[Time] At least 26 people have been shot ‐ and four killed ‐ over the holiday weekend in Chicago, including 11 children, in the second straight weekend of widespread gun violence to impact the city. No children were among the fatalities.
According to the Chicago Police Department, 15 shooting incidents over the weekend have already been reported, and that number could rise ahead of official numbers being released tomorrow.
Two incidents involving children were the result of accidental shootings involving kids playing with firearms, according to authorities. On Friday night, an 11-year-old was hit in the neck after he and a 7-year-old child found a gun inside a house, which then went off. He was transported to the hospital in serious condition.
Later that same night, an 8-year-old and a 12-year-old were accidentally shot by a juvenile relative who was playing with a weapon inside another home. Both were taken to the hospital in fair condition.
In four separate incidents across Saturday and Sunday, teenagers were injured in drive-by shootings ‐ in one shooting, a 17-year-old was offered drugs, and was shot after he refused; two teens were also among six people shot during a gathering in an apartment on Friday night. No one has been charged with a crime and police are investigating.
[MSN] U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting. "failed to take action" now supercedes "TrumpHitler is racist and xenophobic for profiling people travelling from the Wuhan Virus zone"
The intelligence reports didn’t predict when the virus might land on U.S. shores or recommend particular steps that public health officials should take, issues outside the purview of the intelligence agencies. But they did track the spread of the virus in China, and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.
Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it. But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans. Lawmakers, too, did not grapple with the virus in earnest until this month, as officials scrambled to keep citizens in their homes and hospitals braced for a surge in patients suffering from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Intelligence agencies "have been warning on this since January," said a U.S. official who had access to intelligence reporting that was disseminated to members of Congress and their staffs as well as to officials in the Trump administration, and who, along with others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information.
"Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were ‐ they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it," this official said. "The system was blinking red."
#5
and if Trump had done anything the exact same people would be calling him a racist xenophobe.
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
03/21/2020 13:14 Comments ||
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#6
Yeah, sure. They probably had all scenarios covered in their brief so whatever happened they could claim that they predicted it.
President Truman once complained about trained economists: “Whenever I ask their opinion, they say on the one hand, so-and-so; but on the other hand, so-and-so, On the one hand, — but on the other hand. I would like to meet an economist with one hand!“
#7
President Trump was doing all sorts of things, though the Washington Post and certain members of the intelligence community choose to forget. All that travel from affected countries shut down despite the outcry, not to mention the planning that has gone on since 2018 and the Johns Hopkins pandemic gaming exercise that was put on last autumn.
As for the lawmakers not grappling, thanks to the Democrats our federal lawmakers were shut up at close quarters in the Senate for the impeachment farce during the critical period — how many will fall ill because of that particular vicious bit of pointless, time-sucking idiocy?
It should be noted at this point that as a group the Democratic congresscritters and senators are older and in worse health than their Republican counterparts. This should worry those looking further than November.
#13
This relates directly to the art of the intel briefing. The part where you may well have predicted some event unfolding at the moment. But you also gave so many other possibilities and variables that whatever useful information conveyed was reduced to the appearance of mere ass covering.
[Babylon Bee] MIAMI, FL‐It's spring break and, despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, America's young and sexy beachgoers have some rays to catch. It's going to take a lot more than a deadly pandemic to stop these party animals from getting wet and wild in their natural habitat. While Spring breakers on the Florida coast are dying of the spreading COVID-19 virus, one thing lives on: their right to party. Recent aerial photographs reveal that the recently deceased funsters have been arranged on the beach to spell #YOLO ‐ a popular acronym that stands for the inspirational axiom "You Only Live Once".
"I will literally party until I bleed out of every orifice and pass on enough viral death fog to wipe out a small country," said one man wearing one of those hats with two beer cans on top that have little hoses leading to his face. The beer-headed man's attitude seemed to match many on the beach who expressed no concern for their own deaths or the many deaths to come because of large public gatherings such as this one.
Partyers on the beach already have a drinking game planned for if police invade and force them all to disperse. "Every time they say hands up, take a shot of tequila," said one of the beach-anarchist ringleaders. " We're gonna get so trashed. S'gonna be awesome."
