Political ideology predicts susceptibility to believing fake news about the novel coronavirus pandemic

2020/8/1 ©PsyPost


Political conservatism was associated with heightened susceptibility to believing fake news about COVID-19 in the early stages of the outbreak in the United States, according to new research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. The study provides preliminary evidence that support for President Donald Trump plays a role in viewing COVID-19 as less of a personal threat and less severe in general.

“When we launched the project in early March, Dustin Calvillo (the first author) and I were talking about the discrepancy with which the threat was being viewed by different people,” said study author Abraham M. Rutchick, a professor of psychology at California State University, Northridge.

“I’d just begun a pretty strict self-quarantine, and I was struck by how varied people’s attitudes and behaviors were. Given the polarization of political leadership and politicized media, we thought this might be worth investigating.”

The researchers used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to conduct two online studies that included 990 participants in total. The first study was conducted on March 8, while the second was conducted on March 17, just a few days after a national emergency was declared in the United States.

As part of the research, the participants were asked to view and rate the accuracy of 16 news headlines. Eight of the headlines included real information taken from USNews.com, while the remaining eight were fake headlines derived from fact-checking websites.

Two examples of fake headlines that were used in the study.

Rutchick and his colleagues found that those who scored higher on a measure of political conservatism tended to be less accurate at distinguishing between real and fake headlines about COVID-19. Conservatism was also associated with perceiving less personal vulnerability and rating COVID-19 as less severe. More conservative participants were also more likely to believe that COVID-19 was the result of a conspiracy and that the media had exaggerated its risks.

More conservative participants also tended to view President Trump’s performance more positively. Approval of Trump was in turn associated with less knowledge about COVID-19, which predicted greater susceptibility to fake news headlines.

The findings indicate that “our responses to the threat are strikingly different depending on our political beliefs. This is probably due to people taking their cues from the president (or refusing to do so), and differences in the media from which people get their news. More broadly, the study shows how hard it is to get aligned on any issue with political overtones, even when it’s a matter of public health that affects everyone,” Rutchick told PsyPost.

When it came to media consumption habits, the researchers found significant differences based on party affiliation. About 32% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats reported obtaining some of their news from CNN; 20% of Republicans and 50% of Democrats reported obtaining some of their news from The New York Times; and 51% of Republicans but only 14% of Democrats reported obtaining some of their news from Fox News.

“The more news participants got from Fox News, the less vulnerable they felt, and the more they agreed that the pandemic is a result of a conspiracy and that the media is exaggerating the threat. The more news participants got from CNN, the more severe they believed COVID-19 was, and the less they agreed that the media is exaggerating the threat,” the researchers said.

But the study — like all research — includes some limitations.

“The sampling was nonrepresentative and imperfect. And the analyses we used to examine the reasons why political ideology predicts threat perceptions – the idea that it’s via presidential approval, knowledge, and fake news discernment – is definitely a speculative one. The study was also conducted at one specific point in time – it’s a snapshot of what was going on in early March. We don’t know (from this study) much about how these processes unfold over time,” Rutchick explained.

“I’d argue that it’s essential for people to read unbiased media (and track media using things like allsides.com). We’re in a challenging age – it used to be that people would agree on what the truth was but disagree about what to do about it. Now, we can’t even agree on the truth on the ground, which is a grave threat to a functioning democracy,” he added.

The study, “Political Ideology Predicts Perceptions of the Threat of COVID-19 (and Susceptibility to Fake News About It)“, was authored by Dustin P. Calvillo, Bryan J. Ross, Ryan J. B. Garcia, Thomas J. Smelter, and Abraham M. Rutchick.TrendMD v2.4.8

The seaweed monster is back devouring South Florida beaches. It's not a pretty sight

2020/8/1 ©Miami Herald

Seaweed covers the beach in Fort Lauderdale as bathers enter the water, July 28, 2020. - CHARLES TRAINOR JR/Miami Herald/TNS

MIAMI — Like most tourists coming to a South Florida beach for a quarantine break, the Mlynek family had a picture-perfect scene in mind when they arrived from Oklahoma this week: turquoise waters glistening in the sun, gently swaying palm trees and shining stretches of white sand.

What they found in Hollywood instead were smelly, messy mounds of seaweed coating the coastline.

Seaweed is once again invading Southeast Florida beaches as mats of the massive macroalgae swirling around in the Atlantic make their annual appearance. But this year is shaping up to be a really bad one: a combination of ocean currents and seasonal southeasterly winds is moving the nasty stuff over from the eastern Caribbean, fouling vast expanses of sand and turning nearshore waters into a slimy soup.

