Category: Veterans – Patriotism

CDC issues leprosy warning for people making Florida travel plans

South Florida Sun Sentinel

CDC issues leprosy warning for people making Florida travel plans

Cindy Krischer Goodman, Sun Sentinel – August 1, 2023

Omar Havana/Getty Images North America/TNS

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning that cases of leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, are surging in Florida and should be considered when making travel plans.

The infectious disease primarily affects the skin and nervous system and can be easy to treat if caught early.

Leprosy has been historically uncommon in the United States, but has more than doubled in the South over the last 10 years. In a case report issued Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Central Florida has accounted for 81% of reported cases in the state and almost one-fifth of reported cases nationwide.

Of the 159 new leprosy cases reported in the United States in 2020, Florida was among the top reporting states with nearly 30 cases. The Florida Department of Health reported 19 cases from July 2022 to July 2023, with one South Florida case in Palm Beach County.

The CDC said if untreated, the disease can progress to paralysis, blindness, the loss of one’s eyebrows, physical disfigurement, and even the crippling of hands and feet. Symptoms include loss of feeling in hands and feet, nasal congestion and possibly dry, stiff, sometimes painful skin.

The warning comes because of what health officials learned when examining patients diagnosed with leprosy.

“Whereas leprosy in the United States previously affected persons who had immigrated from leprosy-endemic areas, about 34% of new case-patients during 2015–2020 appeared to have locally acquired the disease,” the CDC report says. According to the World Health Organization, medical officials report more than 200,000 cases of leprosy every year in more than 120 countries. While the reason behind the rising cases in Florida is unclear, there is some support for the theory that international migration to Central Florida of people with leprosy is fueling the locally-acquired transmission.

“Prolonged person-to-person contact through respiratory droplets is the most widely recognized route of transmission,” the CDC report says.

When contact tracing cases in Central Florida, health officials found no associated risk factors, including travel, zoonotic exposure, occupational association, or personal contacts. “The absence of traditional risk factors in many recent cases of leprosy in Florida, coupled with the high proportion of residents who spend a great deal of time outdoors, supports the investigation into environmental reservoirs as a potential source of transmission,” the report says.

Because Florida, particularly Central Florida, may represent an endemic location for leprosy, the CDC recommends that physicians consider leprosy if patients who recently have traveled Florida show symptoms.

Scientists Say Atlantic Current Collapse Could Lead to Extreme Cold in Europe and North America

Futurism

Scientists Say Atlantic Current Collapse Could Lead to Extreme Cold in Europe and North America

Victor Tangermann – July 31, 2023

Researchers are warning that the crucial ocean currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could collapse as soon as 2025 — an impending, climate change-fueled disaster that could usher in a new era of extreme temperature fluctuations.

It’s important to note that not every scientist is convinced by this assessment. And though the researchers say the collapse could take place as soon 2025, they also say it could take another 70 years.

That said, a team of researchers led by Peter Ditlevsen, professor and climate researcher at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark anticipate in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications that the currents could collapse anywhere between 2025 and 2095 — if we don’t cut global carbon emissions, that is.

If it were to collapse, much of the Western world could be plunged into an extended period of extreme cold — a counterintuitive result of climate change. Previous collapses, which have predominantly occurred during ice ages many thousands of years ago, have indeed led to temperatures going haywire.

“I think we should be very worried,” Ditlevsen told The Guardian. “This would be a very, very large change. The AMOC has not been shut off for 12,000 years.”

Back in 2021, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany warned in a separate paper that the AMOC is being driven to the brink of collapse due to climate change. In the short term, this collapse could cause temperatures to plunge in Europe and North America, resulting in prolonged periods of extreme cold.

And if the planet’s past history is anything to go by, the stakes are significant. 12,000 years ago, the melting of a massive glacial lake plunged Europe into an extreme cold spell for almost a millennium.

Now, by analyzing statistics from the last 150 years, Ditlevsen and his team say they’ve calculated with a 95 percent certainty that the AMOC will collapse between 2025 and 2095.

“Shutting down the AMOC can have very serious consequences for Earth’s climate, for example, by changing how heat and precipitation are distributed globally,” Ditlevsen said in a statement.

“While a cooling of Europe may seem less severe as the globe as a whole becomes warmer and heat waves occur more frequently, this shutdown will contribute to increased warming of the tropics, where rising temperatures have already given rise to challenging living conditions,” he added.

This change could be far more rapid than the incremental 1.5 degrees Celsius rise caused by climate change over a century. With a collapsed AMOC, we’d be looking at far more extreme changes in the ten to 15 degrees Celsius range over just a decade.

“Our result underscores the importance of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible,” Ditlevsen said.

But while researchers generally agree with this final conclusion, not everybody is convinced the AMOC is about to, well, run amok.

For one, the conclusion contradicts the latest findings of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found in its most recent report that the current was unlikely to just collapse within this century.

“The work provides no reason to change the assessment of the [IPCC],” Jochem Marotzke of the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, told Politico.

“We just don’t have the evidence to state that it has declined,” Penny Holliday, researcher at the UK’s National Oceanography Center, told the BBC. “We know that there is a possibility that AMOC could stop what it’s doing now at some point, but it’s really hard to have certainty about that.”

At the same time, while we may never get a 100 percent accurate prediction — after all, our planet’s climate systems are incredibly complex — we should still heed Ditlevsen and his colleagues’ warning.

“We do still have to take the idea seriously that there could be abrupt changes in the North Atlantic climate system,” University of Reading atmospheric scientist Jon Robson told the BBC. “But the exact predictions that it will happen — and within this time frame — you have to take that with some skepticism.”

