keeping Australia as one of the world’s leading fossil fuel exporters.

But Australians are increasingly concerned about climate change, with a recent poll by Sydney’s Lowy Institute showing almost 90 percent believing it is a critical or important threat.

Scientific drama continues over life on Venus

November 29,  2020 Nicole Karlis, Salon - Commentary

A radar mosaic image of Venus. (NASA.gov)

In September, news about the possibility of floating, cloud-based life on Venus caused a storm in the science world as tumultuous as the sulfur clouds that rain acid down on the second planet from the Sun.

A paper published in Nature Astronomy by a group of international astronomers explained how they detected phosphine (PH₃), a gaseous molecule composed of one phosphorus and three hydrogen atoms, in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Researchers saw phosphine’s signal in spectrograms from two radio telescopes they used to capture the data, and estimated there were 20 parts per billion of the compound in Venus’ clouds.

This discovery, the astronomers stated, was believed to be a “promising” sign of life, as phosphine on Earth is created in the gaseous emanations of anaerobic life. Could it be that, high above among the mountains, craters, thousands of volcanoes and thick atmosphere, little microbes flitted about the Venusian sky?

“If no known chemical process can explain PH₃ within the upper atmosphere of Venus, then it must be produced by a process not previously considered plausible for Venusian conditions,” the authors of the paper stated. “This could be unknown photochemistry or geochemistry, or possibly life.”

On Earth, phosphine is produced as a waste byproduct of simple anaerobic bacteria, and they are a notorious signature of the uncommon gas. The researchers struggled to figure out any other way that the gas could be produced on Venus, geologically or in the atmosphere somehow, but came up empty.

But quickly after astronomers published the initial paper, more research papers followed questioning the observation of phosphine—both its presence and the abundance of the compound. In one critique of the original study, researchers suggest that the signs of phosphine were coming from another common gas in Venus’ clouds, sulfur dioxide, which has a similar spectrogram. Another critique focused on how difficult it is to extract a phosphine signal out of the data that the initial group of researchers used, according to Nature. Subsequently, the same team of astronomers of the initial paper re-examined their data and cited a processing error and recalculated its estimate to 5 parts per billion. In other words, if there’s phosphine there likely isn’t as much of it. Their results were published in a preprint posted on 17 November to arXiv.

So, does that mean that life on Venus has been ruled out?

“If phosphine indeed exists at the claimed abundance of ~5 ppb [parts per billion], then this abundance is still orders of magnitude larger than what one can get out of plausible volcanic activity on the planet based on what we know from Earth,” Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb told Salon over email. “But although we know that phosphine originates from life on Earth, we do not fully understand the detailed path by which it is produced (namely which microbes make it and how).”

Loeb said there is still a lot of research that needs to be done in order to land on a definitive answer to whether or not there’s life on Venus or not— like going to Venus and collecting some microbes in a probe, say.

“We will not be convinced that life exists on Venus until microbes are found by scooping the Venusian clouds,” Loeb said. “The claimed detection of phosphine plays the important role of motivating a mission that will go there.”

Notably, Loeb added that the over-reported estimate of phosphine wasn’t a “mistake.”

“I would not call it a mistake but an overestimate, for now, until proven wrong by better data,” Loeb said.

As luck would have it, NASA’s DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus) mission is one contender to study the upper atmosphere of Venus. According to Forbes, NASA is due to make a decision next year on whether or not the mission will move forward. If phosphine is indeed abundantly present in Venus’ atmosphere, this mission would be able to detect it.

“DAVINCI+ will measure the compositional and dynamic context for interesting gases such as phosphine—and likely others not yet discovered,” Dr. James Garvin, Chief Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the principal investigator of DAVINCI+, told Forbes. “We do not have enough information to rule out more exotic processes potentially responsible for unanticipated phosphorous gases such as phosphine; DAVINCI+’s proposed measurements could directly provide essential chemical context.”

NASA hasn’t paid much attention to Venus since the 1990s, when the Magellan mission mapped out the planet’s surface. But as Loeb told Salon, the “claimed detection” of phosphine “plays the important role of motivating a mission that will go there.”

In other words, the planet Venus could be undergoing its own kind of renaissance in the planetary science world.

When asked if there’s more potential interest in missions to Venus, Loeb said “definitely.” He added that the original report inspired members of his own research group to write two more papers on the subject.