“It’s a bit disappointing, definitely not what we expected,” said Mike Mlynek, a Red Cross executive who booked a vacation at the Margaritaville Hollywood Beach Resort hoping to swim in a pristine beach for a week.

Seaweed, or sargassum, is a natural occurrence, regularly washing up on beaches around the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. But it has become a major headache over the past few years, blanketing popular tourist destinations like Cancun, where the Mexican Navy is using ships in cleanup operations, and Barbados, where the Prime Minister said sargassum is as big a threat to the local economy as a hurricane.

So far it hasn’t been as bad as the sargassum attack of 2018, when a record-breaking crop blanketed beaches from Key Biscayne to Jacksonville. But it’s worse than scientists thought it would be when they calculated predictions earlier this year, said Chuanmin Hu, professor of optical oceanography at the University of South Florida. His lab tracks seaweed movements based on NASA and NOAA satellite images.

“Several months ago we predicted this would be a bad year, but not as bad as 2018; We’ve already seen a whole lot of sargassum reaching our shores faster than we expected,” Hu said. “At this point it’s looking like things are actually worse than our original estimates.”

The total amount of sargassum in the Atlantic is bigger than what satellites registered last year, which is not very encouraging, he added. Over the next two weeks Florida’s east coast will likely see another wave of heavy blooms covering beaches.

In June, vast mats of sargassum continued to increase across the central Atlantic, creating what scientists have dubbed the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt. Over the past few years, this 5,500-mile seaweed blanket stretching from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico has become a permanent occurrence.

In June 2018, the belt was at its thickest, containing more than 20 million metric tons of seaweed — heavier than 200 fully-loaded aircraft carriers. Last month, the total seaweed amount increased to 12.7 million metric tons compared with 8.7 million metric tons in May. In June 2019, sargassum amounts in the Atlantic totalled about 10 million metric tons, Hu’s Sargassum Watch System shows.

Looking ahead, more seaweed will move up the east coast of Florida in August, while the eastern Caribbean will continue experiencing large amounts through September 2020 with many beaching events, Hu said. The western Caribbean will also experience moderate to large amounts.

The algae is not a killer of marine life like red tide or toxic to humans as harmful algae blooms.

In normal years, sargassum is actually a good thing: the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic supports a wide range of species and plays a crucial role in sustaining the early life cycles of whales, dolphins and migratory birds. Baby sea turtles make their way from sandy beaches in Florida and the Caribbean toward the seaweed, finding food and shelter from predators during their first years of life. It’s also a haven for species that live nowhere else, like the Sargassum fish, a frog-like fish whose appearance mimics the seaweed.

Beaches in the Caribbean, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico would historically experience small, manageable amounts of the floating algae until 2011, when unusually large beaching events occurred in all those areas. In late 2009 and 2010, an unusual pattern of winds and surface seawater circulation took place in the Sargasso Sea, taking the algae to new places and expanding its range. An extraordinary number of sunny days and more phosphorus-rich dust blown from the Sahara may have also contributed to the algae explosion.

Scientists also believe that an increase in fertilizer runoff from the Amazon and Mississippi River basins may be contributing to the blooms.

The reasons may not be fully understood yet, but the result is that massive amounts of sargassum seem to have become the new normal, said Stephen Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University. In large quantities, it can prevent newly hatched sea turtles from reaching the water and can get tangled in boat propellers, not to mention the stench as it decays.

“Sargassum is a huge issue for destinations like Barbados or Cancun in Mexico because it’s chasing tourists away,” he said. The Mexican navy is building a fleet of ships to collect the blooms before they reach its famed beaches while Barbados has called on other Caribbean nations to come up with regional solutions to deal with the scourge.

In Hollywood, the city has been using modified tractors to mix the seaweed with sand early in the morning to get the beach ready for visitors. But that wasn’t enough for Valeria Prieto, a visitor from Mexico City. She walked tentatively to the surf, tiptoeing around the thicker piles of sargassum. She quickly dipped her feet in the water and walked back to her beach chair.

“Even if things are better here than in other places like Cancun, it’s the same seaweed, and it’s just nasty,” she said.

———

©2020 Miami Herald

Seagulls lay in the sand as Monica Madrigal find her way to the ocean through a thick raft of Sargassum seaweed that washed up on the seashore by the 71st Street area in Miami Beach Tuesday July 28, 2020. - Pedro Portal/Miami Herald/TNS

REVEALED: Trump wasted half a billion on 10,000 ventilators that won’t arrive until September 2022

n August 2, 2020
By Daniel Villarreal, New Civil Rights Movement

THE THREE STOOGES

A new report from the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the Trump Administration repeatedly delayed an Obama-era order from the health-technology company Philips for 10,000 ventilators, wasting half-a-billion dollars for machines that won’t even arrive until September 2022.

