Sprawling urban areas in Brazil, Nigeria and Bangladesh are all seeing COVID-19 infections rise rapidly.
Having ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest cities, the coronavirus pandemic is now spreading into the megacities of developing countries.
— County Sustainability Group A market area in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, crowded with people despite the coronavirus pandemic, May 12, 2020. [Photo: Ahmed Salahuddin/NurPhoto] \ Sprawling urban areas in Brazil, Nigeria, and Bangladesh are all seeing COVID-19 infections rise rapidly. We study the fragility and resilience of such cities and their urban peripheries, with the aim of encouraging data-driven policy decisions. Given its deadly trajectory in marginalized communities of hard-hit New York and London, coronavirus may well devastate much poorer cities.
Particularly concerning are the slum areas that are home to roughly a billion people— one in seven people on Earth. Characterized by insecure property rights, low-quality housing, limited basic services, and poor sanitation, these informal settlements aggregate risk factors that accelerate the spread of infection.
Yet, our research finds, many residents of slums and squatter settlements are not getting the help they need to survive the coronavirus pandemic.
DENSITY AND POVERTY Overcrowding is one reason slums are known incubators of disease. Informal settlements are typically 10 times denser than neighboring areas of the same city. The Dharavi slum in central Mumbai, for example, has some 97,000 residents per square mile, compared to 11,500 people per square mile elsewhere in the city. It is far harder to practice physical distancing, at home or on the street, in such close quarters.
shared with thanks.. English translation thefreeonline. pics added.. note> the term ‘libertaria’ translated from Spanish is a synonym for ‘anarchist’ and doesn’t imply US right wingers!
ORIGINAL EN CASTELLANO ABAJO
We rescue a brief text that lists both reforms as well as transformations that our society must undertake in pursuit of a libertarian economy, respectful of people, other societies and the environment. It leaves us a question in the air. Can anarchism be globalized, or will we be chained forever to the designs of armies and hierarchs? Will this be our crossroads?
Your Health! _ Source – The transition to an anarchist economy 09/30/2015 by Jose Luis Carretero
A very respectable comrade asked me a while ago for contribution to a possible “economic program” for the libertarian movement. I had little time to write it, but what was basically sought was to open the debate for the writing of a book. This is, basically, what I sent, I think that, now, it can also serve, more than as a closed guide or dogmatic apparatus of things that I am not entirely clear about, as a text that drives an increasingly urgent debate on post-capitalism .
The social transformation necessary to start an economy entirely focused on an anarchist socialist paradigm requires a process of consolidation and development that involves several, temporarily delimited, stages. The construction of a new society and a new economy needs a gradual development, and at the same time entrenched in moments of revolutionary rupture of the preceding order.
It is a transition process that begins with social advances that empower the forces that obtain them, and the classes involved in the fight for their achievement. These advances are unfolding their effects, varying the previous status quo, reinforcing anarchist positions, and accumulating the necessary forces that must be fully expressed in moments of open revolutionary bankruptcy, in which the advancement processes will accelerate.
This dynamic vision of the process of building a transformed society, compared to the purely static conceptualizations that draw the desired scenario, but refuse to imagine and unravel how to achieve it from the current situation, begins with the delimitation of a minimum program to pose at the current moment.
Good Saturday morning and welcome to the Weekend! Yeah, yeah … I know … weekends aren’t a whole lot different than weekdays lately, but still … we can find some fun things to do! For me, it’ll be laundry!!! WHOO HOO!!! Damn, it just doesn’t get much more exciting, does it? I feel my heart […]
Meet the Secretary Bird …Just look at those lashes!!! This beauty is actually a bird of prey usually found in the open grasslands and savanna of the sub-Saharan region of Africa. Watch her strut her stuff
There is a necessity for a liberatory politics in the Archipelago known as the Philippines and as anarchists we think Anarchism has the framework to fill this need. The dominant forms of politics we have now are insufficient for developing a liberatory politics in the archipelago. This liberatory politics becomes a necessity because politics in…
Bank of England secret bail out of big business – over £100bn committed in 3 weeks As part of their activities to combat the economic fallout of Covid-19, the Bank of England has created a new scheme called the Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF), to specifically support the UK’s biggest companies impacted by the crisis. The […]
Our comrade Gabriel has been handed over to the Spanish State this morning (May 13) and is currently in the Badajoz prison (Extremadura). He is well and strong as always. He will certainly have to stay 14 days in a mandatory quarantine and then, supposedly, be transferred to another prison. In that sense, more information will follow.
