Jason Kenney needs to hire Albertans, not fire them. Add your name

Just over one year ago, Jason Kenney’s UCP won the election. He promised you that “Albertans have elected a government that will be obsessed with getting the province back to work.” (CBC: April 18, 2019)

Tell me — do you think that’s true?

I don’t. Especially not after seeing him fire over 20,000 workers in the middle of a crisis.

Add your name if you want Kenney to rehire over 20,000 education workers.

I don’t blame Mr. Kenney for the COVID-19 crisis. There is no politician on earth that could have avoided the fallout from a global pandemic.

But what he did have control over was his response. Instead of protecting jobs, he slashed them. That doesn’t help people – the workers, their students, and families – it hurts them.

It’s not the Albertan way. If the UCP government is truly obsessed with getting the province back to work, Jason Kenney will rehire the 20,000 education workers he just fired. Help me remind him.

Jason Kenney needs to hire Albertans, not fire them. Add your name if you agree:

www.albertandp.ca/education-rehire

We’re in this together. Let’s fight for what we were promised – and what I know you deserve.

Rachel Notley

Leader
Alberta’s NDP

As Earth Day turns 50, green movement faces fresh challenges

MICHAEL CASEY and TAMMY WEBBER,
Associated Press•April 21, 2020



Earth Day Missed Opportunities
FILE- In this Feb. 6, 1969, file photo, state forestry conservation crews gather up oil-soaked straw on a beach in Santa Barbara, Calif. Fifty years after the first Earth Day helped spur activism over air and water pollution and disappearing plants and animals, significant improvements are undeniable but monumental challenges remain. Minority communities suffer disproportionately from ongoing contamination. Deforestation, habitat loss and overfishing have wreaked havoc on global biodiversity. And the existential threat of climate change looms large. (AP Photo/Wally Fong, File)

BOSTON (AP) — Gina McCarthy remembers the way things used to be: Tar balls clinging to her legs after swimming in Boston Harbor. The Merrimack River colored bright blue and green by textile mill chemicals. Black smoke everywhere.

Kim Wasserman worries about what it's like today: Hundreds of diesel trucks rolling down residential streets in her mostly low-income, Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. Houses blanketed in ash from a recent smokestack demolition at a shuttered coal-fired power plant. High rates of asthma and other illnesses.

Fifty years after the first Earth Day helped spur activism over air and water pollution and disappearing plants and animals, significant improvements are undeniable. But monumental challenges remain.

Black, brown and poor communities suffer disproportionately from ongoing contamination. Deforestation, habitat loss and overfishing have wreaked havoc on global biodiversity. And the existential threat of climate change looms larger than anything that came before.

A fundamental, global change in thinking and action is needed that goes well beyond any one day, said former California Gov. Jerry Brown, who called Earth Day an opportunity for “a wake-up call.”

“But the darkness, the blindness is so pervasive,” said Brown, who several years ago started an organization with ex-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to address climate change.

Outrage over the burning Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, an oil spill that killed thousands of seabirds off the California coast and a plunging bald eagle population blamed on pesticides drew millions of people to the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.

Later that year, Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency to oversee the nation's response and in ensuing years, passed landmark laws to protect air and water quality, marine mammals and endangered species, and to clean up the nation's most toxic sites.

“It was quite an amazing time,” said McCarthy, who led the EPA for four years under President Obama and now heads the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “People just (said), ‘Hey, enough is enough ... it’s just not going to happen anymore.’”

Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, who has led a campaign for universities to pull investments from fossil fuel industries, said the first Earth Day “changed our understanding of the environment almost overnight.”

“We have way cleaner air and way more rivers, streams and lakes you can swim in than people did in 1970,” McKibben said.

Yet in the decades since, some problems that sparked the environmental movement have only gotten worse.

Urbanization, farming and industry have led to widespread loss of forests and grasslands, exacerbating the dangers of climate change and contributing to an alarmingly swift decline in animal and plant species. Overfishing threatens the ocean food web. Hotter global average temperatures are leading to both heavier rainfall and drought, and are contributing to sea level rise that threatens coastal communities.

And new issues emerged that weren't foreseen in 1970, including widespread contamination of waterways and drinking water by perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl — industrial chemicals known collectively as PFAS — and plastic pollution that kills and injures marine life.

Meanwhile, minority and poor communities affected by ongoing pollution as well as climate change feel left behind as environmental organizations often focus on issues that don’t always resonate with struggling neighborhoods.

Studies show that polluting industry, highways and shipping terminals are more likely to be located in poor and non-white neighborhoods with less political clout, often because historic housing discrimination or poverty forced people of color to live there.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, blacks ended up living near a major railroad line and industrial areas. Those living near Houston refineries and chemical plants are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. Detroit's most polluted ZIP code, near an oil refinery, is predominantly black and low-income.

“Saving the polar bears is important, don’t get me wrong, but we’re dying in our neighborhoods. What about saving people, too?” said Wasserman, who spent a decade fighting to close two coal-fired power plants in Chicago’s two largest Hispanic enclaves and now worries plans for a distribution warehouse on one site will bring more diesel pollution. “We need to be talking more holistically about saving the earth in general.”

Environmental groups for decades also have struggled to get lawmakers to act on climate change — and to persuade the public to take it seriously.

Early water and air pollution were problems people could see and smell, while climate change until recently had seemed decades away.

"The initial burst of things around Earth Day were mostly things that directly affected people — freeways cutting through their neighborhoods, oil spills on their beaches, their river in Cleveland catching on fire,” said Denis Hayes, who was the 25-year-old national coordinator for that first Earth Day and who is still involved in the movement.

Then, efforts to speak to worldwide climate change began in the 1990s. “That is much more difficult to get people aroused by," Hayes said. "Maybe more important, it’s more difficult to address.”

