DonViejo
DonViejo's JournalH.I.V. Cases Surpass a Million in Russia, but Little Is Done
By NEIL MacFARQUHARDEC. 28, 2016
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Quietly, the number of Russians who have received a positive H.I.V. diagnosis passed the one million mark this year. There is, however, little indication that the government will commit adequate resources to stem the acceleration of the virus from high-risk groups into the general population.
About 850,000 Russians carry H.I.V. and an additional 220,000 have died since the late 1980s, said Vadim Pokrovsky, the longtime head of the Moscow-based Federal AIDS Center, who estimated that at least another 500,000 cases of H.I.V. have gone undiagnosed.
Although the label “epidemic” prompts denials from some senior officials, experts on the front lines like Mr. Pokrovsky are calling it just that. The overall estimate of victims constitutes about 1 percent of Russia’s population of 143 million, enough to be considered an epidemic, they argued. Beyond that, they said that heterosexual sex would soon top intravenous drug use as the main means of infection.
“This can already be considered a threat to the entire nation,” Mr. Pokrovsky said, noting that the caseload is increasing by about 10 percent a year. In 2016, 100,000 new infections are anticipated, about 275 daily. It is the largest H.I.V. epidemic in Europe and among the highest rates of infection globally.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/world/europe/russia-hiv-epidemic.html?emc=edit_th_20161228&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284&_r=0
Howard Dean: 'Obama's Taken the High Road for Eight Years' to Bring the Country Together
by Josh Feldman | 7:16 pm, December 27th, 2016
On MSNBC earlier tonight, Howard Dean said he believes President Obama has been taking the high road throughout his presidency.
Guest anchor Ayman Mohyeldin played a clip of President Obama talking at Pearl Harbor today about resisting the urge to “demonize those who are different.” He asked Dean if that was a dig at Donald Trump.
Dean said it was, but then added this:
more
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/howard-dean-obamas-taken-the-high-road-for-eight-years-to-bring-the-country-together/
'Its time to roll up the sleeves and fight back': DNC chair candidate vows to halt Trump agenda
Source: RawStory
TRAVIS GETTYS
28 DEC 2016 AT 09:36 ET
Democrats may be planning to give congressional Republicans a taste of their own obstructionist medicine.
Jaime Harrison, the head of South Carolinas Democratic Party and a candidate for the Democratic National Committee chair, compared the last eight years of GOP efforts to undermine President Barack Obama to touch it, break it, own it signs found in shops.
The Republicans have touched this government, they broke it under President Obama and now they own it, [link:http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/democrats-consider-giving-republicans-a-taste-of-their-own-medicine-842481731628?cidsm_fb_msnbcHarrison told MSNBCs Ari Melber.] Retribution is at play. We cannot allow Donald Trump and the Republicans to ramrod into this government these folks who want to bring us back to the bygone era, as it relates to the rights that so many of us all enjoy.
Melber opened the segment Tuesday night by describing GOP efforts to prevent Obama from naming a replacement for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and Harrison rebuked the [link:https://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/north-carolina-is-no-longer-a-functioning-democracy-according-to-global-elections-expert/Republican takeover] of North Carolinas state government.
Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/its-time-to-roll-up-the-sleeves-and-fight-back-dnc-chair-candidate-vows-to-halt-trump-agenda/
Julian Assange has kind words for Donald Trump, says Russia has "vibrant" criticism of Vladimir...
Julian Assange has kind words for Donald Trump, says Russia has “vibrant” criticism of Vladimir Putin’s governmentAssange comes out with big praise for journalism in Russia, where critical journalists have been murdered
MATTHEW ROZSA
Julian Assange — who once argued that “since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of government” — came out with high praise for both President-elect Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on Friday.
“Donald Trump is not a D.C. insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities,” Assange said. “They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilizing the pre-existing central power network within D.C. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better.”