Spain asks 16 yrs more .. he already did 30 yrs!
After about a year and a half in hiding, on January 25, 2020, Gabriel Pombo Da Silva was arrested in Portuguese territory. Gabriel previously spent more than 30 years in prison
With an international arrest warrant for a residual theoretical sentence of over ten years (a personal vendetta converted into a “legal detail”), Gabriel continued to contribute to the anarchist struggle with his writings.
This 28 page collection of writings by Gabriel Pombo da Silva is available here to download..
The zine is written in Gabriel’s amazingly raw, imaginative style and shows why the German and Spanish authorities tried to suppress him forever – Read his words, be inspired and take action!!
Although we do not have guarantees that the mail will work regularly, it is obvious that it will not be a virus that is responsible for the letters from your loved ones and solidarity individuals not being able to arrive!
Bioweapon Labs Must Be Shut Down and Scientists Prosecuted By Joseph MercolaMercola.com May 13, 2020 The idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a bioweapons laboratory is gaining traction. May 3, 2020, The New York Times reported1 that during an ABC “This Week” interview Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had stated “the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan.” Pompeo also accused China of covering up the leak.
“Mr. Pompeo, the former C.I.A. chief and one of the senior administration officials who is most hawkish on dealing with China, said that ‘there’s enormous evidence’ that the coronavirus came from the lab, though he agreed with the intelligence assessment that there was no indication that the virus was man-made or genetically modified,” The New York Times writes.2
Now, if you’ve been following this newsletter, you’ve likely seen my interviews with bioweapons expert Francis Boyle and molecular biologist Judy Mikovits, both of whom have cited evidence that strongly points toward SARS-CoV-2 being a laboratory creation. So, the assessment that there’s “no indication” that the virus has been modified seems dubious at best. Most likely, we’re not just dealing with scientific interpretations here, but with political games as well.
Bioweapon Labs Must Be Shut Down and Scientists Prosecuted
As noted by Boyle — professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of the book, “Biowarfare and Terrorism,”3 who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 — what’s needed is a ban on biosafety level (BSL) 3 and 4 labs.
Time and again, serious safety breaches have been identified at laboratories working with the most lethal and dangerous pathogens in the world.4,5,6,7,8,9,10 For example, in 2014, six glass vials of smallpox virus were accidentally found in a storeroom in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s lab at the National Institutes of Health.11 It was the second time in one month mishandling of potential deadly infectious agents was exposed. One month before this shocking discovery, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention12 realized as many as 84, and possibly 86, of its scientists had been exposed to live anthrax.13,14
United States biological weapons program – Wikipedia The United States biological weapons program began in 1943 and was discontinued in 1969.. The program officially began in spring 1943 on orders from U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt.Research continued following World War II as the U.S. built up a large stockpile of biological agents and weapons.Over the course of its 27-year history, the program weaponized and stockpiled the following seven …
The live pathogen had been sent from another, higher-security facility, which failed to follow biosafety protocols. The anthrax sample was supposed to have been inactivated prior to transfer, but for a variety of reasons it wasn’t dead on arrival. The next year, in 2015, the Pentagon realized a Dugway Proving Ground laboratory had been sending incompletely inactivated anthrax (meaning it was still live) to 200 laboratories around the world for the past 12 years. According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report15 issued in August 2016, incompletely inactivated anthrax was sent out on at least 21 occasions between 2003 and 2015.
Asia Times16 lists several other examples as well, as does a May 28, 2015, article in USA Today17 and an April 11, 2014, article in Slate magazine.18 In 2017, the BSL 4 lab on Galveston Island was hit by a massive storm and severe flooding, raising questions about what might happen were some of the pathogens kept there to get out.19 As recently as 2019, the BSL 4 lab in Fort Detrick was temporarily shut down after several protocol violations were noted.20
In October 2014, a U.S. moratorium on experiments on coronaviruses that might make the viruses more pathogenic and/or easy to spread among humans took effect.21 The ban came on the heels of “high-profile lab mishaps” at the CDC and “extremely controversial flu experiments” in which the bird flu virus was engineered to become more lethal and contagious between ferrets. The goal was to see if it could mutate and become more lethal and contagious between humans, causing future pandemics. However, the federal moratorium on lethal virus experiments in the U.S. was lifted at the end of December 2017.22
The Free 
