A blood-engorged female Aedes albopictus mosquito feeding on a human host. Photo James Gathany
With summer approaching, the risk of a surge in cases of the Zika virus has become a major concern for US officials, and the White House has announced that they would be redirecting money earmarked for Ebola to efforts combatting Zika.
The Obama administration made a strong push in 2014 and 2015 to help curtail the West African Ebola Outbreak, and it largely worked: the outbreak has subsided (with some sporadic cases still appearing). With that in mind, the Administration seems to be ready to shift gears to focus on the next immediate threat.
During a White House briefing earlier this week, Press Secretary Josh Earnest announced that the administration would be “reprogramming” $598 million dollars originally designated to combat Ebola, using it instead to fund counter-Zika efforts:
So earlier today, as many of you may have seen, the administration announced that we would reprogram about $600 million to bolster the ongoing Zika response. We’ve consistently said that an available option for the government was to repurpose some existing Ebola funds that would not undermine our fight against that deadly disease. But we also told Congress that just using some of the Ebola funds would be insufficient. And that should be an indication to you that today’s actions to reprogram $600 million is a temporary fix and not at all a long-term solution.
The funding would be split between the Department of Health and Human Services, the Agency for International Development and the State Department to support mosquito control programs, vaccine research and health services for low-income pregnant women, the White House said in a statement.
However, Congress has yet to act on the request, and Earnest noted that many of the local agencies that they’ve spoken with simply don’t have the resources to commit to contain or slow the spread of the virus, should it arrive in the US:
Just last week, the administration convened a summit in Atlanta of top state and local health officials, nonprofit officials, and health care experts. We heard from states that they’re keenly aware of the threat that the disease poses, and many do not have the money that they need for basic tasks that would prevent the spread of Zika.
This is an extremely short-gap fix: the $598 million represents just a third of what was requested from Congress, while also depriving the efforts used to combat Ebola from other resources. While the West African outbreak has subsided, it hasn’t completely ended, and further efforts will be required in order to ensure that individual cases don’t become larger clusters.
“Tickling a juvenile chimpanzee is a lot like tickling a child,” writes Frans de Waal, a primatologist and professor of psychology at Emory University, in an excellent piece about anthropomorphism of animals in The New York Times. Get ready to go into a YouTube black hole.
During a campaign event in Harlem on Saturday night, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders addressed race and politics, and, of course, the issue of Zionist Jews.
An attendee at the event at the Apollo Theater posed a blatantly anti-Semitic question to the Vermont Senator, who is Jewish:
“As you know, the Zionist Jews–and I don’t mean to offend anybody–they run the Federal Reserve, they run Wall Street, they run every campaign.”
Identified by The New York Times as John Prince, the man went on to ask, “What is your affiliation to your Jewish community? That’s all I’m asking.”
Sanders replied, “That’s not what you’re asking,” before defending Israel and saying that Palestinians deserve protection, too.
Many of us were disappointed when American Idol contestant La’Porsha Renae lost to fellow competitor Trent Harmon during the last-ever finale of the reality TV show, but recent comments the Mississippi-born singer made about the LGBT community have caused a number of her fans to second-guess their support.
During a media conference call, a reporter asked Renae about her home state’s newly signed anti-LGBT law, which allows business owners to deny LGBT citizens services based on the idea of “religious liberty.”
La’Porsha responded:
“This is how I feel about the LGBT community: They are people just like us. They’re not animals as someone stated before. They’re people with feelings. Although all of us may not agree with that particular lifestyle for religious reasons, whatever the reason is, you still treat each other with respect. Everybody is a human being. We should be able to coexist with one another.”
LGBT people are not animals! Maybe this means they’re not minerals or vegetables or other categories of non-human, either! How lovely of you to say, La’Porsha. How. Lovely.
She went on:
“I am one of the people who don’t really agree with that lifestyle. I wasn’t brought up that way. It wasn’t how I was raised. But I do have a lot of friends and a lot of people that I love dearly who are gay and homosexual and they’re such sweet, nice people. We should just respect each other’s differences and opinions and move on.”