DeSantis’s economic plan sounds like Biden’s

Yahoo! Finance

DeSantis’s economic plan sounds like Biden’s

Rick Newman, Senior Columnist – July 31, 2023

Who said it, Ron DeSantis or Joe Biden?

1. “We need a future that’s made in America. That means using products, parts, and materials built right here in the United States of America. It means bringing manufacturing back, jobs back, building the supply chains here at home, not outsourcing abroad.”

2. “We need to incentivize the repatriation of American capital and investment here in the United States so we can recapture our supply chains and build a strong durable industrial base.”

The first quote is President Biden, from a speech on his economic vision in January 2022. The second is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s running for the Republican nomination for president, outlining his own economic agenda on July 31, 2023. DeSantis isn’t plagiarizing Biden, exactly, but it sure sounds like he’s borrowing ideas he’s heard before.

DeSantis, badly lagging Donald Trump in Republican polling for the 2024 race, is trying to establish himself as a conservative populist akin to Trump, but with a better reputation for competence and governing. To further the cause, he outlined a “Declaration of Economic Independence” during a July 31 campaign stop in New Hampshire, his first major effort to present an economic vision.

It’s surprisingly similar to Biden’s. Both men favor protectionism and a heavier government role than usual to steer the US economy toward future prosperity. Both vilify China and say the United States needs to end its reliance on the huge trade partner for key products. And they both bash big corporations for building massive amounts of wealth at the expense of ordinary workers.

The biggest difference between the two agendas, in fact, may be that Biden is already pursuing efforts to achieve many of those goals, while DeSantis is only talking about them as a candidate. There are other differences between the two, some largely rhetorical, others more substantive. But the unusual similarities between a center-left president and a far-right challenger indicate how much traditional political views have shifted as foreign threats have changed during the last decade and the global economy has transformed.

Like most challengers facing an incumbent, DeSantis argues that the current leadership has sent the nation into “decline.” Corporate fat cats and Beltway opportunists are lining their pockets while everybody else falls behind. This is a reprise of Bernie Sanders in 2020, Donald Trump in 2016, and even Barack Obama in 2008.

One big change between then and now is an increasingly aggressive China that seems bent on confrontation with the United States and the democratic West, rather than the trade symbiosis of 10 or 15 years ago. “We have to stop selling out this country’s future to China,” DeSantis demanded in his July 31 speech.

Well, Biden beat him to it. And Trump beat him to it before Biden.

Trump started by decrying the US trade deficit with China and slapping tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese imports each year to fix it. The tariffs raised the cost of US imports to the United States but did almost nothing to alter the trade balance. Then COVID hit in 2020, exposing extreme American dependence on China for medical supplies, electronics, minerals, and other crucial products.

Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gestures during a campaign event, Monday, July 31, 2023, in Rochester, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gestures during a campaign event, Monday, July 31, 2023, in Rochester, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

After Biden took office in 2021, he left the Trump tariffs in place and went further. Biden began encouraging allies to join the United States in containing China’s expansionist policies, instead of going it alone the way Trump did. In 2022, Biden lobbied for and signed the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, a huge package of subsidies meant to boost US manufacturing of semiconductors, green energy components, and many other things — much as China subsidizes its own domestic manufacturing. A boom in US factory construction suggests those incentives are working.

Then last fall, Biden rolled out extensive restrictions on the exports of advanced US semiconductors and other high-end technology to China. In June, Biden told a private audience Xi Jinping was “a dictator,” which irked the Chinese president, even if it might be true. China called Biden’s quip needlessly provocative and said US-China relations were at the lowest point in more than 40 years.

So what might DeSantis do on top of all this? He called for an end to normal trade relations with China and said he would ban the import of Chinese products built with stolen technology. That’s not a big expansion of Biden policies and it might be little more than symbolic. China’s “normal” trade relationship with the United States is already undermined by the Trump tariffs and Biden sanctions, and who knows how the US government would assess which of the thousands of Chinese products coming to the United States include pirated technology.

Like Biden, DeSantis also wants to exert a government hand to boost certain parts of the manufacturing sector. He’d seek to repeal Biden’s green energy subsidies, however, and focus more on the domestic fossil fuel industry. If he were president, DeSantis could do a bit of that on his own through regulatory and executive action, but it would require Congress to undo hundreds of billions in green energy subsidies Congress passed last year, and replace them with subsidies directed elsewhere — no easy lift.

DeSantis distinguishes himself from Biden more clearly on cultural issues that have economic implications, such as diversity and inclusion policies and investing focused on environmental factors. DeSantis says he will “end the politicization of the economy” by discouraging or forbidding these kinds of policies in businesses, schools, and other organizations, but critics argue that DeSantis is the one politicizing the economy by focusing on these issues in the first place. Whatever the case, voters haven’t responded very enthusiastically to DeSantis’s “anti-woke” crusade, and DeSantis didn’t use his go-to word—”woke”— a single time in his July 31 speech. The dogs have not responded to this dog whistle. Maybe DeSantis decided to stop blowing it.

Here’s a fresh and interesting DeSantis idea: Hold universities accountable if students take on gobs of debt to get a degree and don’t earn enough once they graduate to pay it off. That does differ from Biden’s approach, which is to forgive a certain amount of debt, which would benefit the borrower but require nothing of the university. Mostly everybody agrees the cost of college in the United States is out of control and the current system of financing badly broken.

