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The post Democrats see clear path to take back the Senate: ‘Something real is shaping up around the country’ appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post Officers clear protesters from outside White House, as ‘Defund the Police’ graffiti removed appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Law enforcement officers cleared protesters Tuesday from outside the White House following a clash the night before, pushing them beyond a space known as “Black Lives Matter Plaza” in the latest apparent effort to crack down on demonstrations steps from the president’s residence.
“Defund the Police” street graffiti was also removed from the area on Tuesday.
The night before, protesters had tried to take down a statue of Andrew Jackson near the White House while attempting to carve out a Seattle-style “autonomous zone,” which they called the “Black House Autonomous Zone.” But police on Tuesday moved protesters out and cleared the area near Lafayette Square and St. John’s Episcopal Church.
TRUMP BLASTS ‘WEAK’ STATE LEADERS FOR ALLOWING REMOVAL OF STATUES AND HISTORIC MONUMENTS
Earlier this month, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser helped name the area north of the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” amid protests over George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody.
The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, meanwhile, made two arrests on Monday night related to the demonstrations in Washington. It is unclear if law enforcement made any arrests on Tuesday morning.
TRUMP VOWS NO ‘AUTONOMOUS ZONE’ IN DC
Earlier Tuesday morning, President Trump warned protesters who damage federal property that they could be arrested and imprisoned. In a Fox News interview, he criticized state leaders for not being as tough on those who seek the destruction of historical monuments.
“A lot of states are weak. A lot of people are weak and they’re allowing it to happen,” Trump said.
“There will never be an ‘Autonomous Zone’ in Washington, D.C., as long as I’m your President,” Trump also tweeted Tuesday. “If they try they will be met with serious force!”
Fox Business Network’s Hillary Vaughn contributed to this report.
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]]>The post Coronavirus: Call for clear face masks to be ‘the norm’ appeared first on Virus Reports.
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Kelly Morellon (right) and her mother Sylvie have designed a face mask with a transparent window
It’s now part of daily life now for many of us – struggling to work out what someone in a supermarket or at work is saying when they’re wearing a face mask.
But for people who are deaf or have hearing loss, masks can prevent them understanding anything at all.
“You might as well be speaking in French,” says Fizz Izagaren, a paediatric doctor in the UK who has been profoundly deaf since the age of two.
“I can hear one or two words but it’s random, it makes no sense… When someone is wearing a face mask I’ve lost the ability to lip read and I’ve lost facial expressions – I have lost the key things that make a sentence.”
It is a problem she shares with the some 466 million people around the world who, according to the World Health Organization, have disabling hearing loss.
Standard face masks, which have become widespread as countries try to stop the spread of coronavirus, muffle words and obscure the mouth.
But now charities and manufacturers alike are coming up with a solution.
Fizz Izagaren says she feels isolated when everyone around her is wearing a standard mask
Main dans la Main (Hand in Hand), an association which supports deaf and hearing impaired people in Chevrières, northern France, is among the organisations around the world that have created a mask with a transparent window.
Its founder Kelly Morellon worked with her mother Sylvie to devise a design that covers the nose but makes the mouth visible, and can be washed at a high temperature to reduce infection.
“The basic aim of these transparent masks is to allow deaf and hearing impaired people to read the lips of someone speaking to them,” Kelly told the BBC.
“But they are also very useful for autistic people, people with learning difficulties and small children who might be scared of masks or need to be able to see facial expressions.
“In any case, a transparent mask allows you to see each other’s smiles, and at this sad time this could not be more important.”
The clear screen in Kelly Morellon’s design can be removed so the cloth can be washed
Unlike some companies around the world – in Scotland, the US and Indonesia, for instance – Kelly and her mother are not able to produce their masks on a commercial basis.
Instead, they are advising people on how to make their own and there are multiple guidelines online to help. Their top tip is to use a little washing up soap to stop the plastic screen fogging up.
But one setting where homemade masks are not suitable – but where both PPE and communication are vital – is in hospitals.
There is just one company in the US that has secured Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to make clear masks for clinical use.
Five hundred of these masks are being used at Brigham and Women’s hospital in the US city of Boston. At the moment they are being reserved for staff to wear when they are speaking to patients with hearing loss, or vice versa. Sign language interpreters, who use facial expressions and lip movements alongside body movements to create more complex and culturally rich signs, also wear them.