#1
Sheriff Chitwood in Volusia County is passing more info to the public re Chinavirus cases here than the county council wants. He's elected rather than appointed so he doesn't entirely answer to them.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/21/2020 10:42 Comments ||
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#2
So, this might be me in the near future. Had the virus. Got over it. Assuming that recovery confers some level of immunity, I've going to have a free pass just as this thing really gets going. Not sure what that means yet. Should get interesting.
#4
This is clearly a public health hazard. Authorities should have cordoned off the crowds and put them in fenced compounds with tents and basic sanitation until the epidemic passes. With an R0 of 2.5 they could infect the eastern seaboard and the country riki tick (or exponentially for you mathematical types).
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
03/21/2020 12:26 Comments ||
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#5
Will make for some nice memes when folks compare the greatest generation fighting WW2 and the millennials partying without regard for the safety of the elderly.
[JSTOR Daily] Last week, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic. In an effort to slow the spread of the disease, schools and universities across the world have transitioned to online instruction. Educators find themselves wondering how to engage their students amidst the developing crisis. We all find ourselves scrambling for information and, let’s face it, ways to make sense of our fear and anxiety.
While JSTOR Daily can’t provide new research on the novel coronavirus that’s causing COVID-19, we can offer important historical, scientific, and cultural context for this unprecedented situation. The essays and articles below‐published over the last five years‐look at the history of quarantine, contagious disease, viruses, infections, and epidemics. We’ll be updating this as we publish new content. As always, free access to the underlying scholarship cited in the stories is available to everyone.
[American Thinker] Anthony Fauci, M.D., the 79-year old head of the National Institute of Allegy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has become the #1 point man on the government’s role in the coronavirus crisis. Fauci has worked for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) his entire professional life. In the past, for more than two decades starting in the mid-1980s, he was the medical establishment’s face of HIV-AIDS ‐ omnipresent on television when AIDS was hot and ever present at international AIDS conferences well into the 21st century. Always, he was an enthusiastic advocate of throwing more federal money at the problem of AIDS. He's widely praised in the press. He's also held in high esteem by his medical peers. In 2008, President George W. Bush honored Fauci with the nation's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
A look back at what Fauci and his colleagues did during their decades of pushing fear and the spending of billions of dollars of funding for HIV-AIDS is instructive.
As an independent journalist, I covered the "war" on HIV-AIDS extensively starting in 1986 ‐ just as the massive effort to combat the condition was gearing up. Eventually, the government’s spending on HIV-AIDS came to eclipse what was spent on the failed war on cancer that began in 1971, which is where my reporting on the politics of medicine and cancer had started.
After seeing a March 9, 2020 tweet by Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D., who has four degrees from MIT, I was inspired to take a look back to try to put Fauci’s current work on coronavirus into some perspective.
#2
From the article - NIH Research $ Spent, per Patient - 1998
AIDS:..................$2,400
Breast Cancer:.......$230
Heart Disease:.......$108
Parkinson's:.............$78
Diabetes:.................$28
That means Faici's pet project, AIDS research, hovered nearly 5x the NIH research dollars as three diseases that together kill far more Americans each year than AIDS ever did or could. There were 400k deaths caused by AIDS in the preceding 7 years, vs 14 million deaths from heart disease alone during that period. Another disease for which research funding was crowded out by AIDS research, diabetes, now causes, at minimum, 83,000 deaths per year and likely many more. IOW, these diseases are killing far more Americans each year than the AIDS epidemic at its peak killed -- and our betters decided that it was wise to allocate to AIDS 24x the funding (in the case of AIDS vs heart disease) or up to 100x the funding (vs diabetes) allocated to known killers that destroy the general population - as opposed to affecting a tiny demographic.
Granted that the current epidemic disproportionately kills a demographic, the elderly, that is many times larger than the demographic that AIDS disproportionately affected - and, unlike this author, I'm not sure it diminishes Fauci's standing as a medical expert - but from a POLICY standpoint, this data set is very disturbing.
It suggests that our leaders allocate medical and other public health resources in ways that are less than rational and that end up causing far more deaths and misery than they prevent.
#3
After seeing a March 9, 2020 tweet by Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D., who has four degrees from MIT
Fun fact - Shiva is a former client of mine. It lasted about a year or so - he was overly demanding and unreasonable and I wound up hanging up on him twice in one day. At that point I knew it was over.
#4
Actually, Lex, I think you are. I'm not saying the priorities are right--I don't think they are.
