#COVID-19 pandemic may stretch beyond 2021

[gidipoint]

COVID-19 pandemic may stretch beyond 2021: WHO

COVID-19 pandemic may stretch beyond 2021: WHO

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said it is unlikely the Covid-19 pandemic will come to an end by the end of 2021. Continue reading

[mr-styles]

Harry Styles Sent Us Back to 2019 — and the Seventies — at Glittery-Slicked MSG Set

If you passed through New York’s Herald Square on Sunday, you probably felt like a time traveler. Thousands of young fans were dressed up, Seventies-style, for a show that they’ve been waiting for for two years — colorful flared pants, feather boas, glitter, and two-piece suits aplenty. Just stop your crying, it’s a sign of times… the times being Harry Styles finally playing Madison Square Garden after years away.

Nearly two years after releasing Fine Line, Styles is hitting the North American leg of Love on Tour, which was announced around the album’s release and originally meant to set sail last spring in Europe — before the Covid-19 pandemic derailed the entire world’s plans.

Even though it’s been two years since its release, there was no universe where Styles wouldn’t tour Fine Line. His second album was even bigger than his self-titled debut, generating hits like “Watermelon Sugar” and “Kiwi,” as well as expanding his fanbase well beyond the young One Direction fans who have stuck by him for over a decade. It was one of the most anticipated treks of 2020 and remains as such in 2021, although it may look a little different this time: Masks are required for all attendees, as well as a Covid-19 vaccination (venues in other states allow proof of a negative PCR test as well in lieu of vaccination).

The wait in between sets for Styles flew by: The attendees occupied themselves by begging Disney stars and rumored “Drivers License” subjects Joshua Bassett and Sabrina Carpenter for photos and singing along to One Direction’s “Olivia” as it played over the speakers — not once, but twice. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and the ensuing arena-wide sing-along seemed to indicate that show time was nearing as anticipation further mounted from the buzzing crowd.

Styles took center stage in a two-piece black suit with feathered arms, launching immediately into Fine Line opener “Golden,” a bright and energetic single that got the room shaking for the first time that night.

Wisely, Styles’ performed in the round, giving fans either his face or “all butt, baby,” as he cheekily pointed out. There were two general admission pits, which from the stands, seemed to be one of the most polite and communal show pits imaginable. It was the perfect setup for a star like Styles, whose thousands of fans dressed to impress and wanted nothing more than a second of his time or attention. Expertly bouncing around the stage and the long catwalks that stretched across the arena, he was able to give that and much more, making the legendary venue feel like an intimate club.

By some miracle, Styles and his band were able to play Fine Line in its entirety (including “To Be So Lonely,” which was left off the setlist of the tour’s first few shows). He also included some well-placed tracks from his 2017 debut, like the raucous “Only Angel” and smooth “Woman.” The pace and energy were vastly different this time; his debut was a largely folk-y affair, heavy on the acoustic guitar with big campfire sing-along energy. Love on Tour is a bawdier party, full of dancing from both Styles and the crowd.

Helping keep the pace were a mix of old and new band members. Of course, drummer Sarah Jones and guitarist Mitch Rowland (who recently had their first child) were back on the road with the star and have been since day one. Fans cheered enthusiastically any time they were highlighted, especially when Rowland shredded his way through the “She” guitar solos. Bassist Elin Sandberg and multi-instrumentalist Ny Oh were exquisite during “Woman” and a pared-down “Cherry” moment, while pianist Niji Adeleye and percussionist Pauli Lovejoy were scene-stealers at every turn with their enthusiastic dancing.

Toward the end of the main set, the communal feeling of the show strengthened. “Treat People With Kindness,” Styles’ mantra, turned into the biggest party-starter yet. Fans in the pit created dance circles and did something akin to the Electric Slide in unison. On stage, Styles held up both Bi Pride and Black Lives Matter flags to massive screams. It quickly morphed into a cover of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” a song Styles really doesn’t need to do but has such a blast singing that I hope he keeps it in his shows forever.

The encore was a perfect cap: “Sign of the Times,” his first-ever solo single, kicked things off as he belted the track beneath two large disco balls that made the whole room sparkle. He introduced the band during a slow-burn reworking of “Watermelon Sugar,” similar to the one he performed at the Grammys this year. He even brought back the song he debuted a few shows ago when he sang to a woman in a banana suit (“She’s dressed as a banana, ayy”). Of course, there were several banana costumes in attendance due to the very existence of the rarity.

For his closer, Styles ended on the highest note, showcasing the biggest flex of his rock star prowess. He blazed through “Kiwi,” the high energy fan-favorite that he also played years ago at MSG; back then, it got the floor shaking so much that drummer Jones’ drumset started sliding across the stage. It was no different this time: The whole room shook through the track as Styles said his goodbyes He had issued a request early in the show for everyone to “be who it is you’ve always wanted to be,” and with one final song, the whole room let loose. They were finally getting to be who they’ve been waiting to become for the last 18 months.

[hldailyupdate]

If you passed through New York’s Herald Square on Sunday, you probably felt like a time traveler. Thousands of young fans were dressed up, Seventies-style, for a show that they’ve been waiting for for two years — colorful flared pants, feather boas, glitter, and two-piece suits aplenty. Just stop your crying, it’s a sign of times… the times being Harry Styles finally playing Madison Square Garden after years away.

Nearly two years after releasing Fine Line, Styles is hitting the North American leg of Love on Tour, which was announced around the album’s release and originally meant to set sail last spring in Europe — before the Covid-19 pandemic derailed the entire world’s plans.

Even though it’s been two years since its release, there was no universe where Styles wouldn’t tour Fine Line. His second album was even bigger than his self-titled debut, generating hits like “Watermelon Sugar” and “Kiwi,” as well as expanding his fanbase well beyond the young One Direction fans who have stuck by him for over a decade. It was one of the most anticipated treks of 2020 and remains as such in 2021, although it may look a little different this time: Masks are required for all attendees, as well as a Covid-19 vaccination (venues in other states allow proof of a negative PCR test as well in lieu of vaccination).

The wait in between sets for Styles flew by: The attendees occupied themselves by begging Disney stars and rumored “Drivers License” subjects Joshua Bassett and Sabrina Carpenter for photos and singing along to One Direction’s “Olivia” as it played over the speakers — not once, but twice. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and the ensuing arena-wide sing-along seemed to indicate that show time was nearing as anticipation further mounted from the buzzing crowd.

Styles took center stage in a two-piece black suit with feathered arms, launching immediately into Fine Line opener “Golden,” a bright and energetic single that got the room shaking for the first time that night.

Wisely, Styles’ performed in the round, giving fans either his face or “all butt, baby,” as he cheekily pointed out. There were two general admission pits, which from the stands, seemed to be one of the most polite and communal show pits imaginable. It was the perfect setup for a star like Styles, whose thousands of fans dressed to impress and wanted nothing more than a second of his time or attention. Expertly bouncing around the stage and the long catwalks that stretched across the arena, he was able to give that and much more, making the legendary venue feel like an intimate club.

By some miracle, Styles and his band were able to play Fine Line in its entirety (including “To Be So Lonely,” which was left off the setlist of the tour’s first few shows). He also included some well-placed tracks from his 2017 debut, like the raucous “Only Angel” and smooth “Woman.” The pace and energy were vastly different this time; his debut was a largely folk-y affair, heavy on the acoustic guitar with big campfire sing-along energy. Love on Tour is a bawdier party, full of dancing from both Styles and the crowd.

Helping keep the pace were a mix of old and new band members. Of course, drummer Sarah Jones and guitarist Mitch Rowland (who recently had their first child) were back on the road with the star and have been since day one. Fans cheered enthusiastically any time they were highlighted, especially when Rowland shredded his way through the “She” guitar solos. Bassist Elin Sandberg and multi-instrumentalist Ny Oh were exquisite during “Woman” and a pared-down “Cherry” moment, while pianist Niji Adeleye and percussionist Pauli Lovejoy were scene-stealers at every turn with their enthusiastic dancing.

Toward the end of the main set, the communal feeling of the show strengthened. “Treat People With Kindness,” Styles’ mantra, turned into the biggest party-starter yet. Fans in the pit created dance circles and did something akin to the Electric Slide in unison. On stage, Styles held up both Bi Pride and Black Lives Matter flags to massive screams. It quickly morphed into a cover of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” a song Styles really doesn’t need to do but has such a blast singing that I hope he keeps it in his shows forever.

The encore was a perfect cap: “Sign of the Times,” his first-ever solo single, kicked things off as he belted the track beneath two large disco balls that made the whole room sparkle. He introduced the band during a slow-burn reworking of “Watermelon Sugar,” similar to the one he performed at the Grammys this year. He even brought back the song he debuted a few shows ago when he sang to a woman in a banana suit (“She’s dressed as a banana, ayy”). Of course, there were several banana costumes in attendance due to the very existence of the rarity.

For his closer, Styles ended on the highest note, showcasing the biggest flex of his rock star prowess. He blazed through “Kiwi,” the high energy fan-favorite that he also played years ago at MSG; back then, it got the floor shaking so much that drummer Jones’ drumset started sliding across the stage. It was no different this time: The whole room shook through the track as Styles said his goodbyes He had issued a request early in the show for everyone to “be who it is you’ve always wanted to be,” and with one final song, the whole room let loose. They were finally getting to be who they’ve been waiting to become for the last 18 months.

(4 October 2021)

[kingstylesdaily]

Harry Styles Sent Us Back to 2019 — and the Seventies — at Glittery-Slicked MSG Set

Nearly two years after releasing Fine Line, Styles is hitting the North American leg of Love on Tour

by Brittany Spanos

If you passed through New York’s Herald Square on Sunday, you probably felt like a time traveler. Thousands of young fans were dressed up, Seventies-style, for a show that they’ve been waiting for for two years — colorful flared pants, feather boas, glitter, and two-piece suits aplenty. Just stop your crying, it’s a sign of times… the times being Harry Styles finally playing Madison Square Garden after years away.

Nearly two years after releasing Fine Line, Styles is hitting the North American leg of Love on Tour, which was announced around the album’s release and originally meant to set sail last spring in Europe — before the Covid-19 pandemic derailed the entire world’s plans.

Even though it’s been two years since its release, there was no universe where Styles wouldn’t tour Fine Line. His second album was even bigger than his self-titled debut, generating hits like “Watermelon Sugar” and “Kiwi,” as well as expanding his fanbase well beyond the young One Direction fans who have stuck by him for over a decade. It was one of the most anticipated treks of 2020 and remains as such in 2021, although it may look a little different this time: Masks are required for all attendees, as well as a Covid-19 vaccination (venues in other states allow proof of a negative PCR test as well in lieu of vaccination).

Luckily, Jenny Lewis stayed on the bill. Her most recent album, the excellent On the Line, came out before Styles’, so at least they were in the same strange boat. Upon the announcement that she was opening on the North American dates, many Gen –Z stans wondered who she was on Twitter. But hopefully they’ve gotten on the Lewis train by now: Her rhinestone cowgirl aesthetic and Nashville-adjacent sound is a perfect fit of Styles’ own, making them a dream pair. She even snuck in a little Rilo Kiley with a cover of “Silver Lining,” hopefully scoring a slew of new listeners for the band that got Lewis her start.

The wait in between sets for Styles flew by: The attendees occupied themselves by begging Disney stars and rumored “Drivers License” subjects Joshua Bassett and Sabrina Carpenter for photos and singing along to One Direction’s “Olivia” as it played over the speakers — not once, but twice. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and the ensuing arena-wide sing-along seemed to indicate that show time was nearing as anticipation further mounted from the buzzing crowd.

Styles took center stage in a two-piece black suit with feathered arms, launching immediately into Fine Line opener “Golden,” a bright and energetic single that got the room shaking for the first time that night.

Wisely, Styles’ performed in the round, giving fans either his face or “all butt, baby,” as he cheekily pointed out. There were two general admission pits, which from the stands, seemed to be one of the most polite and communal show pits imaginable. It was the perfect setup for a star like Styles, whose thousands of fans dressed to impress and wanted nothing more than a second of his time or attention. Expertly bouncing around the stage and the long catwalks that stretched across the arena, he was able to give that and much more, making the legendary venue feel like an intimate club.

By some miracle, Styles and his band were able to play Fine Line in its entirety (including “To Be So Lonely,” which was left off the setlist of the tour’s first few shows). He also included some well-placed tracks from his 2017 debut, like the raucous “Only Angel” and smooth “Woman.” The pace and energy were vastly different this time; his debut was a largely folk-y affair, heavy on the acoustic guitar with big campfire sing-along energy. Love on Tour is a bawdier party, full of dancing from both Styles and the crowd.

Helping keep the pace were a mix of old and new band members. Of course, drummer Sarah Jones and guitarist Mitch Rowland (who recently had their first child) were back on the road with the star and have been since day one. Fans cheered enthusiastically any time they were highlighted, especially when Rowland shredded his way through the “She” guitar solos. Bassist Elin Sandberg and multi-instrumentalist Ny Oh were exquisite during “Woman” and a pared-down “Cherry” moment, while pianist Niji Adeleye and percussionist Pauli Lovejoy were scene-stealers at every turn with their enthusiastic dancing.

Toward the end of the main set, the communal feeling of the show strengthened. “Treat People With Kindness,” Styles’ mantra, turned into the biggest party-starter yet. Fans in the pit created dance circles and did something akin to the Electric Slide in unison. On stage, Styles held up both Bi Pride and Black Lives Matter flags to massive screams. It quickly morphed into a cover of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” a song Styles really doesn’t need to do but has such a blast singing that I hope he keeps it in his shows forever.

