.This is the thread for non-political news and events.
German police detain suspect after deadly shooting outside synagogue
Two people were killed in a shooting in the eastern German city of Halle on Wednesday and police said they had detained one person.
Mass-selling daily Bild said the shooting took place in front of a synagogue, and that a hand grenade was also thrown into a Jewish cemetery. An eyewitness told n-tv television that a perpetrator had also fired shots into a kebab shop in Halle.
I hate to say it Tim but the Kiwis are getting all the plaudits in the foreign press. You need better PR.
This is pretty awesome, a protest in Israel against Netanyahu and the coronavirus surveillance that maintains social distancing.
The other aspect is the lagging data, each report of cases we have is 2 days old by the time it’s announced, today the UK will announce positive tests collated on the 20th. Deaths due to various complications of coroners and family advisement up to 9 days. The worst symptoms too often come over a week into the illness (for example Boris Johnson being hospitalised 10 days after testing positive, if he weren’t PM with the UK testing criteria he would only have been confirmed positive when admitted).
So essentially every reaction to an action is seen pretty much 2 weeks later, a spike ‘immediately’ following lockdown is reflecting the infection rate of maybe a fortnight earlier.
Yeah there are lots of delay aspects to this (incubation period, speed of infection of others, lags and delays in reporting data) that mean that there is a substantial time gap between cause and effect in terms of gauging how effective preventative measures like this have been.
We may be looking at a food shortage:
Coronavirus at meat packing plants worse than first thought, USA TODAY investigation finds
This is another chart, the Financial Times economic editor has been comparing death rates in the UK to the average over the last 50 years.
It’s pretty strong evidence that while it may have looked like it up until the middle of March it is far from the typical mortality rate from normal flu seasons.
Logic used is in this Twitter thread:
NEW: The excess UK deaths linked to coronavirus are likely to be around
41,000
as of yesterday, not the 17,337 of the hospital deaths announcements
Here is the explanation for that estimate, which I will update daily
1/
— Chris Giles (@ChrisGiles_) April 22, 2020
WELCOME TO THE AUSTRALOCRACY, GENTLEMEN
Damn it, Anders! I just ate!
Damn it, Anders! I just ate!
I have noted the time of day for future posting reference.
I hate to say it Tim but the Kiwis are getting all the plaudits in the foreign press. You need better PR.
Yeah the kiwis are doing good.
Fucking assholes
What the fuck is wrong here? After Harry Dunn was killed by a US diplomat’s wife driving on the wrong side of the road there have been several reports and videos showing the same thing in exactly the same area.
Every year tens of thousands of US tourists go to the UK (and vice versa) and I’ve never seen it being a major issue or risk before. I mean we know in advance and adjust.
What the fuck is wrong here? After Harry Dunn was killed by a US diplomat’s wife driving on the wrong side of the road there have been several reports and videos showing the same thing in exactly the same area.
Every year tens of thousands of US tourists go to the UK (and vice versa) and I’ve never seen it being a major issue or risk before. I mean we know in advance and adjust.
Sorry but when I saw that, this was the first thing to pop into my head:
Trump press briefing:
>>”And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?
“So it’d be interesting to check that.”
Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: “I’m not a doctor. But I’m, like, a person that has a good you-know-what.”<<
God, such a rambling moron. I know it doesn’t help anything to just point and Trump saying stupid bullshit because it just doesn’t matter, but… God, I want to shout at him so much.
I would be happy for Trump to trial this treatment personally.
Technically the treatment would work in preventing death from Covid-19, due to being dead from injected disinfectant.
He’s basically a conduit for every crackpot on Twitter and YouTube right to millions of people, and a lot of people are going to die as a result.
You know that feeling when you really want to post “But it’s going to be stupid people, so not much of a problem” but not sure if you’ll get likes or hate…? 
He’s basically a conduit for every crackpot on Twitter and YouTube right to millions of people, and a lot of people are going to die as a result.