AIDS research lets you study details of the immune system--how to turn bits off and maybe back on. It is, from a researcher's viewpoint, both fascinating and far-reaching. Things happen on a faster time-scale, and there are fewer complications like genetic predisposition to breast cancer. We already know ways to treat AIDS, so this may be a little more "pure research."
The problem is, as you point out, that focusing research dollars here isn't apt to return the same public health benefits as more "applied research" on heart disease. True, we already know a lot about heart disease--eat less, exercise, and choose your ancestors carefully. But we could do better.
Posted by: james ||
03/21/2020 16:53 Comments ||
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[Washington Examiner] Cities and entire states have gone on lockdown in the past week as officials work to stem the rapid spread of the coronavirus, sequestering at least 75 million people in their homes.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a statewide stay-at-home order Thursday night, and other governors followed suit within hours. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Ned Lamont of Connecticut, and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, all Democrats, issued similar orders Friday, telling people to stay in their homes unless to go to "essential" businesses only, including pharmacies, grocery stores, banks, gas stations, and child care services.
President Trump applauded Govs. Cuomo and Newsom in Friday’s White House press briefing for taking "strong, bold steps" to stem the outbreak, while National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci said he "strongly supports" the governors’ actions.
Meanwhile, officials in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Washington state, and more have ordered all bars and restaurants to close.
The most recent announcement came from Pritzker, who told reporters in Illinois that the order would last until April 7.
"I fully recognize that, in some cases, I am choosing between people’s lives and saving people’s livelihood," Pritzker said in a news conference. "But, ultimately, you can’t have a livelihood if you don’t have your life."
#9
Illinois is already at the point where they can't tax their way out of their debt. If things don't get fixed soon the rest of the US tax base won't be able to bail them out. Not that we should.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/21/2020 15:18 Comments ||
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[Amazing Polly] Did you know that Bill & Melinda Gates, the CIA, the World Economic Forum, Bloomber / Johns Hopkins, the UN Foundation & more ran a scenario for a Cor-na Virus Pandemic in December 2019? I have clips from that event to share with you as well as other shocking material.
h/t Instapundit
[WSJ] - America’s "arsenal of democracy" saved Europe and the world from fascism during World War II. Today the U.S. can win a similar victory over the novel coronavirus by sticking to the same principles that made the war effort so successful. President Trump took a vital step in that direction Wednesday by invoking the Defense Production Act, which gives him the authority to expedite and expand industrial production of key medical resources necessary to fight the pandemic.
[al-Monitor] The governor’s office in The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor... ’s western border province of Edirne announced March 17 that 147,132 migrants colonists had crossed into EU territory from the province since Feb. 28, when Ankara said it would no longer stop refugees from moving on to Europe. The statement might have been passed over as routine were it not an implicit declaration that Turkey’s "operation" of sending refugees to Europa ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... via Greece had tacitly come to an end.
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[al-Monitor] The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor... remains faced with a major dilemma on how to proceed in Syria after its latest deal with Russia led to a fragile lull in the rebel stronghold of Idlib but fell short of a lasting solution. Contrasting visions appear to be under discussion in Ankara, calling for choices that could bear on Turkey’s foreign policy in the long run.
The most crucial provision in the deal with Russia, sealed by the two countries’ presidents in Moscow on March 5, is perhaps the one regarding the status of southern Idlib. The provision calls for the creation of a security corridor with a depth of 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) on either side of the key M4 highway and joint Ottoman Turkish-Russian patrols along the route to ensure de-escalation. The two sides have divided control over the corridor, with Turkey responsible for the northern side and Russian forces ‐ and by implication, the forces of Syrian Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad
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[Washington Examiner] Days after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ripped President Trump for what she called "racist rhetoric" toward China, a top ambassador from the country is agreeing with her sentiment.
Chinese Ambassador to South Africa Lin Songtian backed the former Democratic presidential candidate in a two-line tweet responding to Clinton's tirade against Trump for his continued use of the terms "Chinese virus" and "Wuhan virus." Clinton claimed Trump was "turning to racist rhetoric to distract from his failures to take the coronavirus seriously early on."
"It is true," wrote Lin on Saturday morning. "Justice always speak loudly."