The encore was a perfect cap: “Sign of the Times,” his first-ever solo single, kicked things off as he belted the track beneath two large disco balls that made the whole room sparkle. He introduced the band during a slow-burn reworking of “Watermelon Sugar,” similar to the one he performed at the Grammys this year. He even brought back the song he debuted a few shows ago when he sang to a woman in a banana suit (“She’s dressed as a banana, ayy”). Of course, there were several banana costumes in attendance due to the very existence of the rarity.

For his closer, Styles ended on the highest note, showcasing the biggest flex of his rock star prowess. He blazed through “Kiwi,” the high energy fan-favorite that he also played years ago at MSG; back then, it got the floor shaking so much that drummer Jones’ drumset started sliding across the stage. It was no different this time: The whole room shook through the track as Styles said his goodbyes He had issued a request early in the show for everyone to “be who it is you’ve always wanted to be,” and with one final song, the whole room let loose. They were finally getting to be who they’ve been waiting to become for the last 18 months.

Love On Tour Setlist

“Golden” “Carolina” “Adore You” “Only Angel” “She” “Falling” “Sunflower, Vol. 6” “To Be So Lonely” “Woman” “Cherry” “Lights Up” “Canyon Moon” “Treat People With Kindness” “What Makes You Beautiful” (One Direction cover) “Fine Line”

Encore: “Sign of the Times” “Watermelon Sugar” “Kiwi”

via RollingStone.com

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, May 4, 2021

Employers, insurers push to make virtual visits regular care (AP) Make telemedicine your first choice for most doctor visits. That’s the message some U.S. employers and insurers are sending with a new wave of care options. Amazon and several insurers have started or expanded virtual-first care plans to get people to use telemedicine routinely, even for planned visits like annual checkups. They’re trying to make it easier for patients to connect with regular help by using remote care that grew explosively during the COVID-19 pandemic. Advocates say this can keep patients healthy and out of expensive hospitals, which makes insurers and employers that pay most of the bill happy. But some doctors worry that it might create an over-reliance on virtual visits. “There is a lot lost when there is no personal touch, at least once in a while,” said Dr. Andrew Carroll, an Arizona-based family doctor and board member of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Landlords and renters both struggling (Washington Post) In the covid economy of 2021, the federal government has created an ongoing grace period for renters until at least July, banning all evictions in an effort to hold back a historic housing crisis that is already underway. More than 8 million rental properties across the country are behind on payments by an average of $5,600, according to census data. Nearly half of those rental properties are owned not by banks or big corporations but instead by what the government classifies as “small landlords”—people who manage their own rentals and depend on them for basic income, and who are now trapped between tenants who can’t pay and their own mounting bills for insurance, mortgages and property tax. According to government estimates, a third of small landlords are at risk of bankruptcy or foreclosure as the pandemic continues into its second year.

Pandemic baby bust unprecedented in Bay Area, California history (San Francisco Chronicle) U.S. residents are having fewer babies this year. And California’s birth rates in January and February—around the time when early pandemic babies would be due—declined by 15% compared to the same period last year, the steepest year-over-year decline for those months since at least 1960, according to a Chronicle analysis. We used data from California’s Health and Human Services department, which collects monthly birth totals per county. We found that the state’s births declined from nearly 70,000 in the first two months of 2020 to fewer than 59,000 in the same period in 2021.

Zoom Court Is Changing How Justice Is Served (The Atlantic) Last spring, as COVID‑19 infections surged for the first time, many American courts curtailed their operations. As case backlogs swelled, courts moved online, at a speed that has amazed—and sometimes alarmed—judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. In the past year, U.S. courts have conducted millions of hearings, depositions, arraignments, settlement conferences, and even trials—nearly entirely in civil cases or for minor criminal offenses—over Zoom and other meeting platforms. As of late February, Texas, the state that’s moved online most aggressively, had held 1.1 million remote proceedings.

Mexico City metro overpass collapses onto road; 20 dead (AP) An elevated section of the Mexico City metro collapsed and sent a subway car plunging toward a busy boulevard late Monday, killing at least 20 people and injuring about 70, city officials said. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said 49 of the injured were hospitalized, and that seven were in serious condition and undergoing surgery. The overpass was about 5 meters (16 feet) above the road in the southside borough of Tlahuac, but the train ran above a concrete median strip, which apparently lessened the casualties among motorists on the roadway below. “A support beam gave way,” Sheinbaum said, adding that the beam collapsed just as the train passed over it.

El Salvador’s judiciary (Foreign Policy) Lawmakers in El Salvador voted to remove five influential Supreme Court judges and the attorney general over the weekend in a move U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has noted with “grave concern.” The motions to remove the officials passed with a supermajority in El Salvador’s legislature, now ruled by President Nayib Bukele’s New Ideas party following a sweeping victory in February’s elections. Addressing the international community on Twitter Bukele dismissed rebukes over the move. “With all due respect: We are cleaning house … and this doesn’t concern you,” Bukele said.

‘Hospitals are full’ as Argentina COVID-19 cases hit 3 million (Reuters) Argentina coronavirus cases hit 3 million on Sunday since the pandemic began, as medical workers said hospitals were full to capacity despite toughened government measures to bring down the spread of infections. The government of President Alberto Fernandez this week unveiled a new round of tougher restrictions as a second wave of infections has battered the country, filling up intensive care units and setting new daily records for cases and deaths. Marcela Cid, owner of a business on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, said that Argentines were increasingly “locked into a situation” that while necessary, was of little help to anyone trying to move beyond the pandemic.

EU proposes reopening external borders (AP) In an announcement sure to be welcomed by travelers worldwide, EU officials on Monday proposed easing restrictions on visiting the 27-nation bloc as vaccination campaigns across the continent gather speed. Travel to the European Union is currently extremely limited except for a handful of countries with low infection rates. But with the summer tourist season looming, the bloc’s European Commission hopes the new recommendations will dramatically expand that list. The Commission hopes the move will soon allow travelers reunite with their friends and relatives living in Europe and support the bloc’s economy this summer. Under the Commission’s proposal, entry would be granted to all those fully vaccinated with EU-authorized shots. Coronavirus vaccines authorized by the European Medicines Agency, the bloc’s drug regulator, include Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

Indian leader’s party takes electoral hit amid virus surge (AP) India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi suffered a resounding defeat in a key state election on Sunday, indicating his Hindu nationalist party’s political strength may be slipping as the country struggles to contain an unprecedented surge in coronavirus cases. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was unable to dislodge West Bengal state’s firebrand chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, after a hard-fought campaign. His party also failed to win in two southern states, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. But the BJP secured a second term in the northeastern state of Assam and an alliance with regional parties led it to victory in the union territory of Puducherry. Even before the current virus surge, Modi’s party faced stiff challenges in these local legislative elections. Following the disappointing results, Modi stands weakened but faces no threats to staying on as prime minister until his term ends in 2024.

Formal Withdrawal from Afghanistan Begins (AP) US and NATO troops stationed in Afghanistan formally began the withdrawal phase over the weekend, a process that is expected to last through the summer and officially end Sept. 11. Roughly 3,000 US troops and 7,000 coalition troops remain in the country, along with a reported 18,000 Pentagon-employed contractors. The exit has been framed as nonconditional—meaning ongoing attacks by the Taliban against the Afghan government won’t delay the withdrawal. Many have questioned the ability of the Afghan National Army to provide security against the Taliban absent international forces. Despite assurances by Afghan officials, Taliban forces have established themselves across most of the country. Afghan forces control an estimated one-third of the country’s districts, with the Taliban controlling about 10%, and nearly half—areas that include a total of roughly 14 million people—currently contested.

Chinese man crosses Taiwan Strait by rubber dinghy, seeking ‘freedom and equality’ (Washington Post) A Chinese man appeared to sail undetected through the highly militarized Taiwan Strait in a rubber dinghy, fleeing his native China for Taiwan in search of “freedom,” according to Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration. The man, identified only by his surname, Zhou, left Shishi county in Quanzhou, a port city in Fujian province, at 10 a.m. on Friday, arriving more than 10 hours later at Taichung port on Taiwan’s western coast, Taiwan’s Coast Guard said on Monday. Officials said they were still investigating Zhou’s journey over the 100-mile stretch of sea between China and Taiwan, which is patrolled by hundreds of Chinese and Taiwanese coast guard ships and naval vessels. Coast Guard officials, relaying Zhou’s account of his journey, told reporters he had traveled in a rubber raft measuring 8.8 feet by 5 feet that he bought on the Chinese e-commerce site Taobao and fitted with an outboard motor. The incident has prompted concerns about the security of the contentious waterway at a time when military observers worry that long-standing tensions between the governments of China, Taiwan and the United States, which is committed to defending Taiwan, could boil over into military conflict.

Australia warns its citizens of jail and $50,000 fine if they return from India (Washington Post) Even in the pandemic era of closed borders, Australia’s latest travel restriction stands out: Anyone, including Australian citizens, who arrives in the country after visiting India in the previous 14 days can face up to five years in jail, a $50,000 fine or both. On Monday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison defended the move. Australia had seen a sevenfold increase in the percentage of people traveling from India who tested positive for the coronavirus, the prime minister told Sydney’s 2GB radio station. The decision to threaten even Australian citizens with jail time if they return home from India during its record-breaking coronavirus surge is a significant escalation of border restrictions for Australia, an island nation that had already mandated strict controls at its borders throughout the pandemic.

DR Congo declares state of siege over eastern bloodshed (Reuters) Militants killed at least 19 people, including 10 soldiers, in raids on two villages in the east of Democratic Republic of Congo on Saturday, hours after President Felix Tshisekedi declared a state of siege in two provinces. A surge in attacks by armed militias and inter-communal violence in the east have killed more than 300 people since the start of the year as government troops and U.N. peacekeepers struggle to stabilize the situation. The most recent attacks took place early on Saturday when militants raided two villages in North Kivu’s regional hub of Beni, local authorities said. Tshisekedi had declared a state of siege in North Kivu and Ituri provinces on Friday.

[stanandcharleyandfriends]

COVID-19 pet boom has veterinarians backlogged, burned out

May 23, 2021 - Kelli Kennedy, Associated Press

Veterinary clinics around the country, including Brooklyn, have been overrun by new four-legged patients, adding to stress among veterinarians and their staff. Vets interviewed by the Associated Press have extended hours, hired additional staff and refused to take new patients, and they still can’t keep up. Burnout and fatigue are such a concern that some practices are hiring counselors to support their weary staffs.

Approximately 12.6 million U.S. households got a new pet last year after the pandemic was declared in March 2020, according to a COVID-19 Pulse Study by the American Pet Products Association. 

Meanwhile, fewer people relinquished their pets in 2020, so they needed ongoing care, experts said. And as people worked from home and spent more time with their pets, they’ve had more opportunities to notice ailments that could typically go untreated.

VERG (Veterinary Emergency and Referral Group), a 24-hour emergency and specialty animal hospital on Fourth Avenue in Gowanus, Brooklyn, reported a 40 percent jump in emergency care since the pandemic began. That’s also meant more pet hospitalizations, straining various specialties like surgery and cardiology.

“The demand continues to grow,” causing extreme weariness in a profession known for its big-hearted workers, said Verg’s chief medical officer, Dr. Brett Levitzke.

“Fear of the unknown with the pandemic leads to more intense emotions from our clients,” said Levitzke.

He’s seen expletive-laced outbursts and threats from pet owners, and also outpourings of love, with cards and baked goods. After the toll on the staff became noticeable, they hired a compassion fatigue specialist for support.

“Unfortunately, compassion fatigue, anxiety, and depression already plagued our profession, and the pandemic has certainly taken it to another level,” Levitzke said.

Vets were already struggling to meet the pre-pandemic demand, with veterinary schools unable to churn out enough doctors and techs to fill the void.

Banfield Pet Hospital, one of the largest national providers of preventive veterinary medicine, which has a location on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill, had approximately half a million more pet visits in 2020 than in 2019. And its telehealth service more than doubled in volume from March through the end of last year.

During the gloomiest stretches of the pandemic, Dr. Diona Krahn’s veterinary clinic in Raleigh, North Carolina, has been a puppy fest, overrun with new four-legged patients.

Typically, she’d get three or four new puppies a week, but between shelter adoptions and private purchases, the 2020 COVID-19 pet boom brought five to seven new clients a day to her practice. Many are first-time pet owners.

Like many veterinarians across the country, she’s also been seeing more sick animals.

“Everyone is working beyond capacity at this point,” said Krahn, who added evening hours last year.

Krahn left her practice three months ago and now oversees nine veterinary and animal hospital clinics across Utah and Idaho under Pathway Vet Alliance. “All of my practices are booking out several weeks in advance.”

Thrive, another veterinary hospital primary care group, with 110 facilities across the U.S. but none in Brooklyn, reported a 20 percent increase in demand during the pandemic. Both repeated a common refrain — as humans spent more time with their pets, they were more in tune with their ailments — big and small.

“With COVID, a lot of people became powerless to the ones closest to them,” said Claire Pickens, a senior director at Thrive, “but the one thing they still had the ability to control was caring for their pet.”

Clinics have been forced to streamline, having patients fill out forms online or by phone pre-appointment because hiring additional staff often isn’t an option.

