When she heard on the news that JBS USA had paid $11 million in ransom to cyber criminals who shut down several of its meat plants, Beatriz Rangel could only think of how differently the mega company had responded to the COVID-19 outbreak last year that killed her father and five co-workers, while sickening hundreds of others. “I thought, ‘I’m sorry God, but they deserve everything […]
Michael Daly
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Kiran Shukla of New Jersey is only one of hundreds of U.S. visa holders stranded in their native India after traveling there to attend to a dying parent in this time of COVID-19. But she may be the only one who then has been kept from attending to a spouse back home who became critically ill and died in her forced absence. She had to watch […]
Each night Ashu Mahajan was stranded in India, his two daughters back home in New Jersey asked his wife a variation on a question that continues to be posed in thousands of families separated by a senseless bureaucratic hurdle. “My girls would ask me, ‘When’s Daddy coming home?’ and I really did not have an answer for them,’” the wife, Neha Mahajan, recalled on Monday. In […]
After the one-term president pardoned his one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort for tax and bank fraud, the undoing of justice included the snipping of a government padlock on the front gate of a brownstone at 377 Union St. in Brooklyn and the removal of a sign in the door that read: “NO TRESPASSING Property of United States Marshals Service.” Source link
Manveen Kaur Sethi might not have been able to save her mother from the coronavirus, but she could have been with her in India at the end. Sethi also would have been better able to help her father, brother, sister-in-law and nephew secure the oxygen and medicines they still need for their continuing fight against COVID-19. Yet because of some bureaucratic nonsense, she has remained stuck […]
Her 9-year-old daughter was home in Tennessee with a fever this week as a bureaucratic technicality kept Payal Raj 8,900 miles away in India, hoping, hoping, hoping it did not signal anything serious. “Today I’m going out of my mind waiting to hear from my husband how her temperature is,” Raj told The Daily Beast. Raj and her daughter, Saanvi, had flown from Tennessee to her […]
Right-wing rocker Ted Nugent expressed not a peep of concern for anybody he might have infected as he announced that he had tested for COVID-19. “I have had flu symptoms of the last 10 days,” Nugent reported via Facebook Live on Monday evening. “I thought I was dying.” That timing meant the people who had cause for concern prominently included South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. Source […]
Dr. Comilla Sasson spent the weekend at her Colorado home awaiting the results of a COVID-19 test her 6-year-old was given after developing a fever. On Monday morning, the 42-year-old emergency medicine physician got word that the results were negative. She herself is fully vaccinated, along with 26 percent of the adults in her state. Her husband is one of the 43 percent who have received […]
A police officer standing over the body of the FedEx shooter on Thursday night radioed a report that should shame every member of Congress who persists in doing nothing meaningful about gun control. “We have the suspect here inside. Looks like he has a gunshot wound to the head. Two rifles here,” the officer said. “Unless there’s another person out, this is going to be our […]
The lights of an apartment complex named after a former Ku Klux Klan member shone just beyond the clouds of tear gas used to disperse protesters outside police headquarters in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, after an unarmed 20-year-old Black man was fatally shot during a traffic stop on Sunday. The KKK member was Earle Brown, on whose farm the city of Brooklyn Center was founded back in […]
On COVID-19 maps where red indicates the highest rate of new infections, The Thumb of Michigan looks like a huge hammer smashed the whole peninsula that gives the area its name. The entire mitten-shaped state has been exploding with new cases over the past fortnight, to a daily average of 72 new cases per 100,000—the highest infection rate in the nation. But the rates of hospitalization […]
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott uttered nary a public syllable when it was revealed in 2019 that 1,000 unaccompanied migrant children had reported being sexually abused or harassed while in federal custody in his home state and elsewhere during the previous four years. After all, that report came during the Trump administration. But now Joe Biden is president. And so Abbott scrambled to hold a press conference […]
As he drove past reopened churches on Sunday, critical care nurse John Haacke figured Easter will prove to be yet another holiday followed by a surge in COVID-19. “It’s not like a guessing game,” Haacke told The Daily Beast on Sunday night. “We told you it’d go up after Halloween. We told you it’d go up after Thanksgiving. We told you it’d go up after Christmas. […]
