Thursday, August 6, 2020

And another day of NRA troubles, prosecutions, disappointment, remembrances, hesitations, mug shots, checkpoints, bleak pictures, executive orders, retaliation, drug-resistant strains, hot July days, and extinction comes to a close:

“Does anybody else in here feel the way I do?” -- Roger Waters

Deaths

US: 162,804 (+1203)

World: 717,657 (+6461)

Cases

US: 5,032,179 (+58,611)

World: 19,255,995 (+281,561)

Countdown: 89 days.

New York Attorney General Moves To Dissolve The NRA After Fraud Investigation. The suit alleges that top NRA executives misused charitable funds for personal gain, awarded contracts to friends and family members, and provided contracts to former employees to ensure loyalty.

Biden Says He Wouldn't Stand In The Way Of A Trump Prosecution. Joe Biden says that he believes prosecuting a former president would be a "very unusual thing and probably not very ... good for democracy," but he would not stand in the way of a future Justice Department pursuing criminal charges against President Trump after he leaves office.

Vice President Pence blasts Chief Justice John Roberts as ‘disappointment to conservatives’. — He’s trying to scare voters.

Remembering Hiroshima: It took just a few years to develop the first atomic weapon, and only weeks between the first test and its use in war. Seventy-five years later, humanity is still coming to grips with the results.

Trump advisers hesitated to give military options and warned adversaries over fears he might start a war. Amid escalating tensions with both North Korea and Iran, President Donald Trump's advisers hesitated to give him military options fearing the President might accidentally take the US to war and deliberately informed their counterparts in both countries that they did not know what the President would do next, multiple former administration officials tell me.

New Covid-19 cases are declining in Arizona, once a hot spot. Here's how the state is turning things around.

A 6-year-old girl in west Tennessee has become one of the youngest people in the country to die after testing positive for COVID-19, according to the Jackson-Madison County Regional Health Department.

Racist police practices like mug shots normalize the criminalization of Black Americans. Ending the release of mug shots to the public helps to restore privacy and dignity for people who have been arrested, but it doesn’t transform predatory policing.

Quarantine 'checkpoint' opens at New York City's Penn Station to enforce travel rules.

US government shelves survey that painted bleak picture of Covid-19 life. According to data collected between 16 and 21 July, more than 29 million Americans do not have enough food.

Africa passes 1M confirmed virus cases; true number far more.

There are 66 NFL players who have opted out of the 2020 season due to the pandemic.

Trump issues executive order barring U.S. firms from doing business with TikTok's parent company.

Canada vows to retaliate against U.S. aluminum tariffs. If the United States re-imposes some tariffs on Canadian aluminum products, Canada will respond by slapping retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods, a government source said on Thursday.

Elliott Abrams, convicted of lying about Iran-Contra, named special representative for Iran. — Seriously?

A drug-resistant strain of the parasite that causes malaria has been identified by scientists in Rwanda. The study, published in Nature, found the parasites were able to resist treatment by artemisinin - a frontline drug in the fight against the disease. This is the first time scientists have observed the resistance to the drug artemisinin in Africa.

World's three hottest Julys happened in the last five years.

Not easy eating green: Herbivores most at extinction risk. About one in four species of herbivores, 25.5 percent, are considered threatened, endangered or vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s scientific authority on extinction risk, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances. By comparison, 17.4 percent of the predators and 15.8 percent of omnivores were at risk, said study lead author Trisha Atwood, an ecologist at Utah State University.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.