Not Clickbait: Pandemic Panic
March 12, 2020
- Coronavirus: COVID-19 Is Now Officially A Pandemic, WHO Says (NPR)
- Tom Hanks coronavirus: Actor and wife Rita Wilson test positive (BBC)
- NBA suspends season until further notice after player tests positive for the coronavirus (ESPN)
- Coronavirus symptoms: what are they and should I see a doctor? (Guardian)
- What Trump actually proposed in his coronavirus speech & Trump’s coronavirus speech was laced with xenophobia (Vox)
- Trump address sparks chaos as coronavirus crisis deepens (CNN)
- A Fumbled Global Response to the Virus in a Leadership Void (NYT)
- ‘He’s gonna get us all killed’: sense of unease after Trump coronavirus speech (Guardian)
- Can a face mask stop coronavirus? Covid-19 facts checked (Guardian)
- Coronavirus facts: is there a cure and what is the mortality rate of the virus? (Guardian)
- Super-rich jet off to disaster bunkers amid coronavirus outbreak (Guardian)
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
― Oscar Wilde
“The more you know, the less you need.”
― Yvon Chouinard
Image via Getty Images
We’re Not Gonna Take It, Oh No We Ain’t Gonna Take It
Concerns over China’s questionable business practices and related human rights violations have been escalating. Recently the non-partisan Australian Strategic Policy Institute reported on Beijing’s movement of tens of thousands of Uyghur Muslims from detainment camps into forced labor factories that produce goods for well-known global companies, including Apple, BMW, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen.
On Wednesday a bipartisan group of American lawmakers unveiled legislation that proposes tight restrictions on US imports from the Xinjiang region of western China, which produces about 80 percent of the country’s cotton. The bill goes farther than existing law and is the toughest response yet to Beijing’s mass detention of minorities and the coerced labor practices requiring them to work in factories, cotton farms, and textile mills.
A report from the Congressional-Executive Commission on China accompanied the bill. The report notes a heightened risk of global supply chains “being tainted with goods and products made with forced labor from” Xinjiang, and said the US should consider “a comprehensive import ban on all goods produced, wholly or in part” in the region.
Should the legislation become law, it could have a dramatic effect on importers and garment retailers like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike and Patagonia, brands specifically named in the draft legislation. Industry groups have been under pressure to police their Xinjiang imports, but companies risk backlash in China if they are seen as criticizing the Xinjiang policies that Beijing defends.
The coronavirus epidemic halted industry across much of China and disrupted labor transfers in Xinjiang. But local news reports said manufacturing and job assignment programs are resuming.
Grifterism Gone Global
- Six men were convicted Wednesday in a criminal court in Paris on charges of perpetrating a fraudulent scheme in which they netted over $50 million from wealthy individuals. The men used a silicone mask to impersonate a former French minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, in video calls in which they asked for money to pay for secret national security operations.
- The fake Le Drian pressed targets for millions of euros, pretending that France was negotiating a delicate and time-sensitive operation involving the release of hostages being held in Syria by terrorists. Targets were told taxpayer money couldn’t be used to pay the ransom, and that they must quickly and discreetly wire the money to foreign accounts.
- The imposters hit on at least 150 prey between 2015 and 2016, including embassies from France and elsewhere, clergymen, aid groups, charities, foreign governments, chief executives of large companies and a French environmentalist. Many of those contacted saw through the ruse and alerted the Defense Ministry in July 2015. But some sent money, including a wealthy Turkish businessman who wired the crooks $47 million in November and December 2016. (NYT)
- US man pleads guilty to duping art buyers with fake Basquiats and Warhols (Guardian)
A Designer Sweatshop Is Still A Sweatshop
- For years luxury brands like Dior, Saint Laurent and others, who don’t own all their own production facilities, have quietly contracted with independent factories in the developing world to make their garments or embroider them. Much of the embroidery work, for example, has been outsourced to India since the 1980s.
- In Mumbai, scores of ateliers and export houses act as middlemen between the fashion brands and highly skilled artisans. But many of those artisans embroidering garments for the world’s most powerful fashion houses were plying their craft without health benefits, in a multiroom factory with caged windows and no emergency exit, earning but a few dollars a day.
- In 2016 a group of luxury houses with labels like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Burberry and Christian Dior, signed onto an ambitious but non-binding compliance project, with goals of ensuring factory safety in Mumbai and elevating Indian embroiderers.
