The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Out of Control in the United States

The surge in coronavirus continues to rage uncontrolled across the United States as cases are rising in 35 states, including record numbers in Florida. Florida health officials reported Sunday a staggering record of new cases in a single day: 15,300. If Florida were a country, it would be the fourth highest in the world in reporting new cases. The state would rank 10th in the list of nations with the most cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University data. The state added at least 12,343 cases since Sunday, according to the Florida Department of Health. At least 35 states are seeing a rise in new cases compared to the previous week, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

 The U.S. has recorded more than 3.3 million coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, meaning nearly 1 out of every 100 Americans has tested positive for COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. At least 135,379 Americans have died. Across the world, 12.9 million people have tested positive for the virus. Both local and state leaders in the U.S. have said in recent weeks new cases are largely driven by Americans who have opted to resume gatherings and outings to bars. In many states, the average age of new cases has shifted downward, with more young people testing positive than ever before since the start of the pandemic. The rising U.S. numbers could just be the tip of the iceberg, as experts have often highlighted infections could be around 10 times higher than what is reported, as many go untraced. To blunt the rise in case, at least 36 states now have some type of mask requirement order in place, and more than half of U.S. states have paused or rolled back their reopening plans in efforts to contain the spread of the virus. But precautions have been met with heavy backlash from many officials and residents and some governors have stayed away from statewide mask orders, including Florida.

Courtesy : CTV News

Can the United States control its Covid-19 outbreak?

By March 26, the United States, with the world’s third largest population, surpassed China and Italy as the country with the highest number of confirmed cases in the world. On a per capita basis, the U.S. had the 11th most cases of any country. By April 25, The United States ranked 10th in deaths per million people with 158, compared to Italy (423), Spain (474), and France (326). By April 25, the U.S. had over 905,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and nearly 52,000 deaths, giving it a mortality rate around 5.7 percent. Comparatively, Spain’s mortality rate was 10.2 percent and Italy at 13.5 percent; Dr. Deborah Birx pointed out the nation’s low mortality rate during a White House coronavirus briefing. Of those, more than 10,000 deaths occurred in nursing homes. Most nursing homes did not have easy access to testing, making the actual number unknown. Subsequently, a number of states including Maryland and New Jersey reported their own estimates of deaths at nursing homes, ranging from 20 to 50 percent.

In counting actual confirmed cases, some have questioned the reliability of totals reported by different countries. Measuring rates reported by countries such as China or Iran have been questioned as potentially inaccurate. In mid-April 2020, China revised its case totals much higher and its death toll up by 50% for Wuhan, partly as a result of a number of countries having questioned China’s official numbers. Iran’s rates have also been disputed, as when the WHO’s reports about their case counts were contradicted by top Iranian health officials.[329] Within the U.S., there are also discrepancies in rates between different states. After a group of epidemiologists requested revisions in how the CDC counts cases and deaths, the CDC in mid-April updated its guidance for counting COVID-19 cases and deaths to include both confirmed and probable ones, although each state can still determine what to report.[330] Without accurate reporting of cases and deaths, however, epidemiologists have difficulty in guiding government response.

The federal government of the United States responded to the pandemic with various declarations of emergency, which resulted in travel and entry restrictions. They also imposed guidelines and recommendations regarding the closure of schools and public meeting places, lockdowns, and other restrictions intended to slow the progression of the virus, which state, territorial, tribal, and local governments have followed. The response to the pandemic has resulted in unprecedented expansion of government power. Advocates of small government worry that the state will be reluctant to give up that power once the crisis is over, as has often been the case historically.

 After mid-March, the federal government made a major move to use the U.S. military to add health care capacity to impacted areas. The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), under existing statutory authority that comes from authorizations and powers of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), is leasing many buildings nationwide such as hotels, college dormitories, and larger open buildings to immediately convert them into hospital facilities. To assist USACE and FEMA efforts, the United States Army is setting up field hospitals in cities widely affected by the pandemic. Some of these facilities will have ICU capability for patients of the pandemic, while others will serve non-coronavirus patients to allow established hospitals to concentrate on the pandemic. A public briefing of the plan was given by Army General Todd Semonite on March 20. USACE will handle leasing and engineering, with contracts for rapid facility modification and setup issued to local contractors. The plan envisions that the operation of the facilities and the provision of medical staff would be entirely handled by the various U.S. states rather than the Federal government.[334] One of the early and largest buildings to be converted is the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, which was quickly being transformed into a 2,000-bed care facility on March 23, 2020.