Trump's insistence on noting the origin of the coronavirus has led to criticism from media outlets who only one month ago used similar language to describe the flu-like illness. The disease is believed to have first appeared in a seafood market in Wuhan, China, but the language the president has used to describe the geographical home of the virus has created a bitterly partisan political debate.
The war of words comes at a time when officials in the United States and China have amplified conspiracies and doubt about the timeline of the virus and where it came from. On March 12, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao suggested that "it might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan."
But top officials in the Trump administration have pushed back on the claim that the U.S. played any role in spreading the disease in China.
#3
Surreal. Now the New York Times is saying - I swear this isn't the Bee - that Trump has ceded leadership on the coronavirus to ... get this ... CHINA.
And the above article from NYT's Germany-based correspondent reprints the scurrilous lie about the bogus "monopoly" request to German company Cure-Vac. After the company itself denied it, and GERMAN media figures denounced Die Welt for printing such a lie.
Despicable slander. Unconscionable. Actionable at law.
"The request raised eyebrows because of its potential implications for habeas corpus –– the constitutional right to appear before a judge after arrest and seek release."
[Washington Examiner] Fox News host Tucker Carlson confronted Sen. Kelly Loeffler over reports that she sold over $1 million in stocks after a Senate Health Committee coronavirus briefing in January.
The Georgia Republican had previously called the news "a ridiculous and baseless attack" and said that "investment decisions are made by multiple third-party advisers without my or my husband's knowledge or involvement."
Appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Friday, Loeffler reiterated her claim that she had nothing to do with the trades. Carlson asked her "who specifically" made the decision for the stocks in her portfolio to be sold despite the strong market.
"That would be the financial advisers that are charged with conducting trades in our portfolios, which we don’t have a say over," Loeffler said. "The most important thing is that I’m informed only after those trades are made. I have nothing in terms of a say in what buys and sells are executed, what that timing is, and I’m only advised after it happens, almost concurrent with the public reporting that we do here."
Carlson then pointed out that she received notice of the stocks that were sold on Feb. 16, and, despite showing the sells, recorded a video reassuring the public that the economy was strong. Carlson showed a clip of the video and asked that if, in retrospect, she would have "hinted that maybe [the economy] is not fine."
"This situation has dramatically changed in the space of three months. I think none of us could have predicted where we would be today, and I think that’s why it’s important that I’m not involved in stock transactions. I don’t want to have to explain my actions three months ago," she said before being cut off.
Posted by: Besoeker ||
03/21/2020 11:08 ||
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#6
Never met anyone named Kelly, male or female, who I would trust with a key to my house. Never met anyone named Loeffler I'd let park my car.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/21/2020 12:11 Comments ||
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#7
Total outsider, like a gynotastic James Dean.
Kelly Lynn Loeffler served as chief executive officer (CEO) of Bakkt, a subsidiary of commodity and financial service provider Intercontinental Exchange. Loeffler is co-owner of the Atlanta Dream in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA).
Husband Jeffrey Sprecher is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, and chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) is an American company that owns exchanges for financial and commodity markets, and operates 12 regulated exchanges and marketplaces. This includes ICE futures exchanges in the United States, Canada and Europe, the Liffe futures exchanges in Europe, the New York Stock Exchange, equity options exchanges and OTC energy, credit and equity markets. ICE also owns and operates 6 central clearing houses: ICE Clear U.S., ICE Clear Europe, ICE Clear Singapore, ICE Clear Credit, ICE Clear Netherlands and ICE NGX. ICE has offices in Atlanta, New York, London, Chicago, Bedford, Houston, Winnipeg, Amsterdam, Calgary, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Tel Aviv and Singapore.
"When a member of Congress attends a briefing like the one that Senators on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and Foreign Relations Committees attended on January 24, does that mean they can’t sell stock because it would be seen as insider trading?"
[Town Hall] - As members of Congress debate the terms of the trillion-dollar-plus coronavirus relief package for businesses and individuals, they would do well to remember our recent history.
Most people in professional Washington hate the populist era we are going through. The populist period exists because Americans already feel like their elected officials are more responsive to large corporate interests than to the individuals who elected them. This played out big-time after the Wall Street bailouts fueled the tea party on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left.