Finally, DeSantis finds a familiar bogeyman responsible for America’s economic woes in the Federal Reserve. He says the Fed should worry about inflation alone and stay out of extraneous matters such as saving the US economy during a financial crash or a pandemic. Except guess what: If DeSantis were president during such a crisis, he’d beg the Fed to ride to the rescue, because it’d be foolish to let a depression ruin lives if you had an alternative, and because President DeSantis’s own political survival would depend on a Fed bailout. Tough talk often ends the moment the election takes place.

Far-right Arizona legislators just got rolled on Prop. 400 vote. More of this, please

AZ Central – The Arizona Republic

Far-right Arizona legislators just got rolled on Prop. 400 vote. More of this, please

Laurie Roberts, Arizona Republic – July 31, 2023

Cars drive along Piestewa Freeway, Arizona State Route 51, near the Ministack, as seen from the pedestrian bridge near Oak Street in Phoenix on May 18, 2023.
Cars drive along Piestewa Freeway, Arizona State Route 51, near the Ministack, as seen from the pedestrian bridge near Oak Street in Phoenix on May 18, 2023.

The Arizona Legislature on Monday at long last forwarded Maricopa County’s transportation tax extension to voters and our leaders did it in the most fitting way possible.

By rolling right over the hardest of hard-right crowd that has called the shots all year long.

It was a refreshing bit of bipartisanship in a record-long session that featured precious little of it.

The result is a ballot proposition that will let Maricopa County voters decide whether to continue taxing themselves to fund the Valley’s regional transportation plan for the next 20 years. Recent polls show sizable support for the plan.

“This is great for the taxpayers,” Rep. David Cook, R-Globe, who chairs the House Transportation Committee. “It’s good for the citizens.”

Freedom Caucus crew couldn’t stomach a compromise

Far-right Republicans, meanwhile, were furious.

“Democrats are over-the-moon on this Prop. 400 bill,” Rep. Justin Heap, R-Mesa, tweeted just before the vote. “If we pass this it will be a massive win for Hobbs and the Democrats. We will be giving Democrats a club to bludgeon us with in 2024.”

“Way to end the session with a win for Hobbs and the Democrats,” one of them, Rep. Rachel Jones, R-Tucson, harrumphed right after the vote, while, no doubt, stomping her foot.

You’ll have to excuse Heap, Jones and some of their fellow far righties for seeing this in politically opportunistic terms rather than in terms of what is best for Arizona.

With Republicans clinging to a one-vote majority in each chamber, the Arizona Freedom Caucus that seems to run the Legislature has taken a my-way-or-the-highway approach all year, never seeing any need to compromise.

Thankfully, the majority acted in Arizonans’ best interest

In the view of its members, a veto by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs (and she’s had a BUNCH of them) is simply another talking point in their favor with primary election voters – the only ones who matter in the vast majority of legislative districts – come election time.

Fortunately, many of the Legislature’s more traditional Republicans understood the necessity of compromise, especially on an issue so vital to the future growth and prosperity of the Valley and thus the state.

Not to mention to the future prospect of being stuck in horrendous traffic for hours on end if the tax isn’t extended before it expires in December 2025.

And so comes Senate Bill 1102, on Day 204 of this year’s 100-day legislative session.

Both sides scored wins on their priorities on Prop. 400 spending

The $20 billion tax extension, if approved by voters next year, calls for spending 63% of the proceeds on freeways and roads and 37% on transit over the next 20 years.

Among other things, it significantly boosts the amount spent on pavement, kills any future extension of light rail and dictates that “road diets” are a distinct no-no – all Republican priorities.

It also preserves a hefty percentage of the tax for public transit, a priority of Democrats.

And it allows for maintaining the existing light rail system, which should be a priority for everybody given that we spent billions to build the thing.

Overall, Monday’s passage was a welcome exercise in give-and-take by warring politicians who have spent most of the year at each other’s throats. Credit goes to both Republican legislative leaders and Hobbs for finally getting it done.

But the vote also spoke loudly and clearly about those hard right Republicans who spent much of the weekend and all of Monday pitching a fit.

Far-right obstructionists rendered irrelevant when it counted

“Never forget that the democrat goal is to remove private vehicles from the average person completely,” an overwrought Rep. Jacqueline Parker, R-Mesa, tweeted. “It’s already starting. The latest rendition of prop 400 will help with that car-free goal.”

That’s nonsense. Even Senate President Warren Petersen, no slouch when it comes to conservative credentials, praised the plan as a Republican triumph.

“This will be the most conservative transportation plan in the history of Arizona ever passed, ever implemented, ever adopted,” the Gilbert Republican said, ticking off the many concessions Republicans won.

The freedom folk are just mad that they were rendered irrelevant. In the end, seven Senate Republicans and 14 House Republicans voted no on the bill (along with one Democrat, who objected to the light rail cuts).

They wanted the ballot measure split into the two questions – one on freeways and one on public transportation.

They believed voters would have killed the transit portion of the tax given low ridership, thus resulting in a tax cut.

So because so few people – and certainly their own constituents – ride buses … we don’t need them?

We won’t need them in the future as the Valley’s continues to explode with newcomers? With new employers? With new job opportunities?

Yeah, that’s some forward thinking there.

SB 1102 passed 43-14 in the House and 19-7 in the Senate.

Senate Republicans who voted no: Shawnna Bolick of Phoenix, Jake Hoffman of Queen Creek, Anthony Kern of Glendale, J.D. Mesnard of Chandler, Wendy Rogers of Flagstaff and Justine Wadsack of Tucson.