As evidenced by last year's climate protests, a new, diverse generation of activists is demanding action, fueled by fears the worst impacts will happen in their lifetime.

Yet environmental issues have become so politically polarized that it's difficult for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground, said Carol Browner, who was EPA administrator under President Clinton and directed climate change policy under Obama.

“We could have done a better job at maintaining the bipartisan support for environmental protection,” she said.

Now, environmentalists fear, regulatory rollbacks under the Trump administration, along with attacks on science long used to make decisions, also threaten years of progress. Trump is pulling the U.S. out of the landmark Paris agreement, which the United Nations rolled out on Earth Day 2016.

Some Democratic lawmakers have responded by introducing the sweeping Green New Deal to transition the economy away from fossil fuels, and many of the Democratic presidential candidates rolled out their own climate plans. But such efforts face stiff opposition from Republicans and some within the party.

For environmental reforms, the support of minority communities will be very important, activists say, because people of color will comprise the majority of the U.S. population within about 20 years.

Yet representation of people of color in large environmental organizations still is far too low, said Dorceta Taylor, a University of Michigan professor who researches the social impacts of environmentalism. Taylor, who is black, published a study in 2014 study that found just 16% of staff jobs in those organizations were held by minorities, though that's a big jump compared to 10 years earlier.

Green 2.0, an advocacy organization that tracks racial and ethnic diversity among the top environmental groups and foundations, found growing diversity among staff and boards, though minorities still were just a fraction of the leadership compared to whites in most organizations.

Minorities care deeply about pollution and climate change “because they see it 24/7,” said Robert Bullard, an environmental policy professor at Texas Southern University and a longtime environmental justice activist.

"Earth Day 50 should not look anything demographically like the first one, which was very white and middle class," he said. “It needs to be ... a day to celebrate the fact that our country is changing.”

---30---

Environmental Destruction Brought Us COVID-19. What It Brings Next Could Be Far Worse.

Jimmy Tobias, HuffPost•April 21, 2020

(Photo: Illustration: Jun Cen for HuffPost)
Dr. Richard Kock was on duty at London’s Royal Veterinary College in January 2017 when he received an urgent message from international health officials. He was needed for an emergency response mission in the Mongolian countryside, where a deadly viral outbreak was underway.

He packed his things, caught a flight to the capital city of Ulaanbaatar and drove for two days into the arid steppe. He found a disturbing scene: frozen corpses scattered on hillsides, burn pits stacked with bodies and residents addled with anxiety.

But this pandemic was not targeting humans. It was goat plague, a lethal and highly infectious virus that has killed goats, sheep and other small ruminants in huge numbers since it was first detected last century. There is a vaccine, but its application in Mongolia had been botched. The virus had spilled from domestic livestock into local populations of critically endangered saiga antelope, and it wiped out about 85% of the infected, Kock said.

“Nearly everything died across a huge landscape,” said Kock, who has worked for decades to stem infectious diseases around the world. There are only a few thousand saiga antelope left in Mongolia today, largely due to the goat plague.

The only comforting element of this tale is that the disease is not transmissible to humans. At least, not yet.

But Kock worries. Goat plague is a paramyxovirus, a virus in the same family as measles. Its case fatality rate can be as high as 90%, and some animals that contract it can infect eight to 12 others.

“They are nasty viruses,” Kock said, adding that they’re formidable in their spread and aggressiveness. It wouldn’t take a big tweak in the goat plague’s genome ― “just two amino acids, essentially” ― for it to become infectious to humans, he said. “In theory, it is very possible.”

Residents pay for groceries by standing on chairs to peer over barriers set up by a wet market on a street in Wuhan, the epicenter of China's coronavirus outbreak, on April 1. (Photo: Aly Song / Reuters)

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, killing thousands and crushing the global economy, the potential threat of zoonotic spillover — when novel viruses and bacteria jump from animals to people — is becoming increasingly clear. The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 almost certainly originated in bats and is believed to have spilled into humans at a live animal market in Wuhan, China. Readily transmissible and far deadlier than the seasonal flu, COVID-19 is now one of the worst pandemics of animal origin that humans have faced in a century. But it won’t be the last.

There are millions of viruses and bacteria out there that reside in wild animals and can potentially infect humans, and these emerging diseases are on the rise everywhere as humans disrupt ecosystems and exploit animal habitat across the globe. We are living in an age of pandemics, and the next one — let’s call it “Disease X,” as scientists often do — could be even more devastating than COVID-19.

“On a scale of 1 to 100, we could place [the current outbreak] probably somewhere a little below midway,” said Dennis Carroll, the chair of the Global Virome Project and former director of the emerging threats division at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Some known viruses circulating today have much higher mortality rates than the novel coronavirus but don’t spread easily among humans. If one of them mutated and became highly infectious in humans, Carroll said, Disease X could make this pandemic “look like a warmup.”

Workers wearing personal protective equipment bury bodies in a trench on Hart Island, which is in the Bronx borough of New York City, earlier this month. (Photo: John Minchillo/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

A Plague Rooted In Environmental Destruction

Political leaders are taking unprecedented measures to contain a virus that has infected at least 2.31 million people, killed at least 157,000 and forced national economies to their knees. Yet those unprecedented measures address only the symptoms of this crisis, an entirely reactionary response that has so far avoided addressing the root causes of novel disease emergence.

“COVID-19 is just the latest zoonotic disease to emerge that has its roots in the rampant habitat loss occurring around the world and the burgeoning wildlife trade,” a group of more than 100 conservation organizations wrote in a letter to the U.S. Congress last month, urging it to include in its stimulus bill new funding to combat the conditions that give rise to outbreaks like COVID-19. “Global pandemics will likely continue and even escalate if action isn’t taken.”

