Pandemic caused 18 pc rise in deaths in US: study
Issued on: 01/07/2020 - 

A worker handles remains at a crematorium in New York on June 5, 2020 Johannes EISELE AFP/File

HEY HEY USA
HOW MANY OF YOU
HAS TRUMP KILLED TODAY

Washington (AFP)

The coronavirus pandemic in the US claimed at least 122,000 more lives than would be expected in a normal year, for a rise of 18 percent, says a study released Wednesday.

But this is just a national average, and the excess death rate was particularly high in virus hot spots such as New York City, which buried three times more people than usual and up to seven times as many during the peak of the pandemic, according to a week by week study carried out at Yale University and published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

In New York City, the expected deaths under a demographic model based on statistics from previous years would be 13,000 from March 1 through the end of May. But this time the number of deaths recorded was 38,170.

What is more, throughout the first phase of the pandemic in the US the official COVID-19 death toll was widely underestimated, the statistics in this study show.

The total number of extra deaths was far greater than that of fatalities officially blamed on the coronavirus. This is because many people who died were not tested for the virus, or because the way death certificates are filled out is not standardized in the US. So 22 percent of the above-normal deaths had no official link to the coronavirus.

States such as Texas and Arizona, which went relatively unscathed in the spring -- but are now hit hard in a new virus surge -- were the worst off by this measure. More than half of the excess deaths went unexplained, with no official link to the pandemic.

But this margin got smaller as more testing was carried out in the US.

"The gap between the official COVID-19 tally and the excess deaths has been shrinking over time and has nearly disappeared in some places, like New York City," Daniel Weinberger, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and first author of the study, told AFP.

"How reliably the official tolls capture the full burden of excess deaths still varies considerably between states," he added.

The official COVID-19 death toll is relatively reliable in New York, Massachusetts or Minnesota, for instance, the study shows.

The study does not address the issue of deaths caused indirectly by the pandemic. These are people who died of other causes, such as a heart attack or stroke and refused to go to a hospital for fear of getting infected with the coronavirus.

Separate data show that these causes of death increased although Weinberger said he does not think they contributed a lot to the overall excess deaths.

© 2020 AFP

Actress 'proud' she walked out of French Oscars over Polanski
AND WELL SHE SHOULD BE 

Issued on: 01/07/2020 - 

No regrets: French actress Noemie Merlant found herself at the centre of the Polanski awards furore JOEL SAGET AFPParis (AFP)

Actress Noemie Merlant has absolutely no regrets about walking out of the French Oscars after Roman Polanski won best director to cap what was perhaps the most bitter and fractious awards ceremony in French cinema history.

Merlant followed her "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" co-star Adele Haenel nd the acclaimed movie's director Celine Sciamma, to the exit after Polanski won best film for "An Officer and a Spy".

Haenel cried "Shame!" as they left, furious that the Cesars academy had honoured a man still wanted in the US for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977, and who has since had to deny several claims of sexual assault.

Haenel -- a key figure in the French #MeToo movement, who last year revealed that she had been sexually harassed by a director as a teenager -- had declared that "distinguishing Polanski is spitting in the face of all victims".

"I am proud that I left with my comrades," Merlant said of the dramatic night four months ago, which caused an earthquake in the French industry.

- 'It had to happen' -

"I think it is good that it caused a stir, that it started a debate.

"The world is changing, and going forward," the actress told AFP.

"Now we are standing up and we are walking out when things have to change. It's something I think that has to happen," said Merlant, who made her breakthrough playing a woman radicalised by the Islamic State in the 2016 film, "Le Ciel Attendra" (Heaven Can Wait).

"Maybe five or 10 years ago, I wouldn't have done it," the actress admitted. But after working with "lots of female directors I began to ask myself some quite perturbing questions about women's lives, about what they wanted to say, and their choices."

Merlant, 31, said that while the Cesars ceremony was "extremely stormy".

