What Happened Today: February 23, 2023
"I've seen a bird flu rising, I've seen trouble on the way"; Times Square doubles down on Vegas; Neo-nazis go to Broadway; Sean Cooper on a literally disintegrating America
The Big Story
The outbreak of avian bird flu (H5N1) has killed an 11-year-old girl in Cambodia, according to the nation’s ministry of health. The case, in which the girl died shortly after the birds at her family home died suddenly, is the first recorded in a human in Cambodia since 2014 and comes amid heightened fears that an outbreak could lead to the next, much deadlier, global pandemic. The current outbreak of bird flu has ripped through worldwide avian populations since 2020, killing 58 million farm-raised birds since February 2022 in the United States alone. Large poultry farmers have taken extreme measures to protect their hens, with workers even stripping down and showering before entering the hen pens.
Normally, the virus stays between birds, and while it has occasionally spilled over into humans, with a 30% mortality rate, there has never been documented human to human transmission. But over the past year, scientists have observed a large number of transmissions in other mammals, including minks, seals, foxes, and even grizzly bears. While the CDC and the World Health Organization both have said current evidence suggests there is no threat to humans, others disagree. “The current pandemic of avian H5N1 is a really concerning issue,” said British research behemoth Wellcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar in a Guardian interview on Monday. Farrar has also said that governments should begin testing new vaccines for the bird flu.
On Feb. 27, the WHO will begin hosting negotiations for a new international pandemic treaty that some Republican lawmakers say could impinge on the national sovereignty for participating nations in the event of a new pandemic. The proposed treaty includes the concept that “international property” should be waived in a pandemic and 20% of all tests, vaccines, and treatments should be saved for the WHO to distribute to poorer countries. Sen. Ron Johnson and a group of 16 other Senate Republicans have proposed legislation that would require any such treaty to be ratified by a supermajority of the Senate.
Read More: https://phnompenhpost.com/national/prey-veng-girl-dies-h5n1-virus-triggering-alarm-bells-kingdom
In The Back Pages: America on Fire
The Rest
→ U.S. officials suspect China could begin providing arms to Russia to aid in its war against Ukraine, State Department Spokesman Ned Price said on Wednesday. At a recent summit with top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned against the move, perhaps out of as much concern for the diplomatic repercussions as for China’s effect on the outcome of the conflict. “In terms of production capacity, China, in many aspects, especially if we talk about ground-forces weapons, might be stronger than Russia and the whole of NATO combined,” said Vasily Kashin, a China specialist and the director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. Meanwhile, the Chinese government is reportedly planning to unveil a plan for peace in Ukraine on the one-year anniversary of the invasion, on Friday.
→ According to a new leaked report from Just the News, the FBI is, to put it mildly, a disciplinary nightmare. Steve Friend, a former FBI special agent who resigned after whistleblowing on January 6th civil liberties abuses, forwarded Office of Professional Responsibility reports to the outlet revealing misconduct on a grand scale. The reports show a pattern of FBI agents abusing their power and then receiving light punishments, including for driving under the influence, having inappropriate sexual relationships at work and with felons, and using the badge for personal matters. Friend said in an interview with Just the News on Wednesday, “There’s definitely a sense of entitlement that has seeped into the agency, and too many people are just content to have a gold badge and gun on their hip and not actually do the work that’s required.”
On May 2, 2022, former Bill Clinton aide Mark Middleton was found hanged and shot in the chest on his Arkansas farm. Now a court is ruling it a suicide, in spite of the fact that he was … shot in the chest and hung from a tree, and the murder weapon was never recovered. While opponents of the Clintons have been accusing them of Macbeth-ing their way to the top for years, this death is especially notable because Middleton signed Jeffrey Epstein into the White House 7 out of the 17 times he visited, and was reported to have flown on Epstein’s “Lolita Express.” Rumors have been circulating that lists of Epstein’s associates will be released in coming months.
→ The Bank of Israel held an emergency meeting on Wednesday, after the shekel hit a long-term low against the U.S. dollar. Much like the banks of the United States, Israel’s national bank has raised interest rates to try to tame surging inflation. But even as current rates sit at 4.25%, the shekel has weakened 8% against the dollar since January. Former Bank of Israel Governor Jacob Frenkel told Israel’s channel 12 that part of the blame should be laid at the feet of those in the government who are pushing controversial judicial reforms, which he fears will have reverberating economic impacts, blunting foreign investment in the Start-up Nation.