Oh, honey, there’s a big difference between tolerance and acceptance, and I think you just gave my new favorite textbook example. And utilizing tokenism (i.e, “I have a gay friend!”) does not let you get away with dehumanizing LGBT people—it just makes your latent homophobia even more glaringly obvious.
Renae’s commentary is even more befuddling in light of another interview the singer had with Yahoo Music, in which she stated that intends to use her new-found fame as a stepping-stone for change—a possibility she discovered during her American Idol tenure.
“Yeah, I know [American Idol] is a singing competition, but it’s also a show where a lot of times they shed light on certain things,” the singer told Yahoo. “Having such a big platform, I wanted to use it for good.”
And because it’s the diametric opposite to these remarks, I’m going to post Renae’s response to the backlash that ensued regarding her anti-LGBT commentary right here.
The Prime Minister of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, said Sunday that he would be resigning from his office, to be formally announced on Tuesday.
Parliamentary Speaker Volodymyr Groysman will reportedly step into the position. The outgoing Prime Minister tweeted the announcement on Sunday:
The political scenario in Ukraine has been getting shakier and shakier recently, with current President, Petro Poroshenko, asking Yatsenyuk to quit in February. (Poroshenko was mentioned in the recent leak of documents suggesting he had set up an offshore company to evade taxes with the company Mossack Fonesca). Yatsenyuk, plagued by war, corruption and poor economic performance, had low popularity ratings in the country. It’s not clear whether he will continue to be involved in the government.
There are probably some readers here who would like to smash a piece of cake in Hillary Clinton’s face. There are others who would like to tenderly feed it to her, like a mama bird to a baby bird. Wherever you fall on the Cake Spectrum™, I think we can all see that this sucks for womankind:
Hillary Clinton isn’t eating this cake because people will mock her, a woman, for eating. She will be teased for taking one bite of the most delicious cheesecake in New York City. We watched Ted Cruz eat his own snot, and he’s still a viable political candidate.
And here I am, talking about it anyway. Let her eat cake.
Michael Cohen, an executive vice president at the Trump Organization and special counsel to Donald Trump, retweeted on Sunday evening an endorsement from @RepStevenSmith, Republican from Georgia’s 15th Congressional District, Tea Party Patriot, and parody account.
This comes after erstwhile surrogate Ben Carson said in a radio interview this week that Trump is aware that his own Twitter practices might be hindering his campaign: “He knows that it’s a problem. And the first part of solving the problem is recognizing that it exists.” Maybe Trump isn’t the only one with a problem.
In any event, it is only a matter of time until Cohen claims he knew it was a joke all along, and that he isn’t mad—in fact, he thinks it’s funny.
On Saturday, Ted Cruz polished off his domination of Colorado by collecting all 34 delegates available in the state, enraging the Trump campaign, which responded to the utter and total loss with its predictable amount of vehement vitriol. From The Guardian:
“You go to these county conventions and you see the Gestapo tactics, the scorched-earth tactics,” said Paul Manafort, Trump’s newly appointed “convention manager”, in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.
Manafort was not specific about what Cruz, the Texas senator who is best placed to take on Trump, or his campaign had done to remind him of the Nazi secret police.
The Cruz win is essential because it drastically increases the likelihood of a contested convention—in that potential scenario, delegates would be free to select whichever candidate they wanted.
In addition, according to The Guardian, the Trump campaign made its unmistakable mark in Colorado by passing out mislabeled ballots with misspelled names and having delegates scream such fetching calls to arms as “Donald Trump! Buy Colorado weed!”
$2 Kindle books, the new 3DS XL, and a cheap camping hammock kick off Sunday’s best deals.
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Once you’ve owned a vacuum-insulated stainless steel water bottle, every other liquid vessel technology will be forever ruined for you. This 20 ounce model has great reviews, and a $10 coupon to entice you today.
The Pebble Time might not be as “advanced” as an Apple Watch or Android Wear watch, but with week-long battery life, the Pebble Time might be the most practical smart wearable you can buy, especially at this price. Just be sure to use code AP20 at checkout to save $20.
For just $11 today, you can sip your drinks in style with eight stainless steel drinking straws (four straight, four bent). I own the bent set, and use them for everything from Coke Zero to Moscow Mules. And don’t worry, they come with a little tube cleaner to help you wash them. Just add both items to your cart, and use code NBYUDBEU at checkout.
