Social Crisis - US

East Avenue Church Shelter in Chico, California, where norovirus has spread and makeshift quarantine barriers have been erected.  Photo: Cayce Clifford

Even people nearly 200 miles from the flames are suffering the consequences of the massive Camp fire.

huffingtonpost.com - by Antonia Blumberg and Lydia O’Connor - November 16, 2018

Skies so hazy that the Golden Gate Bridge looks like a shadow of itself. A fire so devastating that hundreds of people remain unaccounted for. Air so polluted that people without safety masks are trapped inside. A quarantine set up by the National Guard to limit the spread of a dangerous virus.

This is not the climactic scene of an apocalyptic horror movie, set far in the future. This is California in 2018.

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submitted by Diane Tucker

A tree toppled by Hurricane Maria rests over damaged graves in the Villa Palmeras cemetery in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in December 2017.  Mario Tama/Getty Images

CLICK HERE - STUDY - NEJM - Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria

npr.org - by Richard Harris - May 29, 2018

Perhaps 5,000 people died in Puerto Rico in 2017 for reasons related to September's Hurricane Maria, according to a study that dismisses the official death toll of 64 as "a substantial underestimate."

A research team led by scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health didn't simply attempt to count dead bodies in the wake of the powerful storm. Instead, they surveyed randomly chosen households and asked the occupants about their experiences.

From that approach, they concluded that between Sept. 20 and Dec. 31, 2017, there were 4,645 "excess deaths" — that is, deaths that would not have occurred if the island hadn't been plunged into a prolonged disaster following the devastating storm.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the Cambridge Analytica scandal with ads in multiple US and British newspapers Sunday.  JENNY KANE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

usatoday.com - by Marco della Cava - March 25, 2018

As Facebook continues to buffet winds of criticism, its founder took out full page ads in U.S. and British newspapers Sunday to apologize to consumers for not properly securing their personal data.

"This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time," Mark Zuckerberg said in the signed ad, which was published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and six British papers. "We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can't, we don't deserve it."

The ad refers to the misuse of 50 million Facebook profiles, which were mined through an app created by a Cambridge University professor and then sold, in violation of Facebook's terms of service, to Cambridge Analytica, a company that used the profiles to create election ad-targeting tools for the campaign to elect Donald Trump.

washingtonpost.com - by Philip Bump - July 6, 2017

. . . “I think it was Russia,” Trump said, “but I think it was probably other people and/or countries, and I see nothing wrong with that statement. Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows for sure.”

There’s a lot packed into that statement: a cursory acceptance of the consensus view that Russia was involved, a shadow of doubt overlaid with the idea that Russia didn’t act alone, and a blanket shrug at the idea that the truth was really knowable . . .

. . . we’ve cobbled together the publicly available information to demonstrate why a layperson might have reasonable confidence that Russia was behind the election hacks — even if Trump, with access to a fuller set of information, does not concur.

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