So far, though, Congress has failed to act on that threat, and the Trump administration is exacerbating the problem with its relentless campaign to roll back wildlife protections and cut environmental programs at home and abroad. All the while, the threat of zoonotic disease continues to intensify.

The virus that causes COVID-19 is just the latest infectious agent to jump from animals into people. HIV, Ebola, Marburg virus, SARS, MERS, Zika ― those, too, originated in animals and are part of the same perilous trend of novel diseases that have surfaced with increasing frequency as population growth, industrial agriculture, deforestation, wildlife exploitation, urban sprawl and other human activities bring our species into continuous contact with animal-borne pathogens.

“Emerging infectious diseases, the majority of which are zoonotic and have their origin in wildlife, have been increasing significantly — both numbers of outbreaks and diversity of diseases — over the past 50 years,” said Dr. Christian Walzer, chief global veterinarian at the New York City-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

The majority of emerging infectious diseases originate in animals, a 2017 study in the journal Nature Communications concluded, and “their emergence often involves dynamic interactions among populations of wildlife, livestock, and people within rapidly changing environments.” A 2015 study found that land use changes, such as urban expansion and deforestation, is the single most significant driver of many of the zoonotic outbreaks that have occurred since 1940.

“In the broadest sense, humans are the main drivers of zoonotic disease outbreaks,” said Catherine Machalaba, a policy adviser and research scientist at the EcoHealth Alliance.

A small island of trees in a clear-cut pine forest. Dramatic changes in land use have contributed to the rise of zoonotic diseases. (Photo: eppicphotography via Getty Images)
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought global attention to live wild animal markets, which are common throughout Southeast Asia and Africa and which scientists say provide ideal conditions for new pandemics to spawn. The markets, which are often located in dense, urban areas, bring a wide variety of domestic and wild species, living and dead, into contact with humans. They are potential petri dishes for novel pathogens to evolve and spread.

It is at one such “wet market” in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, that the novel coronavirus, labeled SARS-CoV-2, is believed to have first spilled from its original host (thought to be a bat) into an intermediary host species or directly into humans. The crowded market featured dozens of live and dead animals for sale that rarely, if ever, come in contact in the wild, from fish and rats to monkeys and foxes. These markets are poorly regulated, and endangered species are known to end up in them.

This coronavirus crossed over to humans in China, but the spillover of such diseases is occurring all over the world, including in the United States. Walzer points, for instance, to the rise of Lyme disease in North America, where our suburban developments and shopping malls wiped out wild forests, killed native predators, amplified rodent and deer populations, and fueled outbreaks of the tick-borne illness.

“It’s the classic example of how biodiversity loss has increased the risk for spillover,” Walzer said.

Consider also Nipah, a paramyxovirus, like the goat plague, that first appeared in Malaysia in 1998. That virus — an inspiration for the 2011 film “Contagion” — has its origins in fruit bats, but it spilled over to pigs on a farm where livestock pens abutted mango trees that bats used as a food source.

“Bats were coming in in large numbers, feeding on mangos and, in the process of chewing on the mango, they would drop mangos laden with mucus and other body fluids into the pig pens,” said Jonathan Epstein, vice president for science and outreach at the EcoHealth Alliance, which works to study and prevent zoonotic disease spillover. “That is how it started.”

Nipah does not harm bats. But it sickened pigs and soon infected humans, too. First, it spread to workers on the farm. Then, as pigs were traded around the country, it infected other humans. By the end of the outbreak in 1999, 265 people had contracted the virus and more than 100 had died. Malaysian authorities, meanwhile, had slaughtered millions of pigs to staunch the infection’s spread.

But the story doesn’t end there. Nipah, scientists soon discovered, was also in Bangladesh. Since the early 2000s, the country has suffered from a series of recurrent outbreaks that have claimed scores of lives. In these cases, however, there were no pigs involved. The virus spread here happened via sap from date palm plants, which some in Bangladesh harvest and drink raw in the winter months. Fruit bats have learned to exploit this food source, too, and their saliva, urine and droppings sometimes fall into the pots that people use to collect the palm sap. In this way, scientists say, Nipah has spread from bats to Bangladeshis.

“Nipah is a scary virus because it is super deadly,” said Epstein, who has studied the virus’s spread and notes that it has a case fatality rate in Bangladesh of about 75%.

But there’s another reason Nipah keeps disease experts up at night: Humans can spread the virus directly to each other, with no animal intermediary necessary.

“Nipah has shown human-to-human transmission consistently in Bangladesh, and that is why it is among the top listed infectious disease threats,” Epstein said. “It is only a matter of time before a version of Nipah virus gets into people, one that is both deadly and highly transmissible.”

In other words, there’s no need to speculate about the spillover of a scary disease like goat plague when Nipah is already on the scene.

Live animal markets and COVID-19. Degraded forests and Lyme disease. Agricultural production, disrupted bat habitat and a petrifying new paramyxovirus. These examples all tell the same story: Humanity’s effect on the natural world, and on wildlife especially, is causing novel pathogens to infect, harm and kill us. When we mine, drill, bulldoze and overdevelop, when we traffic in wild animals and invade intact habitat, when we make intimate contact with birds, bats, primates, rodents and more, we run an intensifying risk of contracting one of the estimated 1.6 million unknown viruses that reside in the bodies of other species.

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A monkey is kept in a cage for sale at an animal market in Jakarta, Indonesia, in May 2007. (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)

Far From An ‘Unforeseen Problem’
Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has consistently undermined science as part of his pro-development, anti-environment agenda. And the administration’s response to COVID-19 has, unsurprisingly, been defined by similar denial.

Trump spent weeks downplaying the threat, only to suddenly change his tune and insist that no one could have possibly predicted or prepared for such a devastating pandemic. He described the outbreak as an “unforeseen problem,” “something that nobody expected.”

