Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalThe Invisible Hand of Steve Twist
When Josh Tate was sentenced in 2017 to 10 years in prison for getting caught with drugs multiple times, his wife, Claire Tate, tried not to dwell on the moments he would miss with their two young kids. She didn’t see the purpose in sending Josh — who had struggled with a meth addiction for years but never been convicted of a violent crime — away for so long.
“You can’t punish a drug addiction out of somebody,” Claire Tate said recently.
Last year, state legislation supported by prominent conservative groups seemed to offer Josh Tate a chance to serve a larger portion of his sentence at home after completing education and self-help programs.
Claire and Josh began making plans, big and small, for once he was out of prison: going to a grocery store, visiting a hot dog stand in a small southern Arizona town, taking the kids to the beach.
One man had the power to delay their early reunion: Steve Twist. Twist has never held elected office. But over four decades the Arizona victims’ rights advocate, adjunct law professor and former assistant state attorney general has had an enduring impact on policies that created one of the nation’s most punitive state criminal justice systems.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-invisible-hand-of-steve-twist
America needs more doctors and nurses to survive the next pandemic
When Covid-19 first hit the US health care system, the biggest concerns about responding to the crisis were about physical infrastructure: Would hospitals have enough ventilators or physical space to care for a surge of patients? But the shortfalls that limited the American response were ultimately about the country’s human infrastructure: There were not enough nurses in hospitals, not enough staff in long-term care facilities, not enough public health workers.
There still aren’t. With a fourth wave building in December 2021 after the omicron variant emerged, Roberta Schwartz, a senior executive with Houston Methodist Hospital, summarized the conundrum like this: “You can send all the ventilators you want. I have no one to staff them.”
One of the primary lessons of the pandemic is that the United States must develop the ability to temporarily increase our health care staffing capacity whenever the next public health crisis arrives. We can’t magically create hundreds of new doctors and nurses at a moment’s notice. But we can make it easier to use the medical personnel we do have more effectively, to give us a fighting chance in an emergency scenario.
“Surge capacity is probably the name of the game,” Michael Chernew, a health policy professor at Harvard University, told me, adding that it would be difficult and expensive to run a health system at pandemic capacity all the time. “That’s really hard to support.”
https://www.vox.com/22934992/covid-19-pandemic-doctors-nurses-public-health-shortages
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I have 2 brothers. One is a doctor married to a doctor, I'm a nurse. We have 10 kids combined (counting steps), no medical personnel. I have 11 grandkids, one brother has 3. None of us has encouraged our kids to go into the medical field. There are reasons.
Trauma among health care workers comparable to that of combat vets
As Covid cases surged across the U.S. in spring 2020, comparisons were routinely made between war zones and hospitals in a state of chaos.
Health care workers of any specialty — from urologists to plastic surgeons — were recruited to help with the tsunami of extremely ill patients. Intensive care specialists were unable to save lives. Many thousands of patients died alone without loved ones because hospitals barred visitors. And workers were constantly terrified that they, too, would get sick or infect their families.
The war zone comparisons may not have been far off the mark: In a study published Tuesday in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, researchers reported that the levels of mental health distress felt by doctors, nurses, first responders and other health care personnel early in the pandemic were comparable to what's seen in soldiers who served in combat zones.
What health care workers faced early in the pandemic is a type of post-traumatic stress called "moral injury," said Jason Nieuwsma, a clinical psychologist at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, and author of the new report.
Moral injury can manifest in different ways, including feelings of guilt or shame after having participated in an extraordinarily high-stress situation that required immediate and often life-or-death decision-making. It can also manifest as feelings of betrayal.
For combat veterans, such scenarios are easy to envision.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/betrayal-guilt-shame-trauma-health-care-workers-comparable-combat-vets-rcna22918
A new documentary looks at women who survived domestic violence -- then faced jail time
Midway through And So I Stayed, Kim Dadou Brown — a survivor of domestic violence who served 17 years in prison for killing her partner — sits in a semicircle with a group of women, sharing her experiences of abuse. She relates an anecdote about a time she went to a store with her then-partner. Dadou Brown said she was wearing jeans with an intentional rip in the upper back of the thigh.