Democrat Sally Ann Gonzales of Tucson also voted no.

House Republicans who voted no: Neal Carter of San Tan Valley, Joseph Chaplik of Scottsdale, Justin Heap of Mesa, Laurin Hendrix of Gilbert, Rachel Jones of Tucson, Alexander Kolodin of Scottsdale, David Marshall of Snowflake, Cory McGarr of Marana, Steve Montenegro of Goodyear, Barbara Parker of Mesa, Jacqueline Parker of Mesa, Michelle Pena of Yuma, Beverly Pingerelli of Peoria and Austin Smith of Wittman.

The big idea: is it too late to stop extremism taking over politics?

The Guardian – The Big Idea Books

The big idea: is it too late to stop extremism taking over politics?

Bizarre conspiracy thinking has infiltrated the mainstream in many western democracies. How can we push back?

Julia Ebner – July 31, 2023

Elia Barbieri

Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian

Welcome to the 2020s, the beginning of what history books might one day describe as the digital middle ages. Let’s briefly travel back to 2017. I remember sitting in various government buildings briefing politicians and civil servants about QAnon, the emerging internet conspiracy movement whose adherents believe that a cabal of Satan-worshipping elites runs a global paedophile network. We joked about the absurdity of it all but no one took the few thousand anonymous true believers seriously.

Fast-forward to 2023. Significant portions of the population in liberal democracies consider it possible that global elites drink the blood of children in order to stay young. Recent surveys suggest that around 17% of Americans believe in the QAnon myth. Some 5% of Germans believe ideas related to the anti-democratic Reichsbürger movement, which asserts that the German Reich continues to exist and rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. Up to a third of Britons believe that powerful figures in Hollywood, government and the media are secretly engaged in child trafficking. Is humanity on the return journey from enlightenment to the dark ages?

I am often asked why the UK doesn’t have a successful far-right populist party. My answer is: Because it doesn’t need to

As segments of the public have headed towards extremes, so has our politics. In the US, dozens of congressional candidates, including the successfully elected Lauren Boebert, have been supportive of QAnon. The German far-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland is at an all-time high in terms of both its radicalism and its popularity, while Austria’s xenophobic Freedom party is topping the polls. The recent rise to power of far-right parties such as Fratelli d’Italia and the populist Sweden Democrats bolster this trend.

I am often asked why the UK doesn’t have a successful far-right populist party. My answer is: because it doesn’t need to. Parts of the Conservative party now cater to audiences that would have voted for the BNP or Ukip in the past. A few years ago, the far-right Britain First claimed that 5,000 of its members had joined the Tory party. Not unlike the Republicans in the US, the Tories have increasingly departed from moderate conservative thinking and lean more and more towards radicalism.

In 2020, Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski was asked to apologise for attending the National Conservatism conference in Rome. The event is well known for attracting international far-right figures such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the hard-right US presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. This year, an entire delegation of leading Conservatives attended the same conference in London. It might be hard for extreme-right parties to rise to power in Britain, but there is no shortage of routes for extremist ideas to reach Westminster.

‘Invasion on our southern coast’ … UK home secretary Suella Braverman.
‘Invasion on our southern coast’ … UK home secretary Suella Braverman. Photograph: AP

Language is a key indicator of radicalisation. The words of Conservative politicians speak for themselves: home secretary Suella Braverman referred to migrants arriving in the UK as an “invasion on our southern coast”, while MP Miriam Cates gave a nod to conspiracy theorists when she warned that “children’s souls” were being “destroyed” by cultural Marxism. Using far-right dog whistles such as “invasion” and “cultural Marxism” invites listeners to open a Pandora’s box of conspiracy myths. Research shows that believing in one makes you more susceptible to others.

I sometimes wonder what a QAnon briefing to policymakers might look like in a few years. What if the room no longer laughs at the ludicrous myths but instead endorses them? One could certainly imagine this scenario in the US if Donald Trump were to win the next election. In 2019 – before conspiracy myths inspired attacks on the US Capitol, the German Reichstag, the New Zealand parliament and the Brazilian Congress – I warned in a Guardian opinion piece of the threat QAnon would soon pose to democracy. Are we now at a point where it is it too late to stop democracies being taken over by far-right ideologies and conspiracy thinking? If so, do we simply have to accept the “new normal”?

There are various ways we can try to prevent and reverse the spread of extremist narratives. For some people who have turned to extremism over the past few years, too little has changed: anger over political inaction on economic inequality is now further fuelled by the exacerbating cost of living crisis. For others, too much has changed: they see themselves as rebels against a takeover by “woke” or “globalist” policies.

What they have in common is a sense that the political class no longer takes their wellbeing seriously, and moves to improve social conditions and reduce inequality would go some way towards reducing such grievances. But beyond that, their fears and frustrations have clearly been instrumentalized by extremists, as well as by opportunistic politicians and profit-oriented social media firms. This means that it is essential to expose extremist manipulation tactics, call out politicians when they normalize conspiracy thinking and regulate algorithm design by the big technology companies that still amplify harmful content.

If the private sector is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. Surveys by the Edelman Trust Barometer found that people in liberal democracies have largely lost trust in governments, media and even NGOs but, surprisingly, still trust their employers and workplaces. Companies can play an important role in the fight for democratic values. For example, the Business Council for Democracy tests and develops training courses that firms can offer to employees to help them identify and counter conspiracy myths and targeted disinformation.