But a crisis of this magnitude was not only possible, it was all but inevitable. Many people, from business leaders to intelligence officials to infectious diseases experts, have been saying so for years.

“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates said in a 2015 Ted Talk, stressing that the U.S. and the world at large are wildly unprepared to respond.

Even Trump’s own appointees in the intelligence community had issued warnings.
“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” says the 42-page Worldwide Threat Assessment that then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2019.

The report highlights stalled progress in combating infectious diseases such as malaria and the measles, as well as the link between emerging pathogens and human encroachment.

“The growing proximity of humans and animals has increased the risk of disease transmission,” it says. “The number of outbreaks has increased in part because pathogens originally found in animals have spread to human populations.”

And yet the Trump administration was caught unprepared, confused and unable to craft a coherent strategy to tackle the threat. Indeed, even in mid-March, the president was still comparing COVID-19 to the seasonal flu.

Beyond their hapless response, Trump and his Cabinet have also promoted a slew of policies that actively exacerbate the potential for zoonotic spillover.

Since taking power in 2017, the Trump administration has been on an anti-environment bonanza, rolling back wildlife and land protections while also working to cut funding for key international conservation programs that help prevent the sort of activities that give rise to infectious disease emergence. In its proposed budget for fiscal year 2021, for instance, the administration seeks to cut more than $300 million from critical USAID and State Department programs that combat wildlife trafficking, conserve large landscapes and otherwise promote biodiversity and wildlife protection abroad.

“USAID is one of the largest global donors for biodiversity conservation,” said Kelly Keenan Aylward, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Washington, D.C., office.

She pointed, for instance, to the agency’s Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment, a landscape-scale effort that focuses on combating wildlife trafficking and deforestation, two key drivers of biodiversity loss. USAID, Aylward said, also funds essential biodiversity programs in the Amazon and Southeast Asia, among other places.

A poisonous, critically endangered golden mantella frog in the rainforest of Madagascar. Habitat loss from logging and agriculture has driven the species toward extinction. Trump administration policies have exacerbated the loss of biodiversity. (Photo: Ger Bosma via Getty Images)

Trump and his small army of industry-linked political appointees are also going after the country’s key domestic wildlife agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act and fighting the illegal wildlife trade. In fiscal year 2021, they aim to slash the agency’s budget by roughly $80 million, including significant cuts to its law enforcement programs. They also want to whittle away at the agency’s Multinational Species Conservation Fund, which finances conservation programs for imperiled species abroad.

The administration also finalized regulations that significantly weaken both the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, two bedrock conservation laws. It engineered the largest rollback of public lands protection in U.S. history and has presided over a steep decline in the number of new species listed under the ESA. It has withdrawn U.S. membership in UNESCO, a United Nations program that protects hundreds of natural sites around the world, and earlier this month Trump threatened to halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization over its pandemic response, a clear effort to shift blame away from his administration. All this while advocating drastic cuts to U.S.-sponsored global health programs that fight infectious diseases.

Wildlife and land protection programs, advocates say, should be getting more support, not less — especially in light of a raging pandemic that has its origins in environmental destruction and disruption.

“Conservation and wildlife protection efforts must be prioritized in order to protect not only our precious resources,” said Kate Wall, the senior legislative manager at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, “but the stability of our global economy and, indeed, our very existence.”

‘It Should Be A Defining Movement’

Carroll, the former USAID official, said fighting emerging disease requires social engineering that invests not only in the capability to disrupt future spillover but also measures to manage outbreaks when they occur.

Carroll designed and directed Predict, a USAID disease surveillance program that identified more than 1,000 previously unknown wildlife viruses, including strains of Ebola and dozens of coronaviruses, over the last decade. The project proved that our existing technologies could pinpoint future viral threats. But operating on that scale, it would take centuries to catalog the estimated 1.6 million viruses out there ― what Carroll calls “unknown viral dark matter.”

In September, after $200 million and a decade of virus hunting, Trump’s USAID announced it would not renew the Predict program for another five-year cycle. Carroll left USAID around that time. And on March 31, as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the U.S., the administration officially shuttered the program. USAID subsequently granted the program a six-month extension on April 1 to “provide emergency support” to other countries in their response to COVID-19, but the effective cancellation of Predict had already caused real damage — its field work came to a halt months earlier, and some of the organizations that worked on the program were forced to lay off staffers, according to an April report in the Los Angeles Times.

USAID is now in the process of developing a new project, called STOP Spillover, which is expected to be launched this fall and cost $50 million to $100 million over five years. An agency spokesperson told CNN the program will “build on the lessons learned and data gathered” during Predict and “focus on strengthening national capacity to develop, test and implement interventions to reduce the risk of the spillover.”

Carroll now leads the Global Virome Project, a nonprofit that is working to create what he describes as a “global atlas” of animal viruses that would help prepare for, and ideally prevent, pandemics. Mapping viruses by species and location would allow governments to target hot spots for increased surveillance and ecosystem protections.

Carroll also hopes it will make it possible for scientists to develop vaccines that protect humans from not just one virus but perhaps even whole viral families.

“The demise of Predict,” Carroll said, “will only be a tragedy if we don’t continue to invest in viral discovery.”

Workers prepare to spray disinfectant at the Wuhan Railway Station in Wuhan, China on March 24, 2020. The city in central China is where the coronavirus first emerged late last year. (Photo: STR via Getty Images)
Disease research and preparing for pandemics isn’t cheap. The Global Virome Project estimates it would cost $1.5 billion over a decade to identify 75% of the unknown viruses in mammals and birds. On the heels of the Ebola crisis in 2016, a commission of global health experts called for an annual global investment of $4.5 billion to help prevent and fight future pandemics, including $3.4 billion to upgrade public health systems across the globe and $1 million for the development of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics.