As millions of Americans were desperately seeking the COVID-19 vaccine, the imprisoned former Army Green Beret physician from the famous “Fatal Vision” murder case was one of at least four inmates who turned down a shot and still sought early release because of the virus. Jeffrey MacDonald declined the offer of a Moderna vaccine on March 2 at the federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland, where he […]
Were it not for a little girl in a light blue T-shirt reading from a single sheet of white paper, Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken may not have betrayed more than half a million American dead and broken a private promise to support a continued mask mandate at Tuesday evening’s city council meeting. “We’re about seven months into this mask game and there’s probably not a […]
As a group calling itself Free Idaho held a mask-burning outside the statehouse in Boise last weekend, the three Pugel sisters took turns visiting their COVID-19-stricken father in a hospital ICU across town. The mask burners were a bizarre mix of recklessness and caution as their kids joined in feeding protective face coverings to the flames in a steel barrel. “Not too fast, kids,” a grown-up […]
Jody Liebmann resides in Detroit, which means her mayor turned down 6,200 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine when less than 9 percent of the city has been vaccinated “Feeling isolated and forgotten,” she tweeted on Friday. “The @CityofDetroit (my city) Mike Duggan received his Covid vaccine on Dec. 22. He said yesterday the J&J vaccine wasn’t good enough for Detroit. I’ve been stuck at […]
Even as it condemned as “morally compromised” a COVID-19 vaccine that the Vatican itself has approved for emergency use, the Archdiocese of New Orleans was being hit with dozens of new clergy sex abuse claims. The new claims were filed in advance of a March 1 deadline set by the judge in a federal bankruptcy proceeding instituted by the archdiocese in August, citing the double impact […]
The retired NYPD cop now charged with assaulting a D.C. cop in the Capitol riot that has been called domestic terrorism was previously assigned to guard the ruins of the World Trade Center as recovery teams extracted the remains of innocents killed by Islamic terrorism . And 54-year-old Thomas Webster once presented himself as a victim of terrorism in a civil suit filed in the same […]
As the COVID-19 death toll in America continues its march past 500,000 this week, all the big anti-maskers will be at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida. The speakers at “the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world” will include former President Trump, who set an example for anti-maskers by not wearing one, and Donald Trump Jr., who partied in […]
As Ted Cruz was fleeing Houston on Wednesday, the rapper and water company entrepreneur A.J. McQueen was out on the city’s frozen streets, delivering free bottles of his purified best to a desperate city. “I want to help those in need.” he posted on instagram. “DM me if you are out of water. I will try my best to get to you today. I’m gonna do […]
At the end of a week in which four fellow members of South Dakota’s House of Representatives tested positive for COVID-19, Minority Leader Jamie Smith presented Speaker Spencer Gosch with a letter calling for a mask mandate in their chamber to match one in the State Senate. “He said, ‘Thank you, I’l read it,” Smith later told The Daily Beast. Smith then departed the State Capitol […]
While the prosecution at the Senate impeachment trial was showing a video clip of MAGA supporters storming the Capitol, a Trump lawyer in another matter was in a Zoom meeting with the Palm Beach Town Council, screen-sharing a document that had two highlighted lines. “TITLE: President NAME: Trump, Donald J” Source link
As the COVID-19 variants prompt the CDC to study whether we should all be double-masking, three states are demonstrating triple insanity. North Dakota has ceased to require wearing any masks at all. Wisconsin’s state legislature voted in recent days to end the mask mandate there. And at least two counties in Kansas have voted to opt out of that state’s mask order. This all comes as […]
Abraham Lincoln had been prominently mentioned in the invocation and the opening remarks and the inaugural address at the swearing-in of President Joe Biden earlier in the day down in Washington, D.C. Now, as night gathered in Brooklyn, I passed along a row of small signs reading “vaccine entrance” affixed to the cast iron fence outside Abraham Lincoln High School at the edge of Coney Island, […]
Anna Borgia of Florida was a Trump supporter until she learned the former president had granted last-minute clemency to the doctor who had left her blind while subjecting scores of other patients to unnecessary treatments—often involving injections directly into the eye—before being sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for the biggest Medicare fraud on record. “I’m writing a letter to Trump,” Borgia told The Daily […]
Over the long weekend, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem reacted on Twitter to a post about grocery-style food bank in a Texas school that seeks to reinforce the dignity of needy students and families by enabling them to shop with credits earned through good deeds and acts of service. “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” Noem wrote, quoting conservative economist Milton Friedman, who […]