You know that feeling when you really want to post “But it’s going to be stupid people, so not much of a problem” but not sure if you’ll get likes or hate…?
I get the sentiment, and as gallows humour it’s amusing. But a few weeks ago an elderly couple in the US ingested fish tank cleaner because it’s a similar chemical compound to a medicine that’s used to treat Lupus and has been touted as a miracle cure to COVID-19. Trump had been talking about it for a few days, they recognised the name on the packet and decided to give it a shot. One of them died and the other is still in hospital.
Those people, and the other people who are falling for this, who were conned into enabling Trump have been failed over and over by their society that puts profit over education, public safety, and true equality. They’ve been made victims of in ways they don’t even understand, and now that cumulative effect means some of them are going to die needlessly.
There’ll always be those who see only that he is standing with the Seal of the President emblazoned behind him. The President says so therefore it must be true.
There’ll always be those who see only that he is standing with the Seal of the President emblazoned behind him. The President says so therefore it must be true.
Important question: What is Boris Johnson going to say/do to top this?
He’s not but Raab, Hancock and Gove are bound to do something dumb between them. If all else fails, they’ll rope in Patel.
Important question: What is Boris Johnson going to say/do to top this?
More important question: where is Boris Johnson?
Important question: What is Boris Johnson going to say/do to top this?
More important question: where is Boris Johnson?
Even more important question: When is Boris Johnson?
He’s apparently spoken to Trump on the phone and Trump reported that he’s great, he’s going great, he’s the best Prime Minister.
So he’s probably dead.
Nah, he’s hanging out with Jordan Peterson, who also is totally not dead.
I may have seen a line or two in global summaries but really all the news is dominated now by Covid-19, mostly local focus first and then the more notable other countries. A lot on Sweden and NZ because of their different approaches, Spain and Italy because of the high number of cases. The USA for all its lunacy. Singapore because it’s having a second wave worse than the first. Brazil because their president is pretending it doesn’t exist.
Not much on Mexico.
A lot on Sweden and NZ because of their different approaches,
Reading international news about Sweden is a ride. One day it’s harsh criticism, on another it’s outright praise.
I think it’s being coloured a lot by political bias. Those that believe in a lockdown policy find the failings in it and those that are against it find the good points. You can point to the rates being better than Italy or the UK or worse than Norway and Germany.
It’s been a long held view of mine though that ‘the laws’ are not necessarily the most important thing. In general, not just regarding the virus. Culture plays a massive part. The UK which has tougher laws has more pot smokers than the Netherlands, Singapore which has incredibly tough laws including a mandatory death sentence for drug traffickers had in the 2010s higher ecstasy use than Portugal which legalised it completely.
Sweden hasn’t forced everyone to work from home but asked them and 50% have, they don’t have large gatherings and those businesses are closed, care homes have stopped visits. It’s far from ‘business as usual’. A ‘lockdown’ isn’t actually a universal concept, each place is interpreting it and obeying it very differently. Some places tried a looser approach and found a large number ignoring and abusing it so had to enforce harder.
I think there’s also an element of luck at play here too. Right at the start when they had a better grip on tracing the UK found a huge number of cases coming from one business traveller deemed a ‘super spreader’. What if his next assignment was in Canada or New Zealand instead? Knowing the piss poor governments and infrastructure of some of the countries low on the list right now you can only look at luck keeping it down, nobody much got in to spread it before international travel fell to a trickle.
Another example, whatever the lockdown laws are in the UK this is what happened yesterday (for the second week in a row):
Is Sweden, whatever the written rules are, experiencing mass gatherings like that? I don’t know but wouldn’t surprise me if not.
Hey do you guys in the US and Europe get any news reports about Mexico? I’m wondering what they’re saying, if anything at all… can’t find much about it… =/
This is from a couple days ago:
https://abc7.com/mexico-braces-for-surge-in-coronavirus-cases-world-news-covid19-covid-19/6121998/
The New York Post is basically our version of the Daily Mirror, but this is still worth noting:
https://nypost.com/2020/04/25/north-korean-dictator-kim-jong-un-rumored-to-be-dead/
@Jon , honestly don’t hear anything about mexico, and would not mind your viewpoint at all.