According to the report, in 2014, the Obama Administration signed a contract with Philips to add 10,000 ventilators to the nation’s stockpile by June 2019. Though Philips delayed the fulfillment until November 2019, had they been held to that deadline, the nation would have had plenty of ventilators for when the coronavirus epidemic started in March 2020.

However, the Trump Administration granted Philips three extensions.

“On January 21, 2020, when the first coronavirus case was reported in the United States,” the report states, “Philips approached the Trump Administration about accelerating the delivery of ventilators under its existing contract. The Trump Administration ignored this opportunity, and for six weeks, it did not respond to Philips’ offer.”

When Peter Navarro — Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy — and other senior officials in the White House negotiated a new contract with Philips, they ended up scrapping the Obama-era terms and agreed to pay almost five-times the price set under those terms.

While Philips had sold ventilators to other purchasers for prices as low as $9,327 per unit, the Trump Administration ended up paying $50,000 per unit.

“The documents show that the Administration accepted Philips’ first offer without even trying to negotiate a lower price,” the report reads.

The ventilators may arrive after a vaccine for the illness does. In the meanwhile, the U.S. has surpassed over 156,000 coronavirus deaths.

This revelation comes just a day after Vanity Fair revealed that the Trump White House scrapped a national testing plan for the epidemic, thinking that coronavirus would mostly kill of blue states voters and the administration could then blame Democratic governors for it.

SpaceX capsule and NASA crew make 1st splashdown in 45 years

1 of 15  https://apnews.com/bf77af89c527340793d15a9957d30c84
In this frame grab from NASA TV, the SpaceX capsule is lifted onto a ship, Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020 in the Gulf of Mexico. Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken spent a little over two months on the International Space Station. It will mark the first splashdown in 45 years for NASA astronauts and the first time a private company has ferried people from orbit. (NASA TV via AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Two NASA astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday in a dramatic, retro-style splashdown, their capsule parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico to close out an unprecedented test flight by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.

It was the first splashdown by U.S. astronauts in 45 years, with the first commercially built and operated spacecraft to carry people to and from orbit. The return clears the way for another SpaceX crew launch as early as next month and possible tourist flights next year.

Test pilots Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode the SpaceX Dragon capsule back to Earth less than a day after departing the International Space Station and two months after blasting off from Florida. The capsule parachuted into the calm gulf waters about 40 miles off the coast of Pensacola, hundreds of miles from Tropical Storm Isaias pounding Florida’s Atlantic coast.

“Welcome back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,” said Mission Control from SpaceX headquarters.

“It was truly our honor and privilege,” replied Hurley.

The astronauts’ ride home in the capsule dubbed Endeavour was fast, bumpy and hot, at least on the outside.

The spacecraft went from a screaming orbital speed of 17,500 mph (28,000 kph) to 350 mph (560 kph) during atmospheric reentry, and finally to 15 mph (24 kph) at splashdown. Peak heating during descent was 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,900 degrees Celsius). The anticipated top G forces felt by the crew: four to five times the force of Earth’s gravity.

“Endeavour has you loud and clear,” Hurley radioed following a brief communication blackout caused by the heat of atmospheric entry.

Within a half-hour of splashdown, the scorched and blistered 15-foot capsule was on board a SpaceX recovery ship with more than 40 staff, including doctors and nurses. To keep the returning astronauts safe in the pandemic, the recovery crew quarantined for two weeks and were tested for the coronavirus.

The opening of the hatch was held up by extra checks for toxic rocket fumes. After medical exams, the astronauts were expected to fly home to Houston for a reunion with their wives and sons.
The last time NASA astronauts returned from space to water was on July 24, 1975, in the Pacific, the scene of most splashdowns, to end a joint U.S.-Soviet mission known as Apollo-Soyuz. The Mercury and Gemini crews in the early to mid-1960s parachuted into the Atlantic, while most of the later Apollo capsules hit the Pacific. The lone Russian “splashdown” was in 1976 on a partially frozen lake amid a blizzard following an aborted mission; the harrowing recovery took hours.

SpaceX made history with this mission, which launched May 30 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It was the first time a private company launched people into orbit and also the first launch of NASA astronauts from home turf in nearly a decade. Hurley came full circle, serving as pilot of NASA’s last space shuttle flight in 2011 and the commander of this SpaceX flight.

Musk monitored the descent and splashdown from SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California.

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, who both watched the launch in Florida, sent their congratulations via Twitter.