The pandemic, along with the resultant stock market crash and other impacts, has led a recession in the United States following the economic cycle peak in February 2020. The economy contracted 4.8 percent from January through March 2020, and the unemployment rate rose to 14.7 percent in April. The total healthcare costs of treating the epidemic could be anywhere from $34 billion to $251 billion according to analysis presented by The New York Times. A study by economists Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson indicated that most economic impact due to consumer behavior changes was prior to mandated lockdowns.

Americans protest covid-19 restrictions

Protesters across the U.S. rally against stay-at-home orders aimed at reducing the spread of coronavirus. Leading coronavirus modeling shows the country’s collective sacrifice of an economic shutdown — which has resulted in over 30 million jobless claims — has likely prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths, serving as a sign that social distancing is effective. Protests to reopen economies have been held across the U.S. over the last few months as the number of coronavirus cases and fatalities continues to rise. COVID-19 has infected more than 1.4 million people and killed over 85,000 in the U.S., per Johns Hopkins data.

The life of Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the Civil Rights Movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, King is best known for advancing civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and in 1957 became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). With the SCLC, he led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. He helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize the Selma to Montgomery marches. The following year, he and the SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War. He alienated many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled “Beyond Vietnam”. J. Edgar Hoover considered him a radical and made him an object of the FBI’s COINTELPRO from 1963 on. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his extramarital liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and on one occasion mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide.

In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People’s Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the shooting. Sentenced to 99 years in prison for King’s murder, effectively a life sentence as Ray was 41 at the time of conviction, Ray served 29 years of his sentence and died from hepatitis in 1998 while in prison. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971; the holiday was enacted at the federal level by legislation signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and a county in Washington was rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.

King was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. King’s given name at birth was Michael King, and his father was also born Michael King, but, after a period of gradual transition on the elder King’s part, he changed both his and his son’s names in 1934. The senior King was inspired during a trip to Germany for that year’s meeting of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA). While visiting sites associated with the Protestant reformation leader, Martin Luther, attendees witnessed the rise of Nazism. The BWA conference issued a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, and the senior King gained deepened appreciation for the power of Luther’s protest. The elder King would later state that “Michael” was a mistake by the attending physician to his son’s birth, and the younger King’s birth certificate was altered to read “Martin Luther King Jr.” in 1957. King’s parents were both African-American, and he had Irish ancestry through his paternal great-grandfather.

King was a middle child, between older sister Christine King Farris and younger brother A.D. King. King sang with his church choir at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the film Gone with the Wind, and he enjoyed singing and music. His mother was an accomplished organist and choir leader who took him to various churches to sing, and he received attention for singing “I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus”. King later became a member of the junior choir in his church. King said that his father regularly whipped him until he was 15; a neighbor reported hearing the elder King telling his son “he would make something of him even if he had to beat him to death.” King saw his father’s proud and fearless protests against segregation, such as King Sr. refusing to listen to a traffic policeman after being referred to as “boy,” or stalking out of a store with his son when being told by a shoe clerk that they would have to “move to the rear” of the store to be served.

When King was a child, he befriended a white boy whose father owned a business near his family’s home. When the boys were six, they started school: King had to attend a school for African Americans, and the other boy went to one for whites (public schools were among the facilities segregated by state law). King lost his friend because the child’s father no longer wanted the boys to play together. King suffered from depression through much of his life. In his adolescent years, he initially felt resentment against whites due to the “racial humiliation” that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to endure in the segregated South. At the age of 12, shortly after his maternal grandmother died, King blamed himself and jumped out of a second-story window, but survived.