“The industry is growing at a rate that it can’t fill all the roles needed to keep up with the increased demand for services,” said Pickens.

Veterinary positions are projected to grow 16 percent by 2029, nearly four times the average of most other occupations, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics. Vet tech jobs are expected to increase nearly 20 percent in the next five years.

“We are still short staffed despite active seeking of additional staff,” said Dr. Katarzyna Ferry, Veterinary Specialty Hospital of Palm Beach Gardens.

[steadystrangerthing]

Petition for Increase Salary Wage for Private and Public Nurses in the Philippines

Living in this world, everybody seems to believe that there is no job that is easy. Everything is hard and difficult because you have to study for a lot of years before you master something. But if you love the things that you are doing, everything will be easy for you to go on until you’ve reach your final goal.

To be nurse is also a difficult job. You have to study for 4 years for you to graduate and then take a board exam. On that 4 years, students have to pay their tuition which sometimes cost them a leg per semester. They have to study and memorize many medical terms and functions. And they have to master everything that they do because mistakes are not acceptable. Mistakes may cost the life of a patient. 

And it’s no surprise that nurses in the Philippines have the lowest salary in Southeast Asia. This may be due to our corrupt government officials and their negligence when it comes to health care facilities. 

When Covid-19 Pandemic started it added burden to medical professionals specifically the Nurses, in every hospital they do have a called “rotation” where nurses are being rotated to different departments and also on the Covid-19 Ward, where positive patients of Covid-19 are admitted. Even without pandemic, Nurses already had a lot of complains about the salary that they receive every month. There are nurses that had lay-offed due to the low salary that they receive, and the job and obligations that they offer is already beyond on the job description that is stated. 

According to the investigation and interview of the News Reporter Mariz Umali of “24 Oras” the average salary of the government Registered Nurses in the Philippines ranges from P22,000 to P42,000 per month. If we compare the salary of the Nurses in the Philippines to other countries in Southeast Asia, we could say that the country of the Philippines has the lowest monthly salary given to the employed Nurses.

Nurses at the same level in Vietnam have a monthly salary of P62, 000 while nurses in Indonesia have a salary of P79, 000. In Thailand, nurses have a salary of P83, 000, followed by Malaysia with P97, 000, while nurses in Singapore have a monthly salary of P236, 400.

"The nurses were underpaid, overworked, and this is why we are calling for help especially on this time of pandemic, because they were already anxious, sick, and tired of doing their work" Filipino Nurses United (FNU) secretary-general Jocelyn Andamo said. 

He also stated that health care has never been prioritized in the country. Thousands of health workers, who call themselves "priso-nurses", had appealed to the government to let them take jobs abroad, Reuters reported last week. The nurses say they feel underpaid, under-appreciated and unprotected in the Philippines according to Karen Lema. 

There have been a proposed special provision in the 2021 national budget for the government nurses when their compensation adjustment is approved. We are all hoping that this proposed provision will be fully implemented to all nurses may it be private or public nurses. According to the Health Service Research, The Philippines is a job-scarce environment and, even for those with jobs in the health care sector, poor working conditions often motivate nurses to seek employment overseas. The country has also become dependent on labor migration to ease the tight domestic labor market. One out of every five employed workers is underemployed, underpaid, or employed below his/her full potential. As a result, the number of Filipinos working abroad has steadily risen and from 1995 to 2000; overseas deployment of workers increased by 5.32 percent annually.

Despite being undervalued, low-wage health workers make essential contributions during the pandemic and beyond. “Nobody is insignificant,” said Tony Powell, a 62-year-old administrative coordinator of a hospital surgical unit in Washington, D.C. “Without environmental service, without dietary, without secretaries, without medical and surgical techs and certified nursing assistants (CNAs), it wouldn’t be a hospital.” Home health workers, for instance, provide the first line of defense against COVID-19 for millions of elderly and vulnerable people living at home. Without that, the limited capacity of hospitals today would be stretched even further. 

Amidst our darkest hour and critical moment where our life is already in grave, our dear nurses and medical workers are the only hands that we can hold into. Time and knowledge that they sacrifice in order to revive and prevent death from us. No wonder why most of the countries such as England, UK, Dubai, and Singapore prioritized their Medical Staffs especially during this Pandemic. Proper treatment, equipments, and salary are the only things they shout for and a government especially the Philippines can always provide that if they wanted to. Let us help our Medical Staffs especially the Nurses to get what they deserved by signing up in the campaign. Through this, we both lend our hand to save them and also to save our economy.

[sciencespies]

Despite the dumpster fire of 2020, here are 11 huge achievements we made in science

https://sciencespies.com/humans/despite-the-dumpster-fire-of-2020-here-are-11-huge-achievements-we-made-in-science/

Despite the dumpster fire of 2020, here are 11 huge achievements we made in science

With just a handful of days left in this strange beast of a year that will most certainly go down in history books, we thought it would be nice to reflect on the marvellous things scientists still delivered, despite everything.

Of course, scientific achievements are usually years in the making. Nevertheless, here’s a round-up of some of the exciting science news we reported in 2020. Just to remember that it wasn’t all terrible.

1. We found the first known extraterrestrial protein in a meteorite

Could life emerge elsewhere in the Solar System? As curious and intelligent beings, humans are naturally interested in finding out if living creatures thrive beyond the confines of our little blue space rock. One way to discover this requires turning to meteorites.

Earlier this year, scientists revealed they had found the first-ever extraterrestrial protein, tucked inside a meteorite that fell to Earth 30 years ago.

“We’re pretty sure that proteins are likely to exist in space,” astronomer Chenoa Tremblay told ScienceAlert in March. “But if we can actually start finding evidence of their existence, and what some of the structures and the common structures might be, I think that’s really interesting and exciting.”

2. We avoided some troubling changes in the atmosphere

A new study revealed that the famed Montreal Protocol – the 1987 agreement to stop producing ozone-depleting substances – could be responsible for pausing, or even reversing, some troubling changes in air currents around our planet’s Southern Hemisphere.

Healing the protective ozone layer surrounding Earth seems to have paused the migration of an air current known as the southern jet stream, a phenomenon that ended up pushing parts of Australia into prolonged drought.

“If the ozone layer is recovering, and the circulation is moving north, that’s good news on two fronts,” explained chemist Ian Rae from the University of Melbourne.

3. An AI solved a 50-year-old biology challenge, decades before anyone expected

Earlier this month, scientists at the UK-based artificial intelligence company DeepMind announced that a new AI system had effectively solved a long-standing and incredibly complex scientific problem concerning the structure and behaviour of proteins.

For about 50 years, researchers have strived to predict how proteins achieve their three-dimensional structure. The astronomical number of potential configurations has made this task – known as the protein-folding problem – incredibly difficult.

DeepMind’s success means a huge step forward in a range of research endeavours, from disease modelling and drug discovery, to applications far beyond health research.

4. Scientists used fast radio bursts to find the Universe’s missing matter

In a mesmerising tale of mystery within a mystery, earlier this year a really clever application of fast radio burst (FRB) tracing gave astronomers an answer to a perplexing question – just where is the missing matter in the Universe?

We’re not talking about dark matter here, but the baryonic (normal) matter that should be there on account of all our calculations, but simply couldn’t be detected until now. The Universe is vast, and the stretches between galaxies enormous. Yet in that seemingly empty space, lone atoms are still kicking around.

While looking for the source of the powerful interstellar signals known as FRBs, researchers figured out that extremely diffuse gas can account for all the missing ‘normal’ matter in the Universe. Phew.

5. We also confirmed the first-ever detection of an FRB in our own galaxy

That’s right. On 28 April 2020, a Milky Way magnetar called SGR 1935+2154 flared up in a single, millisecond-long burst so incredibly bright, it would have been detectable from another galaxy.

This landmark detection made a huge and immediate impact on the study of mysterious FRBs, that until now had only been detected coming from outside our galaxy, making their precise source difficult to pin down.

“This sort of, in most people’s minds, settles the origin of FRBs as coming from magnetars,” astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni of Caltech told ScienceAlert.

Astronomers had a whale of a time doing follow-up work on this detection, and by November we also had confirmation that this intra-galactic FRB is a repeater. We can expect even more excitement around this next year, for sure.

6. SpaceX and NASA made history with the first crewed launch

Space enthusiasts truly had lots of cause for excitement this year, as various launches and space missions soldiered on despite the global pandemic. On 30 May 2020, SpaceX became the first private space company to deliver NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).

We have liftoff. History is made as @NASA_Astronauts launch from @NASAKennedy for the first time in nine years on the @SpaceX Crew Dragon: pic.twitter.com/alX1t1JBAt

— NASA (@NASA) May 30, 2020

Not only did they safely bring them home several months later, another crewed launch went off without a hitch in November, delivering four astronauts to the space station – the first in what will likely be many routine missions in 2021 and beyond. 

7. NASA touched an asteroid, and JAXA brought back a sample

After a long trip of more than 320 million kilometres (200 million miles), NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft finally touched down on asteroid Bennu in October, collecting a sample of its surface rubble, its efforts captured for posterity in magnificent footage delivered by the space agency. We can expect the probe to return with its precious cargo in 2023.

Last year, the Japanese space agency JAXA achieved a similar feat with the Hayabusa2 probe, collecting a sample from asteroid Ryugu. In December this year, we witnessed the safe return of that sample, and have already been treated to a first glimpse of some of the black dust the team retrieved. We can’t wait to learn more about what these asteroid missions will discover.

Ryugu dust on the outside chamber of the retrieval capsule. (JAXA)

8. Scientists found the first animal that doesn’t need oxygen to survive

Back here on our own world, biologists were in for a surprise when they found the first multicellular organism without a mitochondrial genome – which means an organism that doesn’t breathe. In fact, it lives without any need for oxygen at all.

While some single-celled organisms are known to thrive perfectly well in anaerobic conditions, the fact this common salmon parasite, a jellyfish-like creature Henneguya salminicola, doesn’t need oxygen to survive is quite remarkable, and has left researchers with many new questions to answer.

H. salminicola under the microscope. (Stephen Douglas Atkinson)

9. We got spectacular footage of a “long stringy stingy thingy” off the coast of Australia

Back in April, a trailing ribbon of conjoined tentacled clones caused quite a stir amongst a bunch of biologists exploring a little-studied part of the ocean off the coast of Western Australia. This strange entity was a particularly long siphonophore, a floating string of thousands of individual zooids. In fact, it could be one of the longest such strings ever observed.

Check out this beautiful *giant* siphonophore Apolemia recorded on #NingalooCanyons expedition. It seems likely that this specimen is the largest ever recorded, and in strange UFO-like feeding posture. Thanks @Caseywdunn for info @wamuseum @GeoscienceAus @CurtinUni @Scripps_Ocean pic.twitter.com/QirkIWDu6S

— Schmidt Ocean (@SchmidtOcean) April 6, 2020

“Everyone was blown away when it came into view,” biologists Nerida Wilson and Lisa Kirkendale from the Western Australian Museum told ScienceAlert.

“There was a lot of excitement. People came pouring into the control room from all over the ship. Siphonophores are commonly seen but this one was both large and unusual-looking.”

10. A physicist came up with the mathematics that makes ‘paradox-free’ time travel plausible

Wouldn’t it be great to pop into a time-machine and fix up some mishap you’ve done in your past, all without accidentally killing your grandfather in the process?

Well, 2020 also became the year when we learned of a mathematically sound solution to time travel that doesn’t muck everything up. Physics student Germain Tobar from the University of Queensland in Australia worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

While it hasn’t gotten us immediately closer to having a working time machine, his calculations show that space-time can potentially adapt itself to avoid paradoxes. And, according to Tobar’s supervisor, the mathematics checks out. Fabulous.

11. The first COVID-19 vaccines are already being administered outside of clinical trials

The single biggest challenge the world faced this year was the global COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare professionals and essential workers have carried much of the burden of keeping society afloat, and we can never thank them enough. Meanwhile, researchers from myriad relevant fields – from immunology to genetics – have also worked tirelessly all year long to better understand the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

That work will continue into the new year, but in late November we finally got the first taste of what it means to accelerate scientific research and funding beyond its typical pace. The very first vaccines intended to protect people from COVID-19 have already completed all the necessary phases of clinical trials, and are being rolled out in the UK, US, and parts or Europe.

Lots more will need to be done before we can put this devastating pandemic behind us and protect the most vulnerable communities worldwide, but already having effective vaccines is a truly fantastic achievement, and without a doubt the biggest cause for celebration of science this year. One to carry us into 2021 full of hope.

#Humans

[livinginlandmarketing]

K-rails, bollards, 4-ton boulders and other beefed-up barriers have been going up around the Santa Ana riverbed in Riverside County this year to halt a recent spike in crashes involving all-terrain vehicles.

Riverside city and county authorities are also intensifying efforts to keep ATVs off of public streets.

Off-road vehicles are illegal to operate anywhere in the city, and motorized vehicles are banned from the basin. But since 2018, Riverside police have responded to 40 crashes involving dirt bikes, quads, side-by-sides and other ATVs, Riverside Police Officer Amanda Beeman said.

She added that 18 of those collisions took place in 2021. Four crashes have sent five people to hospitals and left another three people dead.

“These (off-road) vehicles shouldn’t even be on the road,” Beeman said.

One of those who died was a 20-year-old man riding a dirt bike that didn’t have headlights the evening of Thursday, Jan. 21. It collided with a Subaru Crosstrek that was turning left from Main Street onto Alamo Street.