- The success of the pact is questionable, however, as a New York Times investigation found that embroiderers still worked at unregulated facilities that didn’t meet Indian factory safety laws, many workers didn’t have any employment benefits or protections, and many still worked thousands of overtime hours to meet seasonal demands like fashion weeks in Milan and Paris. (NYT)
- Can fashion ever be sustainable? (BBC)
Additional World News
- ‘We Are Like Animals’: Inside Greece’s Secret Site for Migrants (NYT, $)
- How the killing of an abusive father by his daughters fuelled Russia’s culture wars (Guardian)
- Is Zero Hedge a Russian Trojan Horse? (New Republic)
- Russia Trying to Stoke U.S. Racial Tensions Before Election, Officials Say (NYT, $)
- Afghanistan peace talks stall over planned prisoner exchange (Guardian)
- Over 100,000 have fled Nicaragua since brutal 2018 crackdown, says UN (Guardian)
- Venezuelan riot police drive off protesters with tear gas (NBC)
- No one can protect these Syrian kids from the bombs. This group is at least trying to give them the skills to cope (CNN)
- ‘MBS’ Chronicles the Shockingly Young, Powerful and Ruthless Saudi Crown Prince (NYT, $)
- ‘We used to be leaders’: the collapse of New Zealand’s landmark ocean park (Guardian)
Coronavirus: A Black Swan Event
- New CDC guidance says older adults should ‘stay at home as much as possible’ due to coronavirus (CNN)
- How Much of the World Will Be Quarantined by the Coronavirus? (New Yorker)
- The coronavirus is Trump’s Chernobyl (WaPo, $)
- Why toilet paper has become the latest coronavirus panic buy (CNN)
- How canceled events and self-quarantines save lives, in one chart (Vox)
- Why doesn’t coronavirus make kids sick with covid-19? (WaPo, $)
- Coronavirus: How to protect yourself if you have underlying conditions (National Geographic)
- Nursing Homes Becoming Islands of Isolation Among ‘Shocking’ Mortality Rate (NYT, $)
- Trump Bungles Coronavirus Response – Who Wants 4 More Years of This? (Esquire)
Alex Wong via Getty Images
A Lesson Learned Is A Paycheck Earned, But Not Always For Students
- Pursuant to Obama-era debt-relief measures, students misled by for-profit schools that had lured them in with false claims about their graduates’ career and earning prospects, could request their student loans be forgiven. The Trump administration aimed to change that. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos denounced the debt-relief system as a “free money” giveaway and repeatedly sought to curtail it. A federal court blocked her in 2018.
- But DeVos rewrote the rule again, this time adopting a complicated formula for calculating relief that assured most borrowers would have to repay their loans. On Wednesday, in a bipartisan rebuke, the Senate voted 53 to 42 to strike down the revised rule. The House passed a companion resolution in January.
- The legislation now goes to President Trump, who will either side with Congress and sign the bill, or veto the legislation and side with his education secretary to uphold the new rule.
- Last year Trump announced he would forgive loan debt for permanently disabled veterans so they wouldn’t be “saddled with mountains of student debt.” If Trump vetoes this legislation Democrats say they will press for a veto override. (NYT)
Gerardo Mora via Getty Images
Thrown Paper Towels Won’t Clean Up This Mess
- Following the devastation Hurricane Maria caused on the island of Puerto Rico in September 2017, thousands of Puerto Ricans moved to the US mainland. Most of them — estimates say perhaps 130,000 — have settled in Florida, an important swing state where elections are often won by just tens of thousands of votes.
- Generally they believe the Trump administration’s response to the hurricane was, at best, insufficient. Marta Rivera is one of the politically active hurricane refugees forming a vital voting bloc in Florida that is coveted by both Republicans and Democrats. She is also the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit demanding that Florida help Spanish speakers vote by providing bilingual ballots and poll workers, a legal right under the Voting Rights Act, but one that the state has historically neglected.
- The outcome of the case could change not only the primary election next week, but the entire course of the presidential election.
- “If Democrats want to win, they have to drive Hispanic turnout, specifically Puerto Rican and non-Cuban voters,” said Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida specializing in elections. (Guardian)
- In blow to ex-attorney general Sessions, Trump endorses challenger in Alabama (Reuters)
Not Enough Cooks in the Kitchen
- The restaurant business isn’t for the faint of heart. Margins are notoriously slim, employees can be unreliable, and there’s much more grunt work than meets a customer’s eye.
- Irene Li, chef and owner of Mei Mei, a Chinese-American restaurant in Boston, spends a lot of her time thinking about what it takes to keep a restaurant like hers running. She quips: “I have always thought the version of Top Chef that I would want to watch would be chef-owners plunging a toilet, cleaning an overflowing grease trap, balancing a balance sheet and running payroll as fast as they could — a decathlon of all the administrative bulls**t.” That would be a boring show, but “that’s what it really is.”
- One thing Li’s been doing for the last two years has made a big difference in the cost of running her restaurant. She’s opened her books to the entire staff, so everyone can see every line item associated with money coming in the door and all the expenses the restaurant has — from paying employees to keeping the lights on.
- Every staff member from dishwasher to line cook can interpret and speak to the restaurant’s entire profit-and-loss statement. And Li thinks the public should understand it, too. “The lack of willingness to talk about finances in this industry is holding us back…[it’s] the last barrier that we have to break down in order to really all get on the same page and all figure out how to do a better job.” (Eater)
- Chinese Restaurants Are Closing. That’s a Good Thing, the Owners Say. (NYT, $)
Additional Reads
- Should you let babies ‘cry it out’? Debate reignited by new study (Guardian)
- How Siblings’ Gender Can Affect a Child’s Development (NYT, $)
- Culture – How to tell other people’s stories (BBC)
- The Special Kind of Impostor Syndrome That Comes When You’re Not Broke Anymore (NYT, $)
- Alcoholics Anonymous really can work, new review of the research finds (Vox)
- What Happened to Jordan Peterson? (New Republic)
LAST QUOTES
“If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, “This sucks. I’m going to do my own thing.” ― Yvon Chouinard