From f6e22853d0996f6d436062148d52576da35f08ac Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Navan Chauhan Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2021 12:34:51 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Added daily report --- archive-covid-19/19 April, 2021.html | 200 ++++++ archive-daily-dose/19 April, 2021.html | 816 +++++++++++++++++++++++++ index.html | 4 +- 3 files changed, 1018 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) create mode 100644 archive-covid-19/19 April, 2021.html create mode 100644 archive-daily-dose/19 April, 2021.html diff --git a/archive-covid-19/19 April, 2021.html b/archive-covid-19/19 April, 2021.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bcb1603 --- /dev/null +++ b/archive-covid-19/19 April, 2021.html @@ -0,0 +1,200 @@ + + + + + + 19 April, 2021 + +Covid-19 Sentry + +

Covid-19 Sentry

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Contents

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From Preprints

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From Clinical Trials

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From PubMed

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From Patent Search

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources rubber-stamps permits for medium and large CAFOs and levies paltry fines for manure spills, but the department is so critically underfunded that rigorous enforcement of management plans is all but impossible. Implementation of state-sanctioned “best management practices” to reduce manure runoff is voluntary, and such efforts have not stopped the problem from worsening: 61 percent of Iowa’s rivers and streams and 67 percent of its lakes and reservoirs do not meet basic water quality standards, according to the latest assessment by the Iowa DNR. +

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+Manure spills are semiregular occurrences. Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, an organization opposed to confinements, estimates that there have been at least 150 manure or ammonia leaks from Iowa Select operations since its founding — each of which resulted in only a small fine. +

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+Bob Havens, now in his 70s, learned to swim in Pine Lake and built his house there 20 years ago. Now, he says, in the summertime, “the lake turns into this slimy green sludge. You [can’t] even canoe through it, let alone fish,” and billows of foam course through local culverts. Both are signs of a dangerous nutrient imbalance. +

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+Havens sees the pollution as a matter of equity. “A lot of folks in Hardin County can’t afford a three-week vacation in the Bahamas,” he says, but they used to have Pine Lake for excellent swimming, fishing, and boating. Now, he says ruefully, “they just can’t do it.” +

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+That’s what frustrated Duhn. It hurt her to know she’d never take her grandkids swimming at Pine Lake. After her rash cleared up — it took a month of topical treatments — Duhn started going to meetings of the county board of supervisors and organizing people to oppose permits for proposed hog buildings. She thinks they managed to stop one: After a zealous campaign last year over a particular confinement, Iowa Select withdrew its application without saying why. +

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+“People don’t want to recognize that factory farming affects the water,” says Duhn, who helped organize some opponents of the CAFOs but has found that many want no part of the fight. +
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+But in a town where hog farming underpins much of the economy, many keep their opinions to themselves. “People don’t want to recognize that factory farming affects the water,” Duhn says. “Because then life gets complicated.” +

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+It’s no secret that rural American economies have struggled for decades with high poverty rates and anemic job growth. But have CAFOs been a good deal for their host counties? Ask Iowa Select and the company will likely point to a 2017 study it commissioned from Dermot Hayes, an Iowa State University economist with a long record of supporting agribusiness. In the report, Hayes credits the company with “reversing economic decline” in rural communities where it builds giant sow barns. +

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+Dave Swenson, an economist who studies regional development at Iowa State University, says he believes that for all the jobs Iowa Select provides, the overall economy has continued to degrade. +

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+“There’s no evidence that [confinements] have slowed population drain in my opinion. They’re actually one of the key mechanisms for driving people out of rural areas, despite the claims to the contrary.” +

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+According to Mark Buschkamp, director of the Iowa Falls Area Development Corporation, Iowa Select is the largest employer in the area — along with the Jeff Hansen Family Hospital (yes, that Jeff Hansen). But as Duhn puts it, “Is a job with Iowa Select what you want for your kids?” +

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+Iowa Select is the area’s largest employer — along with the Hansen Family Hospital. +
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+A billboard for Iowa Select Farms sits across the street from the Hansen Family Hospital in Iowa Falls. +
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+The jobs are tough: Employees at sow farms monitor food, water, and ventilation; castrate, euthanize, artificially inseminate, and perform pregnancy checks on the animals; remove the dead; power-wash facilities; and wean litters. One former Iowa Select driver told the Guardian in 2019 that he earned $23,000 a year for 12-hour days with no overtime pay. +