Therese Encrenaz, an astrophysicist at LESIA, Paris Observator, told Salon via email that she is convinced that “there are still many open questions regarding the photochemistry and meteorology of its atmosphere.”

“Venus has been forgotten for too long, relative to the space exploration of Mars,” Encrenaz said. “There is no need for phosphine to be interested in Venus! I am very happy to see potential space missions on Venus being in the competition for future selections, at ESA [European Space Agency] and NASA; I hope at least one of them will get selected.”

As Noam Izenberg, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and deputy chair of NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group, previously told Salon, even if there ends up not being phosphine or life on Venus, the search alone “highlights how much we don’t know about Venus, and that fundamental new discoveries […] await us next door.”

What can the left expect from a Biden-Harris administration? Pretty much nothing

Published on November 28, 2020By Tony McKenna, Salon

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris appear at a Democratic presidential debate (MSNBC/screen grab)

On Nov. 7 of this year, the United States let out a collective roar that rippled across the nation, resonating the crowds of blue-clad people swelling the streets and the squares, and causing buildings to tremble as those inside broke out the champagne and began to dance. The celebrations lasted long into the night. For those few precious moments, it felt as though a curse had been lifted, a nightmare abated. Trumpism had ground itself to a resounding and decisive halt and it seemed that political space on the left, and on the center ground, had finally begun to open again.

A scion of 21st-century reality TV, Trump was a vulgar presence; a combination of incompetence and inanity, hitched to the bombast and braggadocio of a circus ringmaster, and rounded off with all the ethical inclinations of a CEO of a napalm factory. Trump was a president of pantomime proportions: In the White House he single-handedly invigorated the satire industry, as the mirth to be made from his perpetual claims to greatness (his level of expertise in every scientific field would have made Joseph Stalin blush) was recycled into comedy skit after comedy skit on “Saturday Night Live” (a “very stable genius,” anyone?)

And yet, as Karl Marx noted so many years ago, the flipside to farce is so often tragedy. While Trump continued to strut, parade and self-promote there was a more sinister aspect to the spectacle of his absurdity. Gaudy, grandiose language of “greatness” and the innate superiority of the “nation” began to filter through the fourth wall of political PR, reaching deeper, darker and more undisclosed regions. The rallying cry “Make America Great Again” started to prick the ears of shady extremists, and forces on the far right began to stir from within the shadows.

In spring 2016, some months before Trump’s election, Andrew Anglin — founder of the prominent neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer — had predicted, “Jews, Blacks, and lesbians will be leaving America if Trump gets elected — and he’s happy about it. This alone is enough reason to put your entire heart and soul into supporting this man.” A year later, on the campus of American University in Washington, which had just elected its first black female student president, nooses began to appear — courtesy, in fact, of the same Daily Stormer site, which had mobilized far right elements in a campaign of hate and harassment against her.

A couple of months after that came the notorious spectacle of Charlottesville, when large numbers of bare-chested, belligerent white men lumbered through the streets chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” Alongside the assorted confederate flags and spidery black of swastikas, T-shirts and caps featuring Trump’s MAGA slogan were increasingly on display. When the forces of the left mounted a counter demonstration, a white supremacist — unable to bottle a visceral sense of rage — drove his car into them, killing one demonstrator and injuring several others. In the aftermath of the atrocity, Trump remarked that there were “some very fine people on both sides” and expressed the view that “both sides” were culpable for the violence — a clear wink-wink, nod-nod to the murderer and the toxic, protean forces that had generated him.

That Trump’s presidency had bolstered and emboldened such elements surely explains the mass eruption of joy and celebration which greeted the news of his departure. But those who would look toward the partnership of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and the commissioning of a new Democratic leadership, to inaugurate an epoch of reason and enlightenment and thereby banish the darkness should undoubtedly look again. For one thing, it bears remembering what brought Trump to power in the first place. Trumpism arrived at the White House, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Trump did not win in 2016 on the back of a broad right-wing social movement which was then translated into a vast hike in the number of Republican votes. Inasmuch as Trump “won” at all — in two presidential elections, he hasn’t even come close to winning the popular vote — he did only marginally better than John McCain had done in losing what was generally viewed as a landslide election in 2008. Trump won 46.1% percent of the popular vote in 2016, while McCain had won 45.7% eight years earlier.

The real difference was on the other side of the ledger: In 2008, Barack Obama had won 52.9% of the popular vote, while in 2016 Clinton only managed to procure 48.2%. In other words, the Democratic vote share had fallen by almost four million votes (even before we take into account the significant increase in population between 2008 and 2016).

