It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, September 07, 2020
REAL LIFE CARTOON
Pensioner blows his house up while trying to kill a fly with electrified bug swatter
The man, 80, blew up the kitchen and the roof of his home in the Dordogne
He used an electric tennis racquet-like contraption to attempt to swat the fly
But gas had been leaking into his house and the electricity caused an explosion
The pensioner escaped with a burned hand and has been treated in hospital
A French pensioner blew up his kitchen while trying to kill a fly that was disturbing his dinner.
The incident took place in the Dordogne village of Parcoul-Chenaud, north east of Bordeaux, on Friday.
Irritated by the fly, the 80-year-old, who has not been named, took out an electronic bug zapper.
A French pensioner blew up his kitchen and the roof above it while trying to kill a fly with an electronic zapper (stock image)
The contraption – which looks like a tennis racquet – is designed to burn insects the moment there is contact.Share
'On this occasion, gas was leaking into the man's house,' said an investigating source. 'The very hot zapper ignited the gas, causing a sudden explosion.
'The man was lucky to get away with a burned hand after diving on the floor, but the kitchen was destroyed along with part of the roof.'
The fly had been disturbing the man while he was eating dinner but the gas had been left on, causing an explosion when he used the electronic swatter
The man was treated in hospital in Libourne following the disaster, which happened at around 7.45pm.
He has not been allowed to return to the house, and is instead staying in a local campsite until repairs are carried out.
It is not known whether the fly survived the blast, but it appeared that it had at least escaped being incinerated by the zapper.
In 2007, a two-year-old Thai boy ended up in hospital in Bangkok with severe burns caused by an electric zapper.
The child's father had been using the device to kill a mosquito in a workroom containing flammable adhesive glue that had ended up on the floor.
After the insect made contact with the metallic mesh screen, an electrical arc was generated, and the insect was incinerated.
The boy then placed the hot swatter on to the floor, which ignited the glue and then the boy's clothing.
Presentation of the Koerber Prize in Hamburg - Botond Roska, a Hungarian physician, speaks during the presentation of the Koerber Prize, endowed with one million euros (1.18 million USD), at the Hamburg town hall. - Axel Heimken/dpa
Work on a procedure that might one day help restore sight to the blind earned a Hungarian researcher a 1-million-euro (1.18-million-dollar) prize in Germany on Monday.
Botond Roska, who works in the Swiss city of Basel, has found a gene therapy that reprogrammes cells in the human eye so that they can perform the work of the light-sensitive receptors needed for human vision, according to the Koerber Foundation, the prize-giver.
The procedure could reactivate the retinas of the blind.
Roska said that for now, the therapy creates a level of vision akin to watching an old black-and-white film. Clinical tests have begun on blind volunteers.
"Roska's research has woken up hope that new treatment methods might restore the ability to see in the blind," said Hamburg Mayor Peter Tschentscher at the award ceremony.
The Koerber Foundation's prize has been awarded annually since 1985, honouring scientists whose work has applied futuristic techniques to the life and physical sciences.
Roska began his career in medicine "after a detour," said Tschentscher. The scientist first studied the cello, but had to give up the instrument following an injury, after which he began to pursue medicine and mathematics.
UPDATED
Hundreds arrested as Hong Kong police swoop on protests over postponed poll
Issued on: 06/09/2020
Riot police carry away a man to detain him during a demonstration opposing postponed elections, in Hong Kong, China September 6, 2020. REUTERS - TYRONE SIU
Nearly 300 people were arrested by Hong Kong police on Sunday as riot officers swooped on democracy protesters opposed to the postponement of local elections
Sunday was meant to be voting day for the city's partially elected legislature, one of the few instances where Hong Kongers get to cast ballots.
But the city's pro-Beijing leader Carrie Lam suspended the polls for a year -- citing the coronavirus -- angering the pro-democracy opposition who had been hoping to capitalise on seething anti-government sentiment.
Hundreds of riot police flooded the district of Kowloon in a bid to thwart online calls for flash mob protests to mark the suspended vote.
Throughout the afternoon officers were heckled by people shouting slogans such as "Give me back my vote!" and "Corrupt cops!" as officers conducted multiple stop and searches and ordered crowds to disperse.
In a Facebook statement, police said at least 289 people were arrested, mostly for unlawful assembly.
One woman was detained under a new security law Beijing imposed on the city for chanting independence slogans, the force added.
Live images showed three prominent pro-democracy politicians -- Leung Kwok-hung, Figo Chan and Raphael Wong -- were among those held.
The protests came hours after the police's newly formed national security unit arrested Tam Tak-chi, another democracy activist and radio DJ, for "uttering seditious words" -- a colonial-era offence.
Tam is the latest in a long line of government critics to find themselves facing prosecution in recent months for their involvement in protests.
When they announced the arrest on Sunday morning, police did not explain what Tam may have said that was considered seditious.
Beijing's Liaison Office in Hong Kong called the protest organisers "heartless", with a spokesperson adding: "there is zero tolerance for any act that violates the national security law".
The office also vowed that "we will absolutely not allow Hong Kong to be chaotic again".
The territory's government condemned the protesters' "unlawful and selfish acts" in a statement issued on Sunday evening.
"The first priority for Hong Kong currently is to unite as one and fight the virus together with concentrated resources," a government spokesperson said.
Beijing has initiated a widespread crackdown against its critics in Hong Kong after the financial hub was rocked by seven straight months of huge and often violent pro-democracy protests last year.
Rallies have been all but outlawed this year with authorities citing both security concerns and wielding emergency anti-coronavirus laws to ban public gatherings.
In late June, Beijing also imposed its new security law, which bans anything authorities perceive to be secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces.
At least 22 people have been arrested under the new law since it came into effect, sending a chill through the city.
On Friday, UN rights experts warned the broadly worded provisions in the legislation posed a serious threat to political freedoms and the right to protest.
Under a deal agreed with Britain ahead of the 1997 handover, authoritarian China agreed to let Hong Kong keep certain liberties and autonomy for 50 years.
Critics say that deal has been demolished by the security law and the increasingly intense crackdown on the city's democracy supporters.
Beijing denies freedoms are being eroded and portrays the anti-government protests as a western-backed plot to destabalise the mainland.
(AFP)
Hong Kong police arrest 289 at protests over election delay
1 of 8 People, sitting on the ground, are arrested by police officers at a downtown street in Hong Kong Sunday, Sept. 6, 2020. About 30 people were arrested Sunday at protests against the government's decision to postpone elections for Hong Kong's legislature, police and a news report said. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
HONG KONG (AP) — About 290 people were arrested Sunday at protests against the government’s decision to postpone elections for Hong Kong’s legislature, police said.
The elections were to have taken place Sunday but Chief Executive Carrie Lam on July 31 postponed them for one year. Lam blamed an upsurge in coronavirus cases, but critics said her government worried the opposition would gain seats if voting went ahead on schedule.