A week after President Trump unleashed the storming of the U.S. Capitol building, a Texas public health official worried he will now be unleashing COVID-19 with a gathering at the border wall. “I am very concerned that if there is a crowd without social distancing that there may be transmission,” Dr. Ivan Melendez, the Hidalgo County health authority, told The Daily Beast. “Without masks absolutely.” If […]
When Arizona received its first shipments of the COVID-19 vaccine in early December, emergency room nurse Nicole Koller saw a first ray of hope in the seemingly unending horror that had arrived with a post-Thanksgiving surge. The 47-year-old traveling nurse filled out an online “pre-screening survey” and figured she and the other health care workers battling COVID day after day at Banner University Medical Center in […]
The pro-Trump thugs who charged up the Capitol steps on Wednesday were met with what seems like a different police department than 32-year-old disability activist Stephanie Woodward has encountered when being arrested at least 15 times. Woodward had never been left with hard feelings, even after a half-dozen cops lifted her from her wheelchair, carried her out to the street, and set her on the sidewalk […]
As people were dying in Los Angeles at an average rate of two every hour and overwhelmed hospitals were turning ambulances away and as oxygen supplies were running perilously low, a group of some 50 anti-mask protesters stormed an upscale grocery just after 3 p.m. on Tuesday. “Masks don’t work!” “they chanted at the entrance to Erewhon on Beverly Boulevard. “It’s a conspiracy!” A woman in […]
Thirteen patients who arrived at the emergency room at Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix last Friday had to be intubated, but there was no room for them in the ICU. And there was one more patient than there were ventilators on hand in the post-Thanksgiving surge. The ER nurses had to keep the patient breathing by manually squeezing an AmbuBag for two hours before they […]
Dr. Cleavon Gilman says he was told his Arizona hospital no longer wanted his services after he sounded the alarm about the second surge COVID-19, so he was home on Wednesday when the older of his two children bought him word of a new pandemic tragedy. “My oldest just came in the room to tell me that her friend’s father just died from COVID19,” Gilman tweeted […]
Armed anti-mask protesters who dare to call themselves patriots again arrived outside Ada County Commissioner Diana Lachiondo’s home in Idaho early Tuesday evening. The 40-year-old Boise native was at her office, preparing to vote by Zoom on a mask mandate that would help defend this corner of America when we are facing the most deadly threat in our history. Her physician husband was at work and […]
On the icy evening of Nov. 10, Robert Sliper was rolled on a stretcher from an ambulance to a gleaming black and yellow Pilatus PC-12 single-engine turboprop Life Flight plane at Black Hills Airport in Spearfish, South Dakota. Sliper was an 84-year-old proud South Dakotan and an admirer of Gov. Kristi Noem, who had declared she had the pandemic well in hand. She had been taking […]
Dr. John Shell of rural Kansas had never quit anything in his life. But the 58-year-old small town doctor says he was left with no choice after his Nov. 23 appearance via Zoom before the Board of Commissioners in rural Coffey County, Kansas. As the county’s volunteer health officer, Shell had decided in July that Coffey would join 80 of Kansas’ 105 counties in opting out […]
Denver Mayor Michael Hancock tweeted a plea when he was just minutes from boarding a plane at his city’s airport. “Pass the potatoes, not COVID… Stay home as much as you can, especially if you’re sick… Host virtual gatherings instead of in-person dinners. Avoid travel, if you can.” Hancock then flew off to Houston, with a connecting flight to Meridian, Mississippi. His wife, Mary Louise Lee, […]
In the wake of a superspreader motorcycle rally and other nearly maskless mass gatherings such as a buffalo roundup, South Dakota has itself become a superspreader. And at a press conference this week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz held South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem partly responsible for a COVID-19 surge in his state that is now forcing him to impose new restrictions. He pointedly cited this summer’s […]
The emergency dispatchers in El Paso, Texas, were assigning ambulances on one COVID-19 call after another. “Respond to a sick patient, a COVID patient… Difficulty breathing, COVID… Confirming it is a COVID patient… Be advised positive COVID… COVID patient getting CPR…This is going to be a positive COVID situation… Patient was at local care physician when patient fainted, COVID symptoms…” In amongst those calls, the operators […]
President Trump began the first of his three rallies in Pennsylvania on Monday with just more of the usual shameless lies and groundless attacks. The Thug-in-Chief then uttered a threat that proved he can still outdo himself. And it was all the more disturbing because the people likely to suffer the consequences most keenly if Trump followed through on it included the thousands who were cheering […]
