Nation’s governors fill leadership vacuum left by Trump

In this time of crisis as Donald Trump flails away and mixes baseless boasting with misleading information, it is the nation’s governors who have had to step into the leadership vacuum thus created. Mike DeWine is the Republican governor of Ohio, the state I used to live in until last year. He has been in politics for almost all his adult life and became governor last year at the age of 72 but he really did not have much to show for that long career. He is a traditional Republican and an ardent opponent of abortion who signed into law the controversial “heartbeat” measure that was so extreme that his Republican predecessor John Kasich had repeatedly vetoed it.
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John Oliver on India’s Narendra Modi

On his show Last Week Tonight a month ago, John Oliver took the opportunity of Donald Trump’s visit to India to give us an in-depth look at what its prime minister Narendra Modi is doing. Trump seems to like Modi a lot and even called him the ‘father of India’ which should alert anyone that Modi is bad news, since Trump loves divisive authoritarians.

Calling Modi the father of India is an outright insult to the memory of the highly admired Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, people who were key players in India’s independence struggle against the British and were strong believers in creating a secular India that would enable the unification of the highly diverse ethnic and religious elements that make up that nation, whereas Modi is a divisive Hindu nationalist whose party seems to have a virulent hatred of Muslims.

Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (2009)

I had intended to skip this opera, the sixth in the series that the New York Metropolitan Opera is streaming for free, because I had never heard of it before but commenter enkidu recommended it as one of their favorite operas so I changed my mind and watched it yesterday and I am glad I did so. (Thanks, enkidu!) This opera does not have the show-stopping rousing arias that can be heard in Carmen or La Traviata which may be why it has not percolated as much into general public consciousness but the music is worth listening to nonetheless. There is a nice harp solo that kicks off Act II.
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The US is badly losing the coronavirus propaganda war to China

Both China and the US stumbled badly in their initial responses to the coronavirus pandemic. But the Chinese government seems to have brought things under control and is now carrying out a propaganda blitz to make people forget their early denial and ignoring of the scale of the problem and is now trying to show the world that they are the ones to turn to for expertise and help in dealing with the pandemic.

Yet now that the situation in China appears to have stabilized, the country is positioning itself at the head of the global response to Covid-19, adopting a unique leadership position that may alter global power relations, despite the biggest shock to its industrial output and economy in recent history and its coverup in Wuhan at the beginning of the crisis.

Western Europe and the U.S. are struggling under the weight of the crisis, with cases rising exponentially every day and higher death rates in Italy than anywhere else. China’s private and public sectors are filling in gaps in equipment where other states are failing, although the spread of the disease is such that demand for those materials might quickly outpace China’s supply. The government and Jack Ma, a Chinese billionaire and co-founder of the Alibaba Group, have already sent doctors and medical supplies to France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Iran, Iraq, the Philippines, and the United States. Chinese citizens living abroad are flying home in large numbers to avoid catastrophic health failures elsewhere. In Massachusetts, a Chinese woman tried and failed to be tested three times for Covid-19 before flying back home to be tested and treated.

“The Chinese government has been trying to project Chinese state power beyond its borders and establish China as a global leader, not dissimilar to what the U.S. government has been doing for the better part of a century, and the distribution of medical aid is part of this mission,” said Dr. Yangyang Cheng, a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University who writes the science and China column for SupChina.

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Politicians profiteering from the pandemic

While ordinary people who hoard essential supplies and try to price-gouge during troubled times are rightly condemned, when it comes to making a quick buck those people are pikers compared to the profiteering of already wealthy politicians.

Republican senator Richard Burr faced demands to resign on Friday after it was reported that he sold off millions of dollars’ worth of stocks just before the market dropped amid fears of the coronavirus pandemic.
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Burr and his wife sold between around $628,000 and $1.7m in more than 30 separate transactions in late January and mid-February, ProPublica and the Center for Responsive Politics reported. Several of the stocks were in companies that own hotels.
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The three other senators known to have sold off substantial holdings just before the market dropped were Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, whose husband is cthe hairman of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Democrat Dianne Feinstein, of California, and Republican Jim Inhofe, of Oklahoma.

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Confusion over use of ibuprofen to treat Covid-19 symptoms

The virus Covid-19 produces flu-like symptoms. Many people use ibuprofen that is found in over-the-counter drugs like Advil, Motirn, and Nurofen to treat their symptoms. Ibuprofen belongs to a class of drugs known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs) and this past week there was some confusion as to whether these aggravated the disease. Last Saturday the 14th, the French health minister initially warned against its use and suggested switching to acetaminophen. The WHO initially on the 17th also urged caution but reversed itself the next day reversed itself and said that currently there is no reason to think that it poses any danger and is not recommending against its use.
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Calling America’s bluff

Historian Anne Applebaum, in an article titled The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff, writes that the US and China share similarities in the way they deliberately shut their eyes in the early stages of the epidemic. She also goes on to say that the ineptness of the US’s response exposes the illusions that many Americans have that the US does things much better than other nations. She says that the problem is structural, embedded in the way that the system does not allow for the continuity in key personnel in government that enables the creation of institutional memories. Hence each crisis sees the government scrambling to find ways to deal with it, and that this particular crisis “disproves everything the country believes about itself”.
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Verdi’s La Traviata

Continuing my foray into the world of opera, thanks to the New York Metropolitan Opera company generously providing free streaming of its past livestreams during the time they are shut down due to the pandemic, I watched the fourth in the series and it was magnificent. There is no other word for it. I was simply blown away by the performance.

Unlike the other three operas I watched, the story in La Traviata is simple, as was the set that consisted of just a bed, a piano, a writing desk, and a couple of chairs. A change of backdrop and lighting between the acts shifted that same arrangement between a ballroom in Paris and a boudoir in a country home. There were just three principal singers, the courtesan Violetta, her lover Alfredo, and his father Giorgio. They sang pretty much everything, with the others in the cast appearing mostly during two party scenes and joining in the chorus. The singing and acting of these three were powerful and so moving that it choked me up on several occasions.
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Meanwhile Iran and the US ramp up hostilities

One might think that with a global pandemic, thoughts of war might fade into the background. But as Murtaza Hussain reports, that is not the case in the US-Iran conflict.

On Wednesday, the birthday of assassinated Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a barrage of rockets slammed into the Camp Taji airbase north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The attack killed two Americans and a Briton, while wounding 14 others. A day later, U.S. forces in Iraq hit back, carrying out airstrikes against Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia that it blamed for the attack. It is a safe bet that the violence between the United States and Iran will not stop there. Already on Saturday morning, reports emerged of another attack at the same base that wounded three more U.S. service members.
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