Police said that 289 people had been arrested, mostly for unlawful assembly. One woman was arrested in the Kowloon district of Yau Ma Tei on charges of assault and spreading pro-independence slogans, the police department said on its Facebook page. It said such slogans are illegal under a newly enacted national security law.
Anti-government protests erupted last year over a proposed extradition law and spread to include demands for greater democracy and criticism of Beijing’s efforts to tighten control over the former British colony. The coronavirus and the tough new security law have diminished the demonstrations this year, but smaller groups still take to the streets from time to time.
The ruling Communist Party’s decision to impose the law in May prompted complaints it was violating the autonomy promised to the territory when it was returned to China in 1997. Washington withdrew trading privileges granted to Hong Kong and other governments suspended extradition and other agreements on the grounds that the territory of 7 million people is no longer autonomous.
Also Sunday, police fired pepper balls at protesters in Kowloon’s Mongkok neighborhood, the South China Morning Post newspaper reported.
In the nearby Jordan neighborhood, protesters raised a banner criticizing the election delay, the Post said.
“I want my right to vote!” activist Leung Kwok-hung, popularly known as Long Hair, was quoted as saying. The newspaper said Leung was later arrested.
Hundreds arrested at protests in Hong Kong to mark postponed election
Hundreds of people were arrested in Hong Kong during a protest against the new national security law, as citizens demanded the right to vote on the day the 2020 Legislative Council elections were originally due to take place.
Police said they had made 289 arrests by 9 pm (1300 GMT), of which 270 were for illegal assembly.
At least two prominent activists, Figo Chan of the group Civil Human Rights Front and veteran legislator and democracy activist Leung Kwok-hung, known as "Long Hair," were among those arrested.
Videos posted on Twitter showed clusters of protesters being apprehended by police, with one group of young men being pepper sprayed.
Elsewhere, a riot police officer could be seen haphazardly firing pepper balls at the ground, while a colleague attempted to hold him back by the arm.
Protestors gathered, shouting, "Five demands, not one less," and called for Beijing to release 12 activists who were recently detained in China after they were caught trying to flee by boat to Taiwan.
According to local media group iCable, a bus driver was detained for "careless driving." Roads were blocked, congested and overrun with chaos from the sheer number of protesters and police on the street, which caused major traffic congestion.
Video footage posted by Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Radio on Twitter showed a 12-year-old girl trying to run away from riot police, only to be tackled to the ground by five officers.
In response to the incident, police issued a statement which said the girl was apprehended as she fled and was being treated with suspicion. The police said they used minimal force but video footage appears to show an officer charging into her, bringing her crashing to the ground.
Police then expressed concern about the participation of "underage girls in prohibited groups" and urged minors to stay away, in a post on their Facebook page.
Police said protesters chanting slogans constituted breaches of the public order ordinance and a disease control regulation.
Over the course of the day, officials raised a blue warning flag and purple national security violation flag for those chanting banned slogans and refusing to move.
They also used pepper balls which are fired by guns and break open releasing an iritant into the air, and pepper spray, which causes temporary blindness, massive irritation and makes breathing difficult.
Earlier this year, Chief Executive Carrie Lam triggered emergency powers to postpone the 2020 Legislative Council elections vote until 2021, citing a surge in Covid-19 cases.
Hong Kong has recorded 4,879 cases of the novel virus, with 94 deaths.
Ahead of the protests, officials had warned that they would deploy large numbers of riot police around the city.
Tempers have been running high since the authorities added the national security law into an annex of the city's mini-constitution, the basic law, in June.
Protests like Sunday's have not been seen since the introduction of the new law, which critics say has severely impinged on the rights and freedoms of those living in the city.
Lam has ignored requests to scrap the new law and to let the elections go ahead.
Trump’s National Labor Relations Board Is Sabotaging Its Own Mission The federal agency that’s supposed to protect union rights is instead championing the interests of bosses.
SEPTEMBER 21/28, 2020, ISSUE SCABBY THE RAT Photo illustration by Cindy Lee.
On a June afternoon in 2019, in front of a statue of George Washington at Federal Hall in New York City’s financial district, more than 100 construction workers and activists gathered for a First Amendment rally. Amid chants of “Free speech, free speech!” an approximately 15-foot-tall gray inflatable rat with glaring red eyes bobbed in the sun. The workers, mostly members of Laborers Local 79, weren’t defending speech, exactly. Rather, they were demanding their right to display Scabby the Rat, the mascot deployed at job sites to shame anti-union bosses.
This article was reported in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Puffin Foundation.
The challenge to these workers came from a seemingly unlikely quarter: the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency responsible for interpreting and enforcing labor law. The NLRB’s general counsel, Peter Robb, had launched a legal assault to ban Scabby from a nonunion construction site at a Staten Island supermarket. Arguing that its menacing presence amounted to illegal protest activity against a “neutral” business under the National Labor Relations Act, Robb, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017, sought a federal court injunction that could effectively outlaw Scabby across the country.
On the steps outside the hall where the Bill of Rights was ratified, Chaz Rynkiewicz, Local 79’s director of organizing, took the microphone and denounced Robb as “an anti-union lawyer that, before he was head of the NLRB, worked for corporations to break unions…. If you know any Trumpsters out there, let them know, educate them. They need to know that they can’t love [their] union and love Trump.”
So far, Scabby has survived the legal attacks. In July 2019, a federal district court judge denied Robb’s request for a preliminary injunction in the Staten Island case. But the giant rat remains under threat: An earlier case against Scabby in Philadelphia is still pending before the NLRB.
The zeal with which Robb has pursued the cherished totem of union solidarity reflects how far the NLRB’s agenda has shifted under Trump. A report by The Nation and Type Investigations—based on interviews with more than 25 labor advocates, attorneys, and current and former NLRB staff members—reveals that the federal agency that’s supposed to protect union rights is instead championing the interests of management.
The NLRB is tasked with administering union elections and processing unfair-labor-practice cases under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, which protects “concerted activity,” the collective action that workers take to try to improve conditions on the job. Over the years, the NLRB’s rulings have tended to oscillate between pro-worker and pro-management decisions, depending on which party holds the White House.
But with management-side lawyers dominating the agency, which is run by a five-seat board and a general counsel, labor advocates say the NLRB is more stridently anti-labor than ever before and is sabotaging its own mission. Not only has Trump’s board consistently sided with bosses, but career civil servants at the NLRB’s regional branches say they are being deprived of funding and staff. CURRENT ISSUE View our current issue
Even before Trump’s appointees began to undermine the agency, labor organizers were frustrated with the NLRB. Cases often require years of litigation, and remedies typically entail only back pay or reinstatement after a worker is unlawfully fired—not penalties stiff enough to deter employers from abuse.
After the rally in New York, Rynkiewicz told me, “As an organizer for 20-plus years, I’ve never viewed the NLRB as an ally of labor. It’s a shame to say.”