“Great to have NASA Astronauts return to Earth after very successful two month mission. Thank you to all!” Trump tweeted.

NASA turned to SpaceX and also Boeing to build capsules and ferry astronauts to and from the space station, following the retirement of the shuttles. Until Hurley and Behnken rocketed into orbit, NASA astronauts relied on Russian rockets. SpaceX already had experience hauling cargo to the space station, bringing those capsules back to a Pacific splashdown.

“This is the next era in human spaceflight where NASA gets to be the customer,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said from Johnson Space Center in Houston shortly before the astronauts’ return.


SpaceX needs six weeks to inspect the capsule before launching the next crew around the end of September. This next mission of four astronauts will spend a full six months aboard the space station. Hurley and Behnken’s capsule will be refurbished for another flight next spring. A Houston company run by a former NASA official, meanwhile, has partnered with SpaceX to send three customers to the space station in fall 2021.

Boeing doesn’t expect to launch its first crew until next year. The company encountered significant software problems in the debut of its Starliner capsule, with no one aboard, last year. Its capsules will touch down in the U.S. Southwest desert.

By beating Boeing, SpaceX laid claim to a small U.S. flag left at the space station by Hurley and the rest of the last shuttle crew. The flag — which also flew on the first shuttle flight — was carefully packed aboard the Dragon for the homecoming.

Also on board: a toy dinosaur named Tremor, sent into space by the astronauts’ young sons.

The boys recorded a wake-up call for their fathers Sunday morning, urging them to “rise and shine” and “we can’t wait to see you.”

“Don’t worry, you can sleep in tomorrow,” said Behnken’s 6-year-old son Theo, who was promised a puppy after the flight. “Hurry home so we can go get my dog.”

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Facebook bows to Brazil judge, blocks 12 accounts worldwide

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Facebook announced Saturday it has obeyed a Brazilian judge’s order for a worldwide block on the accounts of 12 of President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters who are under investigation for allegedly running a fake news network.

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes said Friday night that the company had failed to fully comply with a previous ruling ordering the accounts to be shut down, saying they were still online and publishing by changing their registration to locations outside Brazil.

Facebook issued a statement saying it complied due to the threat of criminal liability for an employee in Brazil.

But it called the new order “extreme,” saying it poses a “threat to freedom of expression outside of Brazil’s jurisdiction and conflicting with laws and jurisdictions worldwide.” The company said it would appeal to the full court.

Facebook also argued it had complied with the previous order by “restricting the ability for the target Pages and Profiles to be seen from IP locations in Brazil”.

“People from IP locations in Brazil were not capable of seeing these Pages and Profiles even if the targets had changed their IP location”, the company said.

Moraes said that Facebook ought to pay $ 367,000 in penalties for not complying with his previous decision during the last eight days.

He also had ruled Twitter should block the accounts. While Twitter said then the decision was “disproportionated” under Brazil’s freedom of speech rules and that it would appeal, the targeted profiles were disabled.

Moraes is overseeing a controversial investigation to determine whether some of Bolsonaro’s most ardent allies are running a social media network aimed at spreading threats and fake news against Supreme Court justices.

The probe is one of the main points of confrontation between Bolsonaro and the Supreme Court.

The president himself filed a lawsuit last week demanding the accounts to be unblocked.

Ruling renews fairness debate in Boston Marathon bomber case

JUST SAY NO TO THE DEATH PENALTY

FILE - In this April 17, 2013 photograph, flowers and signs adorn a barrier, two days after two explosions killed three and injured hundreds, at Boylston Street near the of finish line of the Boston Marathon at a makeshift memorial for victims and survivors of the bombing. A federal appeals court has overturned the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Friday, July 31, 2020, saying the judge who oversaw the case didn't adequately screen jurors for potential biases. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)


“Boston Strong” remains a “vibrant” rallying cry more than seven years after the marathon bombing killed three people and injured more than 260 others, a federal appeals court noted as it threw out the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

But even as the ruling opened old wounds, it raised familiar questions about whether Tsarnaev can receive a fair hearing in the city where the bombs exploded — a community that may now be asked to relive unspeakable trauma.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held Friday that jurors were not adequately screened for bias ahead of Tsarnaev’s 2015 trial, describing media attention in the case as “unrivaled in American legal history.”

The three-judge panel ordered a new penalty phase — this time with more searching questions for prospective jurors — to decide whether the 27-year-old should be executed.

Tsarnaev “will spend his remaining days locked up in prison,” the judges made clear, “with the only matter remaining being whether he will die by execution.”

