Why The Timid Kid Gloves? Shut Them All Down!

"What I can tell you, at the moment, is that the building is clear of employees and protesters and the building is secure."

"We don't have an exact appraisal on it [the state of the building following protest takeover] but there was damage to the exterior, the interior, equipment, materials, structure -- it was significant damage."

California State University, Los Angeles spokesman, Erik Frost Hollins 

A police officer walks by graffiti on the walls of a building at California State University on June 13. AP

 

In Los Angeles protesters barricaded the Student Services Building at California State University, Los Angeles on Wednesday, and before the incident was over, managed to trash the multi-story building. At the time the university president and other employees were in the building.  Two hours later, at 6:00 p.m. the 58 employees had mostly departed but for a group of administrators remaining to midnight, 'managing' the situation. By 1:15 a.m. Thursday most protesters had left the building to return to their campus encampment.

Police, who arrived on t he scene, ordered stragglers to exit the building, and no arrests were made, no injuries reported. Two employee "interactions" with the marauders have been left with law enforcement to deal with. Graffiti is shown on images from the building exterior, furniture blocking entry to rooms, golf carts overturned, picnic tables and umbrellas used to barricade the plaza at the front of the building.

For the past 40 days, the CSULA Gaza Solidarity Encampment has been set up close to the campus gym.

“So long as the encampment remained non-violent, I was committed that the university would continue to talk. [But in the wake of the destruction and theft that occurred Wednesday, a line was crossed and] those in the encampment must leave.”

“I am saddened, and I am angry. Campus community: Know that we will recover from this, but also know that I am committed to doing everything we can to ensure this will never be allowed to repeat. I cannot and would not protect anyone who is directly identified as having participated in last night’s illegal activities from being held accountable.”

CSULA President Berenecea Johnson Eanes

The organizers of these protests that have cropped up everywhere across North America and Europe billed themselves initially as 'pro-Palestine' before it became glaringly evident they were actually anti-Israel, until they finally morphed into mobs of pro-Hamas activists. When they moved their protests from public roadways and in front of Jewish-owned businesses in boycott mode, to finally set up tent encampments on university grounds the realization that the 'spontaneous' student protests were actually led and organized by outside agitators, paid to form raucous, threatening upheavals was revealed.

In New York, identifying themselves as pro-Palestinian activists, others committed to vilifying Israel and elevating the terrorist Hamas Palestinians, threw red paint at homes belonging to the Brooklyn Museum executives, its Jewish director in particular.  Red paint was tossed at the diplomatic mission buildings for Germany and the Palestinian Authority, leading to a police investigation and outrage from city authorities. 

 

Vandalism outside the home of a Jewish board members of the Brooklyn Museum.

From Brad Lander

 

"This is not peaceful protest or free speech. this is a crime, and it's overt, unacceptable antisemitism", stated the city's mayor Eric Adams, sharing a post showing a brick building with red paint defacing its front, a banner hung over the entrance to the home, describing Anne Pasternak, director of the museum, a "white-supremacist Zionist". "Every single American needs to see this. This is the face of hatred. Jewish Americans made to feel unsafe in their own homes -- just because they are Jewish", said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Flyers were in circulation critical of the Palestinian Authority and its Fatah-aligned president, Mahmoud Abbas. Clearly Fatah's more oblique, limp-by-comparison excoriation of Israel as an 'occupying' force finds no favour with the protesters, prepped to throw their weight behind Hamas which has made no secret of its covenant to destroy Israel and massacre Jews. 

 

Demonstrators hold a rally in support of Palestine outside the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in New York City on June 10, 2024. The exhibition pays tribute to the victims of the October 7 attack by Hamas on an Israeli music festival.   Jonathan Fernandes/Sipa USA

 

Earlier in the week a large demonstration was held at the venue of a New York City exhibition established as a memorial to the Israeli victims of the Hamas October 7 terrorism attack on the Tribe of Nova music festival where well over 300 young Israeli men and women were slaughtered, and dozens taken hostage to the Gaza Strip. The tribute to the Israeli victims of Palestinian psychopathy was described as "Zionist propaganda" by the protest group Within Our Lifetime; the music festival described by them as "a rave next to a concentration camp".

Protesters riding a subway train to the demonstration at the Nova exhibit chanted "Raise your hands if you're a Zionist" at other passengers, closing their declaration  by chorusing "This is your chance to get out!" Social media videos revealed demonstrators spraying a subway train with graffiti,  at the Union Square station. 

 

One can only look on with total bemusement and outrage. WHY is this antisocial, hateful, antisemitic behaviour being tolerated?!!!

Vandalism was reported outside the homes of several Jewish board members of the Brooklyn Museum, a spokesperson said.   From Brad Lander

"Canada Will Welcome You"

"[Some people may find it] shocking [to see migrants put up in  hotels, but it's] certainly better than seeing them in the streets."
"Maybe there is a middle ground between the hotel and the street. But what is the middle ground? Putting them up in community housing that's already sorely lacking?"