Although many tried to lay the blame for this at the door of shady Russian hackers or dodgy tech companies such as Cambridge Analytica, their effect was marginal, perhaps imperceptible. The real reason for this electoral demise can be found in the eight years of Democratic administration that preceded it. Those were the years in which Obama’s abstract and facile exhortations toward “hope” and “change” were extinguished in the fiery wastelands of the battle-scarred Middle East and beyond, as his administration prosecuted military attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, and the use of drone technology became endemic.

On the domestic front, the situation was no less grim. Having facilitated perhaps the largest economic crisis in history through their rapacious and often illegal financial dealings, the great banking oligarchs remained untouched and unrepentant, shielded as they were by the same government whose campaign coffers those CEOs had so generously filled in the run-up to the 2008 election. (Goldman Sachs was Obama’s top corporate donor that year, headlining a large number of other Wall Street contributors.)

Indeed behind closed doors, beyond the smooth façade of his presidential image, Obama spoke to the big banking heads with prosaic candor: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” This pithy quote, leaked into the public sphere, casts a light on the inner sanctum, the way political strategy is negotiated behind the back of the population. More importantly, it reveals the attitude of the Obama administration itself to the powerful, and to the people; i.e., the admission that its function is to protect the former from the latter (themselves regarded with patrician contempt as little more than pitchfork-wielding yokels).

The Democrats lost in 2016 because they had failed to provide a genuine political alternative. Both major political parties had followed the neoliberal economic line that privileged and protected the interests of those at the top, and offered an increasingly narrow vision of “choice” to an increasingly weary and disillusioned electorate. Fewer and fewer people turned out to vote, and it was on this basis that Trumpism would step into the void. Voter turnout dramatically improved this year, to be sure. But the question now becomes: What type of choice does the Biden-Harris administration provide?’ What type of political alternative can it offer?

One key selling point is the fact that Harris will be the first Black female vice president in U.S. history. That’s not to be scoffed at, especially considering the potent injection of racism and national chauvinism the country has suffered at the hands of Trumpism. At the same time, it does Harris something a disservice, inasmuch as it does not speak to her actual politics. Once we examine these in detail, the record that emerges is a somewhat murky one. For instance, during her tenure as attorney general of California the state Supreme Court ruled that prison overcrowding represented “cruel and unusual punishment,” yet Harris fought against the early release of prisoners, with her legal team arguing that such a measure would deplete the prison population and therefore deprive the state of a cheap source of labour.

This of course reflected the same political process of neoliberalism that underlay the fusion of private capital with the prison system and had led to the draconian prison reforms carried out under Bill Clinton in the ’90s and continued by both the Bush and the Obama administrations. This led to a vast number of people, disproportionately Black or Latino, languishing in “correctional” facilities for little more than misdemeanors or minor infractions. The profit motive — driven by neoliberal administrations of both the Democrat and Republican stripe — has eaten into the correctional system like a corrosive acid, warping its raison d’être such that Time Magazine, in a 2016 exposé, discovered “that approximately 39% of the nationwide prison population (576,000 people) is behind bars with little public safety rationale.”

And then there are the ubiquitous and tragic cases of those who are imprisoned and later discovered to have been falsely convicted — cases like that of Daniel Larsen, who spent more than a decade in prison before the Innocence Project was able to overturn his conviction. In the event, even after Larsen’s innocence had been established, Harris’ office tried to keep him incarcerated on the bureaucratic and rather spiteful grounds that his legal team had filed for release too late, after an official deadline had expired. (Larsen, thankfully, was released anyway.)

In any case, it seems likely that Harris will be an effective component in an administration likely to reprise many themes from the Obama era, including facilitating the march of private capital into various state sectors, fortifying the armed forces, protecting Wall Street and the financial elite, and cultivating U.S. military interests abroad in robust and murderous fashion. On the subject of Wall Street, it is worth noting that, in the run-up to the 2020 election, Biden boasted the backing of 131 billionaire donors to Trump’s 99, with the banking elite clearly registering in a Biden administration a safe pair of hands to steer the course of financial capital. Indeed, Biden’s selection as his White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, has a long-established career in venture capital.