Image copyright
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
James Wiggins, an American Sign Language interpreter, is among the staff at the Brigham who have been wearing the transparent masks
“When we saw the Covid-19 pandemic beginning… we soon realised there was going to be a challenge because of the escalated use of PPE and how that would create communication barriers,” said Dr Cheri Blauwet, who leads the disability task force at the Brigham.
“We’ve had glowing feedback from patients and we’re getting broader requests from other parts of the hospital, especially the paediatric floors.”
In the UK, there are no approved manufacturers providing clear masks to hospitals. And the sole US manufacturer is not taking any more orders as it deals with overwhelming demand.
Fizz Izagaren, a paediatric registrar at Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey in the UK who is also deaf, says standard masks prevent her from taking patients’ histories verbally. She also says she feels isolated at work because she is not able to speak to her colleagues.
“Clear masks should be the norm for everyone in a healthcare setting,” she says.
Image copyright
EPA
The elderly are both more at risk from coronavirus and more likely to have hearing loss
She is now working with a product designer to try to come up with a mask that the NHS could use widely. But even once a design and a manufacturer are found, this could take time to roll out.
In the meantime, there are concerns the current PPE could stop medical staff getting the required consent from patients.
An intensive care nurse working in London, who is profoundly deaf, told the BBC she had one experience where a patient, who also had hearing loss, was not able to understand her or her colleagues when they were explaining a procedure. The patient could not give consent and the procedure could not go ahead.
“[Clear masks] would make things a lot easier for me,” she said.
“I would be able to do my jobs properly and safely. I would have more independence rather than having to rely on others.”
In the UK, eight charities have written to NHS bosses calling for clear masks to be commissioned, warning of “potentially dangerous situations” arising from communication problems. NHS England has not yet responded to the letter, or to the BBC’s request for comment.
The UK government says it is supporting CARDMEDIC, which provides digital flashcards and other communication aids to NHS Trusts. There are also apps that transcribe speech into text on a mobile phone.
But deaf workers say these workarounds are not always suitable for sensitive or emergency situations.
“As masks become more widespread in the community – it’s going to get harder and harder,” Dr Izagaren says.
“I’m worried the public are going to get more and more frustrated and there will be more discrimination towards the deaf community.”
It is not just people with hearing loss who could benefit, she says.
Experts suggest that other professions such as taxi drivers or even teachers may find clear masks useful as the coronavirus crisis continues.
A niche product initially designed to help the deaf community, could in fact make everyone’s lives better.
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]]>The post It’s now become clear exactly how Republicans might try to overturn a Biden victory in November appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>If you’ve paid any attention to the news over the past few days, you might come away with the impression that Michigan is where President Donald Trump’s hopes for reelection will rise or fall on November 3.
On Wednesday, the Great Lakes State was one of two he targeted with threats over election officials’ decision to mail absentee ballot request forms to every resident of that state.
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“Michigan sends absentee ballot applications to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election. This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State. I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!” Trump tweeted that afternoon, having been shamed into deleting a previous tweet which falsely claimed that actual ballots had been mailed out.
It’s not the first time Trump has made baseless assertions about the integrity of American elections. Since winning the 2016 election, he has made innumerable false claims about “voter fraud,” including suggesting that more than 3 million voters making up Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin of victory had voted “illegally”, as well as claims about nonexistent Democratic malfeasance during the 2018 midterms (in which the only documented case of absentee ballot fraud was committed by a North Carolina Republican candidate for Congress).
And given Michigan’s importance as a potential source of electoral votes for former Vice President Joe Biden — Trump’s presumptive opponent — it’s no surprise that he’s a bit fixated on it.
After all, Michigan is one of the three states that handed Trump electoral votes that had gone to Democratic candidates for decades, and in doing so delivered the presidency into his hands. It’s also one of the states into which his campaign is pouring inordinate amounts of effort and resources, in hopes of keeping enough Michiganders in his corner to equal — or improve — his 10,704 vote margin of victory from four years ago.
Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor who studies elections, said spurious claims about election results are par for the course for Trump.