"I feel deep down that it opened up some things, both in the profession" and beyond it, even "among families and friends".

- Younger generation shocked -

"It is something that people want to talk about -- and even when people don't want to talk about it, that too is interesting," said Merlant, who was nominated for a best actress Cesar with Haenel.

"As women speak up, it allows you to ask questions about ourselves," the actress said. "This is also why so many of this new generation of (women) are shocked" and angry about cases like Polanski's.

Having worked with a lot of woman directors, Merlant said she has been lucky to star in so many female-driven stories.

"Up to know, I think the women that I played were not objects but the subject, and I want to keep it that way," said the actress, the star of the new French film "Jumbo", in which she plays a loner who forms a strange attraction to a fairground ride.

"I really love to go out of my comfort zone and to take on roles and stories that scare me, that take me somewhere else," said Merlant told AFP in March, before the release of the film was delayed by the French lockdown.

© 2020 AFP

Ex-Canada PM Mulroney calls for revised relations with China

THE ECONOMIST CALLED HIM A BLEEDING HEART CONSERVATIVE WHEN HE WAS PM

IT'S ALL ABOUT I SPY WITH MY FIVE EYES
Issued on: 01/07/2020 - 

Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, seen here at George Bush's funeral in 2018, said his country needed to revise its ties with China Alex Brandon POOL/AFP


Montreal (AFP)

Canada must have an "urgent rethink" of its relationship with China, former prime minister Brian Mulroney said Wednesday as tensions build over the possible extradition to the United States of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou.

Conservative Mulroney backed his Liberal successor Justin Trudeau's rejection of any exchange of Meng, who was arrested in Vancouver in December 2018, for two Canadians who were detained in China in apparent retaliation.

Mulroney said Canada's hope that China would emerge as a constructive partner in international relations had been proven wrong, referring in particular to Beijing's militarization of the South China Sea.

"You can see it everywhere from the South China Sea to our two citizens who were bundled off to jail for no reason at all except to protest an extradition decision in Vancouver," Mulroney told The Globe and Mail.

"There has to be an immediate and urgent rethink of our entire relationship.

"We're a civilized important nation in the world. We have an extradition treaty with the United States of America. We were asked to honour it, and we did, and that's what we should have done."

The Canadians, former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, were both detained in China nine days after Canada arrested Meng.

The two men have been held largely incommunicado since December 2018 and were slapped with spy charges after a Canadian judge ruled that extradition proceedings against Meng could go ahead.

Resetting the relationship should also mean the US "helping us, working with us to get our citizens back," Mulroney said.

He added that Canada should exclude Huawei from deployment of 5G telecoms in Canada, as it threatened the exchange of information between the "Five Eyes" countries -- United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

"We have to preserve our relationship with the Five Eyes and whatever that takes, that is what we do," Mulroney said, adding that he believed the United States would withhold intelligence from members who allowed Huawei to participate in their 5G networks.
Washington says Huawei 5G poses risks of espionage and sabotage of western networks.

© 2020 AFP

CHATHAM HOUSE 

Analysis of Israel's Delay of annexation plans

Brazil's indigenous fear devastation from coronavirus

Issued on: 01/07/2020
Brazil is the second-worst hit country by the coronavirus after the United States, with 1.5 million cases and 60,000 deaths. In remote Amazon regions, indigenous communities fear the impact of the disease, which has caused deaths at almost double the rate of the general population.

Gay marriage proponents fear result of Russian referendum

Issued on: 01/07/2020

A prohibition on same-sex marriage is one of several measures Russians are voting on today under a controversial referendum that could also extend the rule of President Vladimir Putin until 2036. Mikhail Tumasov, a Russian LGBT activist living in exile, says LGBT networks encouraged people to turn out to vote no, and fears than any actions to promote same-sex marriage could soon be deemed anti-constitutional.