It won’t turn you into Jordan Spieth, but this golf laser rangefinder has never been cheaper. It’s a Gold Box deal though, so don’t miss your tee time.
Sugru is right up there with binder clips and the Raspberry Pi in Lifehacker’s pantheon of must-have gear, and you can stock up today with 8-packs from Amazon for just $16-$18 each.
With a good set of silicone cooking gloves, you’ll have full finger control when you handle hot pans in the kitchen. Hell, you could use them to just pick up a piece of meat directly off the grill, like some sort of barbecue superhero.
The last month has seen a couple of great wiper blade promotions, but if you haven’t liked the the brands Amazon’s promoted so far, how’s two Valeo frameless blades for $22 sound? This deal applies to every Valeo Ultimate 900-series blade that Amazon sells, some of which go for over $20 by themselves.
All you have to do is add any two blades to your cart (shipped and sold by Amazon), and the total price will be knocked down to $22 at checkout automatically. I can only speak from my own experience, but these are the best blades I’ve ever used, and well worth the money.
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Despite his earlier insistence that everything between himself and the Clinton campaign is hunky-dory, Mayor Bill de Blasio still seems to be having a heck of a time convincing the high profile presidential candidate to appear in the same room with him.
On Wednesday, of the 300-odd people who attended the “Rally for Hillary in Manhattan” at the Lower Manhattan offices of the United Federation of Teachers, Clinton herself was not among them.
“The mayor is still overcoming his early reluctance to endorse Hillary,” veteran Democratic political consultant Geroge Arzt told the New York Times, “and in the hottest Democratic presidential primary in years here, this is proving to be a little awkward.”
Interestingly, the major’s wife, Chirlane McCray, is having no trouble drawing candidate Clinton’s ear: the two held a rally together on Tuesday with the intent of drawing female voters to the Clinton cause.
“Last night, a patron came to me to complain about being hit by the stage blood. Not only was her sweater stained, but also her Burberry cashmere scarf and more importantly (she cried when she showed it to me) her leather Louis Vuitton bag. I told her that we will pay for the cleaning of her items.”
You can’t drive your car over the cobbled roads of Northern France. They’re jagged anachronisms from a past era of transportation, and the only vehicles that still traverse them are tractors and, one Sunday a year, hundreds of professional cyclists. The 114th running of Paris-Roubaix will take place tomorrow, and whoever wins will have to conquer 53 kilometers of the most openly antagonistic roads in cycling. Legendary French journalist Jacques Goddet famously referred to the race as “the last great folly of cycle racing.”
Paris-Roubaix wraps up a two-week stretch of cobbled racing, and its stones are the harshest in the region. Cobbles obviously shake your bones and rattle your skull, but the hidden problem they pose is their slipperiness. When it’s a dry day (as it will be tomorrow), a thin film of dust covers their surface, and you can fall with the slightest twitch. Conquering the cobbles is about focus as much as power. The roads in that part of France are incredibly narrow, and if you pick the wrong line, you fall. The sneaky solution would be to simply ride in the dirt next to the cobbles, but organizers drive farm equipment over the sides of the road to cut off that option. Every cobbled sector is preceded by a mad dash for position, as hundreds of riders have to funnel into a three-wide opening.
The race is known as the “Hell of the North” not for its cobbles, but for the destruction Northern France suffered during World War I. Some of the worst trench warfare took place in and around Ypres, Somme, and Lille, towns that the race had passed through. L’Auto first used the word “hell” when describing the post-war terrain that the race passed through in 1919:
We enter into the centre of the battlefield. There’s not a tree, everything is flattened! Not a square meter that has not been hurled upside down. There’s one shell hole after another. The only things that stand out in this churned earth are the crosses with their ribbons in blue, white and red. It is hell!
Riders who make it over the cobbles and into the velodrome in Roubaix seem genuinely changed by the experience. This before-and-after video that Blanco made a few years back captures the harrowing experience of riding the cobbles pretty succinctly.
