Wednesday, April 7, 2021

And another day of not even being close, building pressure, initial actions, ignoring calls for lockdowns, allowing evictions, white people afraid of losing their status, erasing an ethnicity, and the reality of minimum wage living comes to a close:

“I don’t expect to be rich, I just expect to pay the heat bill.” -- Dave Mayton

Deaths

US: 572,849 (+2589)

World: 2,901,038 (+15,107)

Cases

US: 31,637,243 (+76,805)

World: 133,688,126 (+669,819)

Fact check: Republicans falsely equate Georgia and Colorado election laws. Some of these Republicans are trying to convince Americans that baseball officials are not only wrong but hypocritical. On television and on social media, they have claimed or strongly suggested that the new Georgia law is no stricter than Colorado's elections law. That's not even close to true.

A top Georgia Republican said Wednesday that Rudy Giuliani's false claims of election fraud -- which were presented before state lawmakers -- created momentum for a package of voting rights restrictions that recently became state law. The GOP embraced, and continues to embrace, The Big Lie.

Pressure builds over restrictive voting bills in Texas. Amid the fallout over Georgia's new sweeping elections law, Texas Democrats and voting rights activists are strategizing how to get some of the state's biggest employers to apply political pressure on lawmakers weighing restrictive voting bills in the Lone Star State.

Kentucky became the only state in the country with a Republican-controlled legislature to expand voting rights after a bitter presidential election.

Biden-Harris Administration Announces Initial Actions to Address the Gun Violence Public Health Epidemic.

Covid-19 deaths in Brazil reached more than 4,000 in a single day on Tuesday as the country's hospitals stretch to breaking point.

Brazil’s Bolsonaro ignores calls for lockdown to slow virus.

Ontario issues stay-at-home order, closes most stores as COVID-19 cases rise.

One in 4 U.S. adults is now fully vaccinated.

Survey: Even as schools reopen, many students learn remotely. Nearly 46% of public schools offered five days a week of in-person learning to all students in February, according to the survey, but just 34% of students were learning full time in the classroom. The gap was most pronounced among older K-12 students, with just 29% of eighth graders getting five days a week of learning at school.

Texas Courts Open Eviction Floodgates: 'We Just Stepped Off A Cliff'. The Texas state court system is signaling that it will no longer enforce a federal order aimed at stopping evictions during the coronavirus pandemic. That could clear the way for landlords to push ahead with tens of thousands of eviction cases that have been on hold...Legal aid attorneys are raising the alarm that the state is about to allow a wave of people to be put out of their homes, with no place to go.

Fears of White People Losing Out Permeate Capitol Rioters' Towns, Study Finds. Most of the people who took part in the assault, his polling and demographic data showed, came from places that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture...“You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”

There isn’t a single state where people making the minimum wage can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment at fair market prices while working full-time, according to a report. America purports to be a country of workers — a place where if you try hard enough, put in the time and effort, you’ll make it to the middle class, or at the very least be able to build a solid life. But that version of America doesn’t line up with the reality: As of 2019, 39 million people made less than $15 an hour. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, and 1.6 million workers make that amount or less. Many low-wage workers rely on public assistance to get by. Pew Research Center defines “middle-income” households in the US as starting at about $48,000; a $15 minimum wage at 40 hours a week adds up to $30,000; at $7.25, it’s $15,000.

‘Leave no Tigrayan’: In Ethiopia, an ethnicity is erased. Now, for the first time, they also bring proof of an official attempt at what is being called ethnic cleansing in the form of a new identity card that eliminates all traces of Tigray, as confirmed to The Associated Press by nine refugees from different communities. Written in a language not their own, issued by authorities from another ethnic group, the ID cards are the latest evidence of a systematic drive by the Ethiopian government and its allies to destroy the Tigrayan people.

There's a growing movement to make ecocide (widespread environmental destruction) the fifth crime at the International Criminal Court. If successful, the crime could put corporate executives in the dock at The Hague alongside war criminals.

‘Tantalizing’ results of 2 experiments defy physics rulebook. Preliminary results from two experiments suggest something could be wrong with the basic way physicists think the universe works, a prospect that has the field of particle physics both baffled and thrilled. Tiny particles called muons aren’t quite doing what is expected of them in two different long-running experiments in the United States and Europe. The confounding results — if proven right — reveal major problems with the rulebook physicists use to describe and understand how the universe works at the subatomic level.

Celebrity zookeeper Jack Hanna diagnosed with dementia.

Best Buy launches a new $200 membership program to fight Amazon.

Trump's Twitter Not Even Allowed to Return in Archival Format for Nerds. Instead, the agency will have to build its own way of making Trump’s 26,000 banned tweets accessible to the public where they can’t be endlessly quote-tweeted back onto people’s timelines.

The Washington Senate has approved a measure to ban the use of Native American names, symbols and images as school mascots, logos and team names at most public schools in Washington...The ban does not apply to schools located within Native American areas or to schools in counties adjacent to Native American areas, as long as the nearest tribe is consulted and authorizes the use of the name.

Oregon Senate votes to make passing civics a graduation requirement.

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

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