The Center For Biological Diversity and about 300 other groups sent a letter to Congress on Monday demanding that federal relief money aimed at relieving the effects of the COVID-19 crisis be directed to people directly affected by it, not fossil fuel corporations.
The fossil fuel industry, said the letter, should be excluded from receiving loans in the next COVID-19 aid package. New bills should ensure that affected workers in that industry are provided with assistance and labor protections for weathering a job transition.
“It’s a moral outrage for fossil fuel executives to try to cash in while workers and communities suffer through a pandemic,” said the Center’s Ben Goloff, a climate campaigner. “Congress needs to protect people, not a handful of profiteering polluters.”
Those of you who are familiar with the Benicia Independent know what it is and what it isn’t.
I’m a one-person journalist. For over 13 years here on the BenIndy, I have published news and opinion from a Benicia California perspective.
I am NOT an investigative reporter. Mostly I repost interesting and important stories written by others. I am an environmental advocate and an old time liberal on issues of race and gender, peace, justice, poverty and more. I tend to focus on a single issue for weeks or months – or even years – at a time. I’ve reported at length on hazardous oil trains, gun violence and the need for gun control legislation, local and national electoral politics, and so on.
Recently I’ve taken on the COVID-19 pandemic here in Solano County. And that’s where I want to take you today.
Every day now since the second week of March, I’ve posted Solano County’s numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths. Most days I spend hours combing through local, regional and national news about the virus and posting it here on the BenIndy.
Your response has been amazing. At the height of our successful effort to stop our local refinery from importing dirty and dangerous crude oil by rail, almost 1,800 of you paid a visit to my pages one day – a record for the BenIndy that lasted for about 5 years. Since I started reporting on COVID-19, more than 3,000 of you have checked my pages on 9 occasions, and on April 1 you set a new all-time record of 8,105 views. A huge and unexpected leap!
Thank you!
Now what does all that have to do with the title of this piece, “Headlines in search of stories… coronavirus in Benicia and Solano County”?
Here’s the deal: every morning I get up and flip back and forth through about 7 local and national news channels on the tv. I spend about an hour like that while I drink too much coffee and lean my sore back on an electric heating pad. And I take notes – ideas about important stories that I really SHOULD cover on the Benicia Independent.
Now if I were an editor in chief with staff, I’d assign reporters to make phone calls and conduct interviews and come back with stories, important stories that really should be written.
Alas, that’s not me, and that’s not the BenIndy…
So, with all that lengthy introduction, here is my list of headlines in search of stories. Please. Someone out there – please get on the phone or otherwise track down the information that the public needs to know, for instance…
There’s a NATIONAL crisis in nursing homes – how many are sick in Solano County’s congregant facilities? Where ARE our nursing homes and retirement facilities? (None here in Benicia – so where do Benicians go when we get old and in need of care? And how are those facilities doing???)
Testing in Solano County long term care facilities – numbers, results?
Solano has recorded 3 coronavirus deaths, 2 among those aged over 65. Did they die in a hospital? And before that, were they living at home or in a long term care facility?
Solano County is testing fewer than 50 per day – why?!!!
Today’s news: Contra Costa, Napa, Sonoma and San Francisco are expanding testing – why not expanded drive-through testing in multiple cities in Solano?
Unemployment numbers in Solano and Benicia? Local numbers on those unemployed? And local numbers of unemployed with no health insurance?
Bolinas and SF Mission District are testing EVERYONE – why not here in Benicia? (Yes I know Bolinas is tiny and wealthy, but can’t we think big? Who are a few philanthropists and billionaires with ties to Benicia who could fund such a project?)
Reopening moves are beginning to appear in Bay Area counties. Who is planning the reopening of Solano County, and what are the plans? And will they be open to public comment?
Coronavirus and guns – with schools closed, March was the first month with NO SCHOOL SHOOTINGS in the US since 2002. Rather a bittersweet statistic – do we celebrate, or weep? (This despite an uptick in gun purchases. And what’s that all about?!)
Surely there is a dire fiscal impact of the coronavirus lockdown on Benicia and Solano governmental cash flow and operations. Details needed, and possible solutions.