But those figures pale in comparison to the costs of a global pandemic, as highlighted by the untold trillions of dollars that COVID-19 is now costing the world economy.

Perhaps the frequency of deadly disease outbreaks ― SARS in 2003, swine flu in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014 and now COVID-19 ― will convince the world it is time for a different approach, Carroll hopes. But he fears that, as with previous outbreaks, resources will dry up once the coronavirus threat dissipates and “collective amnesia” sets in.

“We should not accept the idea that spillover from wildlife into people is inevitable,” he said. “It’s not. Viruses don’t move from animals to people. We facilitate that.”

But we can change our ways.

More than 240 environmental and animal advocacy groups signed an April 6 letter urging the World Health Organization to recommend that governments institute permanent bans on wildlife markets and the use of wildlife in traditional medicines.

To truly solve the underlying conditions that fuel zoonotic pandemics, experts and wildlife conservationists are also calling for a new paradigm that recognizes the interconnection of people, animals and ecosystems, which they call the “One Health” approach.

“It should be a defining movement,” Dr. Christine Kreuder Johnson, project director of the USAID’s Predict program and associate director of the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis, said of One Health, which seeks to prevent infectious disease outbreaks by safeguarding wild animals and their habitat.

Humans have driven up to 1 million species around the globe to the brink of extinction, a United Nations report last year found. A U.N. draft biodiversity plan released earlier this year calls for protecting 30% of all lands and oceans by 2030 to combat the biodiversity crisis, which experts say would help keep new infectious diseases at bay.

Other experts told HuffPost that the U.S. should establish a high-level One Health task force that brings together agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Fish and Wildlife Service, USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to chart a course forward for protecting wildlife habitat, strengthening disease surveillance and preventing pandemics.

Still others, like Dr. Richard Kock, say humans must drastically scale back livestock production, which brought the goat plague to Mongolia and fueled the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia.

“Pathogens can move incredibly quickly despite attempts to stop them and despite our technology and our medicines,” Kock said. “It is a wake-up call for humanity.”

4/20 WAS YESTERDAY, VERY QUIET IN THE AGE OF COVID-19

I Sampled My Way Through the Wildly Pretentious World of High-End Weed Products

AMERICAN NOT CANADIAN PRODUCTS

Dave Holmes, Esquire•April 20, 2020

Photo credit: Hearst Owned

From Esquire

I am not, by and large, a weed guy. Oh, I have tried, but through substantial trial and error I have determined that I lack the essential level of chill to pull the whole thing off. For years, I've regarded the stoners in my life with awe and envy; they seem so relaxed and cheerful, while one hit off a vape pen tends to nudge me into the anxiety that is always just over my shoulder. I've observed that marijuana has a way of forcing a person to feel their deepest emotion, which for many people is “potato chips taste good,” and for me is “call 911 I’m not breathing the right amount.” Weed strips away a person’s defenses, which is all perfectly fine unless, like me, you are one hundred percent made of defenses.

I’m not good at getting high, is what I’m telling you.

But I am also one of just a couple Esquire writers in the state of California, where cannabis is not only legal but officially an essential business. My New York-based colleagues receive the latest news from the emerging luxury weed segment every day, getting dispatches about exciting new products that they can’t try because it’s illegal to send this stuff through the mail. So a few weeks ago, I said, “Forward those babies to me,” and they did, and tons of elegantly packaged THC (and CBD) goods came to my door, and then immediately the entire world shut down and now I can’t leave my house.

The last month has presented me with the perfect conditions to sample some upscale cannabis stuff and determine whether there’s one brand out there just for me, or if there is such a thing as a bespoke panic attack. It’s been an enlightening experience, and a nice variation on each day’s coffee-to-bourbon trajectory. I’m still not chill enough to be a stoner, not even a high-end weed stoner, but the quarantine period is young. Here are my findings.

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Photo credit: Courtesy Kiva

Camino Sleep Gummies


Sleep can sometimes be a problem for me, and when it is, I find I have nowhere to turn; melatonin doesn’t really do the trick, and like any sensible person, I’m absolutely terrified by the possibility of Ambien-tweeting. So I was eager to try these delicious little gummies, which promise to put you to sleep with the great taste of midnight blueberry (just like regular blueberry except it fucks). Each one has 5mg of THC and 1mg of CBN, which I don’t know what that is, but they do as they promise, perhaps a bit too well. One whole gummy knocked me right out, and when I woke up at 3 a.m. for my nightly worry appointment, I found that I was still stoned. Fun fact: If there is one time you don’t want an overactive, weed-fueled imagination, it’s in the middle of the night at the height of a pandemic. One half of one gummy actually does the trick, and stretches your luxury weed dollar as well. But learn from my mistakes, and take it the moment you go to bed. Otherwise you’ll be on the couch thinking “I’m drowsy, and my friends are only pretending to like me.”

Photo credit: Courtesy
Atlas
Ember Edibles

Edibles intimidate me, and you know why. Everybody knows somebody who had a bite of one, got impatient because they weren’t super-stoned in two seconds, ate the whole rest of it, and then climbed a tree and now they live there. So naturally, I approached these giant granola bricks with extreme caution. My boyfriend and I each tore a tiny little piece off the corner of Atlas's Ember Sativa Caramel Cashew and Cayenne flavor, ate it, and waited. For hours, nothing happened, then just as we were going to bed, we looked at each other and said, “Oh, no.” I was high as fuck for the next 36 hours, three of which I spent on an airplane that I briefly convinced myself I’d gotten on by accident. (Landed in Dallas—on purpose—and ate a bowl of queso before I left the airport.) Good flavor, though. If you enjoy being terrified by your snacks, go get it.