People on the left and right agree that some government assistance is needed to avoid an economic catastrophe. On the individual level, many people with little savings have already lost jobs. Many more will. The best policy is likely just direct payments from the government targeted as quickly as possible to those most in need. It's going to cost a ton and comes with a huge downside down the road, but it's also hard to argue that we don't need it. That's actually the easy part.
On the corporate side, things get more complicated. People see empty airports, empty restaurants and closed-down businesses. They know many industries are suffering. People also don't want to throw our economy into a crisis. They will support a bailout, but if they later learn that the corporate world got anything that looks like a sweetheart deal out of this crisis, the political retribution will be overwhelming. Go ask the many members of Congress who lost seats in the wake of the financial crisis bailout. That was before this populist era even started.
Right this minute, there are teams of lobbyists trying to get all they can for their industry clients. It's their job. They are good at it. They understand the complicated issues more than anyone else, and they know the members of Congress and their staffs.
Sitting across the table will be the members of Congress (or, more likely, their staffs), who are supposed to represent the American taxpayers during the ongoing negotiations. They share the same worldview. Together, they will define the terms of the bailout, and it will likely be so complicated that it may take weeks, or even months, for the rest of us to know exactly what they did. Too many taxpayers feel like their elected officials are not looking out for their interests first at moments like these. The deals often come out looking too sweet for politically connected companies. If that happens, we will be saying hello to our first socialist president sometime down the road.
#1
Finally, an explanation for Italy: 10% of Covid cases are health workers ==> Italians die like flies because health workers didn't take adequate precaution, and now there are too few to treat the patients.
#4
Italy = under-funded, centrally planned, big-statist social medicine. Short of doctors, and as is typical of socialized medicine, concentrating everything into centralized, larger facilities, but less over-all coverage and capacity.
Posted by: Marilyn Tojo7566 ||
03/21/2020 19:32 Comments ||
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#5
/\ The desired end-state is control. Central planning facilitates control.
#6
So, the people who get this strain of COVID-19, say, for example, that staffer for VP Pence....what are they treated with? Anything? Nothing? Chicken soup?
Today Jack bugged me that I should do a blog post, just for posterity’s sake. But I’ve got no great insight into the world right now. I’m not a doctor, none of this is my area of expertise. I’m just doing like everyone else and trying to be a hermit. Luckily for me, grumpy hermit is my default setting.
Two of my kids have jobs which are necessary and required right now though, so people can keep getting supplies, and both of them are too stubborn to quit. I worry for them.
Even with all this nasty crap going around, and people suffering, I am hopeful for the future. This will pass. Viruses come and go. The economy will get kicked hard, but it will come back. Companies will go out of business and people will lose their jobs, but new ones will start. How long? Beats me. I suppose it depends on how badly we screw up the rest of the year. On the bright side hopefully the world will learn that they don’t want to put all their economic and manufacturing eggs into one communist dictatorship basket.
...Also, on that note, most of you don’t even understand what the words exponential or logarithmic mean, you sound like idiots, so quit pretending to be epidemiologists. You’re just embarrassing yourselves. You don’t know shit either, so quit acting smug. Sharing every click bait article that comes across your feed doesn’t make you "more serious". It just makes you annoying.
...Depending on how long this goes on for, it could cause some real changes in society and how we live our lives. Notice how when the chips are down a bunch of the silly rules, regulations, and unimportant BS we put up with everyday get tossed because they do nothing but get in the way? Well, that should be a hint. I just hope that we don’t replace those stupid things with all new, even more draconian ones.
...Stuff’s going to get weird for a bit. Decent people are going to try to do what they think is best and help those around them. Americans are amazing people with an incredible capacity to get shit done when given the opportunity. But our assholes are going to virtue signal, lie their asses off, and try to score cheap political points, so they can hinder rather than help. In times of trial, try not to be an asshole.
From the guy who wrote "The Red Queen", h/t Instapundit
[Spectator] - Sunday, lonely as a cloud, I wandered across a windswept moor in County Durham and passed a solitary sandstone rock with a small, round hollow in the top, an old penny glued to the base of the hollow. It is called the Butter Stone and it’s where, during the plague in 1665, coins were left in a pool of vinegar by the inhabitants of nearby towns and villages, to be exchanged with farmers for food. The idea was that the farmer or his customer approached the rock only when the other was at a safe distance.
Four modern coins were on the rock, anonymous offerings to the spirits of the moor. Never once in my six decades did I expect to be back in a 17th-century world of social and physical distancing as a matter of life and death.
