Tag: Number

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Politics

L.G.B.T.Q. Elected Officers in U.S. Quantity Practically 1,000, Rising Quick

L.G.B.T.Q. Elected Officials in U.S. Number Nearly 1,000, Rising Fast

The number of elected gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender officials has continued to rise, growing by about 17 percent last year to nearly 1,000 nationwide – more than double what it was four years ago, according to a new annual report.

Their ranks now include two governors, two U.S. senators, nine congressmen, 189 lawmakers, and 56 mayors, according to the report from the LGBTQ Victory Institute, which trains candidates for public office. In total, the group identified 986 elected LGBTQ officials.

“There are more LGBTQ people who take the plunge and choose to run for office,” said Annise Parker, president and chief executive officer of the institute. The 2010-2016 Mayoress of Houston, Ms. Parker, was one of the first openly gay mayors of a major American city.

This is the fifth year the institute has polled the nation, and the total representation of LGBTQ in elected offices has risen to 986 today, from 843 in 2020, 698 in 2019 and 448 in 2017, out of roughly half a million electoral positions .

Of all racial groups, elected Black LGBTQ officials grew the fastest over the past year, with a 75 percent increase in representation, the report said. The number of elected LGBTQ officials from various races rose 40 percent.

The institute prosecutes federal officials, state-wide civil servants, state legislators as well as local and judicial officials. Every state except Mississippi now has at least one elected incumbent who identifies as LGBTQ, the report said.

Ms. Parker said LGBTQ candidates could win across America now, citing Mauree Turner, who was elected to the state MP in Oklahoma last year and is black, Muslim and non-binary.

“The right candidate with the right message can be chosen anywhere,” said Ms. Parker. However, she said bias and discrimination continue to be of concern, especially against transgender candidates.

The partisan divide is one-sided: 73 percent of LGBTQ officials are Democrats and less than 3 percent are Republicans, according to the institute.

“There are more trans-elected officials than Republican elected officials,” Ms. Parker said.

She said former President Donald J. Trump was “probably the best Democratic recruiter you can have,” suggesting that general anti-Trump Democratic zeal fueled the rise in LGBTQ candidates win the office.

As of 2021, there will be at least one elected transgender officer in 23 states, according to the report. The surge in transgender representation last year came entirely from elected transgender women, who grew 71 percent from 21 to 36; there was no growth in the number of transgender men, which remained constant at five.

Ms. Parker said a key goal is to “fill the pipeline” of LGBTQ candidates from local to high office so that there is “a pool of potential presidential candidates from our community” in the future.

She praised Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who ran for president in 2020 and is now federal minister of transportation. But she said she hoped LGBTQ officials would continue to climb the ranks to become governors and senators – traditionally more realistic launch pads for a White House run than small town mayor’s office.

For the time being, however, town halls will remain one of the few political arenas in which LGBTQ officials are fairly represented by six mayors among the top 100 cities based on their proportion of the population. The most prominent is Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago.

Despite the rapid growth, the institute estimates that LGBTQ individuals still make up 0.19 percent of the country’s elected officials, compared to an estimated 5.6 percent of the population.

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Health

U.S. experiences document variety of Covid deaths in January

U.S. reports record number of Covid deaths in January

Lila Blanks holds the coffin of her husband Gregory Blanks, 50, who has died of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), before his funeral in San Felipe, Texas, USA, on January 26, 2021.

Callaghan O’Hare | Reuters

The United States started 2021 with the deadliest month of the coronavirus pandemic yet.

The January death toll has already surpassed the previous record number of deaths in December, according to Johns Hopkins University, when over 77,400 people died of Covid-19 in the United States. According to the data, the pandemic has killed more than 79,200 people so far this month.

In the past seven days, the country has reported an average of more than 3,300 deaths from Covid-19 per day, according to Hopkins, up 12% from a week ago.

There is hope that the death toll will slow in the coming weeks. The number of new cases reported daily in the US, which epidemiologists use as a leading indicator of whether the outbreak is increasing or decreasing, has steadily declined in recent days as an increase from interstate travel and holiday celebrations appears to be easing.