Photo credit: Courtesy Omura

Heat-Not-Burn Device

A high-tech proprietary system so simple it confused the hell out of me, the Omura device uses “heat-not-burn” technology to “activate the terpenes without charring the plant, allowing the plant’s true flavor to shine.” What this means is that you stick a cardboard tube full of weed into one end of the device, touch a button, wait for it to heat up, and then you have one three-minute session to hit it. Whether you hit it once or as many times as three minutes will allow, the tube is spent at the end. The starter kit came with a pack of 10 tubes, half of which we wasted trying to figure out how the Omura works. The machine will only take the proprietary tubes, the proprietary tubes will not work in any other machine. In the brave new world of upscale weed products, this is exactly like having a Sega Saturn.

Photo credit: Courtesy Canndescent
Pre-Rolls

You knew someone was going to use the aspirational marketing speak of Goop culture to sell you joints, and Canndescent’s promise to “marry the mastery of cannabis cultivation with the canvas of your life” tells you it's the one for the job. The Canndescent sampler pack comes with one joint each of its five strains—Calm, Cruise, Create, Connect, and Charge—and the tasting notes eschew the indica/sativa jargon of the dispensary in favor of more direct language. If it’s “time to laugh, go out with friends, or get intimate, invite Canndescent Connect.” If you’re ready to “paint, jam, code, blog, or game,” then “find your muse in Canndescent Create.” Is it “the perfect stolen moment to sink into the pastel, polyester embrace of a Golden Girls marathon and a full tube of Pringles?” Then really any of them will do, and I made that one up anyway. Maybe it’s the Oprah’s Favorite Things of it all, but these managed to keep the heebie-jeebies at bay, and lighting a joint has such a pleasing, analog feel to it, like putting a warm and crackly old record on a turntable. These were my favorite of the bunch, though at press time I have yet to paint, jam, or code.

Photo credit: Courtesy
Mello
CBD Edibles + Suppositories

CBD is everywhere, in creams and tinctures and pills, though nobody can tell me exactly what it does. I am skeptical of its powers, largely because we are asked to hold these two ideas in our minds at the same time: CBD has no psychoactive properties and it totally chills you out. I’ve tried it in its many forms, and I’ve never noticed much of an effect, but hope springs eternal. Mello sent me a couple of CBD products, the first of which was an elegant box of infused sea salt caramels that definitely improved my mood, because free snacks always do. They’re tasty! Here’s the other sample they sent!

Photo credit: Courtesy

Who is this for? Who is this committed both to CBD and to not swallowing? It’s entirely possible that suppositories could be the delivery method that finally sells me on the healing and chilling powers of CBD, but we will never know. Esquire is going to have to start paying me a lot more if I’m going to put things in my butt.

Photo credit: Courtesy
CBD Pillow
Pillow

Yeah, there is now a CBD Pillow, and I have one. Here’s how it works: The pillowcase has evidently been infused with millions of microcapsules of CBD—using the patented micro-encapsulation technology, naturally—which the friction of your head causes to burst, releasing microdoses into your skin and hair follicles throughout the night to relax you as you sleep. As for if it works: Like CBD itself, I truly have no idea, but it’s a good, solid, comfy memory foam pillow. I have been sleeping better, but it’s possible I’m just tired from telling everyone I’ve ever met that I have a CBD pillow.

Photo credit: Courtesy
ALT
Liquid Cannabis


ALT stands for Advanced Liquid Technology, which in this context means “pot water.” It’s a colorless, flavorless liquid that comes in 5mg vials, which you can pour into the beverage of your choice for the unforgettable experience of roofie-ing yourself. This would seem to be the perfect product for the stoner on the go, for someone who really likes to get high but doesn’t want anyone to know about it, not even themselves. I split one vial between two tequila-and-sodas that my boyfriend and I had at cocktail hour the other night, and while it’s impossible to know where the tequila ended and the advanced liquid technology began, the overall effect was “when’s dinner?”
 

Photo credit: Courtesy
1906
Drops

The two major selling points of 1906’s drops and chocolates are that the dosages are small, and they start working within 20 minutes. At last, someone to give me my highs exactly the way I like them: fast-acting and barely perceptible. Like Canndescent, 1906 divides its product line up by general feeling: Genius is for work, Midnight for sleeping, Love for lovin’. Each drop—they look like mints, but take it from me and do not chew them—contains 2.5 to 5mg of THC, perfect for the timid among us and a good start for everyone else. I took one chocolate-covered Go energy drop before a nice long run around my neighborhood recently, and I’ll be damned if the new Dua Lipa didn’t sound better than ever.

Photo credit: Courtesy
Artet
Cannabis Aperitif


Artet is an alcohol-free cannabis spirit “drawn from the history, the culture, and the very moment of the aperitif,” because this is the way we’re talking now. It’s made with eight botanicals, though the taste is mainly “lemon peel.” I mixed a couple of Artet-and-tonics the other afternoon as we cleaned the house, and though the flavor definitely improved with a couple drops of agave syrup, it was a mild, easy-drinking daytime cocktail with a subtle and quick-acting effect. I thought, “I could see myself doing this again.” And then, in celebration of the history, the culture, and the very moment of the weed aperitif, I went to the bathroom in my own home and got lost on the way back.

Photo credit: Courtesy
Besito
Vape Pens

Besito makes a line of single-use vape pens in attractive, hexagonal copper tubes. Vapes of all kinds are viewed with suspicion these days, but Besito’s safety message is both reassuring and free of the highfalutin language that luxury weed too often employs: “Our formulations were developed by biochemists, and contain absolutely no Vitamin E, diluents, fillers, or harmful ingredients. Just the good stuff: dank, sweet weed.” The honesty is refreshing. I got the mint brand, which promised an “uplifting, energetic kind of high that’s perfect for all day long.” And while the flavor took me back to the dark period in my life when I smoked menthol cigarettes, the effect was subtle. Anxiety-free. One might even call it “dank.”