There are no good outcomes from here. Many people will die prematurely. Many will lose their jobs. Many businesses will go under. Many people will suffer bereavement, loneliness and despair, even if they dodge the virus. The only question is how many in each case. We are about to find out how robust civilisation is. The hardships ahead are like nothing we’ve known.
The British government has been unusual in ramping up its social distancing measures, rather than rushing them all at once. This resulted in a good deal of bafflement and criticism, some of it justified. The driving motive was concern that a resurgence of the virus after its initial suppression would be a disastrous outcome, because people would not allow themselves to be curfewed twice, so the timing had to be right. But the vicious experience of Italy has changed everything. So when the darned models revealed that a single ’managed’ peak here leading to eventual herd immunity might kill 260,000 people and overwhelm the National Health Service, the strategy shifted from ’delay’ to ’suppress’.
...One side-effect of the government’s step-by-step approach is that the people have got ahead of the authorities. Lots of people have been volunteering to give up gatherings, work from home if they can or travel less before being asked to. The chorus of complaint last week on social media that the government was not doing enough is a sign that people are now telling the government what to do ‐ which is how it should be in a democracy. A prime minister is being criticised for not ordering us to do things, but ’advising’ us. Better than the other way round. As the libertarian thinker Douglas Carswell put it on Monday: ’Treat people as responsible adults and they will behave more responsibly.’
...Against many risks, excess precaution is a mistake, doing more harm than good by preventing innovation ‐ but not in the case of threats that can explode exponentially from small beginnings. Apart from Singapore, which built a special hospital after Sars, and South Korea, which geared up to test people and gather data on a huge scale, the world had done far too little to get ready for this possibility. Everything now is catch-up. And we are trying to catch the fastest runner of them all: an exponential curve.
#1
Ha! Reading just the other day, when Lysanders came up, about a vinegar bowl near King Alfred's Tower, into which a Lysander crashed in July of '44... and boy did it make a big splash.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Time] At least 26 people have been shot ‐ and four killed ‐ over the holiday weekend in Chicago, including 11 children, in the second straight weekend of widespread gun violence to impact the city. No children were among the fatalities.
[MSN] U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.
[Babylon Bee] MIAMI, FL‐It's spring break and, despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, America's young and sexy beachgoers have some rays to catch. It's going to take a lot more than a deadly pandemic to stop these party animals from getting wet and wild in their natural habitat. While Spring breakers on the Florida coast are dying of the spreading COVID-19 virus, one thing lives on: their right to party. Recent aerial photographs reveal that the recently deceased funsters have been arranged on the beach to spell #YOLO ‐ a popular acronym that stands for the inspirational axiom "You Only Live Once".
[JSTOR Daily] Last week, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic. In an effort to slow the spread of the disease, schools and universities across the world have transitioned to online instruction. Educators find themselves wondering how to engage their students amidst the developing crisis. We all find ourselves scrambling for information and, let’s face it, ways to make sense of our fear and anxiety.
[American Thinker] Anthony Fauci, M.D., the 79-year old head of the National Institute of Allegy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has become the #1 point man on the government’s role in the coronavirus crisis. Fauci has worked for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) his entire professional life. In the past, for more than two decades starting in the mid-1980s, he was the medical establishment’s face of HIV-AIDS ‐ omnipresent on television when AIDS was hot and ever present at international AIDS conferences well into the 21st century. Always, he was an enthusiastic advocate of throwing more federal money at the problem of AIDS. He's widely praised in the press. He's also held in high esteem by his medical peers. In 2008, President George W. Bush honored Fauci with the nation's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
[Amazing Polly] Did you know that Bill & Melinda Gates, the CIA, the World Economic Forum, Bloomber / Johns Hopkins, the UN Foundation & more ran a scenario for a Cor-na Virus Pandemic in December 2019? I have clips from that event to share with you as well as other shocking material. 
[al-Monitor] 
[Washington Examiner] Days after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ripped President Trump for what she called "racist rhetoric" toward China, a top ambassador from the country is agreeing with her sentiment.
[Washington Examiner] Fox News host Tucker Carlson confronted Sen. Kelly Loeffler over reports that she sold over $1 million in stocks after a Senate Health Committee coronavirus briefing in January.