Just before Scabby was deflated, Rynkiewicz added, “The right-wing anti-union people want to portray the NLRB as a friend of labor. It’s not—even on a good day…. When you have the board’s majority put in place by the Democrats, you get nothing. When you have the board’s majority put in by the Republicans, you get an attack.” RADICAL ROLLBACKS
The shortcomings of the NLRB are to some degree baked into its structure. During the labor uprisings of the 1930s, police and the National Guard members frequently killed striking workers. Established by the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, the NLRB was designed to maintain labor peace by absorbing the often violent conflicts into the legal arena. The act, a compromise between labor and management, forced companies to bargain with unions, but it also excluded whole categories of workers, such as farm laborers, and effectively limited collective bargaining to individual companies, not whole industries or sectors.
After World War II, conservative majorities in Congress gutted the National Labor Relations Act with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which expanded employers’ power to suppress workplace organizing, allowed the government to break up strikes deemed “national health or safety” threats, and required anti–Communist Party pledges from union officers, which led organized labor to purge many of its most militant union members. Dangerous web: A 1947 cartoon shows unions trapped in a web labeled “Taft-Hartley compliance.” A spider marked “NLRB” sits at the top. (Phil Drew / The Dispatcher)
Over the next several decades, organized labor withered in numbers and political clout. With private sector union membership now down to about 6 percent, workers and unions are often left seeking justice through this byzantine, Depression-era judicial apparatus. Ready to blow: A 1948 cartoon from a union newspaper warns of the explosive effects of the Taft-Hartley Act. (Phil Drew / The Dispatcher)
The NLRB’s board is currently dominated by three conservative Trump appointees, two with ties to law firms that have represented some of the country’s largest employers. Board chairman John Ring and board member William Emanuel are lawyers who defended companies such as Marriott International and Uber, respectively. A third member, Marvin Kaplan, previously worked on labor policy as a counsel for House Republicans. The board’s lone Democrat, Lauren McFerran, left when her term expired in late 2019 but was reappointed in August. Neither the Trump administration nor the Senate has moved to fill the board’s fifth seat, which has been vacant since August 2018.
Robb, the NLRB’s general counsel, operates independently of the board and is a veteran management-side lawyer who worked with the Reagan administration to bust the air traffic controllers’ union. While the NLRB’s regional branches process most of the unfair-labor-practice charges—handling investigations, adjudications, and settlements—Robb shapes the agenda for the board, which rules on complaints appealed from the regional level, setting precedents for how the National Labor Relations Act is applied and enforced.
Shortly after being sworn into office in November 2017, Robb set about reversing the legacy of the previous board, which had incrementally expanded workers’ rights. In a series of sweeping decisions, the board scrapped rules instituted under Barack Obama barring workplace policies that impinge on the right to organize, axed a prohibition against employers making unilateral changes to collective bargaining agreements, and overturned a ruling allowing workers to form smaller bargaining units within a larger workforce.
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One of the board’s most influential decisions dealt a severe blow to efforts to extend collective bargaining rights for contracted workers. Under Obama, the NLRB loosened the joint employer standard, which determines whether a company can be considered an additional employer of workers hired through a contractor, such as a franchise operator or subcontracted cleaning agency. In 2015, the board ruled that a company could be considered a joint employer if it exercised “indirect control” over workers or had the ability to exercise control.
The Trump board restored a more restrictive joint employer standard—first through a 2017 decision, which the board vacated because of a conflict-of-interest issue, then in 2020 through the administrative rulemaking process. The move upended a multiyear legal challenge brought by McDonald’s workers, who claimed that the company had enough influence over its franchisees to be considered a joint employer and was therefore liable for retaliation against workers involved with the Fight for $15, the campaign for a $15 hourly minimum wage and a union.
The board’s initial moves to nullify Obama-era provisions have been followed by rulings that limit workers’ rights far beyond those under previous Republican administrations. In August 2019 it reduced workers’ rights to protest on private property, determining that management could block musicians with the San Antonio Symphony from leafleting at a performance venue because it was not owned by their employer. It also excluded faculty at religious colleges and universities from its jurisdiction and allowed bosses to bar workers from organizing on company technology and equipment, including the use of e-mail.
In recent months, the board has also used its rulemaking process to roll back pro-worker regulations, especially in regard to union elections; make it easier for employers to interfere with voting; weaken rules that protect unionizing construction workers; and shorten the time that employers must wait before petitioning to oust a union.
“It’s breathtaking how many areas of the law, how many precedents they’ve managed to overturn,” said Wilma Liebman, a chair of the NLRB under Obama. “And they just kind of snap their fingers and do it, in my view, with little regard for the quality of the legal thinking or reasoning, reaching out to decide issues that aren’t before it.”
Some NLRB staffers fear that Robb is making it more difficult for them to scrutinize employers. In June he directed staffers to dramatically alter their investigative procedures. In some cases, bosses can now preview recordings that could be used as evidence and be present when former supervisors testify against them. NLRB spokesperson Edwin Egee told The Nation and Type Investigations that the “dissemination of information during the investigation” enables the agency to “more fairly enforce the [National Labor Relations Act]” and “aid settlement efforts.” But labor advocates say the measures discourage whistleblowers and compromise the integrity of cases.
The NLRB’s rightward shift under Trump has deterred some unions from taking cases to the agency. A current NLRB staff member, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation, said she has observed unions opting to settle to avoid triggering an unfavorable ruling. Unions, she said, “are just less likely to turn to us because they…don’t want to create bad law.”
Several graduate student employee unions, including at Boston College, withdrew their cases in 2018 to prevent the board from overturning the Obama-era precedent that supported the collective bargaining rights of graduate workers at private institutions. “We pulled our petition to protect the rights of graduate student workers at private universities nationwide,” said Sam Levinson, a Boston College graduate student worker, in an e-mail. “The current NLRB has consistently chipped away at the collective bargaining rights for which the labor movement has fought for decades. We decided to organize and build power, instead of allowing Boston College to put the fate of our rights into the hands of Trump and his appointees.”
Even though the petition was dropped, the board initiated a rulemaking process last September to strip collective bargaining rights from graduate student employees—another attempt to change policy through an administrative rule change rather than case law.
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For career staffers who joined the NLRB to help enforce the rights of workers, the Trump board has been demoralizing. “There’s a host of decisions that have come out that are destructive of workers’ rights, and it’s an extremely sad time to be at this agency and work here,” said a second NLRB staff member, who also requested anonymity. “The only hope is that [the administration] will turn before too much damage is done.”
In early 2018, according to Bloomberg Law, Robb floated a proposal to centralize case-handling authority under officials who report directly to him. The NLRB’s 26 regional directors protested, calling the move a unilateral concentration of authority by a Trump appointee. And Senator Patty Murray (D-Wa.) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) sent a letter expressing concern. At the time, an NLRB spokesperson told Bloomberg Law that “no plan involving the restructuring of our Regional Offices system has been developed.” Facing congressional scrutiny and a backlash from staff, Robb seemingly shelved the idea.