On the question of military spending and foreign policy, this year a majority of Senate Democrats, including Harris, voted against and defeated an amendment that would have diverted 10% from a bloated military budget of some $740 billion into jobs, health care and education. Although it is still early days, the president-elect’s political team has already “underscored his deep commitment to the defence of Japan and U.S commitments under Article 5.” That’s a clear shot across the bow of China and an expression of a deepening Democratic commitment to a more aggressive stance toward the biggest economic rival to the U.S., one which some commentators have inferred (correctly, in my view) could lay the basis for a new Cold War.

In other words, the Biden administration shuffles onto the scene already a revenant; it can only offer a revivified formula of the same neoliberal strategy which has already exhausted itself in earlier decades. It is difficult to imagine that it will offer the electorate either something qualitatively new or something that’s likely to genuinely uplift the economic interests of the vast majority. The cloud of euphoria — which was more about the exorcism of Trump than about the ascension of Biden — is likely to dissipate rather quickly under the grind of the neoliberal machine. While Trump himself will eventually depart from the White House, the electoral core he has carved out for himself will remain very much in place.

Importantly, Trump’s most recent provocation — his efforts to call into question the validity of the democratic process, both before and after the election — on the surface the last-ditch cry of foul by a gaudy vulgarian, will in fact act as a potent rallying point for a political base all too ready to congeal around the notion that a liberal elite has robbed the “anti-establishment” candidate of his rightful win.

And the more the Democratic Party pursues its pro-Wall Street policies, the more it will reveal itself as the party of an elite minority — and the more such a conspiracy theory will gain traction in the minds of the bewildered, the small business owners flayed by the economic downturn, those in the traditional rural heartlands who find their prospects and their lands shrinking, those on the edge of destitution. Not to mention those whose sense of social inferiority, isolation and neglect is salved by the potency of the purest racial hatred and the longing for a nostalgic vision of a more traditional Americana in which white skin was the emblem of a pioneer spirit, conferring on its owner both innate privilege and automatic respect.

The slick brand of managerial capitalism which encompasses high finance and a new era of global imperialism, which Biden’s administration is almost certainly set to offer, could well create the perfect conditions in which a new type of far-right demagoguery can metastasize; something which will unite the anguished fury of the lower-middle classes with the most rabid fringes of the far right, fusing them into a toxic and potentially lethal brew.

For this reason, radicals must resist and protest the Biden administration from the outset. To provide it with support — to see in it the liberal antidote to Trumpism — is to make a critical error of the first order, one that will allow the most virulent elements of the Republican Party, in the words of Thomas Frank, to become “ever bolder in their preposterous claim to be a ‘workers’ party’ representing the aspirations of ordinary people.”

Malcolm X once wrote that the perception of the viciously right-wing character of the Republican Party works to cloak the establishment essence of the Democrats; in showing a voter “the wolf,” he argued, the ruling class is able to drive that same voter “into the open jaws of the smiling fox.” What Malcolm X would not live to see is the era we have inherited, the one in which fox begets wolf.

Forget about ‘moving on’ — the nation can’t heal without holding Trump accountable

By Amanda Marcotte, Salon- Commentary
November 29, 2020 


Donald Trump’s coup was still ongoing when the takes preaching the value of forgiveness and letting bygones be bygones started to come out.

“We would remain bitterly divided,” law professor Randall Eliason wrote in a Washington Post op-ed arguing against prosecuting Trump for his many likely crimes. “[C]riminal prosecutions can’t bind up this country’s deep political and social wounds.”

“There is an opportunity to rediscover our common ground with one another — and the way forward does not involve relitigating the last four years in federal criminal court,” argues Michael Conway, former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, in an NBC News opinion piece arguing that Joe Biden should actually pardon Donald Trump, for the love of heaven — the incumbent president who’s still sending his minions to court, trying to steal the election.

Unfortunately, Biden is living up to every stereotype of the quisling Democrat and taking this advice seriously. Reports suggest that in the interest of national “unity,” Biden is discouraging the idea of prosecuting Trump.

This is a serious mistake. Words like “unity” and “forgiveness” sound great in the abstract, but are utterly meaningless in the current political context for one reason: The sole responsibility for all this healing is being foisted, once again, on the backs of liberals. Conservatives can’t be bothered. They’re too busy working on their next moves to undermine democracy, sow division and create chaos.