The U.S. reported about 146,600 new cases Tuesday, bringing the Hopkins average from seven days to just over 166,300 and about 17% from a week, according to Hopkins.

The number of people currently hospitalized with Covid-19 in the United States is also falling, but remains worryingly high. More than 108,900 people were hospitalized with the disease on Tuesday, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project, which was set up by journalists in the Atlantic. That’s not the high point of the more than 130,000 hospital patients reported earlier this month.

However, the potential spread of new, contagious strains of virus in the US, coupled with a slower-than-expected vaccine adoption, threatens to reverse advances in combating the outbreak.

First discovered in the United Kingdom and become the dominant strain there, the B.1.1.7 strain of the virus has been found in a number of states in the United States. Epidemiologists say the strain appears to be spreading more easily, and British officials have said it could also be more deadly.

As of Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 293 cases related to this strain of the virus had been found in the United States, mainly in Florida and California.

Earlier this week, the Minnesota Department of Health confirmed the first known US case of another strain of the virus that was originally discovered in Brazil. Another so-called worrying variant, named 501Y.V2 or B.1.351 depending on the epidemiologist, was first discovered in South Africa and worries scientists, since vaccines and drugs against this strain seem to be less effective. No cases related to this strain have been discovered in the United States

To curb the spread of the virus and especially the importation of new strains, President Joe Biden banned most non-US citizens traveling from South Africa from entering the US earlier this week, and increased travel restrictions for Europe, the UK and Brazil.

The president painted a dire picture of the outbreak, saying on Monday that the US “will see between 600,000 and 660,000 deaths before we start turning the corner on a large scale”.

While Biden urges people to wear masks and follow public health measures like social distancing, he is working to push the adoption of the Covid vaccines and blaming the Trump administration for the initially slow pace. On Monday, he said the US could surpass 1.5 million vaccinations per day, compared to its previous target of 1 million per day, which the last administration had almost reached.

“Time is of the essence,” he said earlier this week. “We are trying to get at least 100 million vaccinations in 100 days and move in the next 100 days where we are way beyond that to get to the point where we can get herd immunity in a country.” of over 300 million people. “

On Tuesday, he said the government was working to buy an additional 200 million doses of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, increasing US supply from 400 million doses to 600 million, although that won’t speed up the pace of vaccinations anytime soon. He also said the administration will increase the number of cans shipped to states each week by about 20%. Some states have stated that they are able to vaccinate more people but are limited by the supply.

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Health

Small Variety of Covid Sufferers Develop Extreme Psychotic Signs

Small Number of Covid Patients Develop Severe Psychotic Symptoms

Brain scans, spinal fluid analyzes, and other tests did not reveal any brain infection, said Dr. Gabbay, whose hospital has treated two patients with postcovid psychosis: a 49-year-old man who heard voices believing he was the devil and a 34-year-old woman who started carrying a knife, undressing in front of strangers, and putting in hand sanitizer to give her food.

According to reports, most of these patients did not get very sick from Covid-19. The patients Dr. Goueli did not have any breathing problems, but they had subtle neurological symptoms such as hand tingling, dizziness, headache, or decreased odor. Then, two weeks to a few months later, they develop “this profound psychosis that is really dangerous and scary for everyone around them”.

It is also noticeable that most of the patients were between 30, 40 and 50 years old. “It is very rare for you to develop this type of psychosis in this age group,” said Dr. Goueli, since such symptoms are more likely to be associated with schizophrenia in young people or dementia in older people. And some patients – like the physiotherapist who took herself to the hospital – understood that something was wrong, while “people with psychosis usually don’t know that they have lost touch with reality”.

Some post-Covid patients who developed psychosis had to be hospitalized for weeks, where doctors tried different drugs before they found one that worked.

Dr. Robert Yolken, a neurovirology expert at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore, said that while people can physically recover from Covid-19, in some cases their immune systems may not be able to turn off or due to “Delayed elimination of a small amount of virus. “

Persistent immune activation is also one of the main explanations for brain fog and memory problems that plague many Covid survivors, and Emily Severance, a schizophrenia expert at Johns Hopkins, said that post-Covid cognitive and psychiatric effects may be due to “something similar in the brain “Are due.