Young people should be helped to become good digital citizens with rights and responsibilities online, so that they can develop into critical consumers of information. National school curricula should include a new subject at the intersection of psychology and internet studies to help digital natives understand the forces that their parents have struggled to grasp: the psychological processes that drive digital group dynamics, online engagement and the rise of conspiracy thinking.

Elia Barbieri

Ultimately, the next generation will vote conspiracy theorists in or out of power. Only they can reverse our journey towards the digital middle ages.

 Julia Ebner is the author of Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over (Ithaka Press).

Further reading

How Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky (Penguin, £10.99)

How Civil War Starts by Barbara F Walter (Penguin, £10.99)

Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko (Redwood, £16.99)

Fulton County DA says work is done in Trump probe and ‘we’re ready to go’

CNN

Fulton County DA says work is done in Trump probe and ‘we’re ready to go’

Sara Murray, CNN – July 30, 2023

Charlie Neibergall/AP

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis reaffirmed in a local news interview that she will announce charging decisions by September 1 in her investigation into efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election result, while applauding the ramped-up security measures around the local courthouse.

“The work is accomplished,” Willis told CNN affiliate WXIA at a back-to-school event over the weekend. “We’ve been working for two and half years. We’re ready to go.”

Willis has previously signaled in letters to local officials and those providing security that she would make any charging announcements between July 31 and the end of August. She laid out a variety of security provisions her team plans to take beginning Monday.

Willis’ latest commitment to that time frame comes after a judge scheduled an August 10 hearing on the Trump team’s efforts to disqualify Willis, a Democrat, from the case, toss much of the evidence she has collected and remove another judge in Fulton County from presiding over the case.

In the local news interview, Willis also praised the Fulton County sheriff after barricades recently went up around the county courthouse in anticipation of what the sheriff’s office referred to as “high profile legal proceedings.”

“I think that the sheriff is doing something smart in making sure that the courthouse stays safe,” Willis said. “I’m not willing to put any of the employees or the constituents that come to the courthouse in harm’s way.”

Willis said that people may not be happy with her upcoming announcements and “sometimes when people are unhappy, they act in a way that could create harm.”

‘I’m not wanted’: Florida universities hit by brain drain as academics flee

The Guardian

‘I’m not wanted’: Florida universities hit by brain drain as academics flee

Joseph Contreras – July 30, 2023

<span>Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

With the start of the 2023-24 academic year only six weeks away, senior officials at New College of Florida (NCF) made a startling announcement in mid-July: 36 of the small honors college’s approximately 100 full-time teaching positions were vacant. The provost, Bradley Thiessen, described the number of faculty openings as “ridiculously high”, and the disclosure was the latest evidence of a brain drain afflicting colleges and universities throughout the Sunshine state.

Related: Trans people, students and teachers are besieged by DeSantis’s crusade. But he’s not done yet

Governor Ron DeSantis opened 2023 with the appointment of six political allies to the college’s 13-member board of trustees who vowed to drastically alter the supposedly “woke”-friendly learning environment on its Sarasota campus. At its first meeting in late January, the revamped panel voted to fire the college president, Patricia Okker, without cause and appoint a former Republican state legislator and education commissioner in her place.

Over the ensuing weeks, board members have dismissed the college’s head librarian and director of diversity programs and denied tenure to five professors who had been recommended for approval.

In a statement given to 10 Tampa Bay about faculty vacancies that was issued earlier this month, NCF officials said that six of the openings were caused by staff resignations and one-quarter of the faculty member departures “followed the changes in the New College board of trustees”. One of those resignations was submitted by Liz Leininger, an associate professor of neurobiology who says she started looking for an exit strategy as soon as she learned about the DeSantis appointments in the first week of 2023.

The 40-year-old scientist joined the New College faculty in 2017, drawn by the opportunities of living near her ageing parents on Florida’s Gulf coast and working closely with undergraduates at a relatively small school where total student enrollment hovers around 700. But as the Republican-controlled Florida legislature passed a series of bills over the last two years that sought to curtail academic freedom and render a professor’s tenure subject to review at any time, Leininger witnessed first-hand the devastating effects of the new laws on her colleagues’ morale.

“All of the legislation surrounding higher education in Florida is chilling and terrifying,” said Leininger, who is rejoining the biology department at St Mary’s College in Maryland this fall where she had been teaching before moving to central Florida. “Imagine scientists who are studying climate change, imagine an executive branch that denies climate change – they could use these laws to intimidate or dismiss those scientists.”

The new laws have introduced a ban on the funding of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Florida’s public colleges and universities, withdrawn a right to arbitration formerly guaranteed to faculty members who have been denied tenure or face dismissal, and prohibited the teaching of critical race theory, which contends that inherent racial bias pervades many laws and institutions in western society, among other changes.

In the face of that and other legislation backed by DeSantis and Republican lawmakers that has rolled back the rights of Florida’s LGBTQ+ community, many scholars across the state are taking early retirement, voting with their feet by accepting job offers outside Florida or simply throwing in the towel with a letter of resignation.

Students protest at New College of Florida
Students protest at New College of Florida, one of Ron DeSantis’s particular targets. Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP

Hard figures for turnover rates will not be available until later this year, and none of the other 11 state-run universities are expected to match New College’s exceptionally high percentage of faculty vacancies.

A spokesperson for the office of State University System chancellor, Ray Rodrigues, issued a statement asserting that the “State University System of Florida has not received any concerns from our member institutions indicating turnover this year has been any higher than previous years. Turnover occurs every year.”