For me, (Vancouver BC, Canada (area)- so west and south) we’ve been told we’ve done a great job.
When spring break happens at different times in different provinces then a combination of luck and seeing what happens gave us a head start. No official lockdown, certain things, but buy in and we can get through this.
It is “by the numbers” where you see the proof.
Now whatever headway we’ve made a prison (Federal Institution) has had an outbreak (12 staff and 106 inmates).
Early March had talk of contacting the families of the non-violent offenders and finding safe homes in the community for temporary release.
This was met with resistance and now that non-action has a potential devastating effect.
To me it was an easy obvious decision to release them.
Care homes (elderly) are still of great concern.
It’s where “the numbers” go bad.
2 chicken plants (large) were shut down locally. Same ownership, people working at both facilities (told to, some serious bullshit).
Couple that with the fact two Alberta beef plants affected that supply 70% of Canada’s beef (!) and we’re back to fearing for food supply. Honestly thought we were past that shit.
_________________________________________
Where I work we have weekly updates from the company, and while they are very polite, they are very much needed.
6 ft apart, or you can be sent home.
We can be shut down if people complain.
It’s a constant thing to remind people, one thing for the people that need a reminder, quite another for those that don’t give a fuck. When people’s true colors come out it can be ugly.
I’m a steel fabricator, working supervisor in my department.
I have an office off the shop floor, two doors.
Door to the shop closed, but other permanently open (no touching doorknobs) and it’s across the hall from the men’s bathroom (again, door open) and I hear every conversation.
2 guys, one young, one old, and both having a hard time with “this inconvenience”.
I can bite my lip, but almost lost it when the younger guy says “if we end up losing 100,000 people we can replace that in like 4 months”
I had to say something but toned it down and said “that’s some cold shit asshole”
The older guy says “you hear that? CNN watcher that over-reacts. Cause of all our problems.”
I really don’t have words for this idiocy. Don’t think I can seriously make peace with them again (I can’t un-hear it).
(nicest way to say it, but once I told you the story I’m getting stuck on it…)
_______________________________
And I don’t know how to wrap this rambling post up.
Nothing I want to edit, only more to add.
I’ll just say “thanks for listening!”
Honestly hope you and yours are safe.
The Financial Times continues to look at excess death rates to see how numbers are likely under-reported.
Most notable here for me is Indonesia. They denied having any cases initally despite the fact that one of the first Australian and Malaysian cases reported it had only been to Bali, not China. They are reporting only 700 deaths yet just for one city they are way in excess of that. Ecuador are reporting 567 deaths but one province is showing over 10,000 excess deaths to the norm.
Of course there’s no way to say that 100% of these excess deaths are all Covid-19 but you can see the difference in variation in a normal pattern and an absence of any other clear reason like a natural disaster or something else to explain the spike.
Wrestlers have a whole new line of business producing very ornate masks for health care workers.
Is this part serious? (Because these days I’m willing to believe anything )
Some Premier League footballers have returned to training grounds today, with plans to resume the English top-flight season set to step up this week.
Yay, it’s ok to make journeys and meet people for frivolous reasons again 
Wrestlers have a whole new line of business producing very ornate masks for health care workers.
Is this part serious? (Because these days I’m willing to believe anything
Yes. They needed a new source of income and wanted to help. They’ve been utilising the same material they use for costumes.
There’s enough fake news around without me inventing it. I wouldn’t do so.
Some Premier League footballers have returned to training grounds today, with plans to resume the English top-flight season set to step up this week.
Yay, it’s ok to make journeys and meet people for frivolous reasons again
But only if those frivolous reasons ultimately generate tens of millions of pounds.
From what I’ve read, but no doubt someone will abuse it, the footballers are able to do quite a bit of training and maintain social distancing. They can do aerobic fitness, passing and free kick stuff without getting with even 10 metres of each other.