Protests in Indian Kashmir over civilian death during attack

#KASHMIR IS #INDIA'S #GAZA

Issued on: 01/07/2020 -

Hundreds of people have protested in Indian-administered Kashmir, accusing government forces of killing a civilian during a clash with rebels TAUSEEF MUSTAFA AFP

Srinagar (India) (AFP)

Hundreds of people in Indian-administered Kashmir staged protests on Wednesday, accusing government forces of killing a man during a rebel attack which also left a trooper dead.

Rebels opened fire from a mosque attic in the northern town of Sopore, setting off a battle with security forces, paramilitary police spokesperson Junaid Khan told AFP.

The family of Bashir Ahmed Khan alleged that he was dragged out of his car after the showdown and shot dead by paramilitary troopers.

His three-year-old grandson, who was travelling with him, was later pictured sitting on his chest.

"Locals said that he (Khan) was brought out of his car and shot dead by the forces," Farooq Ahmed, a nephew of the dead man told AFP.

"They told us that someone in uniform then put the child on his chest as he lay dead on the road and took photographs," Farooq Ahmed said.

The photo of the child sat on the body of his dead grandfather was widely shared on social media.

Paramilitary spokesman Khan said the allegation was "baseless".

Police also denied the claims, saying legal action would be taken for "false reports and rumours".

"There was no retaliation from the security forces," inspector general of police Vijay Kumar told reporters.

Hundreds assembled at the man's funeral near the main city of Srinagar shouting "We want freedom" from Indian rule.

Government forces have intensified counterinsurgency operations against separatist rebels since a coronavirus lockdown was imposed in March.

Since January, at least 229 people have been killed during over 100 military operations across Indian-administered Kashmir, including 32 civilians, 54 government forces and 143 rebels, according to the Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), a rights group.

Rebels have been fighting Indian rule in the Himalayan region for more than three decades to back demands for independence or a merger with Pakistan -- which also controls part of the disputed region.

India accuses Pakistan of arming and training rebels. Islamabad denies the allegations.

© 2020 AFP

Campaign launched for statue of English football's black trailblazer
Issued on: 01/07/2020 -

Plymouth fans are raising money for a statue of Jack Leslie Ben STANSALL AFP/File
London (AFP)

Football fans are raising money to erect a statue of Jack Leslie, who was chosen to play for England but dropped when selectors discovered he was black.
The Plymouth player, who had an English mother and a Jamaican father, was called up to the national side in 1925 but the invitation was subsequently withdrawn.
It would be another 53 years until Viv Anderson became England's first black player.

The Jack Leslie Campaign website said: "We not only want to build a statue as a memorial to Jack Leslie, but also use his story to celebrate diversity and combat racism."

It comes at a time of heightened awareness of racial injustice, with Premier League players wearing "Black Lives Matter" logos following the death of George Floyd in the United States.

Leslie's granddaughter, Lesley Hiscott, told the BBC: "I believe that the manager sent in his request, saying 'I've got a brilliant player here, he should play for England'.

"So then someone came down to watch him. They weren't watching his football. They were looking at the colour of his skin.

"And because of that, he was denied the chance of playing for his country."

Anderson said Leslie's achievements in such a hostile atmosphere should be a badge of pride for black people.

The Nottingham Forest star, who also played for Arsenal and Manchester United, eventually became the first black player to represent England against Czechoslovakia in 1978.

"I'd never heard of Jack Leslie until up to two weeks ago," he told the BBC.

"And that's a crying shame because what he achieved and what he did should be paramount in every black person's mind."

There is already a mural to Leslie at Plymouth's Home Park ground and the club named their boardroom after him, but fans want to go further.

Campaign co-founder Greg Foxsmith, who hopes to raise £100,000 ($124,000), told the BBC: "At a time when some statues are being pulled down, we want to put one of Jack Leslie up to commemorate his amazing achievements and to remember the injustice that he suffered."

Plymouth chairman Simon Hallett said: "Having a statue promoted by our fans and funded by fans is a statement by them that they are joining the fight against racism in football,"

"History has been written by the winners and I think we are now trying to pay more attention to some of the victims of those victories."