Most recently, a Corona man was killed Aug. 6, when the 2006 Jeep he was driving rolled down a ravine in La Sierra Hills. A woman and 10-year-old boy were also in the vehicle and suffered critical injuries.

Police and firefighters respond to a crash involving an ATV and a compact SUV in Riverside on Aug. 4, 2021. The two people riding the quad were ejected from the vehicle and hospitalized with serious injuries. The driver of the SUV was also taken to a hospital with minor injuries. (Photo courtesy of the Riverside Police Department)

Hobby becomes hazard

More people may have taken up off-roading recently as a way to overcome the isolation resulting from stay-at-home orders and the closure of most bars and clubs during the pandemic, Beeman said.

“Since COVID, I have seen a dramatic increase in the off-road use of the river bottom and off-road vehicles on the road,” she said.

Many ATVs aren’t equipped with appropriate lighting and other features required to be safely driven on public streets, Beeman said. Some people ride their off-road vehicles recklessly, she added.

“When you run a stop sign or a red light, or you’re speeding up and down a street and someone pulls out in front of you, we’re seeing injuries occurring,” Beeman said. “More prevalently, because these people aren’t wearing helmets. They’re not wearing seatbelts. They’re not obeying the speed limit.”

On Aug. 4, a 30-year-old man who was not wearing a helmet and a 16-year-old boy riding with him were ejected from a Yamaha YFZ. Police said it ran a red light and struck a Honda CRV at the intersection of Columbia Avenue and Orange Street. The ATV riders were seriously hurt and taken to a hospital, along with the 65-year-old driver of the SUV, who suffered what were described as minor injuries.

Beyond city limits

People riding ATVs and dirt bikes on paved streets may be coming and going from the Santa Ana riverbed, Beeman said. It and the adjacent cycling and hiking trail are off-limits to motor vehicles. But that hasn’t stopped the area from becoming a popular destination for off-roading, Riverside Police Lt. Chad Milby said.

It often draws people from beyond the city’s limits.

A 4-wheel drive vehicle sits stuck in silt in the Santa Ana riverbed Thursday, Sept. 2, 2021. The city of Riverside has placed steel bollard posts at a number of entrances into the basin to prevent vehicles from entering, though vehicles are still able to gain access to the basin through areas outside the city. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

A bicyclist pedals past steel bollard posts as he prepares to ride along side the Santa Ana riverbed in Riverside Thursday, Sept. 2, 2021. The city has placed the posts at a number of entrances to the river basin to prevent 4-wheeled vehicles from entering. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Riverside police officer Russ Williams prepares to lock a steel bollard post back in place to prevent vehicle access into the Santa Ana River in Riverside Thursday, Sept. 2, 2021. The city has installed the posts along various entry points to the Santa Ana River to prevent 4-wheel vehicles from entering into the basin. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Riverside police officer Russ Williams prepares to remove a steel bollard post blocking access to the Santa Ana River as fellow officer Ryan Railsback looks on in Riverside Thursday, Sept. 2, 2021. The city has installed the posts along various entry points to the Santa Ana River to prevent 4-wheel vehicles from entering into the basin. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Boulders have also been placed to help prevent access by vehicles into the Santa Ana riverbed in Riverside Thursday, Sept.. 2, 2021. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Riverside police officer Russ Williams prepares to remove a steel bollard post blocking access to the Santa Ana River as fellow officer Ryan Railsback looks on in Riverside Thursday, Sept. 2, 2021. The city has installed the posts along various entry points to the Santa Ana River to prevent 4-wheel vehicles from entering into the basin. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Riverside police officer Russ Williams unlocks and removes a steel bollard post blocking access to the Santa Ana River as fellow officer Ryan Railsback looks on in Riverside Thursday, Sept. 2, 2021. The city has installed the posts along various entry points to the Santa Ana River to prevent 4-wheel vehicles from entering into the basin. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

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Police and local officials have repeatedly received complaints from nearby residents over the years about raucous gatherings and off-roaders speeding through the riverbed, Riverside City Councilwoman Erin Edwards said. Motorists careening through the area pose a hazard to those walking or cycling along trails, and endanger wildlife on nearby nature preserves. In addition, backfire and heat from exhausts could potentially spark a fire.

“We need to keep this place safe for everyone,” Edwards said. “Especially given the past year or so, as a place for people to get out and enjoy nature.”

Milby recalled hundreds of people with quads, side-by-sides and even RVs at an illegal party in the riverbed held beneath the 60 Freeway, near Market Street, during the last weekend of February. A fight at the gathering led to the fatal stabbing of a 19-year-old.

“It’s dangerous,” Beeman said. “It’s dark. People can get lost. People can get hurt, and then it takes us a long time to locate those people and get them help.”

Officers and park rangers have always maintained a regular presence in the area to deter off-roading, Milby said. But that hasn’t stopped people from cutting the locks off of gates or plowing through hollow bollards so they can bring their toys onto paths built for pedestrians and cyclists.

“We were always repairing and replacing barriers before,” Riverside Parks, Recreation and Community Services interim director Randy McDaniel said. “It was like a game of Whac-A-Mole.”

More barriers, patrols

In response to the escalating number of crashes this year, officers surveyed the 11-mile stretch of the Santa Ana River that passes through the city, Milby said. They charted the access points most frequently used by off-roaders.  

Police brought their findings to city officials and county agencies that manage portions of the riverbed. Together, they came up with a plan.

City Parks and Recreation staff have already placed several  3- to 4-ton boulders and reinforced bollards at Fairmount Park, Ryan Bonamino Park and the Martha Mclean – Anza Narrows Park, McDaniel said.

The push to secure the riverbed extends beyond the city limits. County Flood Control workers have already installed about five times as many boulders as city parks and recreation crews have, McDaniel said.

And Riverside County Supervisor Karen Spiegel is currently leading an effort that aims to map out all the access points along the remainder of the riverbed running through her district by the end of the year, County Parks and Recreations Assistant Director Erin Gettis said.

But barriers alone won’t be enough to solve the problem. Bikers and hikers still need to be able to get onto the Santa Ana River Trail, which means dirt bikes and slim ATVs may still be able to pass through, McDaniel said.

So police, deputies and park rangers have stepped up patrols of the area, Milby said. Their focus is on prevention and education, because it’s simply too risky to go after someone riding a quad with its exhaust blaring at nearly full throttle along the Santa Ana Riverbed, he and Beeman said.

“It’s really the last place you want to get into a pursuit,” Milby said. “The terrain isn’t solid. And you’ve got members of the homeless population living down there, bikers and joggers that you don’t want to see injured in a collision.”

Collaborative efforts to curb the use of off-road vehicles appears to be yielding early results in the city of Riverside. Edwards said the number of complaints from residents near the riverbed have noticeably decreased since improved barriers started going up. And police patrolling the area aren’t spotting as many off-roaders in the riverbed as they had been earlier this year, Milby said.

Beeman, an off-roading enthusiast herself, urged people to enjoy their toys in places where they won’t affect the safety and well-being of others.

“We have El Mirage Dry Lake, Glamis, the (Bureau of Land Management) area at Dumont Dunes, Pismo if you’re into the beach thing, you have all these places,” Beeman said. “Really where we are at in Riverside is pretty centrally located to any of these places. You can get to them within a couple hours drive, maybe even an hour and a half and it’s perfectly legal and appropriate.”

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-on September 05, 2021 at 10:34AM by Eric Licas

[covid19updater]

COVID19 Updates: 08/13/2021

UK: Can someone point me to where 'cases are stable' and vaccines are 'breaking the link between infections and serious illness'? Cases are rising from 30K/day, 615 deaths in the past wk & drops in hospitalisations have halted. This is literally PHE's own data. 

US:  27 people test positive for coronavirus on Carnival cruise ship LINK

Fiji:  644 new cases reported on 13 August in Fiji, bringing the cumulative total to 39,456. Test positivity rate (7 day average) is 36.4%. #covid19 #covid19fiji

US:  U.S. COVID update: More than 1,000 new deaths - New cases: 144,726 - Average: 125,533 (+2,987) - In hospital: 79,265 (+2,402) - In ICU: 19,271 (+655) - New deaths: 1,036

Indiana:  BREAKING: The Supreme Court refuses grant Indiana University students’ request to block the school’s vaccine mandate. Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected the request without referring it to the full court.

Mississippi:  With hospital system near collapse, Mississippi begs for hospital ship to rescue state “The Mississippi hospital system will fail within the next five to seven or 10 days if the current trajectory continues,” University of Mississippi School of Medicine Dean LouAnn Woodward said. LINK

Australia:  100s more Australian military personnel to deploy next week to Sydney, to help enforce city’s LD. This comes as officials report biggest daily  in covid-19, & outbreak spreading beyond Sydney. Sydney’s nine-week LD now unlikely to end Aug 28, as originally planned;

Israel:  Israel Health Ministry said it would be offering a third Pfizer dose to “people over 50, health care workers, people with severe risk factors for the coronavirus, prisoners and wardens”.

Thailand:  Thailand projects that coronavirus cases in the country could double by early next month to 45,000 per day, despite lockdown measures. Thailand which recorded a record 23,418 new cases today and 184 new deaths, struggles to contain its worst outbreak to date;

Japan:  Japan's daily coronavirus cases top 20,000 for 1st time LINK

Japan:  Tokyo to set up 'waiting stations' to accept COVID-19 patients amid lack of hospital beds LINK

Japan:  A woman infected in Japan's first case of the Lambda coronavirus variant has been identified as a person associated with the Tokyo Olympics, government sources said Friday. LINK

Germany:  German Health Minister Jens Spahn has said the country could keep coronavirus restrictions until next Spring - BILD

US:  NIH Director Collins says a booster shot of the Covid-19 vaccine could come "later this fall or early next year" LINK

US:  New hospital admissions in the US due to COVID-19 rose +29.6% from a week ago.

Florida:  New hospital admissions in Florida due to COVID-19 are up a further +22.3% from a week ago, to a new high.

Mississippi:  ‘We are stretched to breaking point': Pulmonologist warns about the dire state of Mississippi hospitals LINK

Florida:  After just the second day of school, 440 students were already quarantined in Florida's Palm Beach County due to detected cases of COVID.

World:  American "archbishop" is distributing bleach as "miracle cure" for COVID LINK

Ohio:  St. Vincent Medical Center saves patient with severe case of COVID-19 using ECMO technology LINK

Hawaii:  2 tourists were arrested in Hawaii in connection with fake COVID-19 vaccination cards, officials say LINK

Canada:  Alberta to backtrack on plans to lift COVID-19 protocols, government source says LINK

UK:  COVID-19: UK reports another 32,700 coronavirus cases and 100 deaths | UK News | Sky News

Tennessee:  In the first two weeks of August, the Memphis Fire Department said it has been overwhelmed by a call volume 23 percent higher than this time last year. The Memphis dispatch center is taking an average of 469 calls a day. LINK

Tennessee:  Methodist LeBonheur staff updates on Delta in the embedded video. Here is what it looks like here in the Mid-South. LINK

Israel:  As of Wednesday, Israel had 451 seriously ill Covid patients in its hospitals. 276 are vaccinated: 266 fully, 10 partly. A year ago today, before vaccines existed, it had a TOTAL of 368 seriously ill hospitalized patients. If this is vaccine success, I'd hate to see failure.

Utah:  With COVID-19 rates still holding strong, Utah's intensive care units are officially over capacity at 102% full. LINK

Vietnam:  VIETNAM: COVID-19 lockdown extended in Hanoi's Chuong Duong through 28 August

Arkansas:  #NEW: The number of #COVID19 patients admitted to Arkansas Children’s has slightly increased since Wednesday. 31 patients with coronavirus, 28 in Little Rock and three in Springdale. 14 are in ICU and seven are on a ventilator.

Arkansas:  Arkansas now has TEN CASES OF THE LAMBDA VARIANT.

UK: Manchester United:  For those attending tomorrow’s game, please consider downloading the NHS Covid-19 app onto your smartphone to be able to check in. You will be prompted to use the app when you enter the stadium.

RUMINT (UK):  Had an old feller come in my covid testing clinic this afternoon, he is a cancer patient who has been isolating for the past year, double vaxxed, went out for the first time last weekend to watch a soccer match, woke up this morning, cough, sore throat, no taste or smell, came in to the clinic in a panic, the poor chap couldn't believe he had isolated that long, only to get infected at a soccer match

Texas:  96% of ICU beds across Texas are full as COVID cases surge: "Some wait hours, some wait days" LINK

RUMINT (Iowa):  Nurse: We got a COVID+ admit last night here for the state fair. They are visiting with family from out of state. They knew they were COVID+. His family still plans to attend, "You can't catch covid outside."

UK:  United Kingdom Daily Coronavirus (COVID-19) Report · Friday 13th August. 32,700 new cases (people positive) reported, giving a total of 6,211,868. 100 new deaths reported, giving a total of 130,801.