→ Times Square could get a casino, chas v’shalom, and it looks like Mayor Eric Adams’ buddy and recent chief of staff, Frank Carone, is going to be heavily involved. As all the major players in the Big Apple compete for the coveted license, the largest city landlord, SL Green has partnered with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, and their team signed Carone as an adviser to ensure “under-represented communities” get hired at what’s sure to be a moneymaker. Carone has promised not to lobby Hizzoner, but would it really matter anyway? Adams is a known ally of SL Green and regularly frequents its properties. Anyway, Adams is only one piece of the gaming puzzle, as state lawmakers will have to make the final approval.
→ Neo-Nazis protested outside New York’s Bernard Jacobs Theatre on Tuesday as the Tony-winning musical Parade returns to Broadway. They claim that the show, about the true story of Atlanta Jew Leo Frank, is celebrating a pedophile, Frank. In 1913, Frank was accused of the murder of a 13-year-old girl who worked in the factory he ran. Ultimately, he was lynched by an antisemitic mob before he could serve his life sentence. “Want to learn the truth about the ADL (Anti-Defamation League)?” one protestor asked while handing out fliers. “You’re paying 300 bucks to go fuckin’ worship a pedophile; you might as well know what you’re talking about.” The band of Neo-Nazis belong to a group called the National Socialist Movement. Jewish actor Ben Platt, who is playing Frank in the show, wrote on Instagram after the protest, “It was definitely very ugly and scary, but a wonderful reminder of why we’re telling this particular story and how special and powerful art and particularly theater can be.”
→ RIP: Moses Elisaf
The first Jewish mayor ever elected in Greece, and the child of Holocaust survivors, who lost at least 12 family members to Auschwitz, has passed at 69. A respected doctor and professor with an expertise in metabolic diseases, Elisaf was elected Mayor of Ioannina in 2019. A member of his local community paid him final respects: “May his memory be a source of inspiration and comfort to his wife, our Jewish community, and Hellenic Republic (the president extended condolences) for years to come; and may his sweet soul be bound in the bond of eternal life. Amen.”
→ It’s an electric vehicle dystopia in the village of Labota, Indonesia; formerly a small fishing village, now packed with 66,000 hard laborers working to process nickel ore, manganese, and steel. Like some Star Wars planet covered in smog and devoted exclusively to the pursuit of industry, Labota now borders the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park, a 3,000 hectare complex for churning metals from the earth that are critical to electric vehicle production. In collaboration with China, the Indonesian government began building the park in 2013, and it has grown exponentially, exposing residents to electricity blackouts and the workers to horrible conditions, including toilets that flow into open sewers. The workers are dying, of accidents, and probably pollution, which is also killing off local fish vital to the fish trade. Aulia Hakim, the head of advocacy at Indonesia’s largest environmental group, told Wired, “The massive exploitation of workers, the environment, and residents is a grave crime against human rights.” The park’s owners are planning on doubling its size to keep up with demand for their metals.
→ NBC News reported on Tuesday that a Nebraska slaughterhouse cleaner, Packer Sanitation Services Inc., has been hiring migrant minors to do its dirty work. More than 100 children aged 13-17 were used by the company to go in at night and clean blood and animal parts from the slaughterhouses across eight states. An anonymous former employee of PSSI told NBC that he had definitely seen young children working these jobs and that “it kind of makes you sick …” The company claims it does not endorse these hiring practices and that it’s a lower-level problem, but the anonymous manager interviewed by NBC said that managers weren’t ever worried they’d be disciplined for hiring children and that if there were an issue, the child would just be fired. We at The Scroll feel that the Old Testament G-d has been sometimes portrayed unfairly and that His righteous anger is just fine with us.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Bibi’s New Deal Power Grab by Yoav Fromer
American conservatives should be aghast at Netanyahu’s judicial reforms
Ofra Haza, Tragic Israeli Pop Diva by Dana Kessler
The incandescent Yemeni Israeli singer sampled on Eric B. and Rakim’s ‘Paid in Full (Seven Minutes of Madness)’ died 23 years ago today
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
America on Fire
Across the United States, critical infrastructure is breaking down and blowing up in plumes of toxic smoke
By Sean Cooper
Last year the Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, collapsed hours before a planned visit by President Joe Biden; he was scheduled to give a speech addressing America’s infrastructure. About an hour's drive northwest of Pittsburgh sits East Palestine, Ohio, where a train carrying hazardous materials derailed earlier this month, leading to the town’s evacuation and causing a public health crisis that has yet to be resolved. The two incidents, one year and roughly fifty miles apart, are not disconnected: They point to a widespread rot afflicting America’s transportation networks, public schools, healthcare facilities, energy grid, and other critical infrastructure that is already causing dangerous failures like the ones in Pittsburgh and East Palestine, and which appears likely to get worse before it gets better.