But Andrew Gothard, the state-level president of the United Faculty of Florida labor union, predicts a loss of between 20 and 30% of faculty members at some universities during the upcoming academic year in comparison with 2022-23, which would signify a marked increase in annual turnover rates that traditionally have stood at 10% or less.

James Pascoe moved to the Gainesville campus of the University of Florida in 2018, the same year that DeSantis was first elected governor. Three years later, the Dallas native started looking for jobs elsewhere when new disclosure requirements made it more difficult for Pascoe to apply for grants. An unsuccessful attempt by the DeSantis administration to prohibit three University of Florida colleagues from testifying as expert witnesses in a voting rights case raised more alarm bells in Pascoe’s mind.

Related: Cries of cronyism as DeSantis bids to place rightwing ally at top university

Then came the passage of legislation in March 2022 that banned the discussion of gender identity and sexuality with elementary school students between kindergarten and the third grade. Pascoe and his male partner began to worry about their future eligibility for adopting children in an environment that was becoming increasingly hostile to gay couples in their judgment.

“It was becoming clear that the university was becoming politicized,” the 33-year-old assistant professor of mathematics said. “When I was waiting to hear back on job applications, they started passing all these vaguely anti-gay, anti-LGBTQ+ laws. The state didn’t seem to be a good place for us to live in any more.”

In the summer of 2022, Pascoe accepted a comparable position at Drexel University in Philadelphia. His partner followed suit by joining the biology department at Haverford College in a nearby suburb.

The prevailing political climate in Florida has complicated efforts to recruit qualified scholars from outside the state to fill some vacancies. Kenneth Nunn served on a number of appointment committees during the more than 30 years he spent on the faculty of the University of Florida’s law school. He said the task of persuading highly qualified applicants of color to move to Gainesville has never been more difficult under a governor who, earlier this year, prohibited a new advanced placement course in African American studies from being taught in high schools.

DeSantis came under renewed criticism this month when the state department of education issued guidelines recommending that middle school students be taught about the skills slaves acquired “for their personal benefit” during their lifetimes in bondage.

Related: ‘The point is intimidation’: Florida teachers besieged by draconian laws

“Florida is toxic,” noted Nunn, one of the few Black members of the law school faculty who says he chose to retire last January in part because of the legislated ban on the teaching of critical race theory. “It has been many years since we last hired an entry-level African American faculty member. They’re just not interested in being in a place where something with the stature of critical race theory is being denigrated and attacked.”

The 65-year-old Nunn will be teaching law in the fall in Washington DC as a visiting professor at Howard University, one of the nation’s leading historically Black colleges and universities.

“I could have stayed in a place where I’m not wanted and tough it out,” he adds. “Or I could retire and look for work elsewhere.”

In the end, Nunn says, concerns about his professional career and even his own physical safety made that decision a relatively easy one.

Just what does home insurance cost in Florida? Estimates vary widely, and new state data might surprise you

South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Just what does home insurance cost in Florida? Estimates vary widely, and new state data might surprise you

Ron Hurtibise – July 30, 2023

Just what does the average Florida homeowner pay for property insurance? Good luck figuring that out based on wildly varying estimates quoted across the media.

About the only thing everyone agrees on is that the state’s insurance rates have been rising sharply. Insurers say they need higher premiums to offset mounting losses from hurricane claims, severe weather events, high rates of litigation, and resulting increases in the cost of reinsurance — insurance that insurers must buy to make sure they can pay all claims after a disaster.

Reforms enacted in 2022 to curtail costs from litigation are expected to eventually stabilize premium costs, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Meanwhile, online insurance aggregators publish estimates that are all over the map.

Policygenius says average Florida homeowners pay $2,442 for home insurance.

Bankrate says $1,981 — but that’s just to insure the dwelling and doesn’t include other vital elements like liability coverage, loss of use, or personal property.

Insurify crunched numbers from 10 Florida ZIP codes and estimated average homeowners are paying a whopping $7,788 this year.

For a report comparing insurance costs across the nation, USA Today estimated that Floridians pay an average of $2,389.

And Insurance Information Institute, an industry-funded nonprofit organization, estimated Florida’s average home insurance premium was $4,321 last October and $6,000 currently.

Which number is closest to what Florida homeowners are actually paying? It’s impossible to say because the estimates are calculated based on “proprietary methods,” said Mark Friedlander, corporate communications director for the Insurance Information Institute.

Insurance agents in South Florida say their clients are paying on the high side of the estimated range of average premiums.

Yet, recently released data by the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation include figures that some might find surprisingly low in comparison to the higher estimates.

The state’s most recent data comes from insurers themselves — sent to OIR each quarter under a law enacted in May 2022.

The data sent by insurers was used to create county-by-county estimates of premiums paid to insure single-family homes, Those estimates were included in the office’s twice-yearly Property Insurance Stability Report released in early July.

State data shows average rates are lower

The report found that on March 31:

Homeowners in 48 of Florida’s 67 counties paid estimated average premiums between $2,000 and $2,999. Averages were below $2,000 in four counties — Sumter, Marion, Baker and Hernando.

Average premiums were in the $3,000s in seven counties: Lee, Okeechobee, Escambia, Okaloosa, Gulf, Pinellas, and Indian River.

Residents of three counties — Walton, Franklin, and Collier — paid average premiums in the $4,000s.

And homeowners in the five southernmost counties — Martin, Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe — paid average premiums of more than $5,000.

In fact, average premiums in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade exceeded $5,500 while homeowners in Monroe, which includes the Florida Keys, paid an average $7,584.