When she came out of the store, her partner was angry. He asked her if she thought she was cute, and told her to turn around. When she did, Dadou Brown said, he grabbed the hole in her jeans and tore it, exposing her in public. For a moment, she was frozen in shock. Then he shoved her, and she snapped back into the moment. “There’s guys on the street,” she says, gesturing in front of her. “There’s drug dealers. There’s kids. There’s people barbecuing, like — nobody said anything. No one ever did.”
Dadou Brown was describing her own experiences: how it felt like the people in her community would rather look away than face the uncomfortable truth of what she was living through. But she might as well have been describing a broader instinct on the part of society to turn away from, and ignore, the abuse victims in its midst. Some things have changed in the 30 years since Dadou Brown was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree. There’s greater awareness now of the difficulties domestic violence victims face in being believed, and the danger they face when trying to leave abusive relationships.
Other elements of understanding have not changed, perhaps especially when a survivor says she was defending herself or responding to an abuser’s attack. The proliferation of true crime as entertainment, through television and podcasts, has only made it worse. Among the most egregious examples is Snapped, the Oxygen network mainstay that repackages real stories of crimes committed by women, often in the context of domestic violence and abuse, as sensationalist curios. Women who kill their partners are portrayed as devious, malevolent, out of their minds.
https://www.vox.com/23010236/and-so-i-stayed-documentary-domestic-violence
Trans women should not compete in female sport - PM
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he does not believe transgender women should compete in female sporting events - a view he conceded may be "controversial".
The issue of transgender athletes - centred around the balance of inclusion, sporting fairness and safety in women's sport - has recently focused on the case of transgender cyclist Emily Bridges.
Bridges was recently ruled ineligible to compete in her first elite women's race by cycling's world governing body.
Johnson was speaking on a range of issues, including the government's approach to the ban on so-called conversion therapy, before adding: "I don't think biological males should be competing in female sporting events. Maybe that's a controversial thing to say, but it just seems to me to be sensible.
"I also happen to think that women should have spaces - whether it's in hospitals, prison or changing rooms - which are dedicated to women. That's as far as my thinking has developed on this issue.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/61012030
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BoJo has "thoughts"---who knew?
How police shut down world's largest darknet market
"It gave us all goosebumps" says Sebastian Zwiebel, as he describes the moment his team shut down Hydra, the world's largest darknet marketplace.
The website was a bastion of cyber-crime, surviving for more than six years selling drugs and illegal goods.
But, after a tip-off, German police seized the site's servers and confiscated €23m (£16.7m) in Bitcoin.
"We've been working on this for months and when it finally happened it felt big - really big," adds Mr Zwiebel.
Police say 17 million customers and more than 19,000 seller accounts were registered on the marketplace, which now carries a police seizure notice.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61002904
South Florida apartment building evacuated after engineers deem it structurally unsafe
The city of North Miami Beach, Florida, ordered the evacuation of a five-story, 60-unit apartment building Monday following an evaluation by a South Florida engineering firm that found the building to be "structurally unsound."
The city received a letter from an engineering firm on Monday notifying the property owner and city officials of the firm's findings after a months-long investigation, according to a news release. The apartment building, Bayview 60 Homes, was built in 1972, according to the release. Fifty-five of the building's 60 units were occupied as of Monday, city officials said.
The building is about three miles north of the Champlain Towers South, the Surfside condo tower that partially collapsed last summer, killing nearly 100 people. The disaster unnerved some residents of coastal properties in Florida and beyond and prompted North Miami Beach to launch a review of all high-rise condo buildings above five stories.
Since last July, several units in the Bayview 60 Homes building have been under repair ahead of the property's 50 Year Recertification inspections.
Susset Cabrera, Chief Communications Officer for North Miami Beach, told CNN on Monday that the owner of the building "verbally requested that the city order an immediate evacuation of residents" based on the engineering report.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/05/us/south-florida-building-evacuated-unsafe/index.html
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Here we go again some more.
What if the ivermectin craze was never about treating Covid?
By Timothy Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Alberta
The rise of the ivermectin cult is one of the most nonsensical storylines — in a sea of nonsensical storylines — to emerge during the pandemic. Even now, as Covid begins to become a less dominant force in our lives, the ivermectin bunkum continues.