You Can Finally Stream 'Cooking With Cannabis,' The Cooking Competition Show Starring Kelis As A JudgeAlexis Morillo,Delish•April 20, 2020

Photo credit: Dave J Hogan - Getty Images
From Delish

Update, April 20, 2020: Netflix's new show Cooked with Cannabis starring Kelis as a judge is available for streaming today. The cooking competition show will have contestants going up against one another to make the best cannabis-infused dish.

The show has just six episodes in its first season with each episode clocking in around 35 minutes. So, yes, it's totally binge-watchable. Contestants will have to make full three-course meals for the panel of judges and the winning cook will receive a $10,000 cash prize.


Original Post, March 18, 2020: A new show is hitting Netflix next month and we have a feeling you'll want to add it to your queue. Cooked with Cannabis is a cooking competition series and the contestants are challenged to make masterful dishes made with cannabis-infused ingredients.

What makes it even better is that it will be hosted by Kelis, the singer of everyone's guilty pleasure anthem "Milkshake" (and cookbook author). She'll be hosting alongside Leather Storrs, a chef from Portland, Oregon.

The series, which is only a six-episode season at the moment, according to Food & Wine, will function like most other cooking competitions. Three professional chefs will go head-to-head while coming up with a three-course meal to wow the judges. Each meal will have a different theme it must follow, such as world cuisine or futurist food, but their dishes have to include cannabis.

Each meal will then be judged by Kelis, Leather, and a guest judge. Some of the guest judges include Ricki Lake and comedian Mary Lynn Rajskub, so the season is bound to be star-studded. Once the winning cook is decided, that chef will win a $10,000 cash prize.

In an interview with Food & Wine, Leather explained one of his favorite parts of this show's concept is the way that cannabis is used as a sophisticated ingredient. "Many of the chefs used the plant in non-psychoactive ways: as a flavoring, as a puree in fresh tortillas, or blended into a flour," he told Food & Wine: "This is a show for food people, for stoners and for folks that are curious about both."

Cooked with Cannabis will hit Netflix on April 20, of course.

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TRUMP MINI ME
Brazil's Bolsonaro appears in protest backing military

Associated Press•April 19, 2020



Virus Outbreak Brazil
Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro speaks to supporters during a protest in front the army's headquarters during the Army day, amid the new coronavirus pandemic, in Brasilia, Brazil, Sunday, April 19, 2020. Bolsonaro came out in support of a small protest Sunday that defended military intervention, infringing his own ministry's recommendations to maintain social distancing and prompting fierce critics. (AP Photo/Andre Borges)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro came out in public to support a small protest Sunday that defended military intervention, prompting strong criticism across the political spectrum while also infringing his own ministry's recommendation to maintain social distancing.

On the day Brazil celebrates its army, Bolsonaro made an appearance at the protest held in front of the army’s headquarters, in the capital city of Brasilia. There, dozens of tightly-packed protesters, many of whom were not wearing masks, were calling for the Supreme Court and Congress to be shut down.

"I am here because I believe in you. You are here because you believe in Brazil,” said Bolsonaro, a former army captain who waxes nostalgic for the country's 1964-1985 dictatorship.

Since being sworn in on Jan. 1 2019, Bolsonaro has asked the defense ministry to organize commemorations of the two decade-long military dictatorship, paid tribute to Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, the military strongman in neighboring Paraguay, and backed changes in schools' history curriculum that would revise the way children are thought about the 1964 military coup.

But for some, Bolsonaro crossed a line Sunday.

“The president of the republic crossed the Rubicon,” wrote Felipe Santa Cruz, president of the Brazilian Bar Association, on his official Twitter account. “Time for Democrats to unite, to overcome difficulties and disagreements, in the name of a greater good called FREEDOM!”

Supreme Court Justice Luís Roberto Barroso, focused his criticism on protesters.

“It is frightening to see demonstrations for the return of the military regime, after 30 years of democracy,” he wrote on Twitter.

Many Brazilians were also angered at Bolsonaro's defiance of the stay-at-home measures introduced by several states governors. Bolsonaro has multiplied public appearances in recent weeks, meeting with supporters, protesters, passersby or business owners.

On Saturday, hundreds of people denouncing pandemic restriction measures opposed by Bolsonaro snarled traffic in major Brazilian cities.

Virus Outbreak Brazil

Demonstrators stand with a banner that reads in Portuguese "We want the Army in power" at the Alvorada palace, after a protest demanding for military intervention during the new coronavirus emergency, in Brasilia, Brazil, Sunday, April 19, 2020. Bolsonaro came out in support of a small protest Sunday that defended military intervention, infringing his own ministry's recommendations to maintain social distancing and prompting fierce critics. (AP Photo/Andre Borges)

Fearing Big Election Loss, China Goes on Offensive in Hong Kong

Iain Marlow, Bloomberg•April 20, 2020


Bloomberg) -- On the surface, Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam appears to have had a few pretty good months: Her government has managed to contain the coronavirus outbreak, during which street protests have mostly disappeared.

Yet her bosses in Beijing don’t appear convinced that will help their allies during Legislative Council elections set for September. A spate of arrests and stern official edicts over the past few weeks amount to an offensive that looks designed to ensure China gets its way no matter what happens at the ballot box.

Over the weekend, Hong Kong police arrested more than a dozen prominent pro-democracy figures in the former British colony, including a current lawmaker, former politicians and a media tycoon whose outlets are sympathetic to protesters who paralyzed the city for much of the last year. That came after Beijing agencies that oversee the city blasted the opposition for filibustering in the parliament, known as LegCo.