Premium amounts calculated by the Office of Insurance Regulation preceded rate hikes tied to higher reinsurance rates that insurers secured as hurricane season began on June 1. Renewal prices charged after companies secured their reinsurance rates will reflect the higher costs. That means the next six-month report will likely reflect significant rate increases.

Missing from the twice-yearly report is a statewide average premium.

The Sun Sentinel tallied data in a separate release by the office of company-level data that includes numbers of policyholders per coverage category and corresponding direct written premium totals. Direct written premiums are the total dollar amount of all premiums paid to the company by its policyholders. Dividing the number of policyholders into the direct written premium data reveals the average premium charged by the company.

Dividing the total number of policyholders into the total direct written premium total for all Florida-regulated insurance companies reveals Florida’s average homeowner insurance premium on March 31 was $3,134.

How many homeowners in Florida’s five southernmost counties would like to be paying that right now?

Probably all clients of Fort Lauderdale-based insurance agent Phil Portnoy, who works at Donna Carrara Insurance Agency.

“The average I’ve seen from private insurers is anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 for, say, $350,000 in coverage,” Portnoy said last week. “I’ve seen renewals down in Pinecrest for as much as $17,000 for a million in coverage and as much as $27,000 for a Palm Beach County intracoastal renewal of $1 million in coverage.”

Al Mendez, partner in Mendez & Associates Insurance in Pembroke Pines, says his average policies range from $4,200 to $6,000 to insure homes in the tri-county region with replacement costs of $300,000 to $500,000.

Mendez calls the current state of the insurance market — with rate increases of 25% to 70% over each of the past three years — “the worst I’ve experienced” in 30 years in the industry.

Some of his clients have seen increases of 100% to 200%, he said. “Florida is now the most expensive state to live in,” he said.

South Florida insurance costs are higher

Mark Friedlander of the Insurance Information Institute said he stands by his organization’s estimates that statewide average premiums increased from $4,231 last fall to $6,000 this year as “verified as accurate by numerous third parties, including insurers and insurance agents.”

As Friedlander is a popular source of insurance information, the $6,000-a-year estimate has shown up in stories by numerous national publications about Florida’s insurance crisis.

Two weeks ago, Friedlander said, “a Barron’s reporter verified our premium data with numerous industry analysts and confirmed its accuracy.”

Insurify, Policygenius and USA Today each used insurance data from a single source — Quadrant Information Services — to produce different estimates.

Chase Gardner of Insurify, which calculated an average estimate of $7,788 for Florida, said the company developed its estimates by using average costs in 10 zip codes “representative of each state’s population distribution.” Zip codes with larger populations were weighted more heavily in calculating the average, he said, which may explain why his company’s estimates were so much higher that Insurify’s and Bankrate’s numbers.

“Even though we both collected Florida data from Quadrant Information Services, prices vary a lot depending on where you live in the state,” Gardner said. “For example, we found that average prices were closer to $2,000 to $3,000 per year or less in northern, inland parts of the state, whereas prices could skyrocket to more than $10,000 per year in southern coastal cities like Miami.”

Friedlander said that the Insurance Information Institute’s estimates looked only at private sector policies and excluded policies sold by the insurer of last resort, state-owned Citizens Property Insurance Corp.

Citizens insured 719,347 single-family homes for an average premium of $3,254 in the first quarter of 2023, the state data shows.

That’s high from a statewide perspective but low for South Florida.

In March 2022, Citizens produced a chart that showed its average premium in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, where 52% of its policyholders are located, was $4,196 — 28% less than the $5,856 combined average of 13 competitors selected for the comparison.

Ultimately, the only home insurance cost estimates that matter are the ones offered to you to cover your home for the upcoming year. And at least for the near future, they’re continuing to increase, agents say.

Ron Hurtibise covers business and consumer issues for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. 

US intelligence report says China likely supplying tech for Russian military

Reuters

US intelligence report says China likely supplying tech for Russian military

Kanishka Singh and Michael Martina – July 27, 2023

The flags of the United States and China fly in Boston

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – China is helping Russia evade Western sanctions and likely providing Moscow with military and dual-use technology for use in Ukraine, according to an unclassified U.S. intelligence report released on Thursday.

The assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was published by the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

China has repeatedly denied sending military equipment to Russia since Moscow’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“The PRC is providing some dual-use technology that Moscow’s military uses to continue the war in Ukraine, despite an international cordon of sanctions and export controls,” the ODNI report said.

“The customs records show PRC state-owned defense companies shipping navigation equipment, jamming technology, and fighter jet parts to sanctioned Russian Government-owned defense companies,” the report said.

It also said China has become “an even more critical partner” of Russia after Moscow invaded Ukraine last year.

ODNI said China and Russia had increased the share of bilateral trade settled in China’s yuan currency, and both countries’ financial institutions are expanding their use of domestic payment systems.

China has increased it importation of Russia energy exports, including oil and gas rerouted from Europe, the report said.

ODNI cited much of the information to media reports. It added: “The Intelligence Community lacks sufficient reporting to assess whether Beijing is deliberately inhibiting United States Government export control end-use checks, including interviews and investigations, in the PRC.”

Earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron’s top diplomatic adviser Emmanuel Bonne said China was delivering items that could be used as military equipment to Russia, although not on a massive scale.

U.S. officials have previously raised concern about transfers of “dual-use equipment” from China to Russia. However, they have repeatedly said they have yet to see evidence of the transfer of lethal assistance for Russia’s use on the battlefield.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh and Michael Martina in Washington; Editing by Caitlin Webber and Daniel Wallis)

Coronavirus is back, but how worried should you be?