While Assange had the circumspection to at least somewhat hedge his praise for Trump, he became outright dishonest when it came time to discuss Putin’s Russia.
“In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as (Alexey) Navalny are part of that spectrum,” Assange said. “There are also newspapers like Novaya Gazeta, in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks, and no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player.”
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http://www.salon.com/2016/12/27/julian-assange-has-kind-words-for-donald-trump-says-russia-has-vibrant-criticism-of-vladimir-putins-government/
Reid: White House options for 2020 resemble 'an old-folks' home'
Source: Politico
By NOLAN D. MCCASKILL 12/27/16 02:02 PM EST
The likely 2020 class of Democratic presidential candidates is starting to resemble “an old-folks’ home,” according to retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.
Reid recently told an aide that he was unsure whether he would support Vice President Joe Biden should he challenge President-elect Donald Trump for the White House in 2020 because the field has yet to take shape.
“It depends on who’s running,” Reid told the staffer, according to a New York Magazine profile of the Nevada Democrat published online Tuesday. “We’ve got (Elizabeth) Warren; she’ll be 71. Biden will be 78. Bernie (Sanders) will be 79.”
Indeed, as the Democratic Party looks to pick up the pieces from a tough November showing that shattered their hopes to keep the White House, make deep inroads in the House and retake the Senate, a roster of familiar faces has surfaced as top contenders for the next presidential election.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/harry-reid-2020-candidates-old-folks-home-232985
After U.N. resolution on settlements, Israelis say the worst is yet to come
By Ruth Eglash December 27 at 1:47 PM
JERUSALEM — Israeli officials fear that a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements as illegal and a barrier to peace could be the start of a wave of international declarations against the country.
Days after the measure was approved, Israel’s foreign ministry is bracing for what it believes could be another U.N. resolution that would impose parameters on negotiations with the Palestinians.
Such a resolution could come out of a meeting in Paris of some 70 international leaders, scheduled for Jan. 15, an Israeli official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Israeli officials are also concerned that a speech being planned by Secretary of State John F. Kerry, which he could present in Paris or before, will outline the Obama administration’s position on a final peace agreement and add fuel to a second resolution.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-white-house-is-scrambling-for-a-way-to-punish-russian-hackers-via-sanctions/2016/12/27/0eee2fdc-c58f-11e6-85b5-76616a33048d_story.html?utm_term=.1032b861bf4c&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1
Obama administration is close to announcing measures to punish Russia for election interference
Source: The Washington Post
By Ellen Nakashima December 27 at 1:32 PM
The Obama administration is close to announcing a series of measures to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election, including economic sanctions and diplomatic censure, according to U.S. officials.
The administration is still finalizing the details, which are also expected to include covert action that likely will involve cyber operations, the officials said. An announcement on the public elements of the response could come as early as this week.
The sanctions part of the package culminates weeks of debate in the White House about how to revise an executive order from last year meant to give the president authority to respond to cyberattacks from overseas, but which did not originally cover efforts to influence the electoral system.
The Obama administration last year rolled the order out to great fanfare as a way to punish and deter foreign hackers who harm the United States’ economic or national security.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-white-house-is-scrambling-for-a-way-to-punish-russian-hackers-via-sanctions/2016/12/27/0eee2fdc-c58f-11e6-85b5-76616a33048d_story.html?utm_term=.1032b861bf4c&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1
Russian officials admitted to The Times that they carried out widespread Olympic doping...
Source: New York Times
Russian officials admitted to The Times that they carried out widespread Olympic doping, saying it was an "institutional conspiracy"
Tuesday, December 27, 2016 4:38 PM EST
MOSCOW — Russia is for the first time conceding that its officials carried out one of the biggest conspiracies in sports history: a far-reaching doping operation that implicated scores of Russian athletes, tainting not just the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi but also the entire Olympic movement.
Over several days of interviews here with The New York Times, the Russian officials said they no longer disputed a damning set of facts that detailed a doping program with few, if any, historical precedents.
