Tag: one year

One year since George Floyd murdered by Minneapolis police

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Brandon Bell/Getty

Hundreds of people gathered on Sunday for the rally in front of the courthouse in downtown Minneapolis where a month ago former policeman Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering the black man by kneeling on his neck…

Amid chants of “no justice, no peace!” and “Say his name,” Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey and St Paul mayor Melvin Carter watched alongside a dozen of Floyd’s family members as speakers called for justice for families of black men slain by police.

Tuesday will mark one year since Floyd’s death sparked worldwide protests and calls for change in policing in the U.S….

Since Floyd’s killing, at least 17 states, including Minnesota, have enacted legislation to ban or restrict the use of chokeholds and neck restraints by police officers, according to data provided to the Associated Press by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Before then, only two states, Tennessee and Illinois, had bans on such police hold techniques. A majority of the bans enacted over the past year are in states controlled politically by Democrats.

No surprise, there. No one expects any political body controlled by the Republican Party to support freedom, democracy or an end to racism in the United States.

India marks one year anniversary since last polio case

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Health officials are hailing a polio breakthrough in India, once recognised as the global epicentre of the crippling disease, as the country marked one year since the last recorded case.

India, once home to half of all global cases of polio, on Friday completed one year since an 18-month-old girl in West Bengal was diagnosed with the disease.


AP Photo/Biswaranjan Rout

The breakthrough could see India removed from a list of nations where polio is still endemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the next month.

With Niger and Egypt taken off that list in recent years, India’s removal would see the list of nations with indigenous polio reduced to just three: Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan…

In a statement, Ghulam Nabi Azad, India’s health minister, said: “We are excited and hopeful, at the same time, vigilant and alert”…

Part of…new tactics and innovations was an effort to reach poor children in railways and on the streets. “Remotes areas were huge havens of disease, but we persisted,” Sona Bari, a spokesperson for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, told Al Jazeera. “Wherever there were no facilities, we just had people camping on the floor.”

According to WHO estimates, the Indian government dedicated two billion dollars to polio eradication over the last decade and a half. “It was almost completely self-funded,” Bari said. “India has shown that it can be done, despite extremely difficult circumstances…”

The advance in a nation where polio had been thought endemic, has raised hopes that polio will join smallpox as the second disease to have been successfully eradicated globally.

RTFA. India will be deemed to have eradicated the disease if it stays polio-free for another two years.

I grew up in the era of diseases afflicting children especially – which have since been stopped by vaccination programs. Back in the day, the religious among us hailed the advances of science as a gift from their God. Nowadays, for whatever reason, it seems the spookiest individuals are the ones blathering about vaccination being a conspiracy of science.

I wish they had my life’s experience, greeting each New Year with questions to my classmates about “who died in your neighborhood, this year” – from polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever. Every neighborhood had one or two “survivors” of polio who made do with crutches to get to school.

Now – religion is an acceptable excuse to keep from having your kids vaccinated. What fools these parents be.

Comcast starts banning consumers who move too much data

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The end of the internet comes not with a bang or a procession of four lolcats of the apocalypse, but just with two blinking lights on a modem. At least that’s how it came for Andre Vrignaud, a 39-year-old gaming consultant in Seattle, when Comcast shut him off from the internet for using too much data.

Vrignaud, it seems, committed the foul of using more than 250 GB of data on Comcast two months in a row, triggering the company’s overage policy that results in a year-long ban from using its services.

“It’s one of those things I never thought would hit me,” Vrignaud said. “They didn’t even call. I just got double blinking lights on my modem…”

It was the second month in a row that Vrignaud got those blinking lights. The first time he called in and tried to figure out what the problem was.

So he turned off the router he had that was open to the public, and asked his roommate to go a bit lighter on data usage, since his household is heavy on streaming media, including YouTube, NetFlix and Pandora.

What he didn’t count on, Vrignaud said, was that Comcast, who he was paying $60 a month for a 15Mbps download speed, was counting uploads against the quota as well.

Just recently he’d switched his online backup system from Mozy to Carbonite, after Mozy put an end to its unlimited back-up service. Carbonite has no such limit, but does throttle users’ uploads once it hits a high level…

He’s got his music ripped into lossless FLAC format, in addition to lower rates, amounting to about a gig a disc — which he stores in a basement RAID server that can handle 12 TB of data. (He says it has plenty of empty space.)

As an amateur photographer, he saves his photos in RAW format, which can run to about 10MB per image. And when Amazon last week opened up its cloud music service to unlimited storage of music files in AAC, Vrignaud batch-converted his collection and began uploading it.

The music is what he assumes caused the problem, but he’s not sure. He admits to doing a little bittorrenting in the last month, but says it was limited to getting a few episodes of a famous British sci-fi show that’s not totally available in the U.S.

And all Comcast is saying is that he’s kicked off — and under the terms of the ban, he can’t even switch to a uncapped, higher-priced, lower-speed business connection.

Life in the Land of Liberty – where establishing standards based on the needs of ordinary citizens is extremist and offering information services as a public utility is socialist.

Both of those concepts may be correct in their identification. Which is why my feelings aren’t hurt when some dimwit populist hurls such accusations in my direction. That doesn’t alter the needs of modern-day Americans however. If industrial-level capitalism doesn’t meet our needs then it really is time for a change at some level or other.