"I find that those who say Canada is 'rolling out the red carpet' for migrants are going too far."

"I get the impression that it's extremely lucrative for certain people -- like for the buses and taxis in Plattsburgh that travel to Roxham Road. [I look on it as a form of] human trafficking."

Mayor Estelle Muzzi, St-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Quebec

"Every time there's a bus that arrives, there's somebody going to Roxham."

"Sometimes I pick up one person, sometimes it's five. They sometimes come in by bus for free from New York City because the mayor paid for everything. But once people get here, they got no goddamn money. So sometimes I take them for free."

"I grew up in poverty, I'm sensitive to it. I understand these people's desire to try anything and pay everything in the hope of a better life."

Tom, taxi driver, Plattsburgh, N.Y. Greyhound terminal

A family of five enters Canada from the U.S. at Roxham Road. Photo by Dave Sidaway / Montreal Gazette

The buses arrive, from New York City where authorities there persuade migrants who have been bused by authorities in Texas and elsewhere on the border with Mexico, to New York City to relieve the strain on their own cities, to agree to travel a little further on NYC's dime, to take refuge in Canada, where they would be welcomed with open arms. They could always cite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's offhand invitation for refugees to consider coming to Canada which would welcome them with open arms.

 

Refugees who crossed the U.S.-Canada border at Lacolle on Feb. 23, were processed and were moved by bus to their next stop. Photo by Dave Sidaway /Montreal Gazette

But that was before the unstoppable influx of migrants, and he was reacting to then-President Trump's crackdown on migrants flooding the U.S.-Mexico border, just to show how sanctimoniously superior  \he was compared to Trump. Now, after years of tens of thousands making their illegal way across the border from the U.S. into Canada, the provincial premiers are becoming beyond annoyed and expressing their opinion of the strain on social welfare resources that they've been forced to deal with.

 

"To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you", invited Mr. Trudeau, and since then 100,000 migrants have crossed into Canada. Quebec no longer absorbs the migrants since it began complaining that too much strain was placed on its social support and healthcare system. Redistribution of asylum claimants from Roxham Road has taken place, to cities in Ontario: Ottawa, Niagara Falls, Toronto, Cornwall, and others. 

Zulema Diaz (R) and Maryangel Diaz, two Latino women who crossed from the U.S. border to Roxham Road in Quebec, order coffee at a hotel, in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada March 7, 2023. REUTERS/Carlos Osorio

 

People escaping poverty and crime in Haiti and Central America, violence and persecution in the Middle East, lack of opportunities in Africa, don't realize that there are people living in poverty in Canada with shrinking incomes and a huge rise in the cost of living. Medical/hospitalization services, welfare, assisted housing, are all stretched to their limits. Canada is a land of opportunity for some, but by no means all its indigenous and immigrant population.

Now, a fee of $50 or $70US will pay for a trip from the bus station to the closest, easiest illegal crossing -- Roxham Road -- from New York to Quebec where migrants carry their belongings and illegally walk across the border to Canada preparing to make an asylum claim. They are intercepted by the RCMP explaining that they've passed a legitimate border crossing. There, if they present themselves, they will be turned back reflecting a border agreement with the U.S. that neither will accept a claimant who originated from the other side, considered a 'safe haven'.

 

Asylum seekers, who state they are from Turkey, walk down Roxham Road to cross into Canada from the U.S. in Champlain, New York, U.S., February 28, 2023. REUTERS/Christinne Muschi

 

Once the RCMP officers hear the words ''refugee claim', the migrants are escorted to a central receiving area from which they will be transported to hotels. They will be fed and sheltered at government expense. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada spent $136 million on 'temporary accommodation in the last 2-1/2 years for asylum claimants entering through Roxham Road for meals, accommodation, transportation and security and another $551.5 million to provinces and municipalities.

If the government agency determines the migrants are eligible for an asylum claim, they are provided access to 'social assistance, education, health services, emergency housing and legal aid' as they await the IRCC's determination on their case, a process that can take years, reflecting significant backlogs. Backlogs encompassing people going through legal channels in the immigration system who find themselves waiting longer as a result of the illegal migrants' claims.

According to RCMP agents, a growing number of migrants have been arriving by way of Florida where they fly into the U.S., pay to take a minibus for the long drive north to Roxham Road. The bus route to Plattsburgh is a five-hour drive from New York City, It has become a booming route since New York City began giving out free bus tickets to migrants who agree to relocate elsewhere, including those wanting to cross into Canada.

Return of the Dread Poliomyelitis

"Based on earlier polio outbreaks, New Yorkers should know that for every one case of paralytic polio observed, there may be hundreds of other people infected."

