Milwaukee County district attorney decides not to charge Police Officer Joseph Mensah in shooting death of Alvin Cole https://t.co/RfvOOhP76v
— Journal Sentinel (@journalsentinel) October 7, 2020
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Allyson Chiu @ WashingtonPost.com, Oct. 6
[...] Christie’s announcement, which followed news that Trump, first lady Melania Trump and other Republican leaders had tested positive for the virus, sparked a flurry of reactions online. Chief among them: confusion.
“Regarding Chris Christie, can someone please tell me how one checks into a hospital as a ‘precautionary measure’?” one person wrote on Twitter. Another person asked, “Can an ordinary citizen with mild symptoms just check themselves into a hospital out of an abundance of caution? Is that how this works?”
Not exactly, experts say.
“What occurred over the weekend with Governor Christie sharing on social media that he was checking himself into the hospital because of his covid-19 diagnosis, that would be extraordinarily uncommon,” said Mark Shapiro, associate medical director for hospital services at St. Joseph Health Medical Group of Sonoma County, Calif.
The process of being admitted to a hospital with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, is much more complex than Christie’s tweet may have suggested, Shapiro added. He, and other experts, urged people who test positive for the coronavirus and are asymptomatic or exhibiting mild symptoms not to show up at hospitals seeking to be admitted for treatment [....]
The procedure at most hospitals, according to Shapiro, is that people who fall ill after contracting the coronavirus are admitted through emergency departments following an assessment by a team of health-care providers. At Mayo Clinic hospitals, for instance, members of the covid-19 front-line care team, many of whom are primary care providers, call patients with positive test results and ask them questions about their condition, which helps with “risk stratification,” said John O’Horo, an infectious-disease specialist with the clinic in Rochester, Minn. In the event that hospitalization may be needed, people usually are processed through the clinic’s emergency room, where they will receive a more thorough assessment to see if they should be admitted [....]
unfortunately, this is still news, and much more urgent now with cold weather
Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said it was better to overdo the pandemic policy response to avert “tragic” fallout than to undershoot.
By Jeanna Smialek @ NYTimes.com, Oct. 6
WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell delivered a message to his fellow policymakers on Tuesday: Faced with a once-in-a-century pandemic that has inflicted economic pain on millions of households, go big.
“Too little support would lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses,” Mr. Powell said in remarks before the National Association for Business Economics.
“Over time, household insolvencies and business bankruptcies would rise, harming the productive capacity of the economy, and holding back wage growth,” he said. “By contrast, the risks of overdoing it seem, for now, to be smaller.”
Six months into the pandemic, millions of Americans remain unemployed as the coronavirus keeps many service industries operating below capacity. The unemployment rate has fallen more rapidly than many economists expected, dropping to 7.9 percent in September, and consumer spending is holding up, but Mr. Powell highlighted — as he has before — that the economy’s resilience owes substantially to strong government assistance that’s been provided to households and businesses [....]
A tainted election was swiftly followed by a violent night and confusion about who rules Kyrgyzstan.
By Jon Cohen @ ScienceMag.org, Oct. 3
On 23 September at 8 p.m [....] went upstairs and changed into jeans and sweatshirt. When he came down, his wife, Christine Grady—a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center—brought him an India pale ale and salmon sliders out on their back deck, where he sat down for an hourlong, socially distanced interview with Science [....]
Olga Quiroga was in her 30th year working in Chicago Public Schools, most recently as a bilingual teacher at Funston Elementary
By Madeline Kenney & Nader Issa @ Chicago.SunTimes.com, Oct. 4
Olga Quiroga came down with cold-like symptoms last month after making a series of trips to Funston Elementary that included a back-to-school event, where the first-grade bilingual teacher met her students’ parents and handed out supplies for the upcoming academic year, her daughters said.
Despite suffering from a heavy cough and debilitating fatigue, Quiroga, a 30-year veteran at Chicago Public Schools, continued to teach her students virtually [....]
The US, UK, and France bombed Syria after accusing the Syrian government of dropping toxic gas in Douma. OPCW inspectors later found evidence that undermined the official narrative, but were censored by their superiors under US pressure.
By Eshe Nelson & Gillian Friedman @ NYTimes.com, Oct.5
The plight of the entertainment industry deepened on Monday as the British company Cineworld, which owns Regal Cinemas in the United States, said it would temporarily close all 663 of its movie theaters in the United States and Britain. The move was expected to affect 40,000 employees in the United States and 5,000 in Britain.
The chain had reopened in parts of the United States and Europe over the summer, but about 200 theaters, mostly in California and New York, have been shut since the pandemic began in the spring.
The news sent Cineworld’s stock spiraling [....]
In the mood to get outside your box? Thought-provoking libertarian argument
By Andrea O'Sullivan @ Reason.com, Sept. 29
Why does media coverage conclude the problem is that the government hasn’t done a good enough job of spying?