This pattern — Republicans screw everything up and are allowed to get away with it in the name of “unity,” and take that as permission to go even further the next time — has been playing out since Richard Nixon first snagged his post-Watergate pardon. In a recent feature in the New York Times Magazine, Jonathan Mahler laid out the frustrating pattern in teeth-grinding detail:

When President George H.W. Bush pardoned six Reagan White House officials who were involved in the Iran-contra affair, he warned of “a profoundly troubling development in the political and legal climate of our country: the criminalization of policy differences.” Bush was sparing members of his own party. President Obama created what is perhaps an even more relevant precedent for Biden by choosing not to prosecute members of the George W. Bush administration who had authorized the unlawful torture of detainees; his nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, used the very same phrase — the criminalization of policy differences — when the issue came up during a 2009 congressional hearing.

Mahler also notes that this goes back to Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, which was justified in the name of “healing.”

But can a wound really heal when one party is busy applying bandages, while the other lurks in waiting, ready to stab the victim again? Of course not. And that’s the problem we’re facing. The “unity” isn’t unity at all. It’s a fake unity in which one side — the side that did not cause the damage wrought by Trump or Bush or Reagan or Nixon — does all the work, while the other side keeps looking for new opportunities to cause trouble. If anything, conservatives grows ever bolder in their corruption, realizing they will never face consequences for their actions, and in fact can count on the left to clean up all their messes for them.

This is all very reminiscent of the mentality around domestic violence in the bad old pre-feminist days, when wives whose husbands beat them were told to suck it up, walk on eggshells and take the abuse in silence. Only when feminists started setting up domestic violence shelters and pressuring the justice system to start holding abusers accountable did things finally start to change.

Biden himself should understand this, as he was the original sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act, which codified and mainstreamed this notion that abusers should face consequences and victims should be allowed to walk away. Biden’s legislation worked: Domestic violence decreased by 67% and murders by men of their female partners declined by 35%. It turns out turning the other cheek was just an invitation to abusers to continue the violence. But introducing consequences for abuse — lost marriages, jail time — saved lives.

It’s time to employ the same logic here. Democrats have tried reconciling with Republicans again and again, but since the work was wholly one-sided and the responsibility for “unity” held only by those who had done the least to destroy it, the result was failure. Instead, Republicans doubled down and doubled down again, escalating from Watergate to Iran-Contra to the Iraq War to now, with a president who is literally trying to steal an election.

All this anxiety around the question of what to do with Trump has little to do with Trump himself. Even those who are waxing poetic about healing and unity are forced to admit Trump is a monster who deserves absolutely nothing. But the fear is that by holding Trump accountable, Biden’s administration would be implicitly passing judgment on the millions of Americans who voted for him.

To which I say, good. Consider, for instance, this year’s Republican National Convention, a lengthy whine session about “cancel culture” from the various speakers. These were people so unused to facing consequences for their actions that the idea of lost dinner-party invitations seems like a painful price to pay for trying to to end democracy. Trump’s voters thrilled to this, enraptured by the idea that they are entitled to lash out at anyone they like, and should never pay even the slightest price — not even a disapproving look from a liberal — in response. They’ve grown soft and childish in this environment of no consequences, unwilling to take on even the slightest responsibility to their neighbors in the midst of a pandemic.

It’s time to stop coddling the easily hurt feelings of conservatives and instead turn our attention toward the nearly 80 million people who turned out — despite extensive efforts at disenfranchisement — to bring the Trump presidency to an end. What do we owe those Americans, the ones who actually did their part to save this country? Instead of demanding that they do more to pander to conservatives’ injured feelings, why not, for once, repay them for their hard work with justice? After all Trump has put this country through, that’s the least those who stood up and resisted him deserve.

WEASAL FAMILY

Corona virus mutates rapidly in mink and ferrets. Should we be afraid?

By Matthew Rozsa, Salon- Commentary
November 29, 2020
  

Ferret outdoors. (Shutterstock)

2020 has been an unpredictable year, but it’s safe to say that even the most cynical doomsday preppers didn’t anticipate checking off “dead, coronavirus-infected mink rising from their graves” from their figurative 2020 bingo cards.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Yet that is precisely what has happened in Denmark, as thousands of mink have been killed and buried in shallow graves to halt the spread of SARS-CoV-2, according to The Guardian. Thankfully the mink did not rise up because they had been resurrected; the more innocuous, though still disgusting, explanation is that their bodies were bloated with decomposition gases and rose to the surface naturally because they had been buried en masse just below the surface.