As COVID-19 deaths in the United States approached 200,000, the toll among health-care workers came to include a 28-year-old doctor who had gone about with a toy stethoscope as a youngster in upstate New York. Dr. Adeline Fagan had grown up to become an OB-GYN resident at HCA Healthcare in Houston. A photo shows her in scrubs, holding a swaddled newborn. She has the incandescent smile […]
As we come to the 19th anniversary of 9/11, the New York City Fire Department has renamed its highest award for bravery from that of an avowedly racist newspaper publisher who supported slavery to that of the chief who died while directing operations at the World Trade Center. After he nearly perished in the collapse of the South Tower, Chief Peter Ganci remained in harm’s way […]
The roar of Harleys announced the determination of 460,000 people to ignore public health warnings and attend the 10-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in August, largely without masks or social distancing. The silent pings of their cell phones enabled a team of economists to trace these reckless souls back to their home counties and statistically link the rally to at least 250,000 COVID-19 infections. The results are […]
The Trump campaign did not likely pick Latrobe, Pennsylvania, for Thursday night’s rally because it is the hometown of Fred Rogers, beloved icon of children’s television. Rogers died in 2003, but his cardigan-clad legacy remains, revitalized when Tom Hanks played him in a 2019 movie. Few people could have been more different than Rogers and Trump in matters of honesty and trust and kindness to others […]
The largely maskless crowd on the South Lawn of the White House for President Trump’s speech accepting the Republican nomination happened to number about the same as the new COVID-19 cases that day in the state with one of the highest infection rates. Iowa reported a record 1,289 new cases on Thursday. But any comparison between that and the 1,000 plus supporters arrayed before Trump was […]
Little Skylar Herbert was so precociously bright and engaging that her kindergarten teacher predicted she would become the first Black female president of the United States. But Skylar was only 5 when she instead became the first child in Michigan to die from COVID-19. This daughter of a police officer and a firefighter is now a heartbreaking marker of history as it is being made in […]
Winning is everything in Trump world, and the winner in the border wall fundraising scandal is a contractor who has ended up with more than $1.7 billion in federal contracts. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon is said by prosecutors to have pocketed only a relatively modest $1 million. Brian Kolfage, who launched the “We Build the Wall” effort on GoFundMe allegedly got less than half that. […]
A south Texas butterfly conservationist has a message for Steve Bannon and three others arrested on Thursday for fraud and money laundering in what the feds describe as a border wall fundraising scheme. “I just wish them well in their cavity searches,” says Marianna Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center. Treviño-Wright was targeted by We Build the Wall late last year, when she sought […]
The hot dog left on Cris Dosev’s front step in northwest Florida was laced with toothpicks. The first assumption many folks made on seeing his photo of the boobytrapped frankfurter on Facebook last month was that it was an attempt to harm the family pooch, Maverick. And since Dosev was in a truly down and dirty campaign to unseat incumbent Florida state Rep. Alex Andrade in […]
The mass gathering at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally amid the pandemic is too crazy even for the company whose name is all but synonymous with the annual event. The Harley-Davidson company has been associated with the rally in the South Dakota town of Sturgis since its inception decades ago. The big, throbbing Harley “hog” is the rally’s official motorcycle. The town’s main intersection is Main Street […]
Anybody but the most irresponsible mayor in America would have been horrified by the video showing maskless concertgoers packed with no regard for social distancing at Shady Gators in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, on Saturday night. The sight should have been all the more disturbing to Mayor Gerry Murawski of Lake Ozark, because video from Memorial Day caused an uproar with images of swimsuited young […]
Twenty-three days after 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro of Kansas City was killed by a stray bullet while asleep in his bed, his mother was invited to address a White House event announcing an anti-crime initiative named after him. Also invited to speak was the husband of 55-year-old Jacqueline Vigil of Albuquerque, who was shot to death in her driveway while on the way to the gym. President […]
In a screed against cancer doctors, “men’s rights” attorney Roy Den Hollander saved some venom for a particular woman judge. “All of this was a nice stressful addition since it occurred in the middle of preparing for oral argument in a federal case before a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama,” he wrote. Den Hollander did not name the judge, but he might as […]