Arkansas:  #BREAKING: Arkansas health officials report 1,458 #COVID19 hospitalizations, the highest ever since the pandemic began. The state recorded 3,023 new cases in the last 24 hours. #ARNews

World:  Emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.575.2 containing the E484K mutation in the spike protein in Pamplona (Spain) May-June 2021 LINK

Oregon:  Is @OregonGovBrown and @OregonDHSAPD *trying* to repeat the mistake of NY gov Cuomo by moving COVID patients to long term care facilities? LINK

Iran:  Iran’s Health System ‘Beyond Disastrous’ from Covid Surge

World:  How SARS-CoV-2 Evades And Suppresses The Immune System (Part Two) LINK

US:  BREAKING: Number of Americans hospitalized with COVID-19 tops 80,000

Tennessee:  DRAMATIC! Latest @TNDeptofHealth data shows #COVID19 cases skyrocketing among Tennessee's school-age children - almost 4,000 cases reported so far this week.

US:  Some U.S. hospitals have reported spikes in amputations as #COVID19 disrupted routine care. Major amputations shot up 42% last year at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago, according to the hospital’s section chief for wound healing and tissue repair

Tennessee:  Vanderbilt University Medical Center, arguably the most important medical facility in the entire state of Tennessee, is "completely full." LINK

Hawaii:  BREAKING:  1167 #COVID19 cases reported today, highest one day total but @HawaiiDOH says this is a combination of cases from the past 24 hrs plus cases from earlier this week not reported due to lab issues. Average daily count for the 3 days impacted = 729/day. #HawaiiNewsNow

District of Columbia:  At Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., diagnoses of Type 2 Diabetes nearly tripled in the first year of the pandemic from a year earlier. Dr. Brynn Marks said school closures and decreased physical activity likely contributed to the spike

US:  A COVID-19 patient in Oklahoma needed a bed. The closest one was in Boise,Idaho. It is 1,107 miles from Boise City, OK to Boise, ID. LINK

Alabama:  #AL #Breaking Gov. Kay Ivey issues ‘limited’ COVID-19 emergency order; ‘No statewide mandates, closures’ LINK

South Carolina:  Pickens County School District decides to go virtual after emergency meeting on COVID-19 cases LINK

World:  Why the delta variant is hitting kids hard in the U.S. and how we can prevent that in Canada LINK

India:  A 69-year-old fully vaccinated journalist has died of #DeltaPlusVariant of #COVID19 at Nagothane in Maharashtra’s Raigad district. LINK

US:  U.S. COVID update: - New cases: 153,659 - Average: 128,680 (+3,147) - In hospital: 81,183 (+1,918) - In ICU: 19,856 (+585) - New deaths: 886

Philippines:  13,177 new Covid19 cases yesterday. Test Positivity Rate is 23.% Total tests done was 57,355 tests yesterday

Oregon:  PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- Oregon governor deploying up to 1,500 National Guard troops to support hospitals as COVID cases soar.

Iceland:  Yesterday(12.08) Iceland 30 covid patients, 5 of them in the ICU, 4 on ventilators. 20 are fully vaccinated, 10 not vaccinated. Of the 5 in ICU, 4 are fully vaxed. 68 hospital admissions for this 40% not vaxed. 9 have been in the ICU, 6 of them vaxed. No deaths.

Georgia:  Metro Atlanta school districts report over 3,000 cases of COVID-19 in first weeks. Georgia reports highest 7-day average of COVID-19 cases in children since start of pandemic. Georgia reported the highest 7-day average of new COVID-19 cases among children 17 and younger since the start of the pandemic Friday. Today’s 7-day average was 949.8 for children between 0 and 17 years old across the state. Just one month ago, on July 13, the state was averaging 69.1 cases in that age group. That represents over a 1,200% increase in cases over the course of the last 30 days. The previous highest 7-day average was 868.4 cases on Jan. 14, 2021.

RUMINT (Mississippi):  What's the next level up from wild weasel? Because that's where Mississippi is today. Going parabolic over there. Two and a half times more cases than last Friday but nowhere left to put the sick.

New Jersey:  @ABC7NY @CBSNewYork @NBCNewYork The State of New Jersey has almost 700 people in the ICU with COVID-19 variants. Eight died from COVID-19 on Wednesday. Southern New Jersey is a disaster.

[newstfionline]

Friday, July 30, 2021

Alaskan coast 8.2 magnitude earthquake was the strongest one in decades, official says (CNN) The 8.2 magnitude earthquake that struck off Alaska’s coast Wednesday night was the strongest one since 1964, an official told CNN. The very strong quake was located about 56 miles (91 kilometers) east southeast of Perryville, Alaska, and happened around 10:15 p.m. Wednesday, the US Geological Survey said. “This event was felt throughout the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak,” according to the Alaska Earthquake Center.

Homes lose water as wells run dry in drought-ravaged basin MALIN, Ore. (AP) Judy and Jim Shanks know the exact date their home’s well went dry—June 24. Since then, their life has been an endless cycle of imposing on relatives for showers and laundry, hauling water to feed a small herd of cattle and desperately waiting for a local well-drilling company to make it to their name on a monthslong wait list. The couple’s well is among potentially hundreds that have dried up in recent weeks in an area near the Oregon-California border suffering through a historic drought, leaving homes with no running water just a few months after the federal government shut off irrigation to hundreds of the region’s farmers for the first time ever. Officials have formal reports of 117 empty wells but suspect more than 300 have gone dry in the past few weeks as the consequences of the Klamath River basin’s water scarcity extend far beyond farmers’ fields. Worried homeowners face waits of six months or more to get new, deeper wells dug because of the surging demand, with no guarantee that those wells, too, won’t ultimately go dry. While much of the West is experiencing exceptional drought conditions, the toll on everyday life is particularly stark in this region filled with flat vistas of sprawling alfalfa and potato fields and normally teeming wetlands.

Biden orders tough new vaccination rules for federal government (AP) President Joe Biden on Thursday announced sweeping new pandemic requirements for millions of federal workers. Federal workers will be required to attest they’ve been vaccinated against the coronavirus or else face mandatory masking, weekly testing, distancing and other new rules. The newly strict guidelines are aimed at boosting sluggish vaccination rates among the four million Americans who draw federal paychecks and to set an example for private employers around the country. The administration encouraged businesses to follow its lead on incentivizing vaccinations by imposing burdens on the unvaccinated. Rather than mandating that federal workers receive vaccines, the plan will make life more difficult for those who are unvaccinated to encourage them to comply. Biden also directed the Defense Department to look into adding the COVID-19 shot to its list of required vaccinations for members of the military. And he has directed his team to take steps to apply similar requirements to all federal contractors. Biden also urged state and local governments to use funds provided by the coronavirus relief package to incentivize vaccinations by offering $100 to individuals who get the shots. And he announced that small- and medium-sized businesses will receive reimbursements if they offer employees time off to get family members vaccinated.

Mexico declares $3 billion U.S. security deal ‘dead,’ seeks revamp (Washington Post) Frustrated by raging violence, the Mexican government is seeking to overhaul the Merida Initiative, a $3 billion U.S. aid program that’s been the centerpiece of security cooperation between the two nations for more than a decade—but has failed to reduce bloodshed. Mexican officials say they have been meeting with Biden administration officials since late spring to refocus their cooperation against drug cartels and other criminal groups, amid growing concerns that such gangs are expanding their control over Mexican territory. “The Merida Initiative is dead. It doesn’t work, okay?” Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard told The Washington Post in the government’s first detailed comments on the discussions. “We are now in another era.” Launched during the presidency of George W. Bush, the Merida Initiative initially provided hundreds of millions of dollars for aircraft, helicopters and other hardware for Mexico’s security forces. In recent years, the funding shifted to technical aid and training to strengthen Mexico’s police and justice system. But despite the billions of dollars in aid, there has been a “huge, huge increase in violence,” Ebrard noted. Homicides in Mexico have quadrupled since the initiative was announced in 2007. Drug overdose deaths in the United States, meanwhile, soared to a record 93,331 last year, fueled by the rising use of fentanyl, much of it smuggled across the southwest border.

Something strange is happening in Britain. Covid cases are plummeting instead of soaring. (Washington Post) This is a puzzler. Coronavirus cases are plummeting in Britain. They were supposed to soar. Scientists aren’t sure why they haven’t. The trajectory of the virus in Britain is something the world is watching closely and anxiously, as a test of how the delta variant behaves in a society with relatively high vaccination rates. And now people are asking if this could be the first real-world evidence that the pandemic in Britain is sputtering out—after three national lockdowns and almost 130,000 deaths. Public health experts, alongside the government, predicted that cases would be rising in Britain at this point, perhaps even exponentially.

France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books. (NYT) When the French government launched a smartphone app that gives 300 euros to every 18-year-old in the country for cultural purchases like books and music, or exhibition and performance tickets, most young people’s impulse wasn’t to buy Proust’s greatest works or to line up and see Molière. Instead, France’s teenagers flocked to manga. As of this month, books represented over 75 percent of all purchases made through the app since it was introduced nationwide in May—and roughly two-thirds of those books were manga, according to the organization that runs the app, called the Culture Pass. The focus on comic books reveals a subtle tension at the heart of the Culture Pass’s design, between the almost total freedom it affords young users—including to buy the mass media they already love—and its architects’ aim of guiding users toward lesser-known and more highbrow arts. Opponents accuse Macron of throwing cash at young people to court their vote before next year’s presidential election.

Europe on vacation, but vaccinations not taking a break (AP) Europe’s famed summer holiday season is in full swing, but efforts to inoculate people against the coronavirus are not taking a break. Instead, with lockdowns easing despite concerns about variants and nations looking to breathe new life into their ailing tourism industries, vaccinations are being taken to vacationers. From France’s sun-kissed Mediterranean coast to the azure waters of Italy’s Adriatic beaches and Russian Black Sea resorts, health authorities are trying to make a COVID-19 shot as much part of this summer as sunscreen and shades for those who are not yet fully vaccinated. The new drive to take shots to tourists is a way of adapting to Europe’s annual summer migration, when it seems whole cities empty of their residents for weeks.

Taliban assassinations of Afghan pilots 'worrisome,' U.S. govt watchdog says (Reuters) Taliban assassinations of Afghan pilots marks another "worrisome development" for the Afghan Air Force as it reels from a surge in fighting, a U.S. government watchdog said in a report released on Thursday. At least seven Afghan pilots have been assassinated off base in recent months, two senior Afghan government officials told Reuters, part of what the Islamist Taliban says is a campaign to see U.S.-trained Afghan pilots “targeted and eliminated.” The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), in its quarterly report to Congress covering the three-month period through June, broadly portrayed an Afghan Air Force (AAF) under growing strain from battling the Taliban amid the U.S. withdrawal—and becoming less ready to fight. The AAF’s fleet of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, for example, had a 39 percent readiness rate in June, about half the level of April and May.

Floods make thousands homeless in Bangladesh Rohingya camps (AP) Days of heavy rainfall have pelted Rohingya refugee camps in southern Bangladesh, destroying dwellings and sending thousands of people to live with extended family or in communal shelters. Just in the 24 hours to Wednesday alone, more than 30 centimeters (11.8 inches) of rain fell on the camps in Cox’s Bazar district hosting more than 800,000 Rohingya, the U.N. refugee agency said. That’s nearly half the average July rainfall in one day while more heavy downpours are expected in the next few days and the monsoon season stretches over the next three months. Citing initial reports, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said more than 12,000 refugees were affected by the heavy rainfall while an estimated 2,500 shelters have been damaged or destroyed.

Thailand sets up hospital at airport; Cambodia closes border (AP) Health authorities in Thailand raced to set up a large field hospital in a cargo building at one of Bangkok’s airports on Thursday as the country reported record numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths. Other field hospitals are already in use in the capital after it ran out of hospital facilities for thousands of infected residents. The airport, a domestic and regional hub, has had little use because almost all domestic flights were canceled two weeks ago. The quick spread of the delta variant also led neighboring Cambodia to seal its border with Thailand on Thursday and order a lockdown and movement restrictions in eight provinces.

Outspoken Chinese billionaire Sun Dawu sentenced to 18 years in prison (CNN) Billionaire Sun Dawu, a vocal critic of the Chinese government, was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Wednesday for “picking quarrels and provoking troubles,” according to an official statement posted by the court. Sun was arrested in March this year. His company, Hebei Dawu Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Group, owns farming operations in China and employs about 9,000 people in poultry processing, pet food production and other industries. He is also famous for being an outspoken critic of China’s ruling Communist Party. As part of his 18-year sentence, Dawu was also fined 3.11 million yuan ($480,000). Sun was one of very few people in China to publicly accuse the government of attempting to cover up the extent of the African swine flu outbreak in 2019, which eventually killed more than 100 million pigs in the country. In an interview with CNN in May 2019, Sun said local officials had only retested his pigs for the disease when he had started to post pictures of the dead animals online. Sun’s sentencing comes amid a growing crackdown on private enterprises in China, as Beijing attempts to pull into line the country’s free-wheeling entrepreneurs. In a set of guidelines put out in September 2020, the Communist Party said the private sector needed “politically sensible people” who would “firmly listen to the party.”

Lockdown Under (Reuters) Sydney, Australia announced Wednesday that they would be extending their lockdown by four weeks. The extension was announced with frustration by Premier Gladys Berejikilan, who stated, “I am as upset and frustrated as all of you that we were not able to get the case numbers we would have liked at this point in time but that is the reality,” during a televised news conference. Berejiklian added police would boost enforcement of wide-ranging social distancing rules and urged people to report suspected wrongdoing. The multiple lockdown extensions have turned a “snap” lockdown into the country’s longest, with many fearing another recession.