Because your electricity might not stay on long enough to reach the end of an article of any greater length, here is a brief survey of the current crisis afflicting America’s critical infrastructure.
Rail
The American rail system was given a respectable grade of “B” by the American Society of Civil Engineers in the organization's most recent analysis of U.S. infrastructure in 2021. But that grade doesn’t fully reflect the dysfunction in the rail system. There have been 12,400 train derailments over the past ten years, including 6,600 tankers holding hazardous liquids or gasses with 348 of those tankers spilling their contents and at least 18,600 people forced to subsequently evacuate affected areas. As the Doomberg Substack recently reported, the transport of chemicals is a potentially explosive issue within the industry because “freight rail companies are forced by the federal government to transport dangerous materials regardless of the peril such cargoes represent.” At the same time, “the chemical industry all but accuses the big four Class I freight rail companies” of “operating as a de facto oligopoly, routinely using their excessive market power to extract disproportionate profits despite offering deteriorating service, risking public safety in the process.”
Not an ideal recipe for safe and efficient service…
Education
If you put aside the current culture war over book bans and ideological purity tests for teachers, the crumbling physical infrastructure of America’s school buildings and the chronic absenteeism of America’s students should give you plenty to worry about.
While public school campuses currently account for the second biggest allotment of all public infrastructure expenses, the physical buildings and utilities that make up the school system at large were found to be nearly failing, receiving a D+ grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2021. Citing at least 53% of all districts that required upgrades to multiple core building systems like HVAC and water pipes, the most recent Civil Engineer analysis of American schools also noted that at least 30% of all schools are so overcrowded that they now rely on trailers and other temporary structures.
Poorly weatherized classrooms are only part of what’s keeping students from showing up to class. After years of remote learning left kids with tenuous feelings of connection to their studies and stunted the development of social skills crucial for navigating the stress of adolescence, students across the nation have simply stopped showing up to class.
The latest data from New York City’s public school officials shows that at least 350,000 students are regularly missing school, with almost half of all students in the Bronx and 3 in every 5 students in Harlem chronically absent. Absenteeism “is something that is being experienced across the board [in California]” said Jacqueline Mora, an assistant superintendent in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. In Mora’s district, chronic absenteeism (a designation given to students who miss at least 10% of the school year) essentially doubled from 10% before the pandemic to 20% during the 2020-2021 academic calendar. The most recent attendance record shows a 31% rate of chronic absenteeism. In Pennsylvania, “habitual truancy rates ”more than doubled during the 2020-2021 school year while Mississippi reported that 28% of its students missed at least 18 days during the 2021-2022 calendar.
Though the statewide 30% absenteeism rate in Illinois is a little better than Chicago’s 45% chronic absenteeism in 2022, the poor attendance is nonetheless exacerbating a swift decline in academic performance across the entire Illinois school system. Almost 20% of the state’s schools reported that only 1 out of every 10 students can read at grade level. Statewide, 53 schools lack any students currently proficient in math. Remarkably, the Illinois State Board of Education rated several of these schools with zero math proficiency as “commendable,” the second highest accountability rating it gives to its schools.
Energy Grid
Over the past several years, extreme weather events have revealed an energy system that’s neither ready to transition to renewable sources nor able to rely on its existing facilities, which are long overdue for upgrades and repair. Last December, Winter Storm Elliott took coal and natural gas plants in Tennessee and North Carolina entirely offline and came close to leaving 65 million people with rolling blackouts as temperatures dipped below freezing. Despite hundreds of people dying during a similarly catastrophic Winter Storm in Texas in 2021, the Dallas Federal Reserve said in January that the state’s power grid remains entirely susceptible to another cold snap. “Wind and solar are the leading share of planned capacity additions in Texas over the next several years,” the Dallas Fed noted, “but with utilization rates that are well below installed capacity due to weather and time of day, their expected contributions are limited.”
It might not be a blizzard, however, that next knocks out your electricity. Poorly secured power stations and resentment towards inept government has led to a 71% increase in physical attacks on energy system infrastructure in 2022 compared to the year prior, according to a new Wall Street Journal analysis. Pointing to “people frustrated by the onset of the pandemic, social tensions and economic challenges,” the Journal projects 2023 will only see more strikes like the set of firearm attacks on several substations across North Carolina last December that left 45,000 residents without power.