Emergency Executive Proclamation 2020-005 in Jacksonville, Florida mandates masks at all indoor gatherings, but not really. Anybody who thinks it will make folks safe at the upcoming Republican National Convention should consider the case of Florida state Rep. Cord Byrd. Call it a bare-faced truth. Source link
Nobody howled louder than Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick when Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner barred the state GOP from holding its convention there amid a COVID-19 explosion. “This is nothing but a political hack job by Mayor Turner,” Patrick told Laura Ingraham on Fox News. Patrick failed to mention that he and Gov. Greg Abbott and various other GOP elected officials had earlier opted out of […]
Unless a plea for sanity prevails, thousands of Texans will be gathering for the state GOP convention in a COVID-19 epicenter later this month. To make it completely nuts, party officials have said they do not plan to require masks at the July 16-18 event in Houston. “We do not intend to mandate mask wearing at the Convention,” Texas GOP chairman James Dickey said at a […]
Meet the grim reaper of Texas. Not that state Attorney General Ken Paxton outwardly resembles the hooded, scythe-wielding spectre from the time of the Black Death. But 14th century Europe had no figure quite like this Lone Star politician from the present pandemic. Here is a guy who is actively opposing measures to keep a deadly contagion from spreading even as he leads an effort that […]
Devil love is propelling the deep state to stomp on the U.S. Constitution and deprive us of our God-given oxygen along with our inalienable rights by making us wear face masks on orders from those who are poised to defund the police. And those officials who follow the devil’s law and mandate masks the way the Nazis once mandated yellow stars for Jews will be subject […]
Three-year-old Mekhi James had just gotten his first barbershop haircut when he became one of 104 people shot in Chicago on Father’s Day weekend. “It hurts! It hurts!” Mekhi cried out after a bullet struck him in the back. The gunfire had come from another car as the boy’s stepfather was driving him home on Saturday. The stepfather sped instead to Western Suburban Medical Center. Mekhi […]
Tommy Valva was an 8-year-old who was battered and starved and terrorized for a quarter of his life before a surveillance camera recorded his final hours freezing to death in the unheated garage where his father consigned him. “Tommy shivering and shaking in the garage, and holding himself, because he needed to use the bathroom, looking into the… camera with pleading eyes for someone to help […]
On the same day President Trump is scheduled to give his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination at the big arena in Jacksonville, Florida, another group will meet in a nearby park where Klansmen in Confederate uniforms handed out ax handles for a racist rampage exactly 60 years before. The permit for the Aug. 27 gathering at Hemming Park was secured by one of that murderous […]
Surveillance video released by police suggests that beloved Louisville barbecue chef David McAtee fired a gun before cops and National Guard soldiers shot and killed him early Monday morning. “The video appears to show Mr. McAtee firing a gun outside of his business door as officers who are using pepper balls… were approaching,” interim Louisville Police Chief Robert Schroeder said. “The video does not provide all […]
Cristina Monet Zilkha. Fatima Schmidt. Dez-Ann Romain. Elvester McKoy. Alonzo Garza-Salazar. Idris Bey. Those were among the dozens of names written on paper cutouts and posted on the wrought iron fence outside Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery as the national COVID-19 death toll approached 100,000. The tombstones and mausoleums and statuary in the 478 acres beyond the fence were made of materials meant to defy time and preserve the memory of […]
The Wisconsin Supreme Court made sure it was not exposed to COVID-19 as it heard arguments regarding the safer-at-home order intended to slow the spread of the virus that had already infected 11,000 in the state and killed more than 400 of them. “Arguments will be conducted with all participants making appearances via Zoom,” Chief Justice Patience Roggensack decreed before the May 5 hearing. Nobody risked […]
The family would have held a traditional Buddhist funeral for 80-year-old Tam Mai, but the same virus that killed him prevented all but four family members from gathering in a Nebraska funeral parlor on Friday morning “A brief viewing, just the four of us,” his 22-year-old granddaughter, Vy Mai, told The Daily Beast. “I guess it was just goodbye. That was it.” When the hospital reported […]
President Trump might have been welcomed to Arizona on Tuesday by the fellow truther once known as his political soul mate. But Joe Arpaio had trouble explaining misspent millions and hundreds of uninvestigated sex crime cases, and numerous civil rights violations during his long tenure as Maricopa County sheirff. Arpaio was voted out the same day Trump was voted in. The new Maricopa sheriff is Paul […]