“It was an institutional conspiracy,” Anna Antseliovich, the acting director general of Russia’s national antidoping agency, said of years’ worth of cheating schemes.
A lab director tampered with urine samples at the Olympics and provided cocktails of performance-enhancing drugs, corrupting some of the world’s most prestigious competitions. Members of the Federal Security Service, a successor to the K.G.B., broke into sample bottles holding urine. And a deputy sports minister for years ordered cover-ups of top athletes’ use of banned substances.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/27/sports/olympics/russia-doping.html?emc=edit_na_20161227&nlid=57435284&ref=cta&_r=0
Republicans may not be prepared for the Obamacare war
By Jennifer Rubin December 27 at 10:30 AM
Republican Senate and House leaders who have summarily decided on a “repeal and dawdle” plan for Obamacare don’t seem to understand what they are up against. They see House and Senate majorities, an incoming president who vowed to repeal all of Obamacare and a reconciliation process that allows them to gut Obamacare taxes and subsidies, essentially killing the program with 51 votes in the Senate. Do they understand it won’t be that easy?
The first problem is Republicans in the House and Senate. Several Republicans have already voiced doubts about repealing Obamacare with no ready replacement. Every freshman congressman from an unsafe district should be voicing his or her concern. Repeal Obamacare and then go back to the voters in 2018 with nothing?! Yeah, it’s risky for those new lawmakers who promised something better than Obamacare, not making health-care coverage disappear.
Next are the voters, including the Rust Belt working-class whites, a group that surely benefited from the marketplace subsidies, as reports like this one from the Atlantic magazine point out:
Among those whose incomes are less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level—just around $49,000 for a family of four this year—whites actually gained insurance at relatively high rates. Data from the 2016 and 2014 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement shows that the proportion of uninsured low-income white people dropped by 8.6 percentage points from 2013 to 2015, a reduction that was roughly similar to the decrease among Hispanic people, but which outpaced the national average of 8.1 percentage points, and dwarfed the decrease among black people in the same income groups. Members of the white working class, in other words, were particularly likely to gain coverage from Obamacare.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2016/12/27/are-republicans-prepared-for-the-obamacare-war/?utm_term=.04368dd1e103
These coal country voters backed Trump. Now they're worried about losing Obamacare.
By Greg Sargent December 27 at 10:40 AM
Last night, CNN aired a terrific segment on people from coal country who voted for Donald Trump — but are now worried that his vow to repeal Obamacare will deprive them of crucial protections that enable them to stay afloat financially. This dovetails with other reporting that suggests a lot of Trump voters may be harmed by repeal of the law.
Which raises a question: Did voters such as these know they were voting for this? After all, Trump promised countless times throughout the campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act, didn’t he? If they are complaining about this now, don’t they have only themselves to blame?
No. I’m going to argue that, while Trump did repeatedly vow repeal, these voters were absolutely right to conclude that he would not leave them without the sort of federal protections they enjoy under Obamacare. That’s because Trump did, in fact, clearly signal to them that this would not happen.
The CNN segment features people who live in Eastern Kentucky coal country and backed Trump because he promised to bring back coal jobs. Now, however, they worry that a provision in the ACA that makes it easier for longtime coal miners with black lung disease to get disability benefits could get eliminated along with the law. That provision shifted the burden of proving that the disability was directly caused by work in the mines away from the victim. Those benefits include financial and medical benefits. Some benefits now also extend to the widows of miners who had black lung disease — or pneumoconiosis, a lung illness associated with inhalation of coal dust — after their husbands die. Other reporting has also confirmed widespread coal country worries about losing these protections.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/12/27/these-coal-country-voters-backed-trump-now-theyre-worried-about-losing-obamacare/?utm_term=.554eab8a4d44&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1
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Name: DonGender: Male
Hometown: Massachusetts
Home country: United States
Member since: Sat Sep 1, 2012, 03:28 PM
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