Rugby is trickier but I know Leigh Halfpenny, one of the best kickers in the world, has been going on his own to practice goal kicking every day. He put a request for a different club to use as he was bored of the view (in South Wales you can do that without breaking the travel rules as there’s one every mile or so).
I think there’s a problem with giving an inch and taking a mile happening though and it’ll probably get worse. The proposed idea of being allowed to visit 10 people over 2 households is completely unenforceable. Unless there’s a list of their selected people to offset against every address in the country it will just mean ‘go wherever you want’ in practice.
True, but it’s still scary as hell. The audacity of that headline alone. The article also pooh poohs fears about China’s social credit score. And it claims “nearly perfect location tracking of most the world’s population” is a great public good. Now I don’t know what to say about that without using very disrespectful spords about these writers. It’s a good argument against smartphones though.
A line of thinking the article uses is “private firms already collect a lot of data about us, so why not allow the government to collect it and use it too?” That is first class casuistry.
Thing is government has set lines of public accountability that the private sector does not, so the question is more about the kind of government you have. If it’s China or Vlad and co? Then stuffed art thou.
But, the whole point of the GDPR law was to give people more control over the data held on them by government. In contrast, it took a global pandemic to force Facebook to be more responsible in the smallest way.
The US is also unusual in the way it tends to opt for far less restrictions on positive freedoms, aka “to” rights, which tend to be for negative freedom, “from” rights. You have freedom of speech where the government will not curtail you, but it doesn’t follow from that you can say anything to anyone without consequence, which is where it tends to kick off. At the same time it is accepted that if you are to be free from say harassment or cyber-bullying then that does restrict the total freedom of speech. There’s always this tension and balancing between the two forms of rights.
How does this chick still have a job?
Fox News’ Tomi Lahren Compares Social Distancing to ‘Willful Slavery’
She’s just pissed because no one wants to be close to her under any circumstances.
Because she causes controversy which results in profit.
Pentagon has released some UFO footage. It’s nothing new if you’re into this sort of stuff.
Despite Texas Gov. Greg Abbott permitting movie theaters to re-open on May 1 in his state numbering nearly 30 million, big movies chains like AMC and Cinemark, which is located in Plano, TX, are still eyeing mid-summer re-opening, not only out of safety, but also due to the lack of new, fresh studio content.
Pretty inevitable with a unilateral decision like that. Texas may be a big state but in context it’s way to small to support the release of even a low budget mainstream movie. Until a majority of places also open up then they’ll maybe find some indie stuff or ‘golden oldies’ to show.
The number of COVID-19 recoveries in Texas will soon exceed the number of total cases in the state, according to Gov. Greg Abbott.
This a completely irrelevant measure. Since the virus doesn’t kill most people the passage of time is all that’s needed for the ‘recovered’ column to grow larger. What’s relevant is if the the number of cases reporting to hospital reduces.
From what I’ve read, but no doubt someone will abuse it, the footballers are able to do quite a bit of training and maintain social distancing. They can do aerobic fitness, passing and free kick stuff without getting with even 10 metres of each other.
Also, they are all lucky enough to live within walking distance of their training grounds! That’s amazing good fortune, really
Because, you’re not allowed to drive anywhere for exercise or for non-essential work.
From what I’ve read, but no doubt someone will abuse it, the footballers are able to do quite a bit of training and maintain social distancing. They can do aerobic fitness, passing and free kick stuff without getting with even 10 metres of each other.
Also, they are all lucky enough to live within walking distance of their training grounds! That’s amazing good fortune, really
Because, you’re not allowed to drive anywhere for exercise or for non-essential work.
I live within walking distance of two of the major Dublin football teams’ home grounds without breaking the 2km limit on outside exercise here. And there’s another two or three I could walk to if I did…
If I played for Newcastle or Sunderland, I could walk to either of them too. I’m not saying it’s impossible, just incredibly lucky (I specifically said “lucky” 
) that multiple clubs have full teams plus support staff who can all walk to work.