Yahoo! News

Coronavirus is back, but how worried should you be?

Parts of the country are seeing an uptick, and hospitalizations are rising nationwide.

Alexander Nazaryan, Senior W. H. Correspondent  – July 28, 2023

A cluster of people in face masks come in and out of a COVID-19 vaccine clinic.
People at a COVID-19 vaccine clinic in Los Angeles on Aug. 5, 2022. (Xinhua via Getty Images)

Dr. Bob Wachter was an expert who diligently practiced what he preached. For three years, the prominent University of California at San Francisco physician advocated masking and vaccination for those who, like him, wanted to avoid the coronavirus, as well as the mysterious, long-lasting symptoms known as long COVID.

When Wachter’s wife contracted the coronavirus last year when they were on a trip to Palm Springs, Calif., together, he still managed not to get sick — even after they sat next to each other in the car on the nine-hour trip back home.

But Wachter’s luck ran out earlier this month, when he finally contracted the coronavirus. To make matters worse, he fell in the bathroom while battling flulike symptoms and was hospitalized for stitches.

Wachter wrote on Twitter that he wanted his experience to serve as a “teachable moment,” a reminder that “Covid’s still around [and] it can still be pretty nasty.”

Not only is the coronavirus still around, but it appears to be returning in parts of the United States.

Read more from Yahoo News: Is the COVID pandemic really over?

A summer mini-spike
An overcrowded airport lounge with lines of travelers in the background.
Weary holiday travelers wait for air traffic to resume at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Va., on June 30. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

Washington was not especially rattled by the infections, but the cases are a reminder that the virus lingers. Students competing in the Solar Car Challenge in Orange County, Calif., for instance, saw the race disrupted this month after about two dozen competitors tested positive for COVID-19.

When the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, visited the White House earlier this month, several members of his delegation tested positive for COVID-19. In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper also caught the coronavirus this month. These do not appear to be isolated incidents.

Wastewater analysis in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Wachter lives, shows increasing levels of the coronavirus. Los Angeles is seeing a similar trend.

“There’s no doubt compared to our nadirs, or the stability that we’ve enjoyed, that there’s a slight increase in test positivity,” California’s health secretary, Dr. Mark Ghaly, told the Los Angeles Times this week.

While most people aren’t locking down or sending kids home from summer camp, the virus appears to be causing a vibe shift. “The U.S. has experienced increases in COVID-19 during the past three summers, so it’s not surprising to see an uptick,” CDC spokeswoman Kathleen Conley told Yahoo News.

In previous coronavirus waves, colder weather drove people indoors and allowed the pathogen to spread. Extremely hot weather could have the same effect. “We are in a very warm year, and people are spending a lot of time indoors,” infectious disease expert Dr. Luis Ostrosky told the Wall Street Journal. “People are congregating in air-conditioned settings, and that is providing an opportunity for transmission.”

Most institutions that had reported coronavirus cases with online trackers are no longer producing daily updates, making both local and national trends difficult to spot. For its part, the CDC drastically scaled back its own tracking in May.

Read more from Yahoo News: COVID-19 emergency isn’t over, and the most ‘painless’ way to prevent it is being ignored, doctors warn

‘Clearly rising,’ but nothing like the past
A pedestrian waits at an intersection by a COVID-19 testing site.
A COVID-19 testing site on a sidewalk in Manhattan in December 2022. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

According to the Centers for Disease Control, COVID-19 hospitalizations rose by 10% in the week of July 15, as compared to the previous week, from 6,444 hospitalizations to 7,109.

“Risk of getting infected is still fairly low, but clearly rising now,” Dr. Tatiana Prowell, a Johns Hopkins oncologist, wrote on Twitter. “Be aware.”

Masking continues to be an easy means of protection, especially when traveling or gathering in crowded settings like concert venues or sports arenas. And many people have neglected to update their vaccines, meaning that they lack some protection from the ever-evolving disease. The latest spike could be driven, in part, by an Omicron subvariant known as Arcturus.

According to the CDC, only 17% of the American population has received the bivalent booster introduced last fall.

“At this time, CDC’s genomic surveillance indicates that the increase in infections is caused by strains closely related to the Omicron strains that have been circulating since early 2022,” CDC’s Conley told Yahoo News.

Those are the very strains the bivalent booster was created to target. The Food and Drug Administration is also preparing an updated booster shot that should be available in September.

Read more from Yahoo News: There will be a new COVID vaccine this fall, but will people get it?

Moving on
A woman in a hat and face mask on a sidewalk.
A pedestrian in a face mask in New York City on July 6. (Amr Alfiky/Reuters)

During the Delta spike in the summer of 2021, nationwide hospitalizations for COVID-19 topped 100,000. A year later, the Omicron wave hospitalized 16,000 people across the country.

Today’s figures are much smaller by comparison. And as of the week of July 22, there had been 166 deaths from COVID-19 across the United States — a far cry from the 26,000 weekly deaths recorded in the U.S. in the first week of 2021.

Those at high risk for severe outcomes should make sure they’re up to date on boosters and know where to access treatment if they contract the virus, Dr. Leana Wen, a professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, told Yahoo News.

Between vaccination and multiple infections, the overwhelming majority of Americans have some immunity. Many have thus simply accepted the coronavirus as a part of life.

“The pandemic, for all intents and purposes, now is gone,” Donald Yealy, chief medical officer of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, told the Washington Post several weeks ago.

But, he cautioned, “the virus isn’t gone yet.”