© 2020 AFP

THIRD WORLD AMERICA
Outside Europe, nations floundering in virus' first wave
Issued on: 01/07/2020 - 

Health experts say the world must urgently help nations battling the virus Arun SANKAR AFP/File

WHO WILL HELP THE GOOD OLD USA
Paris (AFP)

As Europe begins its cautious reopening after weathering the pandemic's first wave in lockdown, many developing and middle-income countries continue to be battered by skyrocketing numbers of COVID-19 cases.

With infections still growing daily in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Nigeria among others, health experts warn that before the world can start buttressing for COVID-19's much-feared "second wave", it must help nations battling the virus now.

The World Health Organization warned this week that the pandemic was "not even close to being over" even as European nations reopen their borders and millions head back to work.

While the United States has had by far the highest caseload, there are growing fears over the fate of hugely populous nations whose COVID-19 curve is pointing inexorably upwards.India for example now has more than 566,000 confirmed cases and is registering nearly 20,000 new infections every day.Mexico has more than 220,000 confirmed cases, Pakistan nearly 210,000, and Bangladesh more than 150,000, with little sign of new infections slowing.

- 'Quite worrying' -

Trudie Lang, director of The Global Health Network at the University of Oxford's Nuffield Department of Medicine, described the trend as "really quite worrying".

"Even though the numbers might not be completely accurate because we've not tested so many, the curve is still the same shape," Lang told AFP.

When COVID-19 emerged in China late last year, the government in Beijing rapidly imposed stringent lockdown measures in a bid to contain the outbreak.

When in February European nations such as Italy and Spain uncovered clusters of the virus, they too adopted unprecedented limits on individual movement that eventually flattened the curve of new infections.

Anant Bhan, a researcher in bioethics and public health policy, said heavily populated and decentralised countries such as India are struggling to keep lockdown measures effectively.

"That makes it a bit more challenging for the healthcare system," he told AFP.

"We might not have one peak, we might have multiple peaks because the spread of infection is variable across the country."

- 'Far from peak' -

For Azra Ghani, professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London, the delayed rise in COVID-19 cases shows in part how successful countries have been until now in limiting the virus' spread.

"If you go back a few months there was a large seeding into Europe and that caused widespread epidemics there," she told AFP.

"All these countries saw what was happening in Europe and reacted. The lockdowns appeared at a relatively early stage of epidemics.

"As they've been coming out of lockdowns we're seeing infections building up in the same way it had initially in Europe, starting to spread in South America, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh," Ghani explained.

For example Indonesia, the fourth most populous country on Earth, is registering around 1,000 new cases daily even as it eases lockdown measures.

Hermawan Saputra, a public health expert at the Indonesian Public Health Association, told AFP the country was "still far from the peak of the pandemic".

Experts previously predicted the outbreak to peak in July.

"But since Jakarta has relaxed (lockdown) we think the peak will be reached in August or September," said Saputra.

"This is honestly terrifying. Easing was premature and people misunderstood it as meaning they had complete freedom -- that's wrong."

In Afghanistan, which has more than 30,000 confirmed cases, restrictions on movement are still in place.

But the public doesn't appear to be getting the message, according to senior health official Ataullah Saeedzai.

"The lockdown is still in place, but people are not taking it seriously," he told AFP.

"People are not observing the lockdown, people are not observing social distancing."

- Health systems stretched -

More worrying perhaps is that COVID-19 is now inundating countries whose health systems were lacking even before needing to respond to a pandemic.

Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation as home to more than 200 million, is registering 600-700 new cases a day. The government said in April its intensive care capacity stood at just 350 beds.

Kema Onu, who works in Abuja for the AIDS Health Foundation, said Nigeria's health system was "not properly equipped" to deal with COVID-19.

"How many ventilators do we have in the country to take care of people who are critically in need of it?" he told AFP.