Growing up in Atlanta, King attended Booker T. Washington High School. He became known for his public-speaking ability and was part of the school’s debate team. When King was 13 years old, in 1942, he became the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal. During his junior year, he won first prize in an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks Club in Dublin, Georgia. On the ride home to Atlanta by bus, he and his teacher were ordered by the driver to stand so that white passengers could sit down. King initially refused but complied after his teacher told him that he would be breaking the law if he did not submit. During this incident, King said that he was “the angriest I have ever been in my life.”  An outstanding student, he skipped both the ninth and the twelfth grades of high school.

King, representing the SCLC, was among the leaders of the “Big Six” civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were Roy Wilkins from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Whitney Young, National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and James L. Farmer Jr., of the Congress of Racial Equality. Bayard Rustin’s open homosexuality, support of democratic socialism, and his former ties to the Communist Party USA caused many white and African-American leaders to demand King distance himself from Rustin, which King agreed to do. However, he did collaborate in the 1963 March on Washington, for which Rustin was the primary logistical and strategic organizer. For King, this role was another which courted controversy, since he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of United States President John F. Kennedy in changing the focus of the march.

The march originally was conceived as an event to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in the southern U.S. and an opportunity to place organizers’ concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation’s capital. Organizers intended to denounce the federal government for its failure to safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and blacks. The group acquiesced to presidential pressure and influence, and the event ultimately took on a far less strident tone. As a result, some civil rights activists felt it presented an inaccurate, sanitized pageant of racial harmony; Malcolm X called it the “Farce on Washington”, and the Nation of Islam forbade its members from attending the march.

Inside Iraq air base after Iran missile strikes

Iran has carried out a ballistic missile attack on air bases housing US forces in Iraq, in retaliation for the US killing of General Qasem Soleimani. More than a dozen missiles launched from Iran struck two air bases in Irbil and Al Asad, west of Baghdad. It is unclear if there have been any casualties. The initial response from Washington has been muted. President Trump tweeted that all was well and said casualties and damage were being assessed. Two Iraqi bases housing US and coalition troops were targeted, one at Al Asad and one in Irbil, at about 02:00 local time on Wednesday (22:30 GMT on Tuesday). It came just hours after the burial of Soleimani, who controlled Iran’s proxy forces across the Middle East. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said the attack was “a slap in the face” for the US and called for an end to the US presence in the Middle East.

Iranian missiles target U.S. troops in Iraq

Iran fired 16 missiles at military bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq, an act of retaliation for the U.S. strike that killed Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani. On 8 January 2020, in a military operation code named Operation Martyr Soleimani, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) launched 22 ballistic missiles at the Ayn al-Asad airbase in Al Anbar Governorate, Western Iraq, as well as another airbase in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, in response to the assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani by United States forces. Iran had informed the Iraqi government before the attack, and the information was passed to the US military. No Iraqi or American casualties were reported. A previous retaliatory attack also took place on 4 January, when rockets and mortars struck the Balad Air Base and the Green Zone. On the evening of 8 January 2020, Reuters reported that three Katyusha rockets were launched, hitting Baghdad’s Green Zone.

In the lead up to the attacks, Iranian officials had stated that Iran would retaliate against U.S. forces for the killing of general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad on 3 January 2020. Reportedly, following the Baghdad strike, U.S. spy agencies detected that Iran’s ballistic missile regiments were at a heightened readiness but it was unclear at the time if they were defensive measures or an indication of a future attack on U.S. forces. U.S. president Donald Trump warned Tehran that any retaliation would result in the U.S. targeting 52 significant Iranian sites, including cultural sites. On 3 December 2019, five rockets had landed on the Ayn al-Asad airbase and there were no injuries. A “security source” inside Ayn al-Asad airbase and a “local official at a nearby town” said that the reports that the Ayn al-Asad airbase were under attack at that time were false. These reports on Twitter temporarily caused a rally of U.S. and Brent crude oil futures. On 4 January 2020, two rockets hit the Balad Air Base located near Baghdad. Two mortars also hit Baghdad’s Green Zone. The attacks resulted in no casualties or damage. 

