Tag: Paused

Categories
Politics

Search paused as authorities put together for demolition

Search paused as authorities prepare for demolition

Search and rescue teams search the rubble of the partially collapsed 12-story Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside, Florida, on July 2, 2021.

Giorgio Viera | AFP | Getty Images

Search-and-rescue operations at the partially collapsed condominium tower in Surfside, Florida came to a temporary halt Saturday, as authorities move to raze the rest of the building in a controlled demolition before the unstable structure is threatened by winds from Tropical Storm Elsa.

During a press briefing, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said operations were paused temporarily at 4:00 p.m. ET Saturday due to preparations for the demolition, which includes drilling into unstable columns. The search can restart once the remaining part of the building is demolished.

“We’re proceeding as quickly as we possibly can,” Levine Cava said Saturday evening.

“It is all of our fervent desire that this can be done safely before the storm so that we can direct the demolition,” the mayor said earlier Saturday. “This demolition would be one that would protect and preserve evidence and allow maximum search-and-rescue activity to continue.”

The death toll from the fallen building rose to 24 as of Saturday, and 121 people are still missing. No one has been rescued since the first few hours after Champlain Towers South, a 12-story condominium built in 1981, partially collapsed on June 24.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the building can be brought down within 36 hours once the final plan is in place, while Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said the demolition could occur as early as Sunday.

“The fear was that the hurricane might take the building down for us and take it down in the wrong direction on top of the pile where we have victims,” Burkett said, referring to Elsa which was downgraded to a tropical storm Saturday.

Levine Cava signed a local state of emergency for Elsa on Saturday morning. “Out of an abundance of caution, we’re ensuring we’re mobilizing everything we need in the county to prepare for any possible impacts,” she said at the briefing.

The long-term forecast track shows Elsa heading toward Florida as a tropical storm by Tuesday morning, but some models would carry it into the Gulf or up the Atlantic Coast.

Search and rescue personnel work at the site of a collapsed Florida condominium complex in Surfside, Miami, U.S., in this handout image July 2, 2021.

MIAMI DADE FIRE DEPARTMENT | via REUTERS

The accelerated plan comes a day after Levine Cava said the demolition might not occur for weeks as engineers studied and signed off on next steps. Officials have restricted access to parts of the building zone that threaten public health and safety.

However, Levine Cava said a demolition expert came forward Friday evening with the experience to move more quickly than originally anticipated. Engineers and state, local and federal authorities reviewed the plan and agreed it was the best path forward, Levine Cava said.

“This proposed demolition is a very narrow footprint so we’re not looking at major impacts to the area or additional evacuations,” Levine Cava said. “We are still in the due diligence process.”

The decision to demolish the portion of the building that’s still standing comes after search-and-rescue operations were halted most of Thursday out of concern that the remaining structure could fall, endangering first responders searching the site.

The cause of the building collapse is still unknown. An engineering firm reviewed the condo tower in 2018, nearly three years before the collapse, and issued a report which found failed waterproofing below the building’s pool was causing “major structural damage.”

“Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially,” the report said.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has launched a full investigation into the collapse and will make recommendations about how to improve building safety.

Levine Cava ordered a 30-day audit of buildings 40 years or older in Miami-Dade County which are five stories or taller and have not completed the re-certification process. The county is reviewing 14 such buildings and 10 that recently began recertification.

A condo building in North Miami Beach was closed and more than 300 residents evacuated Friday after an audit and building inspection report found unsafe structural and electrical conditions.

Categories
Health

Prime Biden Covid officers to debate vaccine rollout with Home after J&J pictures paused

Top Biden Covid officials to discuss vaccine rollout with House after J&J shots paused

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (left), speaks to Dr. David Kessler, Chief Science Officer of the White House COVID-19 Response Team on the Federal Coronavirus Response on Capitol Hill March 18, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Susan Walsh | Getty Images

The House’s coronavirus subcommittee will hear from three leading health officials in the Biden government on Thursday about United States efforts to step up vaccinations as Covid cases, including those of dangerous variants, are on the rise.

The hearing, which will also focus on the continued need for people to wear masks and follow social distancing measures, is slated to begin at 10:30 a.m. ET. It is streamed live.

The event comes two days after dozens of states abruptly stopped administering Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid vaccine in response to the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation to suspend those recordings while investigating cases of women, who have developed a rare bleeding disorder.

Some fear the recommendation, issued in response to six reported blood clot cases from nearly 7 million J&J doses administered, could hamper the global campaign to vaccinate the world against the pandemic.

The selected subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, led by James Clyburn, DS.C., is led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s foremost infectious disease expert, and the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Rochelle Walensky. David Kessler, a senior Covid official in President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services, is also on the witness list.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, listens to the response from Covid-19, DC during a hearing with the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on March 18, 2021 in Washington on Capitol Hill, DC .

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

While the US is vaccinating more people than ever before, Covid cases are increasing in more than half of its states. According to the Johns Hopkins University, an average of more than 71,000 cases per day were counted for the past week.

“It’s almost a race between vaccinating people and this surge that is apparently about to increase,” Fauci told CNN on Wednesday.

The emergence of variants of Covid – like B 1.1.7, which recently flooded Michigan and is now the most common strain in the US – has led health officials to urge Americans to continue to take precautionary measures despite accelerated vaccination efforts.