"Coupled with the latest waste water findings, the department is treating the single case of polio as just the tip of the iceberg of much greater potential spread."

New York State Health Commissioner Mary Bassett

 

"Many of you may be too young to remember polio, but when I was growing up, this disease struck fear in families, including my own."

The fact that it is still around decades after the vaccine was created shows you just how relentless it is."

"Do the right thing for your child and the greater good of your community and have your child vaccinated now."

New York County Executive Ed Day

Children in iron lungs receive treatment for polio at the King George Hospital in Winnipeg in 1953. The Beaver

 

There was an old saying "When it rains it pours" and that seems appropriate at a time when a zoonotic virus that originated in China two-and-a-half years ago speedily swept virulently across the globe, infecting hundreds of millions of people, hospitalizing tens of millions, killing millions. Viruses have always been with us; science is aware of viruses having swept through human communities in the ancient past. And at this critical time when the international community of medical science still doesn't know how the SARS-CoV-2 virus will ultimately play out along comes an old viral enemy, one thought to have been vanquished decades ago.

 

An old commercial for a brand of salt used to turn that old adage around with "When it rains it pours" and that too applies in that we're beginning to come around to the idea that there is an endless supply in nature, of viruses and they will continue to surface, no matter how industriously medical science seeks to find cures beyond preventive vaccines. Now, just as the COVID pandemic has become in our minds, endemic, a virus we will have to live with in its many recurring forms, New York and London have discovered a polio resurgence.

 

Many people infected with polio don’t show any symptoms. Some become temporarily paralyzed; for others, it’s permanent. In 1952, the polio epidemic reached a peak in U.S.: almost 58,000 reported cases and more than 3,000 deaths.

Back in the 1940s and '50s, poliomyelitis surged through global communities, killing children and leaving many others in a condition of permanent paralysis, while countless others suffered no lasting ill effects. Now, suddenly, on July 21 the first polio case in 40 years surfaced with a resident of Rockland County became paralyzed and diagnosed a month later. He was a young, unvaccinated adult. According to the New York State Department of Health the case might have originated outside the United States.

The NYSDOH two weeks on. announced the discovery of the polio virus in waste water samples from Orange and Rockland Counties. In the United Kingdom in June, a rare "national incident" was declared after traces of the contagious virus were discovered in London sewage. 115 polio viruses from 19 sewage samples had been identified by the U.K Health Security Agency in London.

Polio is spread mostly through contamination by fecal matter. No cure exists for it, but vaccination brought the pathogen that killed and paralyzed thousands of children worldwide annually, close to eliminating the disease. Largely eradicated in most countries of the world, polio is still endemic to two countries; Pakistan and Afghanistan. Both countries are affected by a type which has the potential risk of international spread.

This undated photo shows an iron lung. Used to help weakened polio patients breathe, the machine was displayed as part of a Mayo Clinic exhibit. Courtesy Mayo Clinic Health System

The (Elusive) Goal: Achieving Herd Immunity

"We found that test positivity rates were higher in lower income areas [and] among the Black population."
"Further studies are needed to understand how populations are at risk of becoming infected [and to better understand the socioeconomic determinants of infection]."
"[We hope the] information out of New York can help our colleagues to identify populations that are at risk in this country [as rates of infection climb in several areas of the country]."
"[We at Northwell Health hope to better understand the] genetic predispositions of patients and characteristics of the virus, in order to identify better ways to tailor treatment." 
"The story is still being written in terms of the COVID contagion. Time is of the essence in trying to stay ahead of the virus."
Dr. Jim Crawford, chair, Department of Pathology, Long Island Jewish Medical Center and North Shore University Hospital

Stephane Labossiere, right, with the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, hands out masks and printed information about free COVID-19 testing in Brooklyn being offered by NYC Health + Hospitals, Wednesday, July 8, 2020, in New York. Mark Lennihan/AP

New findings arising out of a study that Dr.Crawford and his research colleagues undertook based on antibody tests at a clinic in the Corona neighbourhood of Queens suggest that specific areas of New York have achieved close to a 70 percent immunity rate to COVID-19; a "stunning" revelation leading to the belief that the residents involved may very well be in a protected state from a second wave of the novel coronavirus.

Health care company City-MD made the results available to local media, that a higher antibody rate than anywhere else in the world has been established, the data released publicly. The Italian province of Bergamo, also hard hit by the global pandemic had a 57 percent immunity to COVID, and the site of Austria's largest coronavirus outbreak at the Alpine ski resort Ischgl, reported a 47 percent rate.

But it is in some boroughs of New York city, emergency doctors related, that the rates reflect what the clinical presentations have informed, with an emphasis on areas of the city of lower income and high minority populations. Those very areas where experts theorized would be hardest hit, due not only to the density of the population, but because of poverty and the limitations imposed on people in such circumstances.

