littlemissmartypants
littlemissmartypants's JournalOrphans of the Flood
22 March 2019 at 8:27pm
Mozambique orphans of Cyclone Idai escaping floods in Dunkirk style evacuations
Children in Mozambique who have been made orphans by Cyclone Idai are slowly being evacuated from flood hit areas - in rescues reminiscent of those in Dunkirk during WWII.
Many children have been made orphans by the cyclone. Credit: ITV News
They have been rescued and ferried to safety but are completely on their own - their families did not survive.
The rescue operation out of Beira, Mozambique's fourth largest city and one of the most badly affected by the cyclone and flooding - 90% of all buildings were damaged or destroyed - has involved local fishermen volunteering to help.
Without the assistance of aid, fishermen with boats of varying sizes headed to cut off areas and collected as many people as possible - just like British sailors did following the Battle of Dunkirk.
Local fishermen have volunteered to help. Credit: ITV News
Close to the city of Beira is the district of Buzi which has effectively been turned into a huge lake, littered with ruined homes.
Buzi is effectively now a large lake. Credit: ITV News
Those still in Buzi have been forced to wait for waters to recede after taking refuge on the roofs of the remaining buildings.
Most people affected by what is one of the worst natural disasters to ever hit Mozambique, have had to survive on the bare minimum, without any help from the government.
Survivors have been forced to wait on roofs, hoping aid arrives. Credit: ITV News
More, including video, at the link.
https://www.itv.com/news/2019-03-22/orphans-mozambique-cyclone-idai/
More to the point...his opponent, Dan McCready...
Join Dan in his run for Congress to put country before party and get things done.
Called to Serve
Dan McCready is a Marine Corps veteran, small business owner, husband, and father of four. Dan grew up going to Charlotte-Mecklenburg public schools and camping in the North Carolina foothills on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout. Dan is now running for U.S. Congress as a Democrat in North Carolina’s 9th District.
Dan first felt called to serve our country in the years after 9/11, which happened while he was in college. Dan felt he had been given a lot and wanted to give something back, so he joined the Marines. Dan led 65 Marines in the 2007 Iraq surge. While in Iraq, Dan found another calling. His fellow service members helped him find his Christian faith, and Dan was baptized in water from the Euphrates river. He went on to be honorably discharged as a Captain.
Dan returned home to start a family and a business. After graduating from Harvard Business School and working at McKinsey & Company, he started a small business in Charlotte with another Marine and helped build dozens of solar farms throughout North Carolina that put 700 North Carolinians to work in good-paying jobs. Dan played a key role in North Carolina becoming number two nationally for solar power, and today North Carolina supports over 30,000 clean energy jobs. Witnessing the loss of mom-and-pop shops to big box stores, Dan was also inspired to support the craftsmen who still make things here in America. Dan started an online retailer called This Land that supported more than 50 American craftsmen.
Today, Dan once again finds himself called to serve. Dan was more than happy to keep building his small business and to spend time with his four kids and his wife, Laura, a former children’s attorney. But today Dan sees politicians who are so concerned with partisan games, they’ve forgotten who they are supposed to serve. They put party before country, special interests before working families, and divisiveness before solutions. North Carolina families deserve better. Dan’s volunteering to fight once again — this time for the families of the 9th District.
Donate at the link.
https://www.danmccready.com/
FDA approves first drug for treating postpartum depression
FDA approves first drug for treating postpartum depression
by LINDA A. JOHNSON AP Medical Writer
Tuesday, March 19th 2019
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the first drug specifically developed for severe depression after childbirth.
The agency on Tuesday approved Sage Therapeutics' Zulresso, an IV drug given over 2 1/2 days.
Sage said Zulresso will cost $34,000 without insurance, plus costs for staying in a hospital or infusion center. Whether the treatment gets covered by insurance is determined by each insurance company, which also sets the out-of-pocket costs, depending on the plan.
In a company-funded study of new mothers with moderate or severe postpartum depression, half the women given Zulresso had depression end within 2 1/2 days, about double the rate of those in a comparison group given dummy treatments.
Postpartum depression affects about 400,000 American women a year. It often ends on its own within a couple weeks, but it can continue for months or even years. It can be treated with antidepressants, which can take six to eight weeks to work and don't help everyone, or with counseling.
Much more at the link.
http://kmph.com/news/nation-world/fda-approves-first-drug-for-treating-postpartum-depression
From PBS Newshour:
Hat tip Arkansas Granny.
Extra arts education boosts students' writing scores -- and their compassion, big new study finds
Extra arts education boosts students’ writing scores — and their compassion, big new study finds
BY MATT BARNUM - FEBRUARY 12, 2019
When you’re the big fish, it’s not OK to pick on the little fish just because you can.
That’s an important lesson for everyone. But some Houston first-graders got a particularly vivid demonstration in the form of a musical puppet show, which featured fish puppets and an underlying message about why it’s wrong to bully others.
