Trust

LONDON — As the coronavirus stampeded across Europe and the United States this spring, governments made their depleted citizens a tantalizing promise: Soon, legions of disease detectives would hunt down anyone exposed to the virus, confining them to their homes and letting everyone else get on with their lives.

Nearly eight months on, as a web of new infections spreads across Europe and the United States, that promise has nearly evaporated.

Despite repeated vows by Western nations to develop “world-beating” testing and tracing operations, those systems have been undone by a failure of governments to support citizens through onerous quarantines or to draw out intimate details of their whereabouts. That has shattered the hope of pinpoint measures replacing lockdowns and undermined flagging confidence in governments.

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Rigorous wildlife disease surveillence needed

Fri, 2020-07-10 19:55 — mike kraft

Rigorous wildlife disease surveillance Evidence suggests that zoonotic (animal origin) coronaviruses have caused three recent emerging infectious disease (EID) outbreaks: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In the search for an intermediate host for SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19), studies have identified SARS-CoV-2–like strains in bats ([ 1 ][1]) and pangolins ([ 2 ][2]), but these do not contain the same polybasic cleavage site that is present in SARS-CoV-2 ([ 3 ][3]).

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NY Times: Did Exxon Deceive Its Investors on Climate Change?

Wed, 2019-10-23 10:51 — mdmcdonald

In an OP-ED in the New York Times, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund states that EXXON systematically lied to the public and to its stockholders about the risks of climate change and EXXON's major contributions to the catastrophic damage climate change will inflict on humanity and on biodiversity.

To read the complete article, see:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/opinion/exxon-climate-change.html

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Zuckerberg Takes Out Ads to Apologize as Facebook Data Misuse Crisis Intensifies

Tue, 2018-03-27 09:16 — Kathy Gilbeaux

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.

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Here’s the public evidence that supports the idea that Russia interfered in the 2016 election

Thu, 2017-07-06 18:12 — Kathy Gilbeaux

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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Staff ‘Overwhelmed’ at Nuclear Plant, but U.S. Won’t Shut It

Fri, 2017-02-03 13:50 — Maeryn Obley

Image: Diane Turco, the director of Cape Downwinders, which is opposed to the Pilgrim nuclear plant, speaking at a public hearing on Tuesday. Credit M. Scott Brauer for The New York Times

nytimes.com - February 1st 2017 - Katharine Q. Seelye

One by one, ordinary residents confronted the federal regulators, telling them during a three-hour meeting Tuesday night that the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station here was not safe and should be shut down.

Their chief piece of evidence? An internal email written Dec. 6 by the leader of a federal inspection team and sent accidentally — thanks to autofill in the “to” line — to Diane Turco, a citizen activist opposed to the plant.

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