There have been several recent large, well-done, clinical trials, including one published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, that definitively show, according to one of the study’s authors, “there’s really no sign of any benefit.”
But this growing body of it-doesn’t-work evidence hasn’t stopped ivermectin champions from championing. “RETRACT PAPER @NEJM NOW!!!!!” an anti-vaccine physician posted on Twitter a few days after the study was published. In her view it is a “CRIMINAL PAPER” that is “PROMOTING MURDER.” (All caps and exclamation marks in original, of course.)
The ivermectin stories have gotten so bizarre that I increasingly need to double-check to see whether they are satire. People are advocating giving it to babies, patients are sneaking it into hospitals inside teddy bears, and a candidate in Wisconsin’s attorney general election wants to investigate potential homicides in hospitals because “loved ones were basically being murdered” because ivermectin is being “withheld from them.”
Reality: There has never been good clinical evidence to support the use of the drug in the context of Covid. In the pandemic’s early days there were laboratory studies — that is, research done in petri dishes and not involving actual humans — that suggested the drug, which is used to treat parasites in horses, had antiviral properties. (This kind of work rarely translates into clinical application.) There were also some observational studies that seemed promising.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ivermectin-myths-make-covid-vaccine-test-psas-harder-sell-rcna22901
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All about freedumb!
Rape as a weapon: huge scale of sexual violence inflicted in Ukraine emerges
Women across Ukraine are grappling with the threat of rape as a weapon of war as growing evidence of sexual violence emerges from areas retaken from retreating Russian forces.
The world was horrified on Sunday by a picture taken by the photographer Mikhail Palinchak on a highway 20km outside the capital, Kyiv, in which the bodies of one man and three women were piled under a blanket. The women were naked and their bodies had been partially burned, the photographer said.
The harrowing image adds to a mounting body of evidence that summary executions, rape and torture have been used against civilians in areas under Russian control since the Kremlin launched the invasion of its neighbour on 24 February.
Particularly difficult for many to comprehend is the scale of the sexual violence. As Russian troops have withdrawn from towns and suburbs around the capital in order to refocus the war effort on Ukraine’s east, women and girls have come forward to tell the police, media and human rights organisations of atrocities they have suffered at the hands of Russian soldiers. Gang-rapes, assaults taking place at gunpoint, and rapes committed in front of children are among the grim testimonies collected by investigators.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/03/all-wars-are-like-this-used-as-a-weapon-of-war-in-ukraine
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The Russian military is particularly notorious for this.
Voice from the grave haunts Ronald Greene's deadly arrest
Days before his own death, Louisiana Master Trooper Chris Hollingsworth walked into a secure room deep inside state police headquarters, swore an oath and told investigators about the night he held down Black motorist Ronald Greene and repeatedly bashed him in the head with a flashlight.
Gone was the bravado from Hollingsworth’s earlier boast — captured on body-camera video — that he “beat the ever-living f-—” out of the man before his 2019 death along a rural roadside in northeast Louisiana.
Instead, in a two-hour interrogation, Hollingsworth meekly portrayed himself as the victim in the violent arrest, saying he feared for his life even as graphic footage played over and over of white troopers swarming Greene’s car after a high-speed chase, jolting him with stun guns, punching him in the face and dragging him by his ankle shackles as he wailed, “I’m your brother! I’m scared! I’m scared!”
“I was scared,” Hollingsworth said in the never-before-released recorded interview obtained by The Associated Press. “He could have done anything once my hold was broke off him — and that’s why I struck him.”
Detectives weren’t buying it, describing the repeated flashlight blows to Greene’s head as unjustified while peppering the 46-year-old veteran trooper with questions. Why did Hollingsworth turn off his body-camera video recorder? Why did he jolt Greene with his stun gun before the motorist could even get out of his car? Why did he resort to disproportionate force with an unarmed man who was hardly resisting?
https://apnews.com/article/death-of-ronald-greene-louisiana-race-and-ethnicity-77a2e9f468b244db0b5244bb8f24453b
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The "poor pitiful me" act does not play.
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Gender: Do not displayCurrent location: Virginia
Member since: Wed Jun 1, 2011, 07:34 PM
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