Cycling lends itself well to cinematization, so its most arduous race in the pro cycling calendar has naturally inspired its fair share of works. There have been goofy documentations of Paris-Roubaix, like Cobbles, Baby!, but by far the best and most famous is Jørgen Leth’s A Sunday In Hell, which chronicles the 1976 race. Hell follows the principle actors from the day before the race all the way through to the finish. Film historian Peter Cowie called it “Arguably the best film ever made about professional cycling.” Some enterprising cycling fan uploaded the movie in its entirety to YouTube, and you should watch it.
Hell is filmed like a war movie. It begins with Francesco Moser’s mechanic cleaning his bike with monastic focus for a long, meditative three minutes. Leth lingers on the mechanic’s work and a few other mundanities of pre-race preparations only to contrast them with the chaos of the actual racing. You have to see the mechanic toiling away on a bike he knows will get torn to shreds to feel the stakes of Paris-Roubaix.
The peloton doesn’t actually touch any cobbles for about 100 kilometers. The race’s profile doesn’t look topographically intimidating, but it’s backloaded with cobbled sections all the way until the last kilometer of racing into Roubaix. Leth builds up to the first cobbled sector like he’s negotiating the reveal of a monster in a horror movie. A choir chants “Pariiiiiiis Roubaaaaix!” over the narrator while the peloton enjoys its last bit of easy riding, as if to soften you up before the ass-kicking you are about to witness.
“This is where hell begins,” the narrator grimly notes as the riders first bounce their way onto the cobblestones. The low quality film is a true bounty here, as you can scarcely make out a motorbike from a team car from a cyclist in all the dust that the procession kicks up. Men fall, and Leth lingers on their gashes and hollowed out expressions, then kicks back to the front of the race after noting that “the weak are being left behind.”
What really makes Hell stand out, however, isn’t its treatment of the brutal so much as its balancing act with the mundane. There are long sequences of bored fans playing cards on a picnic blanket while they wait for the race to swing by. The first hour out of Paris is held up by a demonstration, and we get to watch as the peloton slowly snakes its way through a mass of pissed off Frenchmen. The protestors drop their Very Serious intentions when they all stop chanting to mob a bemused Bernard Thévenet, who won the 1975 Tour de France. Eddy Merckx passes through without so much as a glance at the demonstrators, and uses the delay to adjust his saddle.
When the race finally gets cooking, the soundtrack lurches back and forth between the simmering whine of a violin and the pounding of war drums. We see slow motion footage of Walter Godefroot rattling over the cobblestones and motorcycles crashing as they struggle to negotiate the roads. Leth is buddies with Lars Von Trier, and he too films long takes of people in pain. A pre-race favorite, Freddy Maertens, crashes out and Hell lingers on his frustration as he slumps into the medical car. “Here lies Freddy Maertens,” the narrator grimly notes, before moving on to another crash.
I’m not going to spoil who wins, but the film ends with a montage of close-ups of the pained expressions of the losers as they wash the dust off their faces in the famous showers of the Roubaix velodrome. Leth cuts back and forth between showing the exhaustion and spiritual drain of those who lost and the joyfulness of the winner. It’s nearly heartbreaking, having to watch the riders who just missed out on winning the sprint sit there and watch the winner wax cheerfully, but no other work has captured the agony and ecstasy of bike racing quite like A Sunday In Hell does.
According to The Guardian, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe has a rather ghoulish decision on his hands: if he chooses to sign the bill currently on his desk into effect before midnight, Virginia prisons will be authorized to execute the accused with an electric chair rather horrifyingly dubbed “Old Sparky.”
Currently, Virginian death row inmates are given the choice between the chair and lethal injection when faced with their sentences. The bill at hand would make the electric chair the compulsory option.
McAuliffe, who has given no hints as to his thinking on the issue thus far, is closely associated with the Clinton campaign and was last week urged by 300 Virginian religious leaders to veto the bill, which they referred to as a “barbarous relic.” Says The Guardian:
The chair was first used in 1908 to kill a black man convicted of the rape of a white woman. Since then, 217 of the 267 people who have died by electrocution have been African American.