Probe into Beirut blast stalls again, leaving families fuming one year on (Reuters) Ibrahim Hoteit lost his younger brother, Tharwat, in the huge explosion that ripped through the port of Beirut last August. He went around hospitals collecting body parts, starting with Tharwat’s scalp, and buried his remains in a small coffin. Nearly a year later, Hoteit, a spokesperson for families of more than 200 people who died in the disaster, is still trying to call to account those he says are responsible for allowing the accident to happen. As Beirut prepares to mark the first anniversary of a blast that flattened large swathes of the city, politicians and senior security officials have yet to be questioned in a formal investigation. Much of the devastation from the blast is still visible. The port resembles a bomb site, and many buildings have been left in a state of collapse. Major questions remain unanswered, including why such a large shipment of ammonium nitrate, a highly explosive chemical used in bombs and fertiliser, was left stored in the middle of a crowded city for years after being unloaded in 2013.

[johnboothus]

Back on the Ale Trail: Will Beer Tourism Rebound After the Pandemic?

This month, we’re heading outdoors with the best drinks for the backyard, beach, and beyond. In Take It Outside, we’re exploring our favorite local spots and far-flung destinations that make summer the ultimate season for elevated drinking. 

When I reach Chris O’Leary, he’s on his way from New York City to Spokane, Wash., to take a beer trip with a pal he hasn’t seen since the before times. “I’m literally on a plane right now,” he texts. It’s hardly a surprise. Since 2011, O’Leary, a marketing executive who publishes the New York-focused beer blog Brew York, has visited 2,267 craft breweries around the world. Averaging between 250 and 350 breweries per year, O’Leary is one of the most well-traveled beer tourists in the world, and I’d called him to get his take on the post-pandemic future of ale trails, brew tours, and general beer-related travel as hopefully vaccinated Americans re-embrace their wanderlust this summer and beyond.

“[Breweries] are as busy now, if not busier, than I’ve ever seen them,” he says on a phone interview from SeaTac’s baggage claim. “People are just ready to get back out there.” If O’Leary is right, and beer tourism is coming back strong in a post-pandemic world, it’ll be good news for the breweries, travel companies, and other hospitality companies that rely on beer-focused travelers to spend cash in their communities. But everything has changed since we all went into lockdown last year, and the craft beer business was hardly exempt. As the country reopens and cooped-up Americans eagerly book long-delayed vacations, will breweries be on the itinerary?

‘Beer tourists spend quite a bit of money’

Before we look to the future, a brief jaunt through the recent past. As American craft beer’s volume growth has slowed in a more mature, crowded market over the past half-decade, beer tourism — a broad term typically defined as leisure travel primarily motivated by visiting breweries, beer festivals, and so forth — has mostly held steady. “What we saw prior to the pandemic, is that … beer tourism has been on the rise for quite a number of years,” says Neil Reid, a professor of geography and planning at the University of Toledo and the author of several papers on beer tourism.

Data from the Brewers Association, the industry’s largest trade association, roughly tracks with that. According to an annual survey conducted among craft beer drinkers, from 2015 through 2019 the percentage of respondents who said they’d visited at least one brewery while traveling rose steadily each year, from 45 percent to 53 percent. (Among weekly drinkers, those figures were higher.) Bart Watson, the BA’s chief economist, says that “experiential [beer] tourism is growing more in line with at-the-brewery sales” as opposed to overall craft beer sales volume. “Prior to 2020, [those] were still growing very, very strongly.”

Speaking of sales: The reason Watson and other industry observers pay attention to drinkers’ interest in beer tourism is because traditionally there’s big money to be made luring visitors to breweries. While there’s no comprehensive national study showing how much cash beer tourists spend each year, regional reviews indicate it can be substantial. In 2019, an independent analysis commissioned by the tourism board in Grand Rapids, Mich., found that beer tourists generated an economic impact of $38.5 million to the surrounding county — $23.9 million in money they spent on beers, restaurant meals, hotel rooms, and the like, plus another $14.6 million indirectly recirculated through the local economy.

“Beer tourists spend quite a bit of money,” Dr. Cristina Benton, director of market and industry analysis at Anderson Economic Group and the study’s author, told me in a recent phone interview. In examining the spending habits of beer-focused Grand Rapids visitors, Benton and her colleague Sara Bowers found that beer tourists spent an average of $1,060 per party per trip compared to $959 spent on average by other groups.

Reid, who shared a study from the Sonoma County Economic Development Board that found Russian River Brewing Company’s 2019 Pliny the Younger release generated a $4.16 million economic impact on its own, points out that in addition to being potentially powerful revenue drivers, beer tourism programs tend to be fairly low-effort and low-cost for those tourism boards that elect to create them. “It’s an extra webpage, it’s an extra couple brochures. … I think the cost of promotion is pretty small, and return on investment can be pretty high,” she said, especially when factoring in all the ancillary businesses that benefit from beer tourist spending. “There’s a lot of winners when you can attract those folks.”

Uneven impact

Of course, starting in spring 2020, those folks went into quarantine, and many brewery taprooms were forced to close for long stretches due to state restrictions on indoor service, concerns for staff safety, and the demands of new business models. Some took the opportunity to retool and expand existing outdoor setups, or build new ones. But on the whole, on-premise brewery sales decreased in 2020 compared to the year prior; the Brewers Association tracked a 25 percent dent in Q3 2020 figures alone. Beer festivals, another traditional draw for beer-thirsty travelers, were effectively kiboshed, cutting breweries off from a vital way to expand their customer bases.

All this worked out predictably poorly for event promoters, and for companies that focus on conventional, destination-based beer tourism. “Our company, like the travel industry in general, was devastated by the pandemic,” says Allan Wright, president and founder of Zephyr United, a Montana company that offers guided beer, wine, and culinary travel packages through its Taste Vacations division. (Another arm of the company also hosts a beer tourism conference, though the pandemic put it on hiatus both this year and last.) “Last year we canceled 21 out of 24 vacations on our schedule,” Wright says.

Covid-19 did destination-based beer tourism firms like Wright’s no favors. But contrary to what you might have expected, the BA’s data shows that brewery visits actually held steady, and may even have increased from 2019 to 2020. Watson cautions to take those figures with a grain of salt to account for respondents mischaracterizing their visits for to-go beers during the pandemic with more conventional beer tourism. But here, too, beer tourism infrastructure helped out, as many state guilds, regional tourism boards, and ale trail promoters shifted from pitching their constituent breweries as travel destinations to encouraging drinkers to patronize their retail operations.

“People came to pick up carry-out [orders] and support as many local breweries as possible,” says Patrick Fannin, the head brewer at Dreaming Creek Brewery in Richmond, Ky. The brewery, which had only been open for a year prior to the pandemic, is a stop on the Brewgrass Trail, a 20-brewery network in the greater Lexington area organized by Kentucky’s Department of Tourism. “The trail was a kind of [customers’] guide of which ones to go to,” Fannin surmises.

In eastern Pennsylvania, the Visit Bucks County tourism board used its social media handles to encourage visits to the 27 breweries on its ale trail from followers within driving distance. “The Bucks County Ale Trail was actively promoted during the pandemic, primarily over social media, as many of the breweries still sold beer to-go,” says Paul Bencivengo, the president and chief operating officer of Visit Bucks County.

This makes sense when you consider the nature of most beer tourism in the U.S. While marquee beer destinations like Denver, Asheville, and San Diego are strong enough draws to entice drinkers to make cross-country pilgrimages, says Reid, most beer tourists typically hail from within 150 miles or so of the breweries they’re visiting. “It’s basically a weekend trip,” he says.

Driving revenue

As Watson points out, local drinkers skipping the supermarket for the taproom to-go window isn’t beer tourism, certainly not in the sense that Reid and his colleagues define it. But there’s some evidence that actual beer tourism did persist during the pandemic. With U.S. air travel dropping as much as 60 percent in 2020, dedicated beer tourists itching for an approximated taproom experience took to the road instead. To wit: Brew York’s O’Leary estimates he still managed to visit about 220 breweries in 2020, just a slight deviation from his norm, mostly by car travel. “Most of it was road trips. … A lot of my planning was around where Covid-19 [case] numbers were the lowest,” he says.

For Harvest Hosts, a travel firm that rents RVs to members looking to camp at one of the 2,500+ breweries, wineries, and farms that the company has contracted with across the company, that tendency was a boon for business. “We have seen a massive increase (over 400 percent) in RVers visiting breweries since the pandemic started,” Joel Holland, the company’s CEO, says via email. Harvest Hosts counts 338 breweries in its hosting network; in 2020, Holland says, its customers spent more than $25 million at all the businesses that participate in its program.

The combined effect of increased local emphasis, new outdoor spaces, and a shift to road travel may have softened the pandemic’s impact on American beer tourism last year. “I think beer tourism held up better than we would have expected, and is probably poised to rebound,” says Watson. “These numbers suggest that the fundamental demand [for beer tourism] didn’t really go anywhere.”

A post-pandemic bounceback?

As vaccinations continue to rise across the country, the factors do seem favorable for beer tourism to return to something like its pre-pandemic benchmarks. For one thing, Americans are itching to travel. In a June 2021 survey, Destination Analysts, a travel market research firm, found that over 77 percent of Americans plan to travel for leisure in the next three months or so, and 90 percent of those trips will be overnighters. Harvest Hosts’ own survey, conducted at the top of the year, shows similar appetite, with 60 percent of respondents saying they’ll travel more than in 2019. Holland says the firm is seeing customers extend the lengths of their trips as restrictions lift, and that Americans’ slow return to international travel “bodes very well for road travel to wonderful small town breweries.” The company projects that its RV-mobilized travelers will spend upwards of $40 million at their host locations in 2021.

Wright, at Zephyr United, hoped the bounceback would lift destination-based beer tourism that requires air travel. So far, so good: “We not only are back to where we were before, we are well ahead of our numbers from 2019,” he says.

From his vantage point at the BA, Watson sees only a few potential headwinds for beer tourism. For one thing, it’s experience-driven hospitality, he points out, a discipline that may be tough for more production-oriented breweries to master. “People don’t go [to breweries] necessarily just to look at the shiny tanks, they go for the knowledge, for learning, for the experience … and that can be replicated in other beverage alcohol arenas,” he says. On that note, with craft distilleries across the country lobbying for expanded privileges to do tastings and on-site sales, and vineyards already very sophisticated on those counts, beverage-loving tourists have more options than ever at which to spend their travel dollars. Craft beer drinkers, Watson emphasizes, are nothing if not “omni-biborous”: that is, they like drinking craft beer, but like drinking everything else, too.

Still, those are not insurmountable challenges, and though Watson cautions that beer tourism may not bounce back all at once, he speculates its return may come with a welcome post-pandemic “wildcard” for breweries. “A whole bunch of breweries developed new ways of selling beer … with more to-go and delivery” options, he says. That hard-won pandemic expertise may enable breweries to leverage direct-to-consumer sales (in states where that’s legal) to maintain relationships with beer tourists who visit, vineyard-style. “I think it opens up new potential, you know when bigger markets have that, to increase beer tourism, and more importantly the follow-up sales from those visits,” Watson muses.

That remains to be seen, but more certain, for now, is that beer tourism is coming back in some capacity. As he grabs his suitcase in Seattle, I ask Chris O’Leary what advice he has to offer to anyone looking to begin their own march to 2,267 brewery visits this summer. “Look for the hidden gem beer towns,” he replies. “The big [beer tourism] destinations are probably going to be even busier than normal.”

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[ozgeersoy]

Publishing as Method: In Conversation with Ozge Ersoy and Paul C. Fermin

On publishing cultures and trends, conceptualisations of “Asia,” and care and community during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This interview was originally conducted in December 2020 for the publication anthology of Publishing as Method (curator Lim Kyung-yong) in ArtSonje Center, Seoul. As part of this project, around forty initiatives around Asia were interviewed about their publishing activities, including archives, artist-run spaces, collectives, publishing houses, bookshops, art book fairs, and design studios. The conversation with Özge Ersoy, AAA’s Public Programmes Lead, and Paul C. Fermin, AAA’s and IDEAS Journal’s Managing Editor, is shared below. It has been updated and revised for IDEAS Journal.

Lim Kyung-yong (LKY): It seems that the small publishing culture is now quite active in Hong Kong. So is the annual Hong Kong Art Book Fair. What is the reason for the emergence of this kind of publishing culture in Hong Kong? Many artists or curators seem to use these publications as a stage for themselves, and as this publishing culture spreads throughout Asia, cooperation projects through publishing are increasing. How does AAA diagnose this trend?

Özge Ersoy & Paul C. Fermin (ÖE & PCF): We’re just as excited about all the book fairs and small publishing and distribution platforms that have emerged in Hong Kong in the last ten years—Small Tune Press, Zine Coop, Display Distribute, and Queer Reads Library, immediately come to mind—they breathe so much life into the scene. We believe publications made by these independent publishers are sites where art history is being circulated and contested, and that their voices are critical for a fuller understanding of lived realities on the ground—narratives unable to make it past the usual gatekeepers, or that do not register in, say, more academic discourses. That’s one reason they’re part of our Library Collection.

At the same time, there’s a much longer history around art publishing in Asia that we are committed to study and share with our communities. It Begins with a Story: Artists, Writers, and Periodicals in Asia—the 2018 symposium AAA organised in collaboration with The Department of Fine Arts at The University of Hong Kong, and the second symposium presented at Focal Point in collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation—was inspiring on this point, as it explored the countless ways periodicals have acted as sites of exhibition, artistic experimentation, and art history making, while shaping communities around them. For instance, Anthony Leung Po-Shan presented a paper on a group of Hong Kong artists invited to write and develop works for the Hong Kong newspaper Mingpao in the early 2000s, playing a crucial role in connecting art with society and politics.