This is not to say that the deceased mink — or their living counterparts — are not potentially disease vectors. Earlier this month Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was compelled to announce the mass killing of mink, and an end to mink farming for the foreseeable future, after health officials in that country discovered a cluster of SARS-CoV-2 mutations among both farmed mink and people. Scientists have long held concerns that mutations in the virus could limit the effectiveness of any potential coronavirus vaccine.

Less than two weeks later, Danish scientists revealed that they had taken genetic and experimental data on the mutations and found no evidence that they enabled the virus to be transmitted more easily among human beings. They also said that the data also did not indicate that the virus would be more deadly.


Despite these findings, however, scientists still determined that a mass culling of mink was necessary because the virus has been so prevalent among mink farms, with a resulting increase in the number of COVID-19 diagnoses in regions with mink farms.

Denmark is the world’s largest producer of mink pelts, but mink and other mustelidae like ferrets are renowned for their abilities as virus mutation factories. Because ferrets are the animals most like humans in terms of how their immune systems respond to influenza, scientists have experimented with them to make existing viruses more deadly, a biowarfare concept known as “gain of function” research. As The New York Times reported in 2012, “Working with ferrets, the animal that is most like humans in responding to influenza, researchers found that a mere five genetic mutations allowed the virus to spread through the air from one ferret to another while maintaining its lethality.”

It added, “A separate study at the University of Wisconsin, about which little is known publicly, produced a virus that is thought to be less virulent.”

Specifically, virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, revealed in 2011 that he was able to take an influenza virus that did not seem to be transmitted by air, and infected enough ferrets with it that it mutated to the point where it could be airborne. As Science Magazine reported at the time, “The virus is an H5N1 avian influenza strain that has been genetically altered and is now easily transmissible between ferrets, the animals that most closely mimic the human response to flu. Scientists believe it’s likely that the pathogen, if it emerged in nature or were released, would trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths.”

There was some less ominous news this week involving a study led by University College London researchers of virus genomes from more than 46,000 people with COVID-19 from 99 countries. As revealed in the scientific journal Nature Communications, scientists found that the mutations which have occurred so far in the novel coronavirus have not made COVID-19 spread more rapidly.

A weasel / ˈwiːzəl / is a mammal of the genus Mustela of the family Mustelidae. The genus Mustela includes the least weasels, polecats, stoats, ferrets and mink. Members of this genus are small, active predators, with long and slender bodies and short legs.

SEE  

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=MINK

‘We will exterminate you’: Proud Boys and other right-wing Trump diehards confront counter-protesters at Raleigh rally

November 29, 2020
By Jordan Green, Special to Raw Story

Screenshot/ Jordan Greene


A band of COVID deniers, neo-Confederates and pro-Trump diehards, augmented by a 50-strong Proud Boy security detail, marched around the Governor’s Mansion in downtown Raleigh on Saturday, firing up a far-right coalition to carry on the fight as their president faces the reality of leaving office.

The post-Thanksgiving rally was co-organized by Joshua Flores of Stop the Steal NC and Latinos for Freedom, who brought in Reopen NC to help him promote it on Facebook. But the Proud Boys — referenced by Flores as his “private security” in a Facebook Live video two days prior to the event — took the most prominent position in the rally as they spread out along a block of East Jones Street and taunted antifascist counter-protesters.

Flores had promoted the Thanksgiving potluck as a family-friendly event, and urged attendees to not engage with counter-protesters, warning that they would be asked to leave if they failed to honor the request, and adding that “the Proud Boys” would also “have the authority to kick you out.” He also suggested, “Try not to use major cuss words, if you don’t mind.”

The request was almost farcical considering the Proud Boys’ history of inciting conflict through profanity-laced taunts that are often barbed with misogyny and homophobia.

True to form, a Proud Boy named Jeremy Bertino picked up a bullhorn a couple minutes after the official 11:30 a.m. start time and addressed the counter-protesters across the street.

“America will never be a communist nation — never!” Bertino said as fellow Proud Boys lined the sidewalk wearing tactical vests and trademark yellow and black gear. “Your side will lose. We will exterminate you like the rats you are…. Exterminate you!”


Bertino kicked off a chant of, “Fuck antifa.”




Another Proud Boy wore a patch with the letters “S-B-S-B,” a reference to Trump’s infamous election-debate directive: “Proud Boys — stand back and stand by.”

Bertino wore a patch with the letters “R-W-D-S” — short for “right-wing death squads.” Mass killing of political opponents is a theme widely promoted by Proud Boys and other far-right extremists who celebrate Chilean dictator Augosto Pinochet’s grisly practice during the 1970s of disappearing opposition activists by dropping them out of helicopters.