For Kathleen Gutierrez, what was supposed to be a graduate-level education in Tamil literature has turned into a nightmare. She and fellow UC Berkeley student Erin Bennett allege that they have been the targets of persistent sexual harassment from Blake Wentworth, a professor in the department of South and Southeast Asian studies at Berkeley. Tomorrow, the two students intend to file a formal complaint against Wentworth with the state of California. According to The Guardian:
In October, records show, a university investigation concluded that Wentworth violated the college’s harassment policies and made “unwelcome sexual advances” toward her. But more than six months later, the professor has faced no discipline and remains employed at UC Berkeley – with an office two doors away from Gutierrez.
Wentworth, of course, vehemently denies the accusations, and refers to Bennett as a “troubled young woman.” Says Bennett: “I can’t be on campus...I don’t know what graduate school is like without harassment.”
This ongoing incident appears to be part of a larger pattern of negligence and abuse at Berkeley: over 400 pages of disciplinary reports and internal correspondence obtained by The East Bay Timeslast week revealed that 19 university employees were found to be in violation of the institution’s sexual harassment code since 2011.
“My body is just collapsing under all of this,” Gutierrez told The Guardian, “but…I am so committed to staying, because it just infuriates me to think that anybody else might go through this in the future.”
Although for years Donald Trump has staked much of his philanthropic reputation on the claim that he has donated hundreds of millions of dollars of his personal wealth to charity, a recent investigation by The Washington Post reveals that this is far from the case. In fact, many of the gifts that Trump had claimed were simply cash turned out to be free rounds of golf, land-conservation agreements, and actual small parcels of land.
What’s more, these donations often went to organizations that could in some way be of direct benefit to the Trump campaign’s success, such as groups who utilized Trump facilities or conservatives with stakes in the Republican Party.
A list obtained by the Post entitled “Donald J. Trump Charitable Contributions” elucidated the reporters to the fact that Trump had taken charitable credit for “2,900 free rounds of golf, 175 free hotel stays, 165 free meals and 11 gift certificates to the spa.” But that’s not all!
The Post’s analysis showed that the small giveaways from Trump businesses seemed to account for the bulk of the 4,844 transactions that Trump took credit for. But they accounted for only about $6.4 million of the total dollar figure.
The most expensive charitable contributions on Trump’s list, by contrast, dealt with transactions related to real estate.
For one, Trump counted $63.8 million of unspecified “conservation easements.” That refers to legal arrangements — which could bring tax breaks — in which a landowner agrees to forgo certain kinds of development on land that he owns. In California, for example, Trump agreed to an easement that prevented him from building homes on a plot of land near a golf course. But Trump kept the land, and kept making money off it. It is a driving range.
Of course, Trump has a long-established habit of exaggerating when it comes to his personal wealth. Though the FEC valued the Trump name at $3.3 billion as of last year, Trump himself claimed he was worth at least $7 billion more than that. And despite being trailed by a string of high-profile failures such as an Atlantic City casino, an airline, a brand of premium vodka and a board game, America’s most famous Cheeto-dust-dipped sentient potato sack likes to pretend he’s only ever found himself at the helm of wildly successful business ventures.
As The New York Timeshas it, Bernie Sanders spent his Sunday chowing on sauerkraut-smothered Nathan’s hot dogs and mingling with constituents at a rally on Coney Island, accompanied by both his loving wife and Rock Guy Michael Stipe.
The paper of record can try to fool us with this “rally” nonsense all they want. We all know what’s really going on here: a date! A sensuous opera of sweet music and electoral politics and grey hair that is the pairing of Bernie Sanders and R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe. How am I sure that the coupling of Bernie Sanders and his wife is nothing more than a One Direction-caliber sham constructed to cover up the budding Stipe-Sanders courtship? Their hot dog orders couldn’t be more different. From the Times:
“This is a breaking story,” Mr. Sanders said smiling, when asked how he liked his hot dog. “Mustard and sauerkraut.”
His wife frowned. “Ketchup, sometimes onions,” Ms. Sanders said.
If you can’t share a hot dog with your beloved, Lady and the Tramp-style, why even bother?
In the lead-up to New York’s April 19 primary, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have released NY-centric ads focusing on the fact that they’re not hideous bigots. Sanders’ ad focuses on his “New York values,” as a subtle fuck-you to Ted Cruz, while the Clinton ad focuses on the terrifying nightmare that is a potential Trump presidency.