Here from Friday households will be able to host two guests at a time. We’ll see how that goes. The government also launched a contact tracing app, and while some people are worried about the data being safe, I’m more on the side of it not being particularly useful.
The app will store a randomised key of any other person/phone (with the app installed) with whom you spend 15 minutes or more in close proximity. Should one of you fall ill, be tested, and get a positive result you can press a button in the app which lets the state health authorities know to contact the contacts you’ve accumulated over the prior two weeks.
So far so good, but unless we go back to packed trains and buses, or the bars and restaurants reopen there is no situation in the coming months where I’ll find myself that close to a stranger for that long. Pointless.
Moore unfortunately often has a good intention behind his work but doesn’t seem too bothered with detail compared to his rhetoric. Farenheit 9/11 makes very valid points about the role of Saudi Arabia in US politics, how they were shielded despite being largely responsible, but then goes onto a tangent about GW Bush being unable to read which is clearly nonsense and easily debunked, his evidence is one book held upside down, the evidence against is frequent speeches using autocue witnessed by hundreds of journalists. If Bush were truly illiterate I doff my cap to him for his memory in being able to word for word repeat exactly what was there. It’s a pointless tangent that devalues what went before.
There are undoubtedly truths in spin being used to sell some aspects of green technology but I don’t trust him not to get carried away and relay some bullshit because it confirms his prejudices.
It was always Moore’s problem I think. He’s so determined to make his point that he loses perspective and any sense of balance. I liked Fahrenheit 9/11 for what it was, at the time, but it was just as flawed and one-sided as some of the stuff he criticises.
It is not 100 % clean but does that mean it’s as bad as the fossile fuel economy? I doubt it.
Which is the point and sometimes the scrutiny loses a sense of proportion. I’ve seen many claims that thing like panels and windmills take a lot of energy to actually make, which is true but the comparison never looks at the same infrastructure cost of a coal powered station for example, that doesn’t appear out of nowhere and last forever with no maintenance. As you say not 100% perfect but much much better than the alternatives available now.
Biofuels are a lot more suspect but there are sustainable ones in operation, there was a documentary about one that was all fed from the same Canadian forest which was regrown and fed back in so not encroaching into deforestation. Some here is probably causing more damage than good with plantations replacing rainforest.
I always cringe a bit when people criticize Brazil and other countries for the way they treat their forest even though in Europe 99,9 % of all primeval forest is gone. And even then, forest can regrow, Europe has been getting greener in the last decades.
It is something that infuriates many in this part of the world, being lectured by Europeans and North Americans that almost completely eradicated their own forests. That doesn’t really excuse Bolsonaro’s complete disregard for it but in most cases these developing countries have gazetted large protected areas at quite a lot of loss of potential revenue.
Rewilding and reforestation in developed countries though does seem to have moved on in the last 5 years or so, stuff is being done but really more needs to be done to get people to realise it’s their issue too. The standard lawn is a horrible thing for the environment, it contributes next to nothing in helping absorb CO2 and nurture wildlife and absorbs a massive amount of water.
It’s the anniversary of Hitler’s death this week, which I guess is a huge deal for all the people who think they’re still living the second world war, as the Daily Mail have done an article (EDIT: ok, turns out it was from 2015, but still) talking about how they reported on it. Which I wouldn’t normally mentioned, except, well…
They’ve faked it. They’ve fabricated an entirely different front page (and few interior pages) from the one they actually printed on 2nd May 1945. And to be clear, it’s not just that they used modern formatting to make it more readable, they’ve straight up rewritten the entire front page and its stories.
The purported front page:
The actual front page of the Daily Mail that day:
The article (which I’m not going to link to, just know I took that hit for you and even disabled my ad-blocker to do so and dear god how do people manage with that every day?) even pulls quotes from the made-up pages as though they were real.
It’s utterly bizarre and also a pretty scary rewriting of history.
