Sunday, April 19, 2020

In the news, Wednesday, April 8, 2020


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APR 07      INDEX      APR 09
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from HumanProgress.org  Education Website

Charity Rises to the Occasion Amid the Pandemic
Individuals and organizations are tackling the crisis through volunteering, donations and other forms of kindness and solidarity.
If you need a ray of sunlight in these dark times, consider the magnitude of the human capacity for charity and voluntary action as we help one another through a time of crisis. Individuals, private organizations and businesses across the United States have stepped forward to offer assistance to those in need amid the novel coronavirus emergency. Voluntary cooperation and compassion are proving to be some of the most potent weapons we have in tackling the pandemic. ... In some cases, the human inclination toward charity is unfortunately hampered by over-regulation. While the government has, fortunately, recently loosened outdated restrictions on who can donate blood, some other charity-hampering laws still remain in place. Food banks, for example, are pleading with the government to relax certain regulations that prevent them from operating with safe social distancing. Under the current rules, volunteers giving out emergency food supplies are legally required to collect information from the supplies’ recipients through extensive interviews that are difficult to conduct from the recommended distance of six feet away. Despite such unfortunate red tape, people continue to find ways to help one another.

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from New York Post
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED,  Newspaper in New York

Linda Tripp, whistleblower in Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal, dead at 70
Linda Tripp, whose secret conversations with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998, died on Wednesday, her son-in-law told The Post. She was 70. ... Tripp, who has been called a “whistleblower” for revealing the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky, defended herself against the allegations in 2018, saying she regretted “not having the guts to do it sooner.” “It was always about right and wrong, never left and right,” Tripp told the Washington Post in an interview. “It was about exposing perjury and the obstruction of justice,” she continued. “It was never about politics.” Tripp was a civil servant in the Pentagon when she became close to the then-22-year-old Lewinsky, who also worked in the public affairs office.

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from The Paris Review
Literary Magazine

How Pandemics Seep into Literature
COVID-19 promises to alter us all in strange ways. It’s a paradigm-shifting event that divides lives and cultures into a before and after. We will emerge changed, though how those changes will manifest is far from certain. The sensory details of this outbreak—the masks, the faces of doctors and nurses creased with worry and fatigue, the closure signs, the antiseptic smells, the empty streets, the stacks of coffins—will weave their way into our minds and bodies, triggering us back to this moment years in the future. For me, the experience has also held an uncanny familiarity. I have spent the last five years writing a book about how the sensory and affective climate of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic infuses interwar literature, often in ways we have not recognized. My new awareness of the traces of that pandemic shifts my perception of this one, as if the sights and sounds from a century ago have re-emerged, becoming timely in ways I both feared and never wanted.

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from POLITICO
LEAST BIASED, HIGH, news and opinion website in Arlington, Virginia

Blaming the WHO and China Is Not Scapegoating
Trump takes more than his share of potshots, but that doesn’t mean he’s always off the mark. There’s no doubt that Trump is always inclined to shift blame when possible (and even when it isn’t). He’ll never take ownership of the testing debacle at the outset of the administration’s coronavirus response or admit it was wrong and foolish initially to minimize the virus, as he tried to change the media narrative and talk up the stock market. Yet none of this detracts from the force of his critiques of China (although he blows hot and cold on that) and the WHO, which are at the center of this international catastrophe and must be held to account.


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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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