The Justice Department is expected to appeal. Legal observers predict prosecutors will turn straight to the U.S. Supreme Court without asking for a hearing before the full 1st Circuit. The U.S. government recently resumed federal executions following a 17-year pause and, under President Donald Trump, has pursued capital punishment in an increasing number of cases.

“When it comes to death penalty cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has been much more pro-prosecution than many of the circuit courts,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

Should Friday’s ruling stand, attention will shift to whether an impartial jury can be impaneled in a city still traumatized by the 2013 attack. Tsarnaev’s defense team may renew its request to transfer the case out of Boston, where they have long contended public opinion is immutably slanted.

“Everybody in the community understands where ‘Boston Strong’ came from,” Dunham said. “The question will be whether that’s so ingrained in the community that jurors can’t set it aside and fairly determine the outcome of this case.”

Tsarnaev’s case is uniquely complicated in that an entire city — if not the whole country — considered itself the target of the bombing, said George Kendall, an attorney who filed a brief contending it was a mistake to hold the trial in Boston. Prosecutors said Tsarnaev and his brother intended the attack to punish the U.S. for wars in Muslim countries.
ADVERTISEMENT



“This was not just a horrific crime against the individuals who were killed and hurt,” Kendall said in an interview Saturday. “This was an attack on the city of Boston and a deliberate attack on its most cherished tradition.”

Robert Bloom, a Boston College law professor who has followed the case for years, said a new penalty phase would force the community to relive the bombing.

“My hope is that the government will decide not to put the victims through this again,” Bloom said, noting Tsarnaev had been willing to plead guilty before trial had the government taken the death penalty off the table.

Tsarnaev’s lawyer echoed Bloom in an email to The Associated Press following Friday’s ruling.

“It is now up to the government to determine whether to put the victims and Boston through a second trial, or to allow closure to this terrible tragedy by permitting a sentence of life without the possibility of release,” David Patton wrote.

Tsarnaev’s attorneys did not dispute his involvement in the attack, but argued he was less culpable than his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a gunbattle with police a few days after the bombing.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted of 30 charges — including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction — all but a few of which were upheld in the appellate ruling.

The appellate judges differed on whether the case should be moved to another jurisdiction but noted that, “given the sizable passage of time, the venue issue should look quite different the second time around.”

“Two of the three judges indicated it was not error to have the trial in Boston, so the opinion may actually help keep it in Boston in the future,” said Brian Kelly, a former assistant U.S. attorney known for his prosecution of crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger.

Marty Weinberg, a veteran defense attorney, said a second penalty phase would be “made enormously more difficult by the widespread knowledge — particularly in the Boston area — that another jury previously decided upon death.”

___

Mustian reported from New York and Ring from Stowe, Vermont. AP journalist Alanna Durkin Richer contributed from West Harwich, Massachusetts.

Airlines, unions pin hopes for more payroll cash on politics

FILE - In this July 22, 2020 photo, a ticketing agent for Delta Airlines hands a boarding pass to a passenger as he checks in for a flight in the main terminal of Denver International Airport in Denver. Unions are gaining support in Congress for another $32 billion in federal aid to protect airline workers from layoffs for another six months. Still, it's too early to say how the issue will turn out. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

With tens of thousands of airline workers facing layoffs this fall, labor groups are pushing Congress for more federal money to keep them on the payroll until next spring.

The unions have gained significant support among Democrats. They hope that the prospect of mass layoffs weeks before a pivotal election will sway some Republican votes.

The airline industry has been battered by the virus pandemic. In March, companies got $32 billion to help cover payroll costs for six months in exchange for not laying off workers. The money and the ban on layoffs both end Oct. 1, meaning there could be large-scale job cuts less than five weeks before the Nov. 3 election.

“Ultimately the White House will be responsible for that, and so will the 23 Republican senators who are up for re-election,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants. “I don’t believe that’s a political risk that anyone is willing to take.”

But approval is far from certain. Airlines are already downsizing — persuading thousands of workers to take voluntary buyouts or early retirement. And they have lined up billions of dollars in private borrowing, giving them a better chance of surviving a long slump in travel.

The CEO of Southwest Airlines said he supports an extension of federal dollars for airline payrolls, but he doesn’t see the same urgency in Washington.

Back in the spring, “there was broad support from Congress, the administration and even the president,” Gary Kelly said. “This time around, that is not the case.”

Kelly made the comments in an employee video after a union representing flight attendants and other Southwest employees asked him to publicly support the payroll-aid extension.

Thirteen airline unions have joined to lobby Congress for a six-month extension of the payroll provision. Of the total, $25 billion would go to passenger airlines.

Major airlines support the extension, but they are keeping a low profile. Union and airline representatives fear that if the big airlines openly lobby for the money, it could be portrayed as a bailout.