Previewing the in-real-life showdown on Saturday, Bertino posted a photo of North Carolina antifascist Lindsay Ayling on the Parler social media platform, encouraging followers to make a contest out of Photoshopping her image, while making a violent and misogynistic claim that “she has an affinity for alpha males and helicopters” and hash-tagging the post #antifawhore.

Bertino told Raw Story he was merely “trolling” Ayling, but the Proud Boys’ goofball presentation — naming cereals during their initation rite, for example — conveniently provides plausible deniability for any expressed fantasies of violence.

Bertino also denied that his “extermination” remarks were personally directed at the counter-protesters, although his own words say otherwise.

Throughout the four-hour event, unidentified men with bullhorns stood behind the Proud Boys and excoriated the counter-protesters.

“You guys are making lists,” one of the men said. “We’re making lists, too.” He added a reference to “9mm” ammunition that was otherwise inaudible. Another time, the man addressed the counter-protesters, saying, “You are in a very dangerous position. You are in the vast minority.” Bertino told Raw Story he did not hear the comment and could not identify the speaker.

Another unidentified man told the counter-protesters: “Donald Trump has stirred the pot. You think you’ve captured him. But all you’ve done is woken us up. You think this is gonna end? No!” The speaker also called the counter-protesters lazy and accused them of not understanding Christianity.

The right-wing group, which broadly expressed defiance of COVID restrictions and loyalty to Donald Trump, out-numbered counter-protesters almost two to one.

Drawn from Raleigh activists who have been protesting against police brutality since late May, along with antiracists and antifascists who are veterans of efforts to remove Confederate monuments, the counter-protesters responded in kind with taunts toward the Proud Boys. One sign held by a counter-protester read, “Proud Boy Thugs: 21st Century Nazi Brown Shirts.” Another showed a depiction of a Confederate flag, a swastika and the name “Trump,” concluding, “3 generations of losers.”

“For individuals to still be conducting ‘Stop the Steal’ protest/rallies essentially 25 days after Election Day even after Gov. [Roy] Cooper has been declared the winner is in the same vein as the Confederate supporters still showing up places waving Confederate flags,” Kerwin Pittman, a field organizer with Emancipate NC, told Raw Story. “They just can’t accept the fact they lost. They must be called out on their denial and confronted when they attempt to sow seeds of intimidation in any community.”

Pittman was appointed by Cooper, a Democrat, to serve on the North Carolina Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice. Pittman served time in prison on conspiracy to commit murder, and he has been open about his past. All the same, North Carolina neo-Confederates never miss an opportunity to loudly confront him about his record, and on Saturday a detractor from Alamance County jeered Pittman, daring him to say the name of the man murdered in the case.

Around 1 p.m., Tara LaRosa, an MMA fighter, led an advance team of Proud Boys into the street, with Bertino and others acting as marshals as the larger group of right-wing activists marched around the governor’s residence. It’s unclear whether they had a permit for the march.

The marchers chanted “Reopen NC,” “No more masks,” “We are the republic,” and “Silent no more.”

Reopen NC leader Ashley Smith and her husband, Adam Smith, addressed the crowd with a bullhorn at the entrance of the Governor’s Mansion as the right-wing activists held the street, with tight security from the Proud Boys. At the direction of one of the co-organizers, the Proud Boys ejected two reporters, from Raw Story and INDY Week.

The right-wing activists staked out an alternate reality, with one woman insisting to reporters: “Donald Trump won the election.”

Jay Thaxton, a North Carolina Proud Boy, blocked a reporter’s camera. He said, “When you guys start writing real news, we won’t have a problem with you.”

A couple wearing shirts promoting QAnon — a conspiracy theory that posits Trump as a hero working beyond the scenes to vanquish an elite global cabal of pedophiles — strolled through the cordon of Proud Boys to join the rally. The man, who declined to give his name, told a reporter: “I pray that God would help you see both sides of the issue, not being right or left. We have a Bill of Rights.”

Earlier in the rally, before the right-wing activists broke out covered dishes for their defiant potluck, Reopen NC leader Ashley Smith addressed them.

“I’m just so thankful to see so many patriots and people who love freedom and love America,” she said. “Yes, we are here once again to stand in the face of tyranny and all that would destroy everything that we hold dear and love. And I’m here again to say, ‘No, you cannot have my America. You cannot have my North Carolina.’