"It would amaze you that even if you walk into major health care facilities here in Abuja, the prevention and control plan is not completely in place. The health system is a total shambles."

In Pakistan, which has registered more than 200,000 cases, the central government has resisted nationwide lockdown measures, relying instead on local authorities to implement a patchwork of interventions.

While the country has nearly 9,000 oxygenated ICU beds, Qaisar Sajjad, secretary general of the Pakistan Medical Association, told AFP the health system was on the brink of "collapse".

"Even after months into this crisis our hospitals still lack some of the very basic facilities. We lack in both technical equipment as well as human resources," he said.

And in Bangladesh, which an estimated additional 4,000 ICU beds to deal with COVID-19, hospitals are already facing oxygen shortages.

"We are still at the climbing stage of the transmission," said Muzaherul Huq, a former head of the government institute of epidemiology and a former WHO senior official, adding many hospitals lack a centralised oxygen system.

The virus has also begun to spread in the country's vast cramped refugee camps that house almost one million Rohingya refugees, most of whom fled neighbouring Myanmar following a 2017 military crackdown.

- 'Early days' -

And as it circulates in developing nations, the virus is targeting communities already hard hit by other diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

Ghani said a number of vaccination programmes effecting millions of children had been interrupted by the pandemic. There is also growing evidence that women in heavily affected countries are seeking to give birth at home rather than risk catching the virus in hospital.

"Many countries are already seeing overwhelmed hospital capacities and if they are over capacity for one disease that inevitably means other diseases are not being treated," she said.

As researchers scramble to find a COVID-19 vaccine, Lang said that poorer communities that traditionally lacked access to inoculations for other illnesses were at risk of missing out again.

"Say we end up with a vaccine that's quite expensive and requires two or three doses," she said. "What chance really is there of that getting everywhere?

"The ideal vaccine works perfectly with one dose and is cheap. Remove any of those elements and you increase the risk that it won't be distributed equitably around the globe."

As much of Europe girds itself for a second COVID-19 spike, Ghani said the disease was likely to progress at different rates across the world, making its burden more like a continuum than a series of waves.

"It's still early days -- most countries we won't have got more than 10-20 percent of the population infected and that's a long way off the level of spread that this virus could generate," she said.

"We're going to see this virus circulate until at least the end of the year and that poses a constant risk of reinfection whenever interventions are relaxed."

burs-pg/klm/txw

© 2020 AFP

Visiting Berlin’s museum of disgraced monuments
 01/07/2020 -


From Nazism to Lenin, a museum in Berlin displays statues and monuments from the darkest chapters of the country’s history. A racist statue from the 1920s, decapitated only last week, is soon to be included.

NAZISM VS BOLSHEVISM, NO EQUIVALENCY

THE BOLSHEVIKS WERE ANTIFA FOR THEIR DAY
KINDA MAKES THEM ANTI RACISTS ANTI IMPERIALIST ANTI COLONIALISTS THEY WERE
FOR WOMEN'S LIBERATION

I WILL TAKE BOLSHEVIKS ANY DAY

BECAUSE LENIN WAS NOT THE ONLY LEADING BOLSHEVIK- BOGDANOVICH PLAYING CHESS WITH LENIN, MAXIM GORKY WATCHING ALL THREE WERE 
FOUNDERS OF THE BOLSHEVIKS ONLY PICTURE
OF LENIN LAUGHING

ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI ANOTHER LEADER OF THE BOLSHEVIKS WHO SURVIVED IT ALL INCLUDING STALIN 
http://socialistalternative.ca/posts/2201/alexandra-kollontai-pioneer-of-the-struggle-for-socialism-and-womens-liberation/

THIS AGAIN IS A FALSE EQUIVALENCY WHICH

WHITE NATIONALISTS IN FORMER EAST GERMANY CONTINUE TO FOMENT WHILE ADOPTING ALL THE 

WORST ASPECTS OF STALINISM AND HITLERISM