Airlines for America, the trade group for the biggest U.S. carriers, said it is not pursuing new government help but would take it if no new conditions were attached. A group representing smaller carriers, the Regional Airline Association, has been more vocal in urging Washington to approve the money — two of its members have already shut down during the pandemic and a third is in grave jeopardy.

The union campaign is showing signs of momentum. This week, more than 220 lawmakers in the House — mostly Democrats, but joined by 29 Republicans — endorsed the money, which they hope to include in a new coronavirus-relief package being negotiated on Capitol Hill. Prospects in the Republican-controlled Senate and the Trump administration are less clear, however.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., did not include airlines in his $1 trillion coronavirus relief proposal. Some Senate Republicans say McConnell’s measure is already too expensive, and they could object to tacking on another $32 billion.

The Trump administration hasn’t stated its position on a second round of relief. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said recently that airlines need more help to survive the travel downturn caused by the pandemic but gave no details. The Treasury Department declined to comment on the matter this week.

The issue will be decided when negotiators try to reconcile McConnell’s plan and a $3.5 trillion coronavirus-relief bill that the House passed in May.

It is unknown exactly how many jobs airlines will cut. United Airlines sent layoff notices to 36,000 employees and warned pilots this week that there could be more furloughs — the industry’s term for termination of workers who have rehiring rights — later this year or in 2021. American Airlines notified 25,000 workers, Delta Air Lines warned more than 2,500 pilots, and smaller airlines also sent out notices. Southwest said it doesn’t expect to furlough anybody in 2020.

U.S. airlines had about 750,000 employees before the pandemic hit, according to their trade group.

The original payroll aid in grants and low-interest loans was approved as air travel collapsed by 95%. The money was intended to save airline jobs until travel rebounded, but that has not happened. Slow growth in May and June stopped in July, and U.S. air travel is still down more than 70% from a year ago.

House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said in a letter Monday to House and Senate leaders of both parties that travel won’t recover by Oct. 1.

“Without further relief from Congress, mass layoffs among airline industry workers are inevitable — and their magnitude will eclipse those of any furloughs the industry has ever seen,” DeFazio wrote.

___

David Koenig can be reached at www.twitter.com/airlinewriter

LIKE HIV 

In Africa, stigma surrounding coronavirus hinders response

1 of 9  https://apnews.com/b12f98423f0495589c7e4680dde4c115
FILE - In this April 30, 2020, file photo, mourners gather to bury an elderly man believed to have died of the coronavirus but whose family asked not to be named because of the social stigma, in Mogadishu, Somalia. A dangerous stigma has sprung up around the coronavirus in Africa — fueled, in part, by severe quarantine rules in some countries as well as insufficient information about the virus. (AP Photo/File)


KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — After 23 days in quarantine in Uganda — far longer than required — Jimmy Spire Ssentongo walked free in part because of a cartoon he drew. It showed a bound prisoner begging for liberation after multiple negative tests, while a health minister demanded to know where he was hiding the virus.

“The impression was that we were a dangerous group and that what was necessary was to protect the rest of society from us,” said Ssentongo, a cartoonist for Uganda’s Observer newspaper who was put in quarantine when he returned from Britain in March.

The fear he describes is indicative of the dangerous stigma that has sprung up around the coronavirus in Africa — fueled, in part, by severe and sometimes arbitrary quarantine rules as well as insufficient information about the virus.

Such stigma is not unique to the continent: Patients from Ecuador to Indonesia have been shamed when their diagnosis became known.
But with testing in Africa limited by supply shortages and some health workers going without proper protective gear, fear of the virus on the continent as it approaches 1 million confirmed infections is hindering the ability to control it in many places — and also discouraging people from seeking care for other diseases.


This cartoon published on April 9, 2020, by cartoonist Jimmy Spire Ssentongo shows a prisoner, bound and kneeling, begging for liberation after multiple negative coronavirus tests, while a health minister demands where the virus is hiding. The widely circulated cartoon illustrated how Ssentongo and others in Uganda felt after a quarantine stay so long that some people bribed their way out and others went on a hunger strike, Ssentongo told The Associated Press. (Jimmy Spire Ssentongo via AP)

The way people were treated early in this pandemic is “just like the way, early on in the HIV epidemic, patients were being treated,” Salim Abdool Karim, an epidemiologist who chairs South Africa’s COVID-19 ministerial advisory committee, told a World Health Organization event last month. People with HIV were often shunned by their own families, and reports of health workers refusing to care for them were common in the 1990s.

Now, some people avoid testing for the coronavirus “because if they test, they’re ostracized,” Karim said.