Experts say Johnson & Johnson’s recent vaccination problems could fuel skepticism about vaccines.

In their quest to have all eligible individuals in the U.S. vaccinated against Covid, officials have stressed that all of the options available – from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson – are safe and effective. All three have been approved by the FDA for emergency use. Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two separate doses given three to four weeks apart.

But the six cases of women who developed the rare blood clots urged the FDA to stop J & J’s shot “out of caution.”

All women developed the disease within about two weeks of being vaccinated, health officials told reporters Tuesday. One of the women died.

“I think it will affect the hesitation, period. Whether it should or not is a different matter,” said Dr. Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, told CNBC.

With Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine only containing one dose, experts say the hiatus could also reduce vaccine access for some communities.

“This vaccine was biased to be used in harsher environments, places where you couldn’t deliver two doses. You wanted to deliver one dose and stick to the vaccination schedule,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who sits on the Pfizer board of directors at CNBC on Tuesday.

– The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC employee and a member of the boards of directors of Pfizer, genetic testing startup Tempus, health technology company Aetion Inc., and biotech company Illumina. He is also co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Royal Caribbean’s Healthy Sail Panel.

Categories
Business

‘Reply All’ Podcast Is Paused After Accusations of Poisonous Tradition

‘Reply All’ Podcast Is Paused After Accusations of Toxic Culture

The popular Gimlet Media podcast, Reply All, was paused and its series, which addressed racism allegations by food magazine Bon Appétit, was discontinued after former Gimlet employees complained that one of its hosts and a reporter himself was becoming a toxic work culture had contributed.

On Thursday, co-host Alex Goldman announced to the audience in a two-minute statement posted on the Reply All feed entitled “A Message from the Staff From“ Reply All ”” that senior reporter Sruthi Pinnamaneni and Co -host PJ Vogt had decided to leave the podcast. Last week, former colleagues accused them of opposing union efforts that many black workers believed necessary to increase diversity and create an equal workplace.

“Former colleagues of ours at Gimlet have publicly described several cases of worrying behavior from both Sruthi and my longtime co-host PJ Vogt,” Goldman said in the statement released Thursday. “These reports prompted our team to settle the work culture at ‘Reply All’ and ask us whether we could continue broadcasting the story without asking ourselves and what was going on at Gimlet. We now understand that we should never have released the series as reported, and the fact that we did was a systematic editorial error. “

On Twitter and in interviews last week, former Gimlet employees said they viewed Mr. Vogt and Ms. Pinnamaneni’s involvement in the “Test Kitchen” series as hypocritical.

Eric Eddings, a former Gimlet employee who co-hosted The Nod podcast, said he couldn’t believe Ms. Pinnamaneni was telling a series about racism and toxicity in the workplace when she and Mr. Vogt asked for a “nearly identical” atmosphere at Gimlet was responsible.

Mr Vogt and Mrs Pinnamaneni publicly apologized after the allegations surfaced. They didn’t respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

Mr. Goldman said the remaining two episodes of “Test Kitchen,” which were supposed to be a four-part series, would not be released. He apologized to the audience for “our many mistakes”.

“We apologize to our colleagues and our former colleagues who we hurt,” he said. “We are sorry for you, our listeners. And of course we apologize to the people who spoke to us for the ‘test kitchen’ and told us their extremely personal stories. “

The two previously published episodes of “Test Kitchen” would stay online, Goldman said with an additional disclaimer. “Reply to All” would be interrupted, he said, as the show staff assessed what had gone wrong. “Once we fully understand it ourselves, we want to tell you as best we can what happened,” said Goldman.

A spokesman for Spotify, which acquired Gimlet Media in February 2019, said Mr. Vogt and Ms. Pinnamaneni would stay with Gimlet despite not being on the podcast. He didn’t give any details about her new roles.

Mr. Goldman and Mr. Vogt started with “Reply All” in 2014 and adapted it from their previous WNYC radio show “TLDR” (too long; not read). Episodes in recent years have taken listeners to phone scam rings in India and on a journey to track down a Song that a director heard on the radio as a teenager.

Mr Eddings and other former Gimlet employees said that Mr Vogt and Ms. Pinnamaneni were firmly opposed to union efforts, which were seen by black workers as the only way to create an environment in which they could thrive and that the two were theirs Efforts declined to diversify the staff. In one case, according to Mr. Eddings, Mr. Vogt sent derogatory text messages to a Gimlet employee who was involved in the union effort that left the employee in tears.

On the second installment in the Test Kitchen series that Ms. Pinnamaneni recounts, Ms. Pinnamaneni said that Gimlet had “its own version” of the problems Bon Appétit was facing.

“The white people who ran the place hired people of color and promised them changes that never seemed to fully materialize,” she said later. When a group of employees tried to change the atmosphere in Gimlet through union formation, they chose not to join the effort, she said. “As I’ve talked about it, I’ve talked about the way your fight got on my toes.” She said it took her eight months to report on Bon Appétit to realize how wrong she was.

In a series of tweets on Thursday, Mr Goldman said the announcement did not end “Reply All”.

“We’re just finding out what’s next,” he wrote. “‘Answer All’ wasn’t and is not just Alex and PJ. There’s an insanely talented group of people doing this show.”