“There seems to be a pattern where people are targeting critical infrastructure, probably with the intent to disrupt,” Manny Cancel, the chief executive of Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, told the Wall Street Journal. “Going back to the 2020 presidential election, as well as the recent midterm elections, we’ve seen an uptick in chatter and an uptick in incidents as well.”
Health Care
While the roughly 1.5 million health care employees who quit their jobs during the pandemic left the medical field with widespread staff shortages and hospitals reporting extensive delays for emergency care and surgical procedures, routine doctor visits have become their own bureaucratic nightmare. A new Kaiser Family Foundation analysis found that almost 1 in every 5 claims by patients with insurance purchased on the federal exchange were denied coverage. As high as that might be, some plans in the report were denying as many as 80% of claims for insurance coverage, a discrepancy that might be wider still, Kaiser said, if only insurance company data was uniformly collected. “The federal government has not expanded or revised transparency data reporting requirements in years and does not appear to conduct any oversight using data that are reported by marketplace plans.”
Water
Residents downstream of East Palestine, Ohio, have learned that while the nation’s train system might be able to maintain the appearance of infrastructure integrity despite the occasional chemical spill, the water distribution network is far more susceptible to toxic encroachments. “I think it was not in the best interest of human health and welfare and the environment to simply cover [contaminated soil] up and keep going without at least a preliminary evaluation to determine if the level of vinyl chloride that was present in the soil was going to create a potential contamination threat to surface or groundwater,” Dr. Julie Weatherington-Rice, an environmental consultant, told Ohio’s WKBN after Norfolk Southern simply dumped dirt over the trench used to burn off vinyl chloride that spilled from derailed train cars.
It’s a minor consolation for those in eastern Ohio to learn they’ve joined the ranks of dozens of communities across the nation struggling to access clean water and functional water treatment systems. Communities with dirty water, however, arguably have it better than the 2 million Americans who lack basic indoor plumbing altogether. “Because septic systems cost more than most people earn in a year and tend to fail anyway in the impervious clay soil of [Lownes County, Alamama],” Catherine Coleman Flowers writes in Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. “Families cope the best they can, mainly by jerry-rigging PVC pipe to drain sewage from houses and into cesspools outside.”
While proper wastewater systems elude several rural regions, clean water in urban areas remains a perennial problem for many American cities. Last fall, old pipes ushered in an E. coli outbreak across Baltimore’s water system, and Michigan residents in Flint are still receiving advisories to boil their water as recently as this month, after a 2014 lead poisoning crisis impacted the drinking water of more than 100,000 homes. As one recent analysis found, “counties with elevated levels of incomplete plumbing and poor water quality in America—which are variously likely to be more indigenous, less educated, older, and poorer—are continuing to slip through the cracks.”
Bridges
The Biden Administration’s recent $26.5 billion package to address the American bridge crisis is the largest federal intervention in the road system since the federal government began building interstate highways in 1956. Though with 43,000 bridges in need of immediate repair and a total of 220,000 bridges in need of upgrades, much of that money will be used to play catch up on long neglected bridges. Politically important states like Pennsylvania, meanwhile, are scheduled to receive disproportionate chunks of the aid.
The reason why hundreds if not thousands of damaged bridges will ultimately be left untouched speaks to some of the larger issues afflicting American infrastructure decline writ large: no one person or agency is accountable, leaving public officials, utilities, and public servants the opportunity to say it’s someone else’s problem.
From Broken Infrastructure to Brokenness
Much is made of the collapse of trust in America’s public institutions like Congress and the press, but the country’s decrepit physical infrastructure seems to be contributing to the larger sense of national brokenness. In 2020, Pew found that national pride had dipped to a record low, with 21% of Americans either “only a little proud” or “not at all proud” to be an American.
Maybe national pride is too much to ask for when so many communities are struggling to maintain safe roads and clean drinking water. Last week, Vermont’s chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers took a look at nine categories of the state’s major infrastructure systems before granting an overall grade of a C. Mediocre as that might be, the report put Vermont a notch above the national average: a C minus.
Are you saying you’re NOT in favor of spending another $80,000,000,000 or so this year in our Global War on Autocracy?
I think Leo Frank's sentence was commuted by the GA governor. A mob broke into the jail and lynched him.