On IDEAS Journal, we also have pieces that do the work of historicising various publishing cultures. Our former AAA colleague Michelle Wong wrote about three moments of art writing circulation in Hong Kong, with one of her case studies stretching back to the 1960s. Display Distribute wrote an ambitious piece that historicised zines and independent publishing cultures in East and South East Asia, locating alternative trajectories to the usual Western-dominated narratives in the region. Artist Merve Ünsal wrote about the prominence of self-publishing practices of artists and art initiatives in Istanbul, helping us understand it as, in part, a response to the lack of public funding and institutional support, and also a symptom of the need of self-historicisation in a geography ridden with coups, ruptures, and ideological shifts—and this is important to acknowledge.

Karen Cheung reminds us that smaller publishing platforms, especially with regards to zines, have been proliferating because they’re ideally suited to responding—real-time—to ongoing events and movements, given their low costs, ease of production, the fact that they’re less beholden to gatekeepers and institutional constraints, and how in many ways they capture visceral and affective perspectives often neglected in more traditional publishing platforms. Zines come to be a “perfect representation of the spirit of camaraderie and mutual support amongst strangers at protests.” A question we’re starting to ask, so powerfully articulated by Joy James (credit to Eunsong Kim for this reference), is the extent to which acts of care and support under situations like these become stabilising functions of what she calls the “captive maternal.” An open question for which we don’t have any good answers in the context of Hong Kong.

That said, it’s important to acknowledge that practitioners in the cultural field operate under ever increasing precarity, and so whatever “emergence” or “trend” we’re seeing must also be understood as adaptations to decreasing social safety nets across the board, including for many artists and writers and freelancers lumped into that category euphemistically called “flexible labour.” Attempting to navigate the high barriers to entry—internships, gatekeepers, cultural capital, proximity to “global cities,” not to mention discrimination faced along various axis including race, class, gender—these all contribute to what Byung-Chul Han diagnoses as our “burnout society” (credit to Patrick Blanchfield for this reference). In this sense, the “cooperation projects” you’re noting, and perhaps we can also add the increased attention to “mutual aid” projects, come to be means of survival and solidarity under neoliberal precarity. While none of this is news at this point, we feel it is important to reiterate.

LKY: Within a heavily capitalised and highly developed society like Hong Kong and Singapore, a role seems to be required to produce knowledge or information and classify it. For example, we can expect various roles from Singapore for the practice of art in Southeast Asia. I wonder how AAA recognises “Asian” art, how AAA understands and conceptualises “Asia.”

ÖE & PCF: AAA gets the “Asia” question a lot—and for good reason. Lee Weng Choy even wrote an essay about it in 2004, in which he opens by wondering how often AAA deals with the “Asia” versus “Asian” distinction.

While it may seem like a hedge to say that’s an impossible question, and that any response risks a number of essentialising and reifying moves—really, one sense in which we understand “Asia” is as this endlessly constructed, contested, and contradictory space. It is imagined. It is historical and material. It is produced and reproduced.

“Asia” as a signifier has been wielded aspirationally as an organising principle for transnational solidarity or so-called “Pan-Asian” unity, while also being deployed for more nationalistic, imperial expansion. We like how David Xu Borgonjon, who we worked with on a solid IDEAS essay about the racial politics of art school recruitment, noted that “Asian” is also a fetish category. Because while Weng distinguishes “Asian” as an adjective (characterising something as “Asian” in its essence), against “Asia” as a signifier of a more “deliberately complex, contested, and constructed site,” David makes a distinction between “Asian” as “a biopolitical concept of race” versus “Asia” as “a geopolitical concept of place.” Lots of ways to frame this.

You also see “Asia” crop up in the competitive logic of “global cities” (as outlined by Saskia Sassen)—for example in the Brand Hong Kong campaign, launched by the government in 2001, where they attempted to rebrand HK itself as “Asia's World City”—this marketing/PR/branding exercise in turn becoming another site of ideological contestation for actors across the political spectrum.

But that discussion seems like a quaint, distant memory, with all the structural and material violence being unleashed, literally, everywhere right now in 2021. Stuart Hall put it so powerfully when he questioned his own discipline of cultural studies, asking “what in God’s name is the point”—given the urgency on the streets. He added that anybody taking these issues seriously as an intellectual practice “must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we’ve been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything.”

Your question also raises the issue of knowledge production and circulation. Elite capture and co-optation is a very real thing, something Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has written about quite persuasively. Who are these sorts of discourse ultimately for? What structures do they obscure and reproduce? How is the very discourse itself structured in advance by the subject positions of the speakers in relation to the state? Jackie Wang reminds us how market logics are often behind the compulsion to brand one’s analysis as the latest “hot take,” how you’re pushed to distinguish yourself and set yourself apart from others—as opposed to how your work builds upon and is in conversation with others—and basically how damaging this is for knowledge production.

On that point, it’s only right for us to acknowledge some people and institutions who have been influential for the two of us on the “Asia” question—especially the ways they help trouble narratives centring the nation-state or region in Asia, which in turn helps us see critical differences, entanglements, and linkages across these arbitrary demarcations. Climate change, for example, is no respecter of national borders—and groups like Feral Atlas have spoken to this point—“nature” as something that precedes and exceeds the human. At the same time, Iyko Day cautions us that certain calls to move “beyond the human” assume—and problematically so—a shared humanity that can be deconstructed in the first place, instead re-inscribing the very Eurocentric frameworks we hope to disrupt.

And then there’s also Third Text Asia and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, or more recently the fascinating work by folks at Verge: Studies in Global Asias. Individual scholars like Chen Kuan-Hsing, more specifically his 2010 book Asia as Method, still gets a lot of traction too—even if in productive disagreement—challenging us to think of Asia as itself a site that generates theory (not simply a site for “Western speculation”), enabling certain decolonial efforts. But we'd also like to acknowledge our indebtedness to scholars like Iyko Day, Shih Shu-mei, Lisa Lowe, Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Raewyn Connell, all our AAA Researchers—the list could go on—with the main point being that we aren’t thinking in isolation, and that countless others have been thinking longer and deeper about these issues—and one challenge for us has been enquiring into what’s actually helpful for clarifying the stakes, or what’s simply a form of co-opting or re-inscripting of the status quo.

Two of AAA’s own projects on the “Asia” question include Mapping Asia in 2014, and more recently the MAHASSA project, spearheaded by our AAA Researchers led by John Tain, which brings together a diverse group of faculty and emerging scholars to investigate parallel and intersecting developments in the cultural histories of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. We present this project in partnership with The Dhaka Art Summit and Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University, with support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, and have organised several talks and panels alongside closed-door sessions. For us, one of the most generative discussions involved the politics of famine in the context of anticolonial and antiauthoritarian struggles in South Asia and North Africa, and how social realism and abstraction responded to narratives of nationalism. The hope is to better understand common and divergent trajectories in cultural histories within Asia and across regions, rather than trying to find the definitive word on what Asia might be.

One last thing we want to say about this is that we aren’t actually walking around all day thinking about abstract notions of “Asia” and the impossibility of defining it—because no one is. (Well, actually, someone out there probably is…)

LKY: AAA has worked with many institutions, not only in Asia but also around the world. As you know, more and more countries around the world are now becoming culturally, politically, and economically conservative in their own interests. We experienced globalisation and took it for granted, but domestic centralism related to the coronavirus and minority hatred is also strengthening. How is this situation affecting your activities? AAA works on an invisible global art network, but it also seems that such a network is being threatened. I wonder how AAA recognises and responds to this situation.

ÖE & PCF: First, we want to express our gratitude to you and The Book Society, who in many ways are helpful models for responding to this trend—we want to ask you this same question! How do you do it? Every time we visit Seoul, we make it a point to visit your space, and last time we were touched to see a poster on your front door in support of Hong Kong. We also want to acknowledge your generous book donations to our library over the years. Even this very project is another instance of Book Society reaching out and thinking critically with institutions across the region. How can we continue to collaborate with and support you?

But, yes, your question notes the re-emergence of nationalistic and far-right movements across the globe. COVID-19 has exacerbated existing inequalities, and there continues to be a disproportionate effect on the same, already struggling communities. According to a recent World Health Organization report, low-income countries have received just 0.2 percent of all COVID-19 shots, while wealthier nations have received more than 87 percent. Some are referring to this as vaccine apartheid, as yet another example of this moment’s necropolitics. There is so much suffering and grief right now, more than any one person is able to properly frame or comprehend—it staggers us; it exceeds us.

Given the health crisis and the conservative pressures you mentioned, we are all pushed to think about existing structures for education, community, and care. Many of our collaborators across the region are asking how to re-imagine these structures, and our ongoing online conversation series Life Lessons started in response to these questions. Some examples include Melati Suryodarmo and Ming Wong speaking about traditional performance forms in Asia that influenced their teaching practice and the types of kinships they’ve developed around their work; Suzanne Lacy and Wu Mali discussing how social practice builds on feminism and ecology; Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh and Zeyno Pekünlü discussing collectivity as a form and method of learning, and the role of the university as both an enabler and an obstacle in developing collective pedagogical models.

Also, over the last year, AAA has made accessible several Research Collections that look at artist-driven initiatives that take mutual support and solidarity as their core values. Womanifesto, a feminist biennial programme that was active in Thailand from 1997 to 2008, is an example we would like to highlight. This initiative started with an exhibition in the mid-nineties to make space for women artists, and has evolved into a biannual event with exhibitions, workshops, residencies, and publications, which reflected the changing strategies in contemporary feminist thinking and practices. For those interested, we would recommend the discussion “Backyards and Neighbourhoods” that brought together artists Varsha Nair and Phaptawan Suwannakudt with scholar Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, where they discussed what has changed since the mid-1990s—around the time of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing—when women artists and curators sought to create spaces for visibility and representation.

Two other archival collections we would like to highlight were spearheaded by a team led by Chương-Đài Hồng Võ: Manila Artist Run Spaces Archive, featuring material on six initiatives active between the mid-eighties and the early 2000s, and Green Papaya Art Projects Archive, which comprises substantial materials on the longest active, artist-run organisation in Manila. Ringo Bunoan, who has been instrumental in the work around these archives, asks at what cost artist-run spaces in the Philippines adapt themselves to the current crisis characterised by pandemic fatigue and unfair practices in the arts field: “To be truly alternative now, artists must be part of the reckoning and reconfiguration of the structures that perpetuate divisions and inequalities that have long plagued the art scene in the country.”

As always, we keep learning from artists.

LKY: In addition to archive activities, AAA is engaged in activities such as research, publication, and exhibition. Please introduce some of them. In particular, I would appreciate it if you could explain AAA's publishing programme.

ÖE & PCF: AAA’s publishing practice started twenty years ago and has gone through many changes in form and content. At the beginning of AAA’s journey, our Co-founder and Director Claire Hsu printed 1,000 copies of the exhibition catalogue for China’s New Art: Post-1989 (1993), organised by Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong, as she received its publication rights. AAA then sold the books as part of its first fundraising project, and the sales allowed AAA to hire its first librarian and start building its database. Later, AAA produced monographs like Wu Shanzhuan Red Humour International (in collaboration with Inga Svala Thórsdóttir) (2005) and From Reality to Fantasy: The Art of Luis Chan (2006). Between 2012 and 2015, AAA published four bilingual volumes of an e-journal called Field Notes, featuring contributions by more than one hundred scholars, critics, artists, and curators. Each issue focused on a theme: from the significance of archival practices in the region, to the popular Mapping Asia project that challenged our inherited notions of bounded territories, turning instead to myth, liminal spaces, and active entanglements.

More recently, AAA shifted gears and, since the last four years, has been focusing on its online publication IDEAS Journal, which allows for a more flexible and responsive publishing schedule. IDEAS commissions essays, conversations, and also more visually driven notes, with a rigorous yet hopefully unpretentious style for people who like reading things with clear stakes—in other words, propositions and analysis over merely descriptive commentary. IDEAS is more interested in new ways of thinking, rather than simply new things to think about. It’s important for us to acknowledge Claire Hsu and Doretta Lau for bringing IDEAS into being; Janet Chan, Emily Wong, and Chelsea Ma for being fabulous and editing its Chinese language version; and Karen Cheung, without whom we would be lost, heartless, and lacking a decent soundtrack for our emotional undercurrents. All the incredible writers we’ve gotten to work with deserve recognition here, too—IDEAS literally doesn’t exist without them. Christina Yuen Zi Chung was the first writer Paul was privileged to work with when he joined, and in many ways she continues to be the gold standard and inspiration for us both. It was such a pleasure working with her that we invited her back to do a public talk on “Reimagining Feminism in Hong Kong.” Shout-out to the brilliant Christina.

We also have an AAA office in Delhi with an amazing team headed by Sneha Ragavan, where they’ve lead research projects like the Bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Art Writing of South Asia, gathering more than 12,000 pieces of published art writing in thirteen languages from the twentieth century. This bibliography is available online as an interactive online database. They also collaborate with foundations and sponsor research grants around art writing, artistic research, and visual culture. Currently they’re working on a three-volume set of dossiers, which bring together art writing from the region.