But in August he appeared to have revived his consolidation efforts with a plan to combine case handling across several branches in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Denver, and Phoenix. Democrats in Congress criticized the proposal as a backdoor attempt to undercut the regional directors. Egee said the plan did not constitute a reorganization of the local offices and was merely a “resource sharing” initiative intended to “address chronic workload imbalances” between regions.
In 2018, Robb antagonized staffers with a memo recommending dozens of ways to speed up investigations. Although Egee said the guidance was drawn “directly from NLRB employees,” the NLRB Union, which represents workers in the regional offices, responded by arguing that it will “result in a reduction in quality, not an improvement.”
Staffers say they are under pressure to process cases quickly, prioritizing efficiency above all else. Meanwhile, the workforce has shrunk. While the number of field staffers has been decreasing since 2011, Robb exacerbated that trend by offering buyouts and early retirement incentives to eligible employees, according to the NLRB Union. The result, it said, has been a more than 20 percent reduction in staffing since fiscal year 2017—from more than 900 to about 717 full-time equivalents as of June 30. (Egee cited different statistics, stating that the total number of employees has declined less than 4 percent since fiscal year 2018.)
During fiscal year 2019, according to the NLRB’s annual performance report, the processing time from initial filing to judgment for unfair-labor-practice cases fell from 90 to 74 days. Yet the agency’s funding has shrunk by an inflation-adjusted 15 percent since fiscal year 2011, according to the NLRB Union.
A third NLRB field staffer said being asked to work faster with fewer resources feels like an attack on the agency. “If you are trying to [end] the administrative state and you want to get rid of the agencies you like the least—ours is probably one of them—then this is what you do. You really starve the staff, and you decrease morale.”
Some NLRB employees have left the agency on principle, according to another current staff member. “It is really tough when you believe in Section 7 rights and you have to write [a legal rationale] that you believe is eroding them,” the person said, noting that the NLRB was losing both experienced senior staffers and talented younger lawyers. “We’ve had some incredibly bright attorneys hired in the last five or so years who are jumping ship…. They’re still in labor law. They’re still in the fight. But they’re not going to fight from within the board.”
The agency’s two staff unions—the NLRB Union and the NLRB Professional Association, which represents employees at the headquarters—have been waging a modest resistance. They have accused the board of understaffing the agency, refusing to bargain in good faith over the Professional Association’s contract, and letting millions of dollars in the agency’s budget go unspent. (The board has disputed the allegations and attributed the underspending to contracts that were not completed or came in under budget.)
Last November, the unions held a rally at the NLRB’s Washington, D.C., headquarters and passed out leaflets reading, “NLRB Leadership is destroying the agency from within by refusing to spend funds to hire staff.” They even brought Scabby the Rat to stand guard. Industrial unrest: Anti-union vigilantes attack striking workers in Ambridge, Pa. The NLRB was designed to reduce the number of labor actions. (Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
A RANK-AND-FILE STRUGGLE
As Trump’s board whittles away labor rights, unions and workers increasingly see the legal bureaucracy of the NLRB as irrelevant or even antithetical to their efforts.
“A lot of people—the layman, the regular worker [or] union worker…they think that the board is there to protect them,” said Rob Atkinson, a former UPS driver. But under the current administration, “it’s obvious with their decisions that they’re no longer a friend of the working man and woman. They’re now a watchdog for the national Chamber of Commerce and Trump’s buddies.”
UPS fired Atkinson, a longtime Teamsters shop steward in western Pennsylvania, in 2014 for allegedly violating package delivery procedures. He filed two grievances, saying he was fired for his activism in a rank-and-file Teamsters movement, but he got no relief from what he said was a biased internal grievance panel.
Atkinson sought justice with the NLRB, and shortly before Trump took office, a lower-level judge found that his dismissal had been retaliatory, invoking an Obama-era ruling that said the board can override a grievance panel when considering certain violations of the National Labor Relations Act. But last December, the Trump-appointed majority on the board reversed that precedent, deciding that the grievance panel should have had the last word.
“My panel was made up of political enemies and people who wanted me gone,” Atkinson said. But his struggle with his former employer “really opened my eyes and showed me how cold and callous big businesses are and how we really need huge, strong unions and a strong National Labor Relations Board…to hold these companies accountable.”
In a statement, UPS said the board “recognized that an internal dispute resolution process can be relied upon to make fair and regular decisions on claims that might take years to resolve in other forums.”
Atkinson is appealing his case in federal court. His experience turned him into something of an NLRB watchdog; he now runs a Facebook group that tracks cases and educates other workers about what Trump is doing to labor law. “Look what the NLRB is doing to our rights and how they’ve turned into an antagonistic organization to the average working man or woman instead of an organization that’s there to uphold us,” he told me. LABOR BIDEN NEEDS TO TALK ABOUT JOBS ON LABOR DAY. AND EVERY DAY.
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to fresh labor clashes: Meatpacking workers have walked off the job, nurses have protested nationwide demanding more protective gear, and Whole Foods workers have filed suit after being disciplined and fired for wearing Black Lives Matter masks and apparel. Yet the NLRB continues to make it harder for workers to organize.
In July the NLRB Union and other labor groups denounced the board’s safety guidelines for resuming in-person union elections as inadequate and advocated a move to online or mail-in voting instead. At the same time, the NLRB’s advice division, which provides legal guidance to regional offices, has issued memorandums that seem to give employers the green light to act unilaterally in response to the pandemic. One advisory suggests that an employer can refuse to bargain with a union over requests for pandemic-related “paid sick leave and hazard pay.” The NLRB also indicated that a person can be fired after speaking out against a company’s Covid-19 safety protocols.
Sharon Block, the director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program and an NLRB member under Obama, said that during the pandemic, it was “incumbent on worker protection agencies like the [NLRB]…to be exceptionally vigilant on behalf of workers and attuned to violations of their rights, because it is so hard to feel secure enough to speak out. [But] this is a board that we watched operate for three years in a way that would not give that kind of security to workers.”
Nonetheless, she added, the systemic problems with enforcing the National Labor Relations Act go beyond the Trump administration. “Even with board members…and a general counsel with the best of intentions who really believe in the spirit and the purpose of the act, it’s just a tool that doesn’t work anymore.”
The Labor and Worklife Program wants to overhaul labor law and extend protections to domestic and undocumented workers. It also advocates for sectoral bargaining, which would enable workers in an industry to negotiate en masse.
In the more immediate term, Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would expand the rights of workers to strike and organize at work, institute meaningful penalties for bosses who violate labor law, and allow workers to sue employers in civil courts rather than be forced to rely solely on lengthy litigation at the NLRB.
Despite its limitations, workers continue to use Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, often to ward off campaigns to suppress organizing. Since April, Amazon workers belonging to the grassroots group Amazonians United in Chicago filed several unfair-labor-practice charges with the NLRB, alleging that they were unfairly disciplined by the company after staging walkouts and slowdowns to demand better health protections. Amazonians United member Ted Miin said he and his coworkers were reprimanded for allegedly violating social distancing guidelines at work, which he sees as retaliatory selective enforcement. (Amazon did not return a request for comment.)