Or simply locked away. Ssentongo, who was released from quarantine on the 24th day after testing negative three times, told The Associated Press that he and others were poorly treated at the facility, a hotel. Like him, many were held for far longer than the required 14 days, and he saw some bribe their way out. He was among those that went on hunger strikes in a bid to be freed.


FILE - In this April 18, 2020, file photo, a boy wearing a face mask carries a small bowl of "githeri", or mixed beans and maize, for him to eat as he walks past a mural warning people about the risks of the coronavirus, painted by graffiti artists from the Mathare Roots youth group, in the Mathare slum, of Nairobi, Kenya. A dangerous stigma has sprung up around the coronavirus in Africa — fueled, in part, by severe quarantine rules in some countries as well as insufficient information about the virus. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga, File)

“It was dehumanizing,” said Ssentongo, who also noted that there was no social distancing at the facility, and medical workers were rarely seen and inconsistent in their efforts to control the virus. A medical team once took a woman suspected of having the virus from her room and sprayed her with disinfectant, but ignored her partner.

In neighboring Kenya, people in quarantine reported similar poor treatment and discrimination.

At one facility, those inside said their money was rejected by the staff and the surrounding community when they tried to buy food, according to a Human Rights Watch report in May. At another, kitchen staff sometimes declined to serve them, forcing a security guard to bring the food.

Some humanitarian groups warn that stigma could set back Africa’s pandemic response.

FILE - In this July 8, 2020, file photo, people walk past an informational mural warning people about the dangers of the new coronavirus and how to prevent transmission, with words in Swahili reading "We are the Cure", painted by youth artists from the Uweza Foundation, in the Kibera slum, or informal settlement, of Nairobi, Kenya. A dangerous stigma has sprung up around the coronavirus in Africa — fueled, in part, by severe quarantine rules in some countries as well as insufficient information about the virus. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga, File)

In Somalia, “our teams are seeing people who have tested positive running away from their homes out of fear of being stigmatized by the community,” Abdinur Elmi, an official with the aid group CARE, said in a statement.

As a result, the group said, contact tracing has become nearly impossible in the Horn of Africa country, which has one of the world’s weakest health systems after nearly three decades of conflict.

Worryingly, the stigma has attached to health and aid workers in some places.

In the West African nation of Burkina Faso, a nurse’s assistant who found employment as a cleaner in a hospital said her uncle gave her an ultimatum: quit or leave home.

“He said, ‘Pack your bags and find another place to live,’” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to avoid retribution from her family.

Health Minister Pierre Somse, of Central African Republic, said humanitarian workers have been targeted because the idea has spread that Westerners, who often do such work, brought the virus. He urged governments to “de-dramatize” the response to calm panicked communities.


FILE - In this Thursday, May 28, 2020 file photo, Samson Waithaka rides a bicycle with informational messages warning about the new coronavirus in the Mathare slum, or informal settlement, of Nairobi, Kenya. A dangerous stigma has sprung up around the coronavirus in Africa — fueled, in part, by severe quarantine rules in some countries as well as insufficient information about the virus. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga, File)

Aid workers have raised similar concerns about how the response is described in Uganda, where health officials frequently speak of “hunting down” suspected patients.

The blaring horns and sirens of the vehicles used by those tracing the contacts of the infected add to a sense of fear in some communities, such as the village of Bugomoro near the Congo border, said Charles Kaboggoza. The World Vision official said he witnessed discrimination against the family of a man who tested positive after returning from Afghanistan in March.

“The people had stopped them from going to fetch water from the (well),” he said. “It was really stigmatizing.”

Some accused the patient of bringing a “curse” to the community, he said.

Stigma is also having a negative effect on health care more broadly. In CARE-supported health centers in Somalia, the number of people seeking consultations for communicable diseases has fallen by 26% since the first case of COVID-19 was recorded in the country, “with fear of stigma for having the virus being a major factor,” according to the group.

Some leaders are aware of the dangers of stigma and are countering it.

In South Africa, which has more than half the confirmed virus cases on the continent, President Cyril Ramaphosa praised the family of diplomat Zindzi Mandela, daughter of anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, for publicly saying that she had tested positive before she died.

On Twitter, Ramaphosa’s health minister, Zweli Mkhize, encouraged South Africans to be tolerant as “it can happen to anybody in any house.”

The Rev. Sammy Wainaina, of Kenya’s All Saints Cathedral, who received treatment for the virus in an intensive care unit in June, said he felt compelled to publicly share his status. Consequently he was “treated badly,” he said, recalling people in his neighborhood who seemed eager to avoid him.