Finally, we’ve also been building editorial collaborations and partnerships, such as Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series that we contribute to, along with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. This partnership has resulted in three publications so far: Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98 (2018), FESTAC ’77 (2019), and Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000 (2020)—all focusing on exhibition histories.

LKY: What are your main projects now? I wonder about future plans.

ÖE & PCF: It’s AAA’s twentieth anniversary, and for us, this is an opportunity to celebrate all the artists and educators who have contributed to AAA and its communities. There are two ongoing exhibition projects we would like to highlight. The first is Learning What Can’t Be Taught at AAA Library, which looks at the major changes in art education in China from the 1950s to the 2000s through a selection of artworks, archival materials, and interviews. The exhibition focuses on six artists from three generations who were each other’s teachers and students at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou: Jin Yide, Zheng Shengtian, Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Jiang Zhuyun, and Lu Yang. With this exhibition, we’re asking whether “artistic attitude” can be taught or passed down from one generation to another. In a text for Art & Education, Anthony Yung (who has been leading this research at AAA for the last decade) and Özge mention how Zheng Shengtian, who was born in 1935, studied art in the 1950s, and experienced the political turmoil in China in the second half of the twentieth century, has continued to test the boundaries of what is suitable for teaching and learning. When we recently asked Zheng about the moment when he turned from a student to an artist, he responded with a sentence that still resonates with his students: “I am still waiting for this moment to come.”

We are also excited about the exhibition Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys, which just opened at Tai Kwun Contemporary, and features newly commissioned works that engage the archive of the late artist Ha Bik Chuen, who was a self-taught sculptor and printmaker. Ha’s personal archive covers fifty years of art in Hong Kong. Curated by Michelle Wong, this exhibition invites artists Banu Cennetoğlu, Kwan Sheung Chi, Lam Wing Sze, Raqs Media Collective, and Walid Raad to explore the potentials and the limitations of archives, as well as our sense of scale, self, and history vis-a-vis Ha’s own archive. Özge is currently working on bewitched, bewildered, bothered, Banu Cennetoğlu’s artistic contribution in the form of talks, film screenings, and a publication, which delves into the politics of posthumous archives. The publication, titled The Orpheus Double Bind, features the English translation of a text by the literary critic Nurdan Gürbilek. Interested in how the author questions their authority to give voice to the dead, Gürbilek writes: “Orpheus looks back; because he wants to transcend the threshold of death and see Eurydice in all her invisibility, to give form to her dark obscurity. This desire the writer feels, for the darkness of the other, is at once the writer’s source of inspiration and his destructive act: Orpheus loses Eurydice a second time because he wants to bring her back, wants to give form to her absence; but what makes the work possible, in all its obscurity, is this gaze that wants to give form to absence.”

Another thing we’re excited about is working with Gudskul, a collective from Jakarta, to develop programmes around self-organisation and collective learning; and also the Mobile Library: Nepal project, which offers support for community-based, collaborative initiatives and universities in Nepal—spearheaded by Susanna Chung and Samira Bose. Co-presented by Siddhartha Arts Foundation, this project is another example of how we work collaboratively with like-minded organisations in Asia to enrich reference points within Asia. Lots of things to look forward to.

Paul is especially grateful to be working on an upcoming IDEAS essay by Eunsong Kim, whose writing over the years—clarifying, poetic, transformative, and always committed—should be on syllabi everywhere. She’s also working on a book for Duke University Press called The Politics of Collecting: Property & Race in Aesthetic Formation, and recently co-launched offshoot journal. Shout-out to the mighty Eunsong Kim. Thank you so much for existing—accelerating reality—a reminder that nothing’s ever a given. Wu-Tang forever.

Özge Ersoy is AAA’s Public Programmes Lead. Paul C. Fermin is AAA’s and IDEAS Journal’s Managing Editor.

All images are courtesy of Özge Ersoy.

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Schools Are Open, but Many Families Remain Hesitant to Return (NYT) Pauline Rojas’s high school in San Antonio is open. But like many of her classmates, she has not returned, and has little interest in doing so. During the coronavirus pandemic, she started working 20 to 40 hours per week at Raising Cane’s, a fast-food restaurant, and has used the money to help pay her family’s internet bill, buy clothes and save for a car. Ms. Rojas, 18, has no doubt that a year of online school, squeezed between work shifts that end at midnight, has affected her learning. Still, she has embraced her new role as a breadwinner, sharing responsibilities with her mother who works at a hardware store. Only a small slice of American schools remain fully closed: 12 percent of elementary and middle schools, according to a federal survey, as well as a minority of high schools. But the percentage of students learning fully remotely is much greater: more than a third of fourth and eighth graders, and an even larger group of high school students. A majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian-American students remain out of school. For every child and parent who has leaped at the opportunity to return to the classroom, others changed their lives over the past year in ways that make going back to school difficult. The consequences are likely to reverberate through the education system for years, especially if states and districts continue to give students the choice to attend school remotely.

Job report anxiety (1440) The US economy added 266,000 new jobs in April, according to government estimates released Friday, far below analysts’ estimates of 1 million. Unemployment also ticked up slightly, from 6.0% to 6.1%. The country has roughly 8.2 million fewer jobs than it had before the pandemic. The figures caught many off guard, with analysts banking on rising vaccine rates and the reopening of many state economies around the country to boost hiring. Some argue a stimulus-provided boost in unemployment benefits, roughly equal to a $15-per-hour wage, has kept workers from returning. Others have argued many low-wage jobs are undesirable amid the pandemic, while highlighting separate issues making it difficult to return to work, such as lack of child care.

Cyberattack on US pipeline is linked to criminal gang (AP) The cyberextortion attempt that has forced the shutdown of a vital U.S. pipeline was carried out by a criminal gang known as DarkSide that cultivates a Robin Hood image of stealing from corporations and giving a cut to charity, two people close to the investigation said Sunday. The shutdown, meanwhile, stretched into its third day, with the Biden administration loosening regulations for the transport of petroleum products on highways as part of an “all-hands-on-deck” effort to avoid disruptions in the fuel supply. Experts said that gasoline prices are unlikely to be affected if the pipeline is back to normal in the next few days but that the incident—the worst cyberattack to date on critical U.S. infrastructure—should serve as a wake-up call to companies about the vulnerabilities they face. The pipeline, operated by Georgia-based Colonial Pipeline, carries gasoline and other fuel from Texas to the Northeast. It delivers roughly 45% of fuel consumed on the East Coast, according to the company.

U.S. and Iran Want to Restore the Nuclear Deal. They Disagree Deeply on What That Means. (NYT) President Biden and Iran’s leaders say they share a common goal: They both want to re-enter the nuclear deal that President Donald J. Trump scrapped three years ago, restoring the bargain that Iran would keep sharp limits on its production of nuclear fuel in return for a lifting of sanctions that have choked its economy. But after five weeks of shadow boxing in Vienna hotel rooms—where the two sides pass notes through European intermediaries—it has become clear that the old deal, strictly defined, does not work for either of them anymore, at least in the long run. The Iranians are demanding that they be allowed to keep the advanced nuclear-fuel production equipment they installed after Mr. Trump abandoned the pact, and integration with the world financial system beyond what they achieved under the 2015 agreement. The Biden administration, for its part, says that restoring the old deal is just a steppingstone. It must be followed immediately by an agreement on limiting missiles and support of terrorism—and making it impossible for Iran to produce enough fuel for a bomb for decades. The Iranians say no way. Iran and the United States “are really negotiating different deals,” said Vali R. Nasr, a former American official who is now at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “It’s why the talks are so slow.” The Americans see the restoration of the old deal as a first step to something far bigger. The Iranians refuse to even discuss a larger agreement.

‘Cautious hugging’ and pints: UK PM Johnson to ease England’s lockdown (Reuters) British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will set out on Monday the next phase of lockdown easing in England, giving the green light to “cautious hugging” and allowing pubs to serve customers pints inside after months of strict measures. The country is in the process of gradually lifting its latest lockdown over a period of months, in line with a four-step plan unveiled in February, after a rapid vaccine rollout helped drive down COVID-19 cases and deaths. Under Step 3, from May 17 people will be allowed to meet up indoors for the first time in months, in groups of up to six people or two full households together. Pubs, cafes and restaurants will be able to host customers indoors, also for the first time in months and subject to certain rules. Other indoor entertainment like cinemas and sports venues will also be able to resume activity.

Village Caught in Czech-Russia Spy Case Just Wants Things to Stop Blowing Up (NYT) VLACHOVICE-VRBETICE, Czech Republic—For nearly a century, local residents have wondered at the strange comings and goings at a sealed-off camp ringed by barbed wire and dotted with keep out signs on the edge of their village. The armies of Czechoslovakia, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the Czech Republic all made use over the decades of the 840-acre property, deterring trespassers with guard dogs and armed patrols. When the professional soldiers pulled out in 2006, the secretive activities became even more shadowy. Dozens of weapons depots hidden among the trees were taken over by arms dealers, a company reprocessing missile fuel and other private businesses. Then, in October 2014, came the biggest mystery of all. An enormous explosion ripped through depot No. 16, knocking farmers in nearby fields to the ground and sending dangerous debris raining down on the surrounding area. Initially, the blast—and a second round of explosions two months later—were blamed on the mishandling of weapons stored on the site. But last month the Czech government said that what had happened was a military-style sabotage operation by Russian intelligence operatives. The villagers, more focused on local property values than geopolitics, just want things to stop blowing up.

Thousands suspended at Myanmar universities as junta targets education (Reuters) More than 11,000 academics and other university staff opposed to Myanmar’s ruling junta have been suspended after going on strike in protest against military rule, a teachers’ group told Reuters. The suspensions come as the resumption of universities after a year closed due to the coronavirus epidemic prompts a new confrontation between the army and the staff and students who are calling for boycotts over the Feb. 1 coup. A professor on a fellowship in the United States said she was told she would have to declare opposition to the strikes or lose her job. Her university authorities had told her every scholar would be tracked down and forced to choose, she told Reuters. As of Monday, more than 11,100 academic and other staff had been suspended from colleges and universities offering degrees, an official of the Myanmar Teachers’ Federation told Reuters, declining to be identified for fear of reprisals.

US trashes unwanted gear in Afghanistan, sells as scrap (AP) The twisted remains of several all-terrain vehicles leaned precariously inside Baba Mir’s sprawling scrapyard, alongside smashed shards that were once generators, tank tracks that have been dismantled into chunks of metal, and mountains of tents reduced to sliced up fabric. It’s all U.S. military equipment. The Americans are dismantling their portion of nearby Bagram Air Base, their largest remaining outpost in Afghanistan, and anything that they are not taking home or giving to the Afghan military, they destroy as completely as possible. They do so as a security measure, to ensure equipment doesn’t fall into militant hands. But to Mir and the dozens of other scrap sellers around Bagram, it’s an infuriating waste. “What they are doing is a betrayal of Afghans. They should leave,” said Mir. “Like they have destroyed this vehicle, they have destroyed us.” The bitterness of the scrapyard owners is somewhat self-interested: they’re angry in part because they could have profited more selling intact equipment. But it’s been a common theme for the past two traumatic and destructive decades where actions the U.S. touted as necessary or beneficial only disillusioned Afghans who felt the repercussions.

153 Palestinians in hospital after Jerusalem holy site clash (AP/Reuters) Israeli police firing tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-coated bullets clashed with Palestinian stone-throwers at a flashpoint Jerusalem holy site on Monday, the latest in a series of confrontations that is pushing the contested city to the brink of eruption. More than a dozen tear gas canisters and stun grenades landed in the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, said an Associated Press photographer at the scene. Monday’s confrontation was the latest in the sacred compound after days of mounting tensions between Palestinians and Israeli troops in the Old City of Jerusalem, the emotional ground zero of the conflict. Hundreds of Palestinians and about two dozen police officers have been hurt over the past few days. The site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, is also considered the holiest site in Judaism. The compound has been the trigger for rounds of Israel-Palestinian violence in the past. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel a “terror state” for “mercilessly and unethically attacking Muslims in Jerusalem.”

Gaza militants, children among 24 dead as Israel hits Hamas (AP) Israel unleashed new airstrikes on Gaza early Tuesday, hitting the high-rise home of a Hamas field commander and two border tunnels dug by militants, as Hamas and other armed groups fired dozens of rockets toward Israel. It was an escalation sparked by weeks of tensions in contested Jerusalem. Since sundown Monday when the cross-border fighting erupted, 24 Palestinians—including nine children—were killed in Gaza, most by airstrikes, Gaza health officials said. The Israeli military said 15 of the dead were militants. During the same period, Gaza militants fired more than 200 rockets toward Israel, injuring six Israeli civilians in a direct hit on an apartment building. This was preceded by hours of clashes Monday between Palestinians and Israeli security forces, mainly in Jerusalem but also across the West Bank. More than 700 Palestinians were hurt, including nearly 500 who were treated at hospitals. In a sign of widening unrest, hundreds of residents of Arab communities across Israel staged overnight demonstrations against the situation in Jerusalem, one of the largest protests by Palestinian citizens in Israel in recent years.

Chad’s rebel battle (Reuters) Chad’s military junta has claimed victory over the rebel group it has been fighting in recent months. The military staged a parade through the capital N’Djamena on Sunday to underline their control, but their triumph has been questioned by their enemies. A Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT) spokesman said the rebel group was not aware that fighting was at an end and told Reuters it “will comment when it has reliable and credible information.” Chad’s military declared FACT “annihilated” as recently as April 24, only for fighting to flare up again.