“Honduras is in a tenuous political moment. It has operated as a narco-state under the right-wing National Party since 2009 when a military coup ousted then-President Manuel Zelaya, Castro’s husband. Persistent corruption, weak government institutions, climate change, high levels of violent crime, and rampant poverty have driven hundreds of thousands to flee the country in recent years, with many Hondurans seeking asylum in the US.
Change seemed to be on the horizon last November. Voters turned out in droves to elect Castro in a landslide win against the National Party’s Nasry Asfura — an ally of the outgoing president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who has been accused of taking bribes from narcotraffickers. Castro promised to create a coalition government to bring together the National Party’s political opponents, including her own center-left Libre party, under an agenda of combating corruption and promoting economic development.
As part of a joint initiative with the US government, American companies pledged to inject more than a combined $1.2 billion over a multiyear horizon into Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Those funds were meant to help reduce migration by providing new economic opportunity in the region. In Honduras, Castro’s incoming administration was seen as a reliable partner that could ensure the investments worked as intended.”
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“Castro’s proposed reforms could be transformative for Honduras, a country where corrupt economic elites have long ruled. She has vowed to institute an anti-corruption commission backed by the United Nations, similar to one that was shut down in Guatemala in 2019, and to convene a National Assembly seeking to rewrite the country’s constitution to guarantee social democratic rights. And she has promised a “new economic model” that would reduce inequality and the cost of living and would involve building an environment more conducive to private investment.
But the future of that agenda is in flux due to a constitutional crisis wracking the Honduran Congress.”
“It’s been over a year since Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube banned an array of domestic extremist networks, including QAnon, boogaloo, and Oath Keepers, that had flourished on their platforms leading up to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Around the same time, these companies also banned President Donald Trump, who was accused of amplifying these groups and their calls for violence.
So did the “Great Deplatforming” work? There is growing evidence that deplatforming these groups did limit their presence and influence online, though it’s still hard to determine exactly how it has impacted their offline activities and membership.
While extremist groups have dispersed to alternative platforms like Telegram, Parler, and Gab, they have had a harder time growing their online numbers at the same rate as when they were on the more mainstream social media apps, several researchers who study extremism told Recode. Although the overall effects of deplatforming are far-reaching and difficult to measure in full, several academic studies about the phenomenon over the past few years, as well as data compiled by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs for Recode, support some of these experts’ observations.
“The broad reach of these groups has really diminished,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University. “Yes, they still operate on alternative platforms … but in the first layer of assessment that we might do, it’s the mainstream platforms that matter most.” That’s because extremists can reach more people on these popular platforms; in addition to recruiting new members, they can influence mainstream discussions and narratives in a way they can’t on more niche alternative platforms.”
“While this is the first experiment in giving unconditional cash transfers to formerly incarcerated people, numerous studies in the US and elsewhere have shown how guaranteed income can benefit vulnerable members of society.
Stockton, California, gave 125 people in neighborhoods at or below the median income $500 per month, which led to mental health improvements and increased likelihood of finding a job. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Casino Dividend in North Carolina gives all tribal members a cut of gambling revenue that amounts to $4,000 to $6,000 per year; research has seen improvements in mental health and education and decreases in crime and addiction. Other studies around the world have shown benefits to health and food security, and reduction in crime.
Studies consistently show that recipients aren’t more likely to spend money on alcohol and drugs (as some have feared) — in fact, spending on “temptation goods” decreases in many cases. People also didn’t stop working in the vast majority of guaranteed income experiments (though there have been studies that tilted in the other direction).
The Florida experiment is especially intriguing because it will chart how guaranteed income can affect outcomes for a group that’s especially at risk of financial calamity.
A similar study shows promising results: Vancouver gave people experiencing homelessness $7,500 and found recipients moved into stable housing faster and were able to save money. The program was designed by formerly incarcerated people, and the team decided that the first month out of prison is particularly important because of the search for housing and a job, which is why it starts with an initial higher payment of $1,000 and then goes down to $600 in the following months. (Durham, North Carolina, is also running a similar guaranteed income pilot for formerly incarcerated people starting this March.)