Categories
Politics

Variety of Executions in U.S. Falls Regardless of Push by Trump Administration

Number of Executions in U.S. Falls Despite Push by Trump Administration

WASHINGTON – Partly because of the impact of the pandemic on the criminal justice system, the number of executions in the United States this year has fallen to its lowest level since 1991 despite the Trump administration reviving the federal death penalty. This emerges from a study published on Wednesday.

The report from the Information Center on the Death Penalty said seven prisoners were executed by states, the lowest number since 1983. The center led the decrease in executions as well as a decrease in new death sentences due to court closings and public health concerns related to the prison back coronavirus, but also cited a long-term trend away from the death penalty in much of the country.

In contrast, the federal government executed 10 prisoners, the highest number of federal civilian executions in a single calendar year in the 20th or 21st century. The surge – the first time the federal government has executed more civilian prisoners than all states combined – was the result of a decision by the Trump administration to end an informal 17-year moratorium on the death penalty for federal crimes.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has announced that he will work to end the federal death penalty. However, the Justice Department has planned three more executions in the first half of January before he takes office.

Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which is not categorically opposed to the death penalty but has been critical of its use, said states and the federal government were exposed to the same virus even though the annual numbers were skewed by the pandemic but reacted very much differently.

“At the time when almost every state was prioritizing the safety of its citizens over the execution of prisoners, the federal government decided that it was more important to carry out a rash of executions without full judicial review of these cases in the circumstances and public health endangered, ”he said.

Attorney General William P. Barr announced in July 2019 that the government would execute five men in the coming months, which the courts foiled shortly before the executions began. The Supreme Court then cleared the way for the Trump administration to resume the death penalty in June and allowed any execution.

In her senior year, the government has also allowed additional available execution options such as firing squads or electrocution. The 17-year federal death penalty hiatus was largely due to legal challenges and the unavailability of lethal injections, said Charles Stimson, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He said the government had simply continued the constitutionally approved tradition of the federal death penalty.

“Ultimately, if we are to uphold the rule of law, you have to make the rule of law work,” said Stimson.

This year, the total number of executions by both states and the federal government fell from 22 in the previous year to 17, according to the report.

Updated

Apr. 16, 2020, 7:32 am ET

The coronavirus has spread to correctional facilities across the country, making the death penalty difficult and killing some death row inmates before states can kill them. The Texas courts have stopped or delayed eight executions, and four more have been delayed in Tennessee by court order or by the governor, the report said. Of the 62 execution dates set for that year, only 17 were carried out.

In contrast to the federal states, the federal government has largely adhered to its schedule despite the dangers of the pandemic.

Two lawyers for Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row scheduled to be executed, contracted the coronavirus after visiting her client. A judicial statement by a Bureau of Prisons official found that eight members of the team that carried out a federal execution in November at the Terre Haute, Indiana prison complex, where hundreds of cases have been reported, later tested positive for the virus.

Coronavirus forced states to temporarily close their courts, a major factor that resulted in the fewest new death sentences passed in a year since the Supreme Court repealed existing death penalty laws in 1972.

According to a Gallup poll, support for the death penalty in murder cases has been around 55 percent since 2017.

Robert Blecker, professor emeritus at New York Law School, said poll support for the death penalty depends largely on how the question is phrased. Support will rise when the question identifies the circumstances and “atrocities associated with the murder,” he said.

Colorado became the 22nd state to abolish the death penalty this year, and 12 others have not carried out executions in at least a decade, according to the center’s report.

In addition, voters in at least nine major counties elected new prosecutors who had pledged to abandon the death penalty or use it sparingly. These districts make up 12 percent of the current death row population, the report said.

Most likely, the number of executions and death sentences will rise in 2021 and 2022 as the pandemic subsides, said Dunham, the report’s lead author. But those who are to die under the Trump administration will most likely be the final federal executions, at least while Mr Biden is in office.