“This is a pattern that we’ve seen throughout his presidency where he, even after winning, wanted to throw down on the fact that he had lost the popular vote and made allegations about non-citizens voting that would explain why he had lost the popular vote,” McDonald said, though he took care to note that such allegations were “of course, completely unfounded”.
He added that Trump appears to be engaged in “a similar pattern of throwing down on the electoral system, where it may either in the future or afterwards adversely affect him”.
While McDonald noted that Trump and Republicans in Congress have little power to push back on election results once they have been certified and the electoral college has met, he suggested that the greater risk to a legitimate election comes not from Republicans in Washington making baseless claims about fraud in Michigan, but from those in a neighboring state with a notoriously gerrymandered legislature: Wisconsin.
“The larger threat … is a scenario where a state like Wisconsin is pivotal in the election results and the electoral college, and Biden has won Wisconsin, but the Republican legislature decides to override the results from the election and award the electors to Donald Trump,” he said adding that the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Bush v. Gore noted that state legislatures have plenary power to decide how electors are appointed.
“If you’re looking for a scenario where the results are somehow reversed from a Biden victory by allegations of irregularities in the election, that’s probably the scenario you’re looking at,” he added.
While McDonald posited that Michigan could also play host to such a scenario because of its “heavily gerrymandered” legislature, he stressed Wisconsin is the most likely candidate for such a power grab because of the lengths Republicans there have gone to stymie Democrats in the past, most recently by forcing voters to cast their ballots in person during the April primary election.
It’s also a state where Republicans have made no secret of their belief that voters in cities are illegitimate.
After Wisconsin Republicans maintained their margins in the state legislature even as Democrat Tony Evers defeated then-Governor Scott Walker in 2018, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos defended the gerrymandering that led to the GOP’s lopsided majority by suggesting that the state’s two largest cities — Madison and Milwaukee — don’t really represent the will of the people.
“If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority,” he said while speaking to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “We would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the legislature.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University history professor who studies fascism and authoritarian leaders, concurred with McDonald’s assessment that Wisconsin Republicans could find reasons to overturn a narrow Biden victory, especially if his margin was based in heavily Democratic cities. She said that the steps Wisconsin Republicans took to strip Evers of a number of powers before he took office are a good indicator of how they might react to a Biden victory.
“Today’s GOP has a political culture that’s quite anti-democratic, so in terms of measures… to keep power from Democrats and avoid losing all the gains that they’ve made under Trump, they will feel the need to do anything possible,” she said. “If it’s legal, then it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility because the GOP has gone to extreme lengths for years.”
Ben-Ghiat said it would be within the realm of possibility for Wisconsin Republicans to take their cues from Trump’s rhetoric and seize on nonsense claims of fraud or the fact that Biden’s margins rely heavily on voters in urban centers as an excuse to throw out the results.
“There [in the GOP] you have a culture of lawlessness which Trump inculcates and embodies, that makes people who may hesitate to do something like that with a national election feel more empowered. Because what we’ve learned is that far from punishing wrongdoers, the Trump-era GOP rewards them, pardons them, and legitimizes them,” she said. “Corruption is like a contagion, it’s a cultural shift. And so people who might have hesitated to do those things… will perhaps tip over and feel that they can get away with it.”
Tom Palzewicz, a Wisconsin Democrat who is running to replace retiring Representative James Sensenbrenner, said his colleagues are taking measures to ensure that should Biden win the Badger State, his margin of victory will be unambiguous.
Governor Evers, he said, is using some federal coronavirus relief funds to ensure that enough equipment exists to count absentee ballots on election night, and the Wisconsin Democratic Party is working to educate and encourage voters to request absentee ballots.
“We had a massive campaign in order to make sure people understood how to get a ballot,” he explained, adding that the efforts to encourage absentee voting in the April primary “worked wonders”.
“They’ve got a great digital campaign and they’re already on top of it,” he said of state party officials.
But Palzewicz warned against underestimating Republicans’ lust for power and the lengths they will go to to protect the Trump presidency.
“They have proven over and over again that it is all about party over country, and whatever thing they can do to make sure they can hold on to power — be it through gerrymandering, be it through making people go to the polls on Election Day in the middle of a pandemic, be it striking down the governor’s ‘safe at home’ plan — they will try to find a way,” he said.
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