In the news, Wednesday, May 13, 2020

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MAY 12      INDEX      MAY 14

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from Anglican Journal

Bishop: Basic income about ‘what’s right to do for people’
On May 3, the Anglican Church of Canada published a letter sent to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau calling for a guaranteed basic income (GBI) for Canadians. “Although we represent great diversity, we write to you because we are united, and morally bound in a singular message: Canada needs Guaranteed Basic Income for all,” the letter said. “We need it today.” Signed by more than 40 Anglican and Lutheran bishops across Canada—“from the tundra of the high Arctic, the out-ports of the Atlantic coast, from French and English speaking Canada, from urban to rural, the Prairies, the Rockies and coastal mountains and from the Pacific coast”—signatories included Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada; Archbishop Mark MacDonald, national Indigenous Anglican archbishop; and the Rev. Susan Johnson, national bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. While COVID-19 pandemic served as a spark for the letter—and is cited multiple times—the letter calls for “a new social contract, defining a new relationship amongst Canadians, through the mediating role of our government: we would be articulating a relationship where we would know, with enduring certainty, that some of our public spending would provide income for others. With GBI we state clearly and definitively that no one will be failed by the system so catastrophically that they cannot feed and house themselves and their families; that no one is left so alone and so far behind that they cannot find a path out of precarity.”

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from AP (Associated Press)
LEFT-CENTER BIASED, VERY HIGH, News Agency in New York City

Merkel: evidence of Russian role in German parliament hack
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday there is “hard evidence” of Russian involvement in a cyberattack on the German parliament in 2015 that reportedly also involved the theft of documents from her own parliamentary office. German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported last week that federal prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant against an alleged officer with Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency identified as Dmitriy Badin, who already is being sought by U.S. authorities. On Friday, news magazine Der Spiegel reported that correspondence from Merkel’s parliamentary office was among the documents targeted in the 2015 hack.

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from The Guardian (UK)

LEFT-CENTER, HIGH, British daily newspaper published in London UK

Pensioners 34 times more likely to die of Covid-19 than working age Brits, data shows
As Britain edges back to work and employees consider the risks of moving beyond lockdown, official figures underscore that over-65s are 34 times more likely to die of coronavirus than working-age Britons. About 12% of all deaths relating to Covid-19 have occurred among those under 65 – a total of 4,066 deaths. Most victims have been in the over-65 category, accounting for 30,978 fatalities. Death rate among working population is relatively low but risk varies by gender, ethnicity, class and ‘exposure to people’.

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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California

Ordering Moments In History
At irregular and rare moments in history, something happens that fundamentally changes the economic, political, or societal order. These historical “ordering moments” are related to black swan events, seemingly unpredictable occurrences with extreme consequences. But all black swans are not created equal. Although one may consider the mortgage crisis that led to the Great Recession of 2008 a black swan event, it did not fundamentally change the global economic order. The same cannot be said of the bubonic plague that swept through China and then migrated along trade routes to Europe between 1331 and 1351, killing one-third to one-half of the population in its wake. The Black Death altered the relationship between labor and capital, giving much greater bargaining power to workers. The gap between rich and poor shrank; the cost of military expeditions rose as soldiers demanded higher wages; and rulers had to become more efficient at raising revenue, which furthered the process of state formation. The Church could not explain why God was punishing mankind, and so mankind sought other explanations, helping to usher in the Renaissance and Reformation—two other ordering moments whose ramifications echo down through the ages.

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from The Kansas City Star

St. Louis had almost twice as many COVID-19 cases, but the KC area is spiking now
So why is it that the St. Louis metro area has so far had almost twice the COVID-19 caseload we’ve had in the Kansas City metro — 7,600 to 3,700 — and about three times the deaths, 466 to 167. Kansas City’s health director, Dr. Rex Archer, thinks that because differences in population totals, density, and the quite similar actions taken by officials on opposite ends of Missouri can’t account for the differences, the most plausible explanation is that the coronavirus just showed up there earlier, undetected in people who were asymptomatic but spreading the virus all the same. (This is why we wear masks, remember?) “Some of this we may not figure out for another year or two,” Archer said, “but the strongest hypothesis is that they had more hidden cases and were further along in their outbreak” than it first appeared.

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from The Spokesman-Review

Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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from The Wenatchee World

Opinion | Healthcare professionals: We have flattened the curve, now we’re behind it
It is futile to attempt to bring the risk of contracting COVID-19 down to zero. Free people make choices every day that increase their risk of dying. Your chances of dying while driving a car is almost double your chance of dying while driving an SUV. We don’t ban cars. Hundreds of children drown in pools each year. We don’t ban pools. Five thousand Americans choke and die on solid food every year. We don’t ban solid food. The truth is, we have accepted that there are trade-offs between the risk of death and quality of life, and we make them every day.

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