There are also broader benefits of guaranteed income for families, communities, and society. A guaranteed income experiment in Kenya found benefits to the entire local economy as people spent money on neighboring businesses. While Alachua County in Florida is not Siaya County, Kenya, the researchers are hopeful that guaranteed income can help mitigate the negative effects incarceration has on communities.”
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““I think the question is,” says Couloute, “do we all deserve safer communities? If the answer is yes, then that means we want to do everything we can to ensure people with felony records live crime-free lives and don’t recidivate. If we can help folks leave our criminal justice system and get jobs, pay taxes, and become great tenants and homeowners, and so on and so forth, that only contributes to our society rather than detracting from it.”
These are lofty goals, and we won’t know the effects of this program for another couple of years. Scott hopes that this pilot can draw attention to the linkages between incarceration and poverty while Couloute discussed potential wide-ranging implications for anyone struggling with economic stability and social disadvantage.
The benefits are most obviously targeted at the 115 recipients. But if the results pan out, this experiment could bolster the case for a broader policy shift.”
“How the virus spreads among wildlife is a black box that scientists try to peer into through the tiniest of pinpricks. But what they do know is that when the coronavirus establishes itself in wildlife, it creates for itself a sort of insurance policy. We may be able to get the pandemic among humans under control, but the virus is likely to lurk in other species, making it that much harder to monitor and defeat.
The spread of SARS-CoV-2 in wildlife is not the most pressing issue of the pandemic right now. Humans are still catching the virus from each other and dying from it. Still, these wildlife risks, if they are realized, could have serious consequences. Scientists want to be vigilant about dangers that could emerge from the wilderness.”
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“Infections have turned up in cats, dogs, lions, tigers, pumas, ferrets, mink, certain rodents, snow leopards, and others. The CDC even has guidelines to protect pets from Covid-19. When a virus jumps from animals to humans and then back to animals, scientists call that spillback.
Most of these infections in animals appeared to be self-contained. An infected house cat presumably stays in the house when infected — it doesn’t start a chain of transmission. “They were all isolated cases,” Suresh Kuchipudi, a Penn State infectious disease researcher who collaborated with Kapur, says of known cases in animals.
The deer infections were different. “This is first time that a completely free-living animal species in the wild has been found to be infected, and that infection is widespread,” Kuchipudi says.
How the deer got infected in the first place remains a mystery, but researchers believe the outbreak came from humans. The virus circulating in the deer had similar genetic sequences to the virus circulating in humans at the time that they got it.”
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“Whatever happened to start the deer outbreaks, it appears to have happened many times. The genetic analysis in the PNAS paper finds evidence of several separate jumps from humans into animals. Further research needs to be done to identify the exact pathway, and hopefully to prevent the next leap.
Once the virus jumps into the deer, they are also spreading it to each other, the studies find. “There was not just human-to-deer spillover, but there was also deer-to-deer transmission, as evidenced by genomic changes that would confirm that,” Kuchipudi says.”
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“The pandemic in humans is much more urgent than Covid-19 in animals. All of the scientists I spoke to agreed about that. The coronavirus is still killing thousands of people every day, and that’s the problem that should get the bulk of our attention and resources.”
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“On the other hand, the scientists say they want more visibility into what’s happening in the animal world. “We need wildlife surveillance,” Olson says, meaning more testing of animals for coronavirus antibodies — a sign they have been exposed — or active infections. “We just don’t have the tools to begin to understand the system, to even start mapping what’s going to happen here, because our ability to see it is so opaque right now.””
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“Covid-19 outbreaks in animals are not situations we can plausibly control. Rather, they’re something to monitor in case they start to look like pressing problems.”