Etc., etc… You get the idea. But who can take it on? The huge problem with all this is the horrific times our local news media, journalists and reporters were suffering even before the pandemic. Too many cutbacks, too few local journalists, too few local newspapers, and now too many absences, too much loss of revenue during these historic pandemic times. (So yes, there’s another headline in search of a story.)
Associated Press, by Seth Borenstein, April 22, 2020
These maps made available by NASA show nitrogen dioxide levels over California during March 2-6, 2020, pre-shutdown against the COVID-19 coronavirus; March 9-13 during soft shutdown measures, March 16-20 when “shelter in place” orders were announced, and March 23-27 during a full period of “shelter in place” orders. NO2 is a noxious gas emitted by motor vehicles, power plants, and industrial facilities. (NASA/European Space Agency via AP)
An unplanned grand experiment is changing Earth.
As people across the globe stay home to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, the air has cleaned up, albeit temporarily. Smog stopped choking New Delhi, one of the most polluted cities in the world, and India’s getting views of sights not visible in decades. Nitrogen dioxide pollution in the northeastern United States is down 30%. Rome air pollution levels from mid-March to mid-April were down 49% from a year ago. Stars seem more visible at night.
People are also noticing animals in places and at times they don’t usually. Coyotes have meandered along downtown Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. A puma roamed the streets of Santiago, Chile. Goats took over a town in Wales. In India, already daring wildlife has become bolder with hungry monkeys entering homes and opening refrigerators to look for food.
When people stay home, Earth becomes cleaner and wilder.
“It is giving us this quite extraordinary insight into just how much of a mess we humans are making of our beautiful planet,” says conservation scientist Stuart Pimm of Duke University. “This is giving us an opportunity to magically see how much better it can be.”
Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, assembled scientists to assess the ecological changes happening with so much of humanity housebound. Scientists, stuck at home like the rest of us, say they are eager to explore unexpected changes in weeds, insects, weather patterns, noise and light pollution. Italy’s government is working on an ocean expedition to explore sea changes from the lack of people.
“In many ways we kind of whacked the Earth system with a sledgehammer and now we see what Earth’s response is,” Field says.
Researchers are tracking dramatic drops in traditional air pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, smog and tiny particles. These types of pollution kill up to 7 million people a year worldwide, according to Health Effects Institute president Dan Greenbaum.
The air from Boston to Washington is its cleanest since a NASA satellite started measuring nitrogen dioxide,in 2005, says NASA atmospheric scientist Barry Lefer. Largely caused by burning of fossil fuels, this pollution is short-lived, so the air gets cleaner quickly.
These maps made available by NASA shows the average concentration of nitrogen dioxide in March 2015-19, top, and in March 2020 as people stay home against the COVID-19 coronavirus. NO2 is a noxious gas emitted by motor vehicles, power plants, and industrial facilities. (NASA via AP)
Compared to the previous five years, March air pollution is down 46% in Paris, 35% in Bengaluru, India, 38% in Sydney, 29% in Los Angeles, 26% in Rio de Janeiro and 9% in Durban, South Africa, NASA measurements show.
“We’re getting a glimpse of what might happen if we start switching to non-polluting cars,” Lefer says.
Cleaner air has been most noticeable in India and China. On April 3, residents of Jalandhar, a city in north India’s Punjab, woke up to a view not seen for decades: snow-capped Himalayan peaks more than 100 miles away.
Cleaner air means stronger lungs for asthmatics, especially children, says Dr. Mary Prunicki, director of air pollution and health research at the Stanford University School of Medicine. And she notes early studies also link coronavirus severity to people with bad lungs and those in more polluted areas, though it’s too early to tell which factor is stronger.
The greenhouse gases that trap heat and cause climate change stay in the atmosphere for 100 years or more, so the pandemic shutdown is unlikely to affect global warming, says Breakthrough Institute climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. Carbon dioxide levels are still rising, but not as fast as last year.
Aerosol pollution, which doesn’t stay airborne long, is also dropping. But aerosols cool the planet so NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt is investigating whether their falling levels may be warming local temperatures for now.