Concerned that it might not be worth the effort, Miin was wary of filing a charge. But when the official probe began, the atmosphere at work changed. “Management has basically loosened up on us a lot at our warehouse since we’ve had active NLRB cases open,” he said.
Miin knows his charges may lead to nothing. He acknowledged that “the Trump administration has been rewriting the NLRB rules to favor bosses over workers.” But whatever form their resistance takes, he added, “as workers, we have to protect ourselves. No one’s coming to save us…not the NLRB, not politicians, not reporters. As workers, we have to get organized ourselves.”
Raising a plastic cup, Alain Cocq gestured towards the camera and said, “Well, my friends, I’ll drink to your health one last time.”
In a video livestreamed to Facebook just after midnight on September 5, the 57-year-old Frenchman announced to his followers his plan to die. Cocq has an extremely rare, painful and incurable medical condition that causes the walls of his arteries to stick together. He says that he’s been in the terminal stage of his illness for the last 34 years.
After unsuccessfully petitioning French President Emmanuel Macron to allow him to die in dignity through medical assistance, Cocq announced that he would stop eating and drinking, starting on Friday night, and that he would livestream the process on Facebook.
But the social media platform quickly moved to ban Cocq from posting videos. Cocq told his more than 22,000 followers and 4,000 Facebook friends that the site had blocked him until September 8. He has previously said that he expects to die within two to five days.
Undeterred, Cocq said that he would find another solution within the day. But he also called on his followers to protest against Facebook’s “unjust methods of discrimination and obstruction of freedom of expression”.
Facebook considers his death a suicide, depictions of which are banned on the social network. A spokesperson from Facebook France told French newspaper Le Monde that while the company “respects his decision to want to draw attention to this complex issue”, its regulations meant it was obliged to block his video “because our rules do not allow the showing of suicide attempts”.
Why livestream your death?
Alain Cocq has long campaigned for the right to a medically assisted death. He’s travelled in his wheelchair from his home in Dijon in eastern France to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, to the European institutions in Brussels and to the United Nations in Geneva to meet with lawmakers and advocate for the right to active euthanasia.
Cocq explained to French media that he wanted to show his final moments of agony to an online audience of thousands of people “so that people know what the end of life is like in France”.
He is clear, however, that he doesn’t want the video to be too upsetting for viewers. He plans to broadcast it without sound and the camera will stop filming as soon as he dies. “For me, it’s out of the question to show disturbing images,” he said. “The moment I pass away will be a deliverance. The fight will go on after me.”
Cocq’s deteriorating condition has confined him to his bed at home, where he says he is “crippled by unbearable pain”. He wrote a letter to the French president imploring him to let him “pass away peacefully”. In the response Cocq received on September 3, Emmanuel Macron wrote that he was “moved” by Cocq’s plea, but said that “because I am not above the law, I cannot grant you your request”.
Euthanasia is illegal in France. The Claeys-Leonetti law, which was modified in 2016, grants the right to terminally ill patients to be heavily sedated until death, but only under specific circumstances – for instance, if death is imminent. This is not the case for Cocq.
France is a lot more rigid on the issue than other European countries. In Europe there are five countries – Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Luxembourg – where physician-assisted euthanasia is legal.
France has had other high-profile cases similar to Cocq's. Vincent Lambert was left quadriplegic and in a vegetative state after a motorcycle accident in 2008. He remained like that for 11 years while his family tussled over whether he should live or die. After a long legal battle, doctors removed life support and he died in July last year.
In February this year, France’s then-health minister Agnès Buzyn said that the government would again look into the issue of end-of-life and palliative care – a plan that was disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Facebook Says Trump’s Misleading Post About Mail-In Voting Is OK. Employees Say It’s Not.
Facebook employees are outraged over the company’s “shameful” and “unconscionable” decision not to remove a post from President Donald Trump spreading voting misinformation that could lead to people voting twice.
On Thursday morning, Trump, a frequent source of false and misleading information about mail-in voting and voter fraud, posted potentially unlawful advice to voters on Facebook and Twitter.
“On Election Day, or Early Voting, go to your Polling Place to see whether or not your Mail In Vote has been Tabulated (Counted),” Trump wrote. “If it has you will not be able to Vote & the Mail In System worked properly. If it has not been Counted, VOTE (which is a citizen’s right to do). If your Mail In Ballot arrives after you Vote, which it should not, that Ballot will not be used or counted in that your vote has already been cast & tabulated. YOU ARE NOW ASSURED THAT YOUR PRECIOUS VOTE HAS BEEN COUNTED, it hasn’t been ‘lost, thrown out, or in any way destroyed.’”
Voting twice is illegal and Trump’s comments were condemned for offering advice that could cause people to break the law and create confusion and delays at polling stations. "The president's idea is a great one for people looking to go to jail,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement. Do you work at Facebook or another technology company? We'd love to hear from you. Reach out at craig.silverman@buzzfeed.com or via one of our tip line channels.
Hours before Trump’s post, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new policies intended to protect the upcoming US election from disruption. Zuckerberg said the company had expanded its voter suppression policy to forbid content containing explicit and “implicit misrepresentations about voting.”
Some Facebook employees felt Trump’s post contained, at the very least, implicit misrepresentations about the voting process. Roughly an hour after Trump’s post appeared, an employee flagged it on the company’s internal discussion forum, Workplace.
“Seems like this already violates our extended policies on voter suppression by misrepresenting how or when to vote. Intentionally voting twice is a felony, right?” they wrote in a Workplace group focused on policy and communications issues.
A person on Facebook’s policy team responded to say Trump’s post was being reviewed by the company’s “Voter Interference subject matter expert[s].”
Multiple employees expressed confusion that the post hadn’t already been deemed violative and removed.
“This is voting misinformation,” said an employee. “Your polling place will not be able to track if your vote had been received.”
Facebook
Other employees agreed.
“This post [is] essentially urging people to go to their voting place, ask for information that place will not have, and then commit voter fraud by voting twice.”
“This must come down. Following Trump’s advice here will lead people to commit felonies. If they vote in person just as their mail-in votes are being counted, they actually will be double-voting,” said an employee, noting that voters in Washington state can track their mail-in ballot’s status online and do not need to go to a polling station.
“This post is insane, even by the standards that [Trump] has set the past few years. How many people will try doing this and end up being charged with felonies?”
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Rather than remove Trump’s post, Facebook eventually decided to add a generic label with information about voting. It later changed that to a label emphasizing the security of mail-in voting. "Voting by mail has a long history of trustworthiness in the US and the same is predicted this year. (Source: Bipartisan Policy Center)," the second label reads.
Separately, Facebook said it had removed posts containing video footage of a Trump speech on Wednesday where he suggested people vote twice.
"In violation of our policies, earlier this week President Trump called for people to vote twice and we removed that video when it wasn't shared to correct the record," Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois told BuzzFeed News.