An earlier study, however, seemed to indicate that such dense areas of inner cities were able to manage surprisingly well, the lockdown ensuring that people stayed where they were, in a limited geographic range, venturing out when absolutely required, and realizing in the end, a lower infection rate than parts of the outer city where populations are unable to walk short distances to a destination, must drive and drive further to access shopping and appointments becoming more susceptible to infection.

The figures of 68 percent antibodies at Queens and 56 at another clinic in Jackson Heights of positive tests affirm an approach to the high antibody rate required to establish herd immunity. And it seems clear to some from New York City's testing program that herd immunity has been achieved by some such communities, raising the prospect that other jurisdictions abroad that have been hard hit with COVID, may also experience herd immunity, where a 70 percent infection rate arming people with antibodies passes the test.

Not everyone is in agreement however. Virologists feel the results may not be representative of the general population since testing had taken place at urgent care centres; warning insufficient data exists to definitively conclude that herd immunity has been achieved, given that little is known as well how rigorously testing was carried out, and whether false positives occurred.

Just five percent of the population tested positive in Spain where the largest and most meticulous antibody study had been carried out in a survey of 60,000 people across the nation, and not with a focus on any single area. Among the hardest-hit cities in the world, New York recorded 222,000 cases and close to 23,000 deaths up to the present.

About 314,000 tests were administered by CityMD, up to June 26, with 26 percent of the tests positive. A study using antibody tests to determine what proportion of the population was infected from early March to the present woould require a study with a different focus. Antibody research found roughly 20% of the New York City population acquired infections, nowhere near the 60% experts agree would confer herd immunity.

Some neighborhoods, like Corona in Queens, were so hard hit during the peak of the coronavirus epidemic that they might now have herd immunity. Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

COVID Symptoms -- Amityville Horror

"They all did the right  thing. They wee all concerned about their friend. It  was horrible that they had to witness this."

"We don't know what they witnessed. There were a number of people on this conference call."

Suffolk County Police Detective Lt.Kevin Beyrer, homicide unit commanding officer

"This is a shocking and disturbing case."

 "By the defendant’s own admission, he brutally stabbed his father repeatedly until he was certain [the victim] was dead."

Suffolk County District Attorney Timothy Sini.

Thomas Scully-Powers is pictured in police custody Friday, May 22, after being charged with second-degree murder in the slaying of his 72-year-old dad, Dwight Powers, in their Amityville, L.I., apartment yesterday. (News 12 Long Island)

Zoom has had a lot of bad press lately. The fairly new-on-the-scene video chat platform has been vulnerable to malicious intrusions with hackers displaying Nazi imagery, racist messages and child pornography during conference calls on Zoom. The platform has pledged to patch these vulnerabilities with security updates against the 'zoom bombers'. What they surely never might have anticipated was that their platform would be home to a sinister and deadly drama that suddenly ended someone's life while horrified conference-call 'attendees' watched.

Police have taken a man by the name of Thomas Scully-Powers, 32, to hospital for treatment of minor injuries. Injuries the man sustained from leaping out of a second-floor window from the home of his father. The same Scully-Powers has been charged with second-degree murder. He was last seen by 20 virtual attendees of a Zoom conference call with his father, 72-year-old Dwight Powers, naked and behaving quite erratically.

Since those same viewers had just seconds earlier seen their fellow conference-call attendee suddenly slump from his chair, disappearing from the screen, while heavy breathing was heard, it was relatively simple to imagine something quite, quite wrong had occurred in the home in Amityville, New York. Strange and frightening enough to those witnessing the event that several people on the video chat dialled 911.

In short order responding police officers knocked at the door of the house where they determined Dwight Powers lived, in fact within the hour they arrived at the address where the door was opened by the younger Scully-Powers who immediately on viewing the visitors slammed it shut and swiftly disappeared upstairs. Then leaped from a second-floor window, and fled.

He made his escape roughly a kilometre distance before he was arrested. Conference call witnesses informed police that they had watched aghast as a nude Scully-Powers stripped sheets from a bed to lay them on the floor, seemingly over something. And presumably that 'something' was the dead body of his father whom he had repeatedly stabbed until he was dead.

"Bedsheets were being ripped off the bed by a gentleman who appeared to be naked as well as bald and he had a tattoo on his left arm, and then he placed the bedsheets on the floor as if he was covering something up."

Unnamed witness

"By the defendant’s own admissions, he brutally stabbed his own father repeatedly until he was certain he was dead."  

"[Scully-Powers admitted he stabbed his father approximately 15 times and used] several different knives because the blades kept bending."

Suffolk County District Attorney Tim Sini

Amityville and Suffolk County police investigate a fatal stabbing at a Dixon Avenue residence in Amityville on Thursday. Credit: Paul Mazza