“Breyer prizes compromise, and as the court has become more ideologically polarized, he’s tried to find points of common ground with the conservative justices, even on relatively high-profile issues, like religious liberty. That pragmatic streak was on display in 2005, when he served as the pivotal vote in two separate cases about public displays of the Ten Commandments. In one of the cases, he voted with the conservatives to uphold the display; in the other, he voted with the liberals to strike it down. Over the years, he joined the conservatives in a variety of other important religion cases, including a dispute over a 40-foot cross that was displayed on public property in Maryland and a fight over whether Missouri could exclude a church from a public grant program for playground resurfacing.
In those cases, he often stressed the need to avoid religious disagreements — which sometimes led to outcomes that upset liberals. In the 2005 case where he voted to uphold a Ten Commandments display in Texas, for instance, he wrote that although it was a “borderline case,” ruling that it was unconstitutional could lead to the removal of similar displays around the country and “thereby create the very kind of religiously based divisiveness that the Establishment Clause seeks to avoid.”
And his breaks with his liberal colleagues haven’t been on religion alone. According to a recent analysis by political scientists Lee Epstein, Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn, Breyer cast the lowest percentage of liberal votes of any of the three Democratic appointees who served with him. Epstein, Martin and Quinn found that most of those disagreements were in the area of criminal procedure, particularly in cases related to search and seizure.
Of course, Breyer has been an outspoken liberal voice on other issues, including reproductive rights and the death penalty.”
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“Breyer plainly became concerned about the court’s reputation, particularly after Ginsburg died and was replaced by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which gave the conservative majority even more power. He’s spent the years since then trying to convince Americans that the court was fundamentally a nonideological institution, even publishing a short book where he argued that the court — despite its clear conservative tilt — was not a political institution.
That commitment to preserving the judiciary’s nonpartisan image — and staying mostly in line with public opinion — put Breyer increasingly out of step with the court’s trajectory. This year’s term isn’t over yet, but at least some of the Supreme Court conservatives seem ready to veer sharply outside the mainstream on abortion, gun rights and other high-profile issues. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, meanwhile, shows no desire to make nice with the conservatives — in a recent dissent, she called the court’s decision to leave a highly restrictive Texas abortion law in place a “disaster” and a “grave disservice to women in Texas.”
In a 2020 interview, Breyer told reporter Dahlia Lithwick, “The best is the enemy of the good. … But if you have a choice between achieving 20 or 30 percent of what you’d like or being the hero of all your friends, choose the first.” That attitude seems unlikely to be especially popular at the Supreme Court going forward — among liberals or conservatives.”
“Immigrants frequently fill jobs that native-born Americans are reluctant to do. Unsurprisingly, the largest gaps in the labor market tend to appear where immigrants make up a larger share of the workers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2020 “foreign-born workers were more likely than native-born workers to be employed in service occupations; natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations; and production, transportation, and material moving occupations.” Foreign-born workers make up roughly 17 percent of the U.S. labor force. In each of the struggling sectors mentioned above, more than 20 percent of the workers are already immigrants.
This dynamic isn’t just affecting low-wage jobs. According to Bloomberg, the U.S. is currently experiencing its worst health care labor shortage ever. An estimated 2.7 million immigrants are already working in hospitals. In October, 16 percent of American hospitals reported that they were critically short-staffed and the situation has only gotten worse. These essential jobs need to be filled so desperately that health officials are allowing staff infected with COVID to stay on the job. Many health care workers are experiencing burnout, and immigrants have already proven they can step in and get the job done.
Immigrants won’t solve every labor shortage in the U.S., but letting more people come here for an honest and well-paying job would be a great place to start. The sooner we see more immigrants allowed into the U.S., the sooner we’ll see more milk and meat at the supermarket.”
“the FBI already has unbelievably sweeping authority to surveil individual Americans or domestic groups without ever having to go before a judge to get a warrant.
Under an investigative category known as an assessment, FBI agents can search commercial and government databases (including databases containing classified information), run confidential informants, and conduct physical surveillance, all without a court order.”