She said that for Trump's Thursday post, "we applied the new label we launched yesterday, which clearly notes that voting by mail has a long history of being trustworthy and secure in the U.S."
A Facebook policy employee posted a more detailed explanation for the decision in the Workplace thread.
“While all states prohibit attempts to vote more than once, the post does not explicitly call for people to vote twice,” they wrote. “Rather, it encourages individuals to check the status of the mail-in ballot and, if necessary, to cast a ballot in person. This may be permitted in some jurisdictions under provisional ballot rules. As such, this post does not meet the criteria of our voting interference policies.”
That decision, and the fact that it took hours to make, inspired anger and disbelief among Facebook employees. Many pointed out that the policy team’s reasoning cited the lack of an “explicit” call to vote twice from Trump, even though the newly announced policy specifically said Facebook will remove “implicit” misrepresentations.
"We deserve everything we get now. Truly. I’m ashamed and appalled by this decision."
“Facebook is broken. Another performative announcement by leadership not intended to address any issues,” said one employee.
Several employees said they believed Trump’s post, published just a few hours after Zuckerberg’s announcement, was intended to test the company’s commitment to the new, stricter “implicit” policy.
“I believe the whole purpose of this post was to show how our policies and declarations are all bark and no bite and to prove FB will not have the courage to enforce them,” said an employee, adding that leaving Trump’s post unmoderated makes “a mockery of [Zuckerberg’s] post just a few hours earlier.”
Others criticized how long it took for Facebook to come to a decision. “If each obviously violating post from accounts with massive reach require multi-hour reviews, our new expanded policy is toothless.”
Internal dissent over the incident gathered momentum throughout the day, as employees began posting memes in the Trump post thread, including a famous clip of an NFL coach yelling, “They are who we thought they were!” and an image from a comedy sketch where a Nazi officer asks, “Are we the baddies?”
Apoplectic over Facebook’s handling of the incident, the employee who started the original thread called on the company to release an internal report detailing just how it determined Trump’s post to be non-violative.
“We deserve everything we get now. Truly. I’m ashamed and appalled by this decision,” they wrote.
Craig Silverman is a media editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in Toronto. Ryan Mac is a senior tech reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.
Los Angeles County sets record for highest temperature
Denver to face temperature plunge from 99 to 32 in one day
September snow, cold to plunge across Rockies early this week
SEPT. 6, 2020 Los Angeles County sets record for highest temperature
Sunday's heatwave has politicians and power utilities calling on residents to conserve energy as tens of thousands lost power. Photo courtesy of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power/Twitter
Sept. 6 (UPI) -- The National Weather Service said Los Angeles County experienced its highest official temperature ever recorded on Sunday.
The federal agency said Woodland Hills registered a temperature of 121 degrees Fahrenheit just before 1:30 p.m. Sunday, topping the previous 119-degree record set on July 22, 2006.
"This broke the all-time record high temperature for the station," the NWS said in a 1: 32 p.m. statement. "This is also the highest temperature ever observed at an official recording station in Los Angeles County or in the Los Angeles County Warning Area, which includes San Luis Obispo County, Santa Barbara County, Ventura County and Los Angeles County."
Weather stations in Paso Robles, Santa Maria, Santa Barbara, Camarillo, Down Town Los Angeles, Long Beach, Burbank, Lancaster and Palmdale all registered high-temperature records on Sunday, the NWS said in a 6:18 p.m. update, adding that several of the records had stood since 1955.
The heat spike caused the California Independent System Operator to issue an energy conservation warning that was to be in effect until 9 p.m.
"It's time, California," it said on Twitter. "Let's do this together."
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said the heatwave was causing power outages throughout the city and crews would be working to restore the power as soon as possible.
"Time to turn off major appliances, set the thermostat to 78 degrees (or use a fan instead), turn off excess lights and unplug any appliances you're not using," the mayor tweeted. "We need every Californian to help conserve energy. Please do your part."
More than 60,000 homes were without power as of 8 p.m. PDT, according to poweroutage.us.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power estimated power would be restored between 24 to 36 hours from the start of the outage
Sunday's record occurred nearly a month after California's Death Valley registered what may have been Earth's hottest temperature ever recorded at 130 degrees on Aug. 16. Denver to face temperature plunge from 99 to 32 in one day By Chaffin Mitchell, Accuweather.com
Forecasters are predicting a high of 99 degrees Fahrenheit in Denver on Sunday afternoon, followed by a low of 34 degrees on Monday night. Photo by mrminibike/pixabay
Sept. 6 (UPI) -- Residents in Denver are set to experience summer and winterlike temperatures within the span of just 24 hours.
Forecasters are predicting a high of 99 degrees Fahrenheit in Denver on Sunday afternoon, followed by a low of 34 degrees on Monday night, which could be a record-setting temperature drop.
"This would be the earliest in recorded history that a swing of this magnitude occurs," AccuWeather Meteorologist Jake Sojda said. Sojda said this is due to a powerful storm system and large dip in the jet stream that will direct a shot of Arctic air into the Plains and central Rockies from Monday through Tuesday.
"The flat terrain of the High Plains allows strong, gusty northerly winds to push the fresh Arctic air southward along the Front Range very quickly and efficiently. The air doesn't have time to moderate leading to a very sharp change in temperature," Sojda said.
While Sojda says a 50- to 60-degree temperature change in one day is not particularly uncommon in Denver, and has happened many times in the city since weather data recording began in Denver in 1872, usually a surge of Arctic air like this happens in the winter months. This will likely be the most significant push of cold air between November and February.
"The previous record was from Sept. 19, 2010, when the temperature fell from 96 to 41 in one day, a 55-degree drop. The next earliest was Oct. 9, 2019, another 55-degree drop when when the temperature went from a high of 83 to a low of 28," Sojda said.
The all-time record for the largest one-day temperature change occurred on Jan. 25th, 1872, when Denver fell from a high of 46 to a low of -20, a 66-degree change, Sojda reports.
"With a forecast high in the low to mid-90s on Monday, and then a low in the low to mid-30s Monday night, this event could fall in the top five all-time for one-day changes, but will likely fall a little short of the all-time record," Sojda said.
Still, for it technically being summer, this is going to be a historic event
"There was also a two-day temperature change of 76 degrees on Dec. 14, 2008, when Denver went from a high 58 to a low -18," Sojda said.
Severe thunderstorms are not expected to be triggered from this, according to Sojda, but strong and locally damaging wind gusts as well as heavy snow in higher elevations will be a problem.
"Because of the heat leading up to this, in cities like Denver, the ground and especially paved surfaces will still have a lot of heat content. This is going to make it difficult for snow to accumulate and snow totals will almost certainly be much lower than if it were mid-winter. Still, elevated surfaces can still cool very rapidly and turn icy. This could make bridges and overpasses icy, even if snow isn't piling up on the ground around them," Sojda said.