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+It’s easy to see why communities across the state revolted — and many continue to revolt — against this particular type of economic development. A recent poll found that nearly two-thirds of respondents favor a moratorium on new corporate hog facilities. +

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+In January 2018, Thomas Burkhead learned that Iowa Select had applied for a permit to build its largest-ever sow complex a mile from his family’s farm near Rockwell City, in Calhoun County. He launched into action. +

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+The proposal was for a veritable hog mothership, a three-shed breeding complex covering an area larger than four football fields and housing 7,498 pigs — 5,200 of them gestating sows. Manure pits would underlie each shed; combined, they’d hold enough waste to fill three Olympic-size swimming pools. +

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+Despite residents’ complaints, Iowa Select and the Hansens have won friends in high places in the state, through political investments and their growing power as the state’s largest hog farmers. +
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+Once weaned, the offspring of those sows would need to be fattened, and that meant even more confinements would soon need to be built. Calhoun County already had more than 150 facilities housing north of 300,000 pigs, and residents say the smell of their manure was already making the area unlivable. “There are a lot of days where I don’t go outside, because it stinks enough to make you vomit,” Burkhead says. “I mean, it will knock you on your knees.” +

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+Burkhead rallied neighbors and community groups, among them Food and Water Watch and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, to fend off the sow-barn proposal. But he figured they had almost no chance. +

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+But the opponents persisted, eventually finding a mistake in Iowa Select’s application. The group rallied people to a special supervisor’s meeting and convinced the board to decline to recommend the proposal to the Department of Natural Resources. The DNR then kicked the proposal to the Environmental Protection Commission, an oversight board, which waved the company’s application through. Both the commission and the DNR leadership are appointed by the governor. +

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+In Iowa, counties have virtually no policy avenue for blocking confinements that meet the state’s requirements. Activists have resorted to leaning on a public scandal to shame companies into withdrawal. They create Facebook pages, write op-eds and letters to local officials and newspapers, crowd hearings held by county supervisors, and testify for hours — anything to chip away at CAFO operators’ standing with local leadership. +

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+Every year since 2018, Iowa politicians, cheered on by activists, have introduced a bill in the Iowa legislature to stop CAFO expansions, and they’ve convinced Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) to introduce a bill that includes a long-term phaseout of large CAFOs nationwide. But neither has the support to reach the floor. +

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+Coming up on its 30th anniversary, Iowa Select is still expanding, along with the rest of the hog industry in Iowa. The state is now home to at least 13,000 confinements, and applications hit the DNR office at a steady clip. +

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+The 2016 spring gala for the Deb and Jeff Hansen Foundation was a glittering event, packed with smiling faces and powerful personalities. Iowa’s then-governor, Terry Branstad, was in attendance, as was the current president of Iowa State University. The university, following a $2 million Hansen family donation, had dedicated the Jeff and Deb Hansen Agriculture Student Learning Center less than two years earlier. +

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+This guest list was typical for the charity’s annual fundraiser. For the 2019 gala, Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds contributed to the auction an afternoon’s tour of the capitol and governor’s mansion, led by Reynolds herself. Iowa Select requested her presence at the gala the day after Reynolds won her election — likely aided by the Hansens’ six-figure campaign contribution. +

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+The Hansen Foundation has a long and well-publicized history of charitable giving. It donates thousands of pork chops to food banks, gives vouchers for ham to dozens of schools, and organizes “Operation Christmas Meal,” a series of drive-through pork handouts. In 2018, it gave away about $600,000 per year, accompanied by streams of photos uploaded to Facebook of smiling employees, occasionally joined by a governor or US senator. +

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+In December, Reynolds, who is up for reelection in 2022, spent a frigid day handing out Iowa Select pork packages at an Operation Christmas Meal drive-through event in Osceola, Iowa. But the Hansens weren’t there to help. Their jet had landed a few days earlier in sunny Naples, Florida. +

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+Hog CAFOs along highway D-41 near Iowa Falls. The Hansens no longer live near the CAFOs that have made them wealthy. +
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+Charlie Mitchell is a journalist living in Chicago. His work has appeared on The New Republic, The Baffler and elsewhere. Austin Frerick is an agriculture and antitrust expert at Yale. +

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+Kathryn Gamble is an independent photographer in Des Moines, Iowa. +

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From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

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