The Clinton ad, “Stronger Together,” premiered on April 10, and reminds you that Donald Trump once said that women who have abortions should be punished and that Mexican immigrants are rapists. Those are sentiments that go against “everything New York and America stand for,” Clinton says in a snippet of a speech displayed in the ad.
“With so much at stake, she’s the one tough enough to stop Trump,” the voiceover says.
The Sanders ad, “Bolder,” went up the same day. It’s a little less dystopian and a little more aspirational, praising “values forged in New York,” and reminding you that Sanders is a “Brooklyn born native son, who knows what we know: we’re all in this together.”
Another person with significant ties to New York is, of course, one Donald J. Trump, who was greeted rapturously the other night by a crowd of Long Islanders. More than 15,000 people are said to have attended.
Trump and Clinton are both polling well ahead of their opponents here. Sanders only recently opened a New York campaign office, and the conventional wisdom is that he has little chance of beating Clinton in New York. Still, these ads make a good point together, especially in light of how rancorous the Democratic primary has become: Neither of our candidates are absolute garbage monsters hellbent on the destruction of a diverse and healthy civil society. It’s not much, but it’s something.
Clinton and Sanders at the last Democratic debate, March 9, 2016. Photo via AP
Ben Carson’s tepid endorsement of Donald Trump is truly the gift that keeps on giving. Each time he appears on Trump’s behalf to argue the case for a Trump presidency, he drives the point home a little further—not even Trump’s official supporters can muster real enthusiasm for an orange, white and blue America.
So why did Carson decide to endorse Trump, beyond an apparent promise of a role in the Trump administration? Here are some reasons Dr. Carson has voluntarily given in public:
“You have to look at the good and the bad. There’s no perfect person.”
“He has some major defects, there’s no question about it.”
“Are there better people? Probably.”
“I didn’t see a path for Kasich, who I like, or for Rubio, who I like. As far as Cruz is concerned, I don’t think he’s going to be able to draw independents and Democrats unless he has some kind of miraculous change... Is there another scenario that I would have preferred? Yes, but that scenario isn’t available.”
“There is a humility issue there that could perhaps use some polishing.”
“Even if Donald Trump turns out not to be such a great president, which I don’t think is the case—I think he’s going to surround himself with really good people. But even if he didn’t, we’re only looking at four years.”
“He knows that [his Twitter usage is] a problem. So, you know, the first part of solving the problem is recognizing that it exists.”
“A lot of people have been charged with various things. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to demonize them. You’ve probably been charged with something too, maybe with a misdemeanor or something.”
“The sound has deteriorated to the point where I can’t hear you.”
The New York Times reports on the remaking of the internal affairs unit of the state corrections department, which, in its current form, has proved impotent against the powerful union representing guards. Thanks to the union, a guard can be accused multiple times of raping prisoners, admit to repeatedly punching someone, or even kill an inmate without losing his or her job or being transferred to a different facility. These are not hypotheticals. The first two are the cases of James For and Lavar Thomas, respectively, while the guards involved in the third case were neither identified nor, according to the Times, disciplined in the Fishkill Correctional death of Samuel Harrell.
The corrections officers’ union, known as NYSCOPBA, is a politically powerful force, especially upstate, where many of New York’s prisons are located. The contract it has negotiated for officers affords them enormous leverage when they are investigated for wrongdoing. Superintendents “have practically no power to transfer problem officers” to other prisons, according to the Times, and internal affairs investigators are required to give officers a full day’s notice before questioning them about anything. In one case, the Times notes, a C.O. broke an investigator’s jaw in an effort to keep the investigator from entering the Clinton correctional facility.
Recently, the internal affairs unit has undergone changes designed to make it tougher on wrongdoing, by throwing out inexperienced investigators and former guards being thrown out and replacing veterans from outside law enforcement agencies. Hopefully, that means more internal affairs guys who are more interested in getting rid of bad actors than they are in protecting their buddies. But real change will probably require altering the officers’ union contract, which expired last month, and it’s still unclear how that’s going to happen. Negotiating a new one could take multiple years, according to the Times—and until then, the current protections remain in place.