“Right now, we’re going to have some food,” Smith continued. “We’re gonna hug our neighbors and say the Pledge [of Allegiance].”

In anticipation of Thanksgiving, on Nov. 10, Gov. Cooper issued an executive order limiting the number of people at indoor gatherings to no more than 10. On Nov. 23, he followed up with another executive order requiring masks in all public indoor settings.

As justification for the restrictions, the most recent executive order cited record high COVID-19 daily case counts and hospitalizations in North Carolina.

“We are at a critical point, and I am writing to update you on the worsening surge of COVID cases in our community and health system, and to share the actions we are taking,” wrote Cone Health Chief Operating Officer Mary Jo Cagle in a memo to staff on Nov. 20.

Cone Health serves Greensboro, North Carolina’s third largest city. Cagle said that during the previous week, the number of COVID patients in the hospital system leapt by almost 50 percent, from 95 to 142. She warned that the Green Valley facility, Cone’s special COVID hospital, was nearing capacity.

Like the Proud Boys, Adam Smith, the husband of the Reopen leader, has expressed a willingness to resort to violence to uphold his belief system.

In May, he carried a rifle through downtown Raleigh while marching alongside a boogaloo-inspired group that flouted North Carolina’s law against carrying dangerous weapons during a demonstration. The politically varied group included an array of Second Amendment hardliners, including a neo-Nazi, an avowed anarchist and self-described constitutionalists. One of the armed men who participated in the walks, Benjamin Ryan Teeter, is now facing federal charges of attempting to provide material support to Hamas.

In May, Adam Smith posted a Facebook Live video saying that people must be willing to kill, if necessary, to resist emergency orders — or what he described as “tyranny.”

“But are we willing to kill people? Are we willing to lay down our lives?” he asked. “We have to say, ‘Yes.’ We have to say, ‘Yes.’ Is that violence. Is that terrorism? I’m not trying to strike fear in people by saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ I’m gonna say, ‘If you bring guns, I’m gonna bring guns. If you’re armed with this, we’re going to be armed with this.’”

On Saturday, Lindsay Ayling, the antifascist activist, said she observed a Proud Boy point her out to Smith. Then, she said, Smith said, “Lindsay, I’m going to kill you.”

Smith responded by text to Raw Story: “Of course I didn’t say that!… That’s ridiculous.”

Ayling insisted that she heard the statement clearly and confirmed with another person that they heard it, too. She posted a video on Twitter showing Smith pointing in her direction and then wiggling his fingers in a motion that suggests pulling a trigger. Smith was standing next to Bertino at the time, and just before making the gesture, Smith yelled, “We are the people. We are the power.”

As Trump’s political and legal options for hanging onto the presidency evaporate, the Raleigh event and other rallies at state capitols are helping to maintain the tenuous alliance of violent nationalists, Christian-right extremists and conspiracy-mongers that are intent on preventing a left turn as Biden takes office. At the moment, much of that energy is focused on a planned pro-Trump rally on Dec. 12, two days before Biden’s election is made official as states cast their electoral votes. The Proud Boys have promoted the event through their Telegram account, and the gathering is expected to be a reprise of the chaotic Millions for MAGA march on Nov. 14, which Proud Boys and other far-right groups treated as a moment of triumph.

Bertino stood at the side of Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio at the Washington Monument that night as Tarrio exulted after a clash with left-wing opponents.

“I mean, we practically cleaned the streets right there where they’re sitting at BLM Plaza,” Tarrio said. “They’re corralled in, and there’s like a hundred of ’em, when usually there’s thousands of ’em. And you know who we have to thank for that?

“All of us,” he continued. “And this right here shows you the power when we the right-wing unite, and we get together. And we don’t bicker about stupid shit.”

Lindsay Ayling

@AylingLindsay

·

Nov 28, 2020

Replying to @AylingLindsay

Several members of neo-Confederate hate group ACTBAC rallied with the Proud Boys today, including Steve Marley and Thomas May (2nd pic). May is the racist who was caught on video screaming "white power" during a Trump caravan through Alamance County earlier this fall.

Lindsay Ayling

@AylingLindsay

Upon reviewing some footage, I noticed that Adam Smith (who later threatened to kill me) made a hand gesture miming shooting me. You can also see that Proud Boy Jeremy Bertino was once again wearing an RWDS (right wing death squad) patch.

4:35 PM · Nov 28, 2020

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