Stanford’s Field says he’s most intrigued by increased urban sightings of coyotes, pumas and other wildlife that are becoming video social media staples. Boar-like javelinas congregated outside of a Arizona shopping center. Even New York City birds seem hungrier and bolder.
In Adelaide, Australia, police shared a video of a kangaroo hopping around a mostly empty downtown, and a pack of jackals occupied an urban park in Tel Aviv, Israel.
We’re not being invaded. The wildlife has always been there, but many animals are shy, Duke’s Pimm says. They come out when humans stay home.
For sea turtles across the globe, humans have made it difficult to nest on sandy beaches. The turtles need to be undisturbed and emerging hatchlings get confused by beachfront lights, says David Godfrey, executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy.
But with lights and people away, this year’s sea turtle nesting so far seems much better from India to Costa Rica to Florida, Godfrey says.
“There’s some silver lining for wildlife in what otherwise is a fairly catastrophic time for humans,” he says.
___
Associated Press writer Aniruddha Ghosal in New Delhi contributed to this report.
KrebsOnSecurity.com, April 20, 2020
A “reopen California” protest over the weekend in Huntington Beach, Calif. Image: Reddit.
The past few weeks have seen a large number of new domain registrations beginning with the word “reopen” and ending with U.S. city or state names. The largest number of them were created just hours after President Trump sent a series of all-caps tweets urging citizens to “liberate” themselves from new gun control measures and state leaders who’ve enacted strict social distancing restrictions in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s a closer look at who and what appear to be behind these domains.
A series of inciteful tweets sent by President Trump on April 17, the same day dozens of state-themed “reopen” domains were registered — mostly by conservative groups and gun rights advocates.
KrebsOnSecurity began this research after reading a fascinating Reddit thread over the weekend on several “reopen” sites that seemed to be engaged in astroturfing, which involves masking the sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants.
The Reddit discussion focused on a handful of new domains — including reopenmn.com, reopenpa.com, and reopenva.com — that appeared to be tied to various gun rights groups in those states. Their registrations have roughly coincided with contemporaneous demonstrations in Minnesota, California and Tennessee where people showed up to protest quarantine restrictions over the past few days.
A “reopen California” protest over the weekend in Huntington Beach, Calif. Image: Reddit.
Suspecting that these were but a subset of a larger corpus of similar domains registered for every state in the union, KrebsOnSecurity ran a domain search report at DomainTools [an advertiser on this site], requesting any and all domains registered in the past month that begin with “reopen” and end in “.com.”
That lookup returned approximately 150 domains; in addition to those named after the individual 50 states, some of the domains refer to large American cities or counties, and others to more general concepts, such as “reopeningchurch.com” or “reopenamericanbusiness.com.”
Many of the domains are still dormant, leading to parked pages and registration records obscured behind privacy protection services. But a review of other details about these domains suggests a majority of them are tied to various gun rights groups, state Republican Party organizations, and conservative think tanks, religious and advocacy groups.
For example, reopenmn.com forwards to minnesotagunrights.org, but the site’s WHOIS registration records (obscured since the Reddit thread went viral) point to an individual living in Florida. That same Florida resident registered reopenpa.com, a site that forwards to the Pennsylvania Firearms Association, and urges the state’s residents to contact their governor about easing the COVID-19 restrictions.
Reopenpa.com is tied to a Facebook page called Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine, which sought to organize an “Operation Gridlock” protest at noon today in Pennsylvania among its 68,000 members.
Both the Minnesota and Pennsylvania gun advocacy sites include the same Google Analytics tracker in their source code: UA-60996284. A cursory Internet search on that code shows it also is present on reopentexasnow.com, reopenwi.com and reopeniowa.com.
More importantly, the same code shows up on a number of other anti-gun control sites registered by the Dorr Brothers, real-life brothers who have created nonprofits (in name only) across dozens of states that are so extreme in their stance they make the National Rifle Association look like a liberal group by comparison.
This 2019 article at cleveland.com quotes several 2nd Amendment advocates saying the Dorr brothers simply seek “to stir the pot and make as much animosity as they can, and then raise money off that animosity.” The site dorrbrotherscams.com also is instructive here.