Higher elevations, above 6,000 to 7,000 feet, will get colder, and the heat still contained in the ground may be eliminated more efficiently, Sojda said, which allows for more accumulation and even some slushy and icy roads.
"The drastic change in temperature can also have a big effect on infrastructure. Railroads, in particular, are susceptible as the rail lines can warp and buckle both with the extreme heat but also the extreme change," Sojda said.
According to AccuWeather Lead Storm Warning Meteorologist Brian Knopick, the rails expand in the high heat, and sometimes measures need to be taken to allow for this expansion without damage occurring to the rails. But, then when the temperatures rapidly drops 40 or 50 degrees or more, the rail contracts again and can leave gaps at the seams.
If these become large enough, they can damage the wheels of a train and even cause it to derail. upi.com/7035992
September snow, cold to plunge across Rockies early this week By Courtney Spamer, Accuweather (0)
Sept. 6 (UPI) -- A drastic temperature swing and a dose of early season snow will have residents from Montana to New Mexico wondering what month it is by Tuesday.
A storm is forecast to bring a mixture of rain and snow across the Intermountain West and the Plains Monday through Tuesday night, spreading precipitation from northern Montana to Texas.
Snow is forecast to begin falling in the northern Rockies of Montana and Wyoming on Monday, before extending southward through northeastern Utah, Colorado, and northern New Mexico into midweek.
Ski resorts in Montana have had a few snow showers already this year. Big Sky Resort in southwestern Montana got a few flakes on the last day of meteorological summer, Aug. 31.
"Snow is common for the northern Rockies in the month of September, but the earliest measurable snow accumulation on record for a place like Denver is Sept. 3," said AccuWeather Meteorologist Nicole LoBiondo.
With snow set to arrive in the greater Denver area early Tuesday, that's less than a week after the earliest snowfall on record.
A significant snowfall is in store above 7,000 feet, on average, from western Montana to Wyoming and Colorado. It is in this area that 6-12 inches of snow is forecast and an AccuWeather Local StormMax™ of 18 inches is possible.
With elevations of 5,000 to 7,000 feet from Montana to northern New Mexico, a few inches of snow can fall, especially on non-paved surfaces. But, overall, snowfall levels will tend to be lower across the northern part of the Rockies, amounting to more snow.
Elevations below 5,000 feet are forecast to see a few flakes, which at times are likely to be mixed in with rain. Perhaps enough snow could fall for a dusting of snow on non-paved surfaces, but any accumulations will likely be slushy.
Roadways are likely to initially be wet given the magnitude of the heat ahead of the storm. As the cold air arrives with the storm and the ground begins to cool, however, roads and sidewalks could turn slick early on Tuesday. Pedestrians and motorists alike should be aware of the risk for slippery travel.
The weight of the snowfall on fully leafed trees could cause limbs and branches to break. In addition to damage to trees, fallen limbs could also lead to more widespread power outages.
In addition to the snow, this storm will usher in a temperature swing of as much as 65 degrees Fahrenheit in less than 48 hours.
A dip in the jet stream will allow cold air from Canada to rush southward and bring record-challenging low temperatures in cities like Billings, Mont., Cheyenne, Wyo., and Denver. After Denver set an all-time record high for September of 101 on Saturday, a strong cold front of the will help cold air to infiltrate the Colorado capital, bringing temperatures into the 30s Monday night.
Protesters march on Rochester as mayor announces police reforms
Sept. 7 (UPI) -- Protesters in Rochester, N.Y., marched for a fifth consecutive night Sunday against the police-involved death of Daniel Prude as the mayor announced law enforcement reforms and called for calm.
The Rochester police department said 1,000 protesters had turned out Sunday night and had descended upon the Public Safety Building.
"Let's work together to keep everyone safe!!" the department said on Twitter. The protestors have arrived to the Public Safety Building. Let's work together!!— Rochester NY Police (@RochesterNYPD) September 7, 2020
Protests erupted in the city after police-worn camera footage of Prude's encounter with police in March was released on Wednesday, prompting his family and activists to call for RPD to be better trained to handle mental health crises.
Prude, 41, died March 30, one week after he was detained during what his family described as a mental health episode.
Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren earlier Sunday announced during a press conference that the availability of mental health officials will be doubled at that the crisis intervention unit and its budget will be moved from the police department to the city's Department of Youth and Recreation Services.
"It is my solemn duty as the mayor of this city to honor Mr. Prude, to not let his death be in vain and to do everything possible to transform how we police our city, to truly protect and serve our residents," she said.
Warren said a group of church elders was to be bussed in for Sunday night to create a buffer between the police and protesters while calling for the situation to de-escalate.
"No one of us can do anything alone," she said. "It takes people reaching across, working together to ensure we have a brighter future."
Police chief La'Ron Singletary told reporters during the press conference that police reforms are moving forward and vowed to work with the community to protect the protesters' First Amendment rights.
"We want to make sure that Mr. Prude's death changes how we do policing in this city," he said. "Moving forward, we are dedicated to taking te necessary actions to prevent this from ever happening again."
A day after the video was released, Warren announced the suspension of seven police officers and apologized to the Prude family and on Friday, New York Attorney General Letitia James moved to empanel a grand jury as part of its investigation into Prude's death.
COVID-19 patients suffer long-term lung and heart damage but it can improve with time
Coronavirus patients recover faster if they undergo rehabilitation as soon as possible after coming off ventilators or leaving intensive care
IMAGE: CT SCAN OF PATIENT'S LUNGS SHOWING COVID-19 DAMAGE IN RED view more
CREDIT: GERLIG WIDMANN AND TEAM, DEPARTMENT OF RADIOLOGY, MEDICAL UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK.
COVID-19 patients can suffer long-term lung and heart damage but, for many, this tends to improve over time, according to the first, prospective follow-up of patients infected with the coronavirus, presented at the European Respiratory Society International Congress. [1]
Researchers in the COVID-19 'hot spot' in the Tyrolean region of Austria recruited consecutive coronavirus patients to their study, who were hospitalised at the University Clinic of Internal Medicine in Innsbruck, the St Vinzenz Hospital in Zams or the cardio-pulmonary rehabilitation centre in Münster, Austria. In their presentation to the virtual congress today (Monday), they reported on the first 86 patients enrolled between 29 April and 9 June, although now they have over 150 patients participating.
The patients were scheduled to return for evaluation six, 12 and 24 weeks after their discharge from hospital. During these visits, clinical examinations, laboratory tests, analysis of the amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide in arterial blood, lung function tests, computed tomography (CT) scans and echocardiograms were carried out.
At the time of their first visit, more than half of the patients had at least one persistent symptom, predominantly breathlessness and coughing, and CT scans still showed lung damage in 88% of patients. However, by the time of their next visit 12 weeks after discharge, the symptoms had improved and lung damage was reduced to 56%. At this stage, it is too early to have results from the evaluations at 24 weeks.