 According to Iraqi Prime Minister (PM) Adel Abdul Mahdi’s spokesperson, on 8 January, shortly after midnight, the PM had received a message from Iran, indicating that the response to the killing of General Soleimani had “started or was about to start”. Iran also informed the PM that only those locations where the U.S. troops are stationed would be targeted. Although the exact locations of the bases were not disclosed, U.S. officials confirm their troops had adequate warning to shelter from the attack. According to the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), the country’s state-run news outlet, Iran fired “tens of ground-to-ground missiles” at the base and claimed responsibility for the attacks. ISNA stated that the code used to launch the missiles was “Oh Zahra”. The attacks unfolded in two waves, each about an hour apart. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed responsibility for the attack and announced that it was carried out in response to the killing of Soleimani. The IRGC added that if the United States responded with a retaliatory strike, the IRGC would respond in kind. The IRGC further declared that their statement was intended as a warning and applied to all of the United States’ partners who provided their bases to its military.

Trump and Kim hold historic meeting at Demilitarized Zone

U. S. President Donald Trump took a historic step into North Korea, drawing on his penchant for showmanship and surprise to pull off talks with Kim Jong Un in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that divides the two Koreas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arctic Cold Wave Hits United States

In January 2019, a severe cold wave caused by the Arctic polar vortex hit the Midwestern United States and Eastern Canada, killing at least 21 people. It came after a winter storm brought up to 13 inches (33 cm) of snow in some regions from January 27–29.

Normally, the Northern Hemisphere jet stream travels fast enough to keep the polar vortex stationary in the stratosphere over the North Pole. In late January 2019, a weakening of the jet stream split the polar vortex in two, with one formation traveling southward and stalling over central Canada and north-central United States for about a week before it dissipated. The influx of frigid air from the North Pole created high winds, and brought extreme sub-zero temperatures, further exacerbated by severe wind chill. Large amounts of snow fell in the affected area. Some have attributed the unusual weather pattern to climate change.

In the Chicago area, temperatures plummeted as low as −23 °F (−31 °C) at O’Hare International Airport on January 30, with a windchill of −52 °F (−47 °C). Chicago’s Northerly Island recorded temperatures as low as −21 °F (−29 °C) and Chicago’s Midway International Airport recorded a temperature of −22 °F (−30 °C).[6] Chicago also reached record lows on January 31, with a temperature of −21 °F (−29 °C) and a windchill of −41 °F (−41 °C). Rockford reached an all-time record low of −31 °F (−35 °C), shattering the old record of −27 °F (−33 °C) from 1982. Moline in the Quad Cities reached an all-time record low of −33 °F (−36 °C). In Mount Carroll, a temperature of −38 °F (−39 °C) was recorded on January 30. If verified, this would be the all-time lowest temperature in the state of Illinois.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Life Along the US-Mexico Border

Data from the United States Border Patrol Agency’s (USBP) 2010 annual report shows that among the total number of border crossings without documentation from various countries into the United States, 90 percent were from Mexico alone. In addition, there are more than 6 million undocumented Mexican nationals residing in the United States. The border, with a length of 3,145 kilometers (1,954 mi), has a very high rate of documented and undocumented migrant crossings every year. With such a high rate of people crossing annually to the United States, the country has invested in several distinct security measures. In 2010, due to insecurity and instability at the southern border of the U.S. President Barack Obama signed an appropriation bill, which gave the Customs and Border Protection, specifically the Border Patrol, 600 million dollars to implement and improve security. The U.S. government has invested many millions of dollars on border security, although this has not stopped undocumented immigration in the United States. In June 2018, the U.S. government announced installation of facial recognition system for monitoring the immigrant’s activities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Castro era ends in Cuba

A look back at the reign of brothers Fidel and Raul Castro, as the communist island prepares to choose its first non-Castro leader since the 1959 revolution.

1926: Born in the south-eastern Oriente Province of Cuba

1953: Imprisoned after leading an unsuccessful rising against Batista’s regime

1955: Released from prison under an amnesty deal

1956: With Che Guevara, begins a guerrilla war against the government

1959: Defeats Batista, sworn in as prime minister of Cuba

1961: Fights off CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles

1962: Sparks Cuban missile crisis by agreeing that USSR can deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba

1976: Elected president by Cuba’s National Assembly

1992: Reaches an agreement with US over Cuban refugees

2006: Hands over reins to brother Raul due to health issues, stands down as president two years later