“The authorities would like to prepare Hong Kong people for the possibility that the LegCo majority falls into the hands of the pro-democracy camp,” said Joseph Cheng, a veteran democracy activist and retired political science professor. “The preservation of the regime is of paramount importance all of the time -- and the authorities are willing to pay the price, in terms of conflict, damage to the stability of Hong Kong, its international image, its progress.”

On Tuesday, Lam blasted the opposition’s “malicious filibustering” and suggested that the city’s recent stimulus relief package wouldn’t have been possible if the pro-democracy forces had a majority in the Legislative Council -- and that Hong Kongers and businesses alike would suffer.

“Imagine if the Legislative Council is led by those who voted against the HK$130b in funding? What would Hong Kong become?” Lam asked in a regular news conference ahead of a meeting of the city’s Executive Council. “How can the suffering of companies and the people be alleviated?”

The harder-line approach comes just as Hong Kong appears to be ready to open up again after months of social-distancing restrictions kept people indoors: The city reported no new cases Monday for the first time since March 5. It risks spawning another summer of discontent, with protesters expected to mark several anniversaries from June up until the LegCo election.

On Monday, Fitch Ratings downgraded Hong Kong as an issuer of long-term, foreign currency debt in part because the city’s “deep-rooted socio-political cleavages remain unresolved,” despite the virus dampening protests.

“This injects lingering uncertainty into the business environment, and entrenches the risk of renewed bouts of public discontent, which could further tarnish international perceptions of the territory’s governance, institutions, and political stability,” Fitch said.

Xi’s Hardliners

A majority for the pro-democracy camp in the lawmaking body would be unprecedented: The high-water mark came in 2004, when it won 42% of seats. But the sometimes-violent protests last year, in which demonstrators called for meaningful elections, propelled the pro-democracy camp to win about 85% of seats in a vote for local district councils in November.

President Xi Jinping’s response to that result was the appointment of two hardliners to oversee Hong Kong. In January, Luo Huining, a cadre known for executing Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, was made head of China’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, while in February Xi appointed Xia Baolong, who oversaw a crackdown on Christian churches several years ago when he was the Communist Party chief of China’s Zhejiang province, as director of the overarching Hong Kong & Macau Affairs Office.

In recent weeks, Beijing’s agencies overseeing the city have accused the opposition politicians of potentially violating their oaths with delay tactics -- a potential precursor to disqualification. They also reiterated their support for national security legislation that has ignited previous rounds of protest in the city.

Lam and other pro-establishment politicians in Hong Kong have criticized the filibustering and have supported the right of the Liaison Office chief to comment on gridlock at the city’s legislature. As Hong Kong successfully contained the virus, Lam’s popularity rating has rebounded from record lows and “significantly increased” in a poll conducted in late March and early April, which did not attribute the increase to any particular policy.

“The central government has constitutional responsibility for the governance of Hong Kong, and of course has the right to express its views on the performance of the Legislative Council,” said Zhi Zhenfeng, a law professor at the state-run China Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. He added, though, that “policy tweaks are possible” and the recent statements do no constitute any sort of new policy direction.

However, the Hong Kong government’s defense of the two central government agencies to comment on Hong Kong politics has set off alarm bells, particularly since Article 22 of the city’s mini-constitution bars any Beijing-controlled entity from interfering in the former colony.

The Hong Kong Bar Association pointed out Monday that the city’s government was contradicting previous statements on the role of Beijing’s agencies in Hong Kong, and that the “current uncertainty contributes to undermining confidence” in both governments’ commitment to the “one country, two systems” principle. In its statement, Fitch Ratings said the central government is “taking a more vocal role in Hong Kong affairs than at any time since the 1997 handover.”

Danger of Extremism

For both China and Hong Kong, the economic stakes are high. The U.S. has increased scrutiny of the city’s autonomy from the mainland, which is essential to maintaining special trading privileges that help underpin the economy.

President Donald Trump’s administration roundly condemned China’s latest arrests, which included 81-year-old Martin Lee, a former lawmaker nicknamed the “Father of Democracy” since he was a founder of the city’s flagship opposition Democratic Party. China rejected the international criticism on Monday, calling it “gross interference in Hong Kong’s internal affairs.”

China’s assertive tone -- and the arrests of many moderate, older opposition figures -- could alienate the city’s more radical protesters and encourage them to renew violent attacks in the city, said opposition lawmaker Fernando Cheung. This may allow authorities in Beijing to then justify canceling the election or ramming through controversial national security legislation known as Article 23, he said.

“Democrats don’t want to see extremism grow,” Cheung said. “We want to keep peace and prosperity, but by way of the government’s handling of this -- and more so the Communists handling of the situation -- there’s a danger that extremism will grow.”

Summer Is Coming

This idea was echoed in a blog post over the weekend by Jerome Cohen, a renowned American scholar of Chinese law and a professor at New York University, who wrote the arrests could be a “trap” that could justify “repressive” national security measures or lead to a cancellation of the upcoming election.

Hong Kong officials repeatedly warned of the risk of terrorism last year, and those fears have continued to grow. The city’s police chief on Monday received an improvised explosive device at his office on Monday although no one was injured, the South China Morning Post reported, citing multiple unidentified insiders.

Either way, analysts are expecting political turmoil to return to the streets once the pandemic fears subside.

“They’re trying to use a tough political line ahead of summer, which is the traditional peak of social movements in Hong Kong,” said Ivan Choy, a senior lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “They want to use this time to try and threaten these people from coming out, to make people think that if they come out again there will be legal consequences. This is their thinking. Whether this happens is another issue. Protesters could be provoked.”

(Updates throughout.)

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.