"The bad news is that people show lung impairment from COVID-19 weeks after discharge; the good news is that the impairment tends to ameliorate over time, which suggests the lungs have a mechanism for repairing themselves," said Dr Sabina Sahanic, who is a clinical PhD student at the University Clinic in Innsbruck and part of the team that carried out the study, which includes Associate Professor Ivan Tancevski, Professor Judith Löffler-Ragg and Dr Thomas Sonnweber in Innsbruck.
The average age of the 86 patients included in this presentation was 61 and 65% of them were male. Nearly half of them were current or former smokers and 65% of hospitalised COVID-19 patients were overweight or obese. Eighteen (21%) had been in an intensive care unit (ICU), 16 (19%) had had invasive mechanical ventilation, and the average length of stay in hospital was 13 days.
A total of 56 patients (65%) showed persistent symptoms at the time of their six-week visit; breathlessness (dyspnoea) was the most common symptom (40 patients, 47%), followed by coughing (13 patients, 15%). By the 12-week visit, breathlessness had improved and was present in 31 patients (39%); however, 13 patients (15%) were still coughing
Tests of lung function included FEV1 (the amount of air that can be expelled forcibly in one second), FVC (the total volume of air expelled forcibly), and DLCO (a test to measure how well oxygen passes from the lungs into the blood). These measurements also improved between the visits at six and 12 weeks. At six weeks, 20 patients (23%) showed FEV1 as less than 80% of normal, improving to 18 patients (21%) at 12 weeks, 24 patients (28%) showed FVC as less than 80% of normal, improving to 16 patients (19%) at 12 weeks, and 28 patients (33%) showed DLCO as less than 80% of normal, improving to 19 patients (22%) at 12 weeks.
The CT scans showed that the score that defines the severity of overall lung damage decreased from eight points at six weeks to four points at twelve weeks. Damage from inflammation and fluid in the lungs caused by the coronavirus, which shows up on CT scans as white patches known as 'ground glass', also improved; it was present in 74 patients (88%) at six weeks and 48 patients (56%) at 12 weeks.
At the six-week visit, the echocardiograms showed that 48 patients (58.5%) had dysfunction of the left ventricle of the heart at the point when it is relaxing and dilating (diastole). Biological indicators of heart damage, blood clots and inflammation were all significantly elevated.
Dr Sahanic said: "We do not believe left ventricular diastolic dysfunction is specific to COVID-19, but more a sign of severity of the disease in general. Fortunately, in the Innsbruck cohort, we did not observe any severe coronavirus-associated heart dysfunction in the post-acute phase. The diastolic dysfunction that we observed also tended to improve with time."
She concluded: "The findings from this study show the importance of implementing structured follow-up care for patients with severe COVID-19 infection. Importantly, CT unveiled lung damage in this patient group that was not identified by lung function tests. Knowing how patients have been affected long-term by the coronavirus might enable symptoms and lung damage to be treated much earlier and might have a significant impact on further medical recommendations and advice."
COVID-19 patient undergoing muscle training for rehabilitation
Patients with severe COVID-19 can spend weeks in intensive care on ventilators. The lack of physical movement, on top of the severe infection and inflammation, leads to severe muscle loss. The muscles for breathing are also affected, which weakens the breathing capacity. Pulmonary rehabilitation, which involves physical exercises and advice on managing symptoms, including shortness of breath and post-traumatic stress disorder, is crucial for helping patients to recover fully.
Ms Al Chikhanie said: "The most important finding was that patients who were admitted to pulmonary rehabilitation shortly after leaving intensive care, progressed faster than those who spent a longer period in the pulmonary ward where they remained inactive. The sooner rehabilitation started and the longer it lasted, the faster and better was the improvement in patients' walking and breathing capacities and muscle gain. Patients who started rehabilitation in the week after coming off their ventilators progressed faster than those who were admitted after two weeks. But how soon they can start rehabilitation depends on the patients being judged medically stable by their doctors. Despite the significant improvement, the average period of three weeks in rehabilitation wasn't enough for them to recover completely.
"These findings suggest that doctors should start rehabilitation as soon as possible, that patients should try to spend as little time as possible being inactive and that they should enrol with motivation in the pulmonary rehabilitation programme. If their doctors judge it to be safe, patients should start physical therapy exercises while still in the hospital's pulmonary ward."
Thierry Troosters, who was not involved in the study, is President of the European Respiratory Society and Professor in Rehabilitation Sciences at KU Leuven, Belgium. He said: "Anecdotal evidence has been emerging since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that many patients suffer debilitating long-term after-effects from the coronavirus. Dr Sahanic's presentation is important because it is one of the first, comprehensive prospective follow-ups of these patients and shows the serious, long-term impact of COVID-19 on the lungs and heart. It is sobering to hear that more than half of the patients in this study showed damage to their lungs and hearts 12 weeks after hospital discharge, and that nearly 40% were still suffering from symptoms such as breathlessness. The good news, however, is that patients do improve and this surely will help the rehabilitation process, as discussed in the second presentation.
"Ms Al Chikhanie's research complements this information and shows how essential it is for patients to start pulmonary rehabilitation as soon as they are physically able to do so. This is why rehabilitation can also be started in the ward, if programmes are adapted to the capabilities of the patient. This is perfectly in line with a recent statement of our Society where we also advocate for tailored rehabilitation. It is clear from both these studies that rehabilitation, including physical and psychologic components, should be available for patients as soon as possible and it should continue for weeks if not months after they have been discharged from hospital in order to give patients the best chances of a good recovery. Governments, national health services and employers should be made aware of these findings and plan accordingly." [5]
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[1] Abstract no: OA4143, "Persisting pulmonary impairment following severe SARS-CoV-2 infection, preliminary results from the CovILD study", by Sabina Sahanic et al; "Covering COVID - the best abstracts" session, 18.00 hrs CEST, Monday 7 September. https://k4.ersnet.org/prod/v2/Front/Program/Session?e=259&session=12607
[2] The severity score has a maximum scale of 25 points.
[3] Abstract no: PA938, "The weekly recovery of physical capacities in COVID-19 patients during post-extubation pulmonary rehabilitation" by Yara Al Chikhanie et al; "New insights into determinants of patient-reported outcomes in chronic respiratory diseases" E-poster session, online from Monday 24 August. https://k4.ersnet.org/prod/v2/Front/Program/Session?e=259&session=12283
[4] Two more patients have been added since the abstract with 17 patients was accepted for the congress.
[5] "COVID-19: Interim Guidance on Rehabilitation in the Hospital and Post-Hospital Phase from a European Respiratory Society and American Thoracic Society-coordinated International Task Force" by Martijn A.Spruit et al. European Respiratory Journal 2020; DOI:10.1183/13993003.02197-2020: https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2020/07/30/13993003.02197-2020
Anti-government protest in Hong Kong - A protester takes part in an anti government protest after the government delayed a Legislative Council election for one year citing the coronavirus (COVID-19). - Jayne Russell/ZUMA Wire/dpa
Craig SilvermanBuzzFeed News Reporter
Ryan MacBuzzFeed News Reporter