The show left an impression on the students at Codwell Elementary, according to their teacher Shelea Bennett. “You felt like you were in that story,” she said. “By the end of the story they were able to answer why [bullying] wasn’t good, and why you shouldn’t act this way.”
The puppeteer’s show was part of an effort to expand arts education in Houston elementary and middle schools. Now, a new study shows that the initiative helped students in a few ways: boosting students’ compassion for their classmates, lowering discipline rates, and improving students’ scores on writing tests.
It’s just the latest study to find that giving students more access to the arts offers measurable benefits. And adding time for dance, theater, or visual arts isn’t at odds with traditional measures of academic success, according to the research — which amounts to one of the largest gold-standard studies on arts education ever conducted.
More at the link.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2019/02/12/study-arts-education-boosted-compassion-and-writing-scores/
CROSSING GUARD: This very responsible turkey halted traffic on a two-lane road
CROSSING GUARD: This very responsible turkey halted traffic on a two-lane road in New Hampshire until the entire flock was able to cross. https://t.co/JdDi1aoEni https://t.co/3I6WcPBrZp
https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1107463707280449536?s=19
US to Investigate Health Impact of Nickel, Silicone in Medical Implants
US to Investigate Health Impact of Nickel, Silicone in Medical Implants
By SASHA CHAVKIN / March 18, 2019
A fresh U.S. Food and Drug Administration probe into adverse patient reactions to materials in medical devices, including breast implants, metal-on-metal hips and the birth control coil Essure, has been announced.
The FDA says it will hold a public hearing this fall into nitinol as part of the investigation into inflammatory and immune responses in patients; it will task its own scientists to conduct research on medical implant materials; and it will review published studies.
Nitinol is an alloy containing nickel that is used in Essure. Many patients have reported allergic reactions to Essure and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control have estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of the population is allergic to nickel.
...Snip...
Last fall, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported extensively on breast implants, Essure and metal-on-metal hips as part of the global Implant Files investigation of the medical device industry and its overseers. ICIJ’s coverage examined regulators’ refusal to recognize adverse reactions to these devices among patients, including breast implant illness, an ailment reported by many breast implant patients characterized by chronic fatigue, muscle pain and cognitive difficulties.
More at the link.
https://www.icij.org/investigations/implant-files/us-to-investigate-health-impact-of-nickel-silicone-in-medical-implants/
Seeking Conviction: Justice elusive for NC sexual assault survivors
Seeking Conviction:
Justice elusive for NC sexual assault survivors
Analysis of 4 ½ years of North Carolina court data shows that about 1 in 4 sexual assault defendants who were charged and had their cases resolved in that time window were convicted of either sexual assault or a reduced and related charge. Of those cases in that time period, 50 defendants went to trial; 23 were found guilty. But individual counties had different outcomes. More than 30 of the state’s 100 counties had no sexual assault or reduced-charge convictions at all. A few were well above the statewide level.
A collaborative investigative project spanning 6 ½ months and including 11 news organizations analyzed statewide court data and conducted extensive interviews with sexual assault survivors, victim advocates, medical professionals, law enforcement, prosecutors and state officials across the North Carolina.
The result is Seeking Conviction, an investigative series examining sexual assault convictions in North Carolina, the challenges to successful prosecution, the differences across jurisdictions and the issues state court rulings create when it comes to consent.
This project begins publishing and broadcasting across North Carolina on Monday, March 18, and will continue through Thursday, March 21. Check back every day for more.
Much more at the links.
https://carolinapublicpress.org/seeking-conviction-justice-elusive-for-nc-sexual-assault-survivors/
https://carolinapublicpress.org/28695/analysis-nc-convicts-fewer-than-1-in-4-sexual-assault-defendants/
https://carolinapublicpress.org/28698/how-carolina-public-press-analyzed-nc-court-data-on-sexual-assault/
This is heartbreaking.
You can watch an amazing Nature episode, in full here, that contains truly beautiful footage of this spectacular grouse and its habitat.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/group/birds/sagegrouse/
Thanks for the post Judi Lynn.
The expert, Kathleen Belew, says call it what it is ...
The "white power" movement... (she starts at 4:48 with quote starting at 6:29 on the PBS Newshour video.)
Snip
“Belew’s book helps explain how we got to today’s alt right.”—Terry Gross, Fresh Air
The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the history of a movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in Waco and Ruby Ridge and with the Oklahoma City bombing and is resurgent under President Trump.
Returning to an America ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of veterans and active-duty military personnel and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists to form a new movement of loosely affiliated independent cells to avoid detection. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place and put them in charge of brokering alliances and birthing future recruits.
Belew’s disturbing and timely history reminds us that war cannot be contained in time and space: grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action. Based on years of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right.
Snip
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674286078
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