A number of other sites — such as reopennc.com — seem to exist merely to sell t-shirts, decals and yard signs with such slogans as “Know Your Rights,” “Live Free or Die,” and “Facts not Fear.” WHOIS records show the same Florida resident who registered this North Carolina site also registered one for New York — reopenny.com — just a few minutes later.
Merchandise available from reopennc.com.
Some of the concept reopen domains — including reopenoureconomy.com (registered Apr. 15) and reopensociety.com (Apr. 16) — trace back to FreedomWorks, a conservative group that the Associated Presssays has been holding weekly virtual town halls with members of Congress, “igniting an activist base of thousands of supporters across the nation to back up the effort.”
Reopenoc.com — which advocates for lifting social restrictions in Orange County, Calif. — links to a Facebook page for Orange County Republicans, and has been chronicling the street protests there. The messaging on Reopensc.com — urging visitors to digitally sign a reopen petition to the state governor — is identical to the message on the Facebook page of the Horry County, SC Conservative Republicans.
Many of the reopen sites that have redacted names and other information about their registrants nevertheless hold other clues, mainly based on precisely when they were registered. Each domain registration record includes a date and timestamp down to the second that the domain was registered. By grouping the timestamps for domains that have obfuscated registration details and comparing them to domains that do include ownership data, we can infer more information.
For example, more than 50 reopen domains were registered within an hour of each other on April 17 — between 3:25 p.m. ET and 4:43 ET. Most of these lack registration details, but a handful of them did (until the Reddit post went viral) include the registrant name Michael Murphy, the same name tied to the aforementioned Minnesota and Pennsylvania gun rights domains (reopenmn.com and reopenpa.com) that were registered within seconds of each other on April 8.
A large number of “reopen” domains were registered within the same one-hour period on April 17, and tie back to the same name used in the various reopen domains connected to gun rights groups. A link to the spreadsheet where this screen shot is drawn from is included below.
A Google spreadsheet documenting much of the domain information sourced in this story is available here.
No one responded to the email addresses and phone numbers tied to Mr. Murphy, who may or may not have been involved in this domain registration scheme. Those contact details suggest he runs a store in Florida that makes art out of reclaimed or discarded items, and that he operates a Web site design company in Florida.
Update, April 21, 6:40 a.m. ET:Mother Jones has published a compelling interview with Mr. Murphy, who says he registered thousands of dollars worth of “reopen” and “liberate” domains to keep them out of the hands of people trying to organize protests. KrebsOnSecurity has not be able to validate this report, but it’s a fascinating twist to this tale: How an ‘Old Hippie’ Got Accused of Astroturfing the Right-Wing Campaign to Reopen the Economy
Update, April 22, 1:52 p.m. ET: Mr. Murphy told Jacksonville.com he did not register reopenmn.com or reopenpa.com, contrary to data in the spreadsheet linked above. I looked up each of the records in that spreadsheet manually, but did have some help from another source in compiling and sorting the information. It is possible the registration data for those domains got transposed with reopenmd.com and reopenva.com, which included Mr. Murphy’s information prior to being redacted by the domain registrar.
Original story:
As much as President Trump likes to refer to stories critical of him and his administration as “fake news,” this type of astroturfing is not only dangerous to public health, but it’s reminiscent of the playbook used by Russia to sow discord, create phony protest events, and spread disinformation across America in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
This entire astroturfing campaign also brings to mind a “local news” network called Local Government Information Services (LGIS), an organization founded in 2018 which operates a huge network of hundreds of sites that purport to be local news sites in various states. However, most of the content is generated by automated computer algorithms that consume data from reports released by U.S. executive branch federal agencies.
The relatively scarce actual bylined content on these LGIS sites is authored by freelancers who are in most cases nowhere near the localities they cover. Other content not drawn from government reports often repurpose press releases from conservative Web sites, including gunrightswatch.com, taxfoundation.org, and The Heritage Foundation. For more on LGIS, check out the 2018 coverage from The Chicago Tribune and the Columbia Journalism Review.
The Center For Biological Diversity and about 300 other groups sent a letter to Congress on Monday demanding that federal relief money aimed at relieving the effects of the COVID-19 crisis be directed to people directly affected by it, not fossil fuel corporations.
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