Still, he encouraged others to follow his lead.

“When you keep quiet,” he said, “stigma continues to grow.”

___

Associated Press writers Cara Anna in Johannesburg and Sam Mednick in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, contributed to this report.

___

Follow AP pandemic coverage at http://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and 

https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

AP PHOTOS: Year on, India’s lockdowns ruin Kashmir’s economy

ANOTHER VIOLATION OF UN JURISDICTION WITH NO CONSEQUENCE

1 of 17 https://apnews.com/93a036dbbdbd6fee52f934db3e35a685
A Kashmiri shopkeeper sits at the entrance of his half closed shop during lockdown in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, July 27, 2020. Indian-controlled Kashmir's economy is yet to recover from a colossal loss a year after New Delhi scrapped the disputed region's autonomous status and divided it into two federally governed territories. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)

Pigeons fly at a deserted market area during lockdown to stop the spread of the coronavirus in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, July 22, 2020. Indian-controlled Kashmir's economy is yet to recover from a colossal loss a year after New Delhi scrapped the disputed region's autonomous status and divided it into two federally governed territories. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)

A Kashmiri boatman rows his boat through a closed floating market on the Dal Lake during lockdown to stop the spread of the coronavirus in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, July 17, 2020. Indian-controlled Kashmir's economy is yet to recover from a colossal loss a year after New Delhi scrapped the disputed region's autonomous status and divided it into two federally governed territories. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)

#KASHMIR IS #INDIA'S #GAZA

SRINAGAR, India (AP) — A year ago, Abdul Rashid was making a living by selling flowers to tourists in hundreds of ornate pinewood houseboats in Dal Lake in Srinagar, the main city in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

When India suddenly scrapped disputed Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status, followed by an unprecedented security clampdown, economic ruin ensued.

“It was not just a political change. It destroyed our livelihood,” said Rashid, 60, who has now turned to growing vegetables to feed his family.

Days before the Aug. 5, 2019, decision by the central government in New Delhi, authorities asked hundreds of thousands of tourists, Hindu pilgrims and migrant workers to leave the territory, shutting its economy. Since then, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost.






The stunning Himalayan region has known little but conflict since 1947, when British rule of the subcontinent divided it between the newly created India and Pakistan.

After a series of political blunders, broken promises and a crackdown on dissent, Kashmiri separatists launched a full-blown armed revolt in 1989, seeking unification with Pakistan or complete independence. India dubbed the insurgency terrorism abetted by Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denies.

Hundreds of the colorful hand-carved houseboats, known as shikaras, lie deserted, mostly anchored still on the desolate lake. Hotels are empty and there are hardly any tourists.

Some businesses had resumed with the partial lifting of the security and communication clampdown earlier this year. However, Indian authorities enforced another harsh lockdown in March to combat the coronavirus pandemic, further emaciating the local economy.

The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industries pegged the economic loses in the region at $5.3 billion and about half a million jobs lost since August last year.

The 7-decade-old Hotel Standard in Srinagar had a staff of 30, according to its manager Khurshid Ahmed. Now there are just three. The only activity inside the once-bustling place is by the cleaning staff.

Mohammed Rajab, a taxi driver for 37 years, hasn’t been hired even once since last August. “I parked my taxi at our stand few days before August 5 last year. It’s still there along with 250 others,” he said.

Tens of thousands of daily wage workers, like Rajab, have suffered the most.

Mohammad Lateef, a boatman, used to ferry tourists around the lake. He now sells cucumbers and cigarettes to locals along its banks.

“We’ve not earned a single penny for a year now,” said Ghulam Qadir Ota, a houseboat owner. “All we have are these boats. We don’t have any other means to earn.”

HEALTHCARE FOR SALE
Siemens Healthineers to buy US cancer care firm Varian

BERLIN (AP) — Germany-based Siemens Healthineers said Sunday it will buy U.S. cancer therapy and research company Varian in a deal worth around $16.4 billion.

Siemens Healthineers, in which industrial conglomerate Siemens holds a majority stake, said it will buy all shares in Varian Medical Systems, Inc. for $177.50 per share in cash.

It said that the acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2021, and requires the approval of regulators and Varian shareholders. Varian’s board of directors unanimously approved the agreement, it added.

Palo Alto, California-based Varian had revenues in the 2019 fiscal year of $3.2 billion, Siemens Healthineers said in a statement. Varian says it employs about 10,000 people around the world.

Siemens Healthineers said it plans to finance the acquisition with a mix of debt and equity.

It plans to issue new shares this year, a move that Siemens said will reduce its stake in Erlangen-based Siemens Healthineers to about 72% from 85%