Miriam Main resigned on Monday and said she refuses to help men "perform a poor imitation of breastfeeding," which can put babies' safety at risk,

The post La Leche League Official Resigns in Protest of Pro-Trans ‘Chestfeeding’ Policy appeared first on Breitbart.

By Don Thompson, KFF

California public health officials are dipping into state and federal stockpiles to equip up to 10,000 farmworkers with masks, gloves, goggles, and other safety gear as the state confirms at least 21 human cases of bird flu as of early November. It’s the latest reminder of the state’s struggle to remain prepared amid multibillion-dollar deficits.

Officials said they began distributing more than 2 million pieces of personal protective equipment in late May, four months before the first human case was confirmed in the state. They said they began ramping up coordination with local health officials in April after bird flu was first detected in cattle in the U.S. Bird flu has now been confirmed at more than 270 dairies in central California, and traces were recently detected at a wastewater sampling site in Los Angeles County. Bird flu was also recently detected in a flock of commercial turkeys in Sacramento County.

California is putting a number of lessons from the covid-19 pandemic to use, such as coordinating emergency response with local health officials and tracking infectious diseases through wastewater surveillance, as the state tries to limit the spread of bird flu to humans. It’s striving to maintain an adequate emergency stockpile to withstand the first wave of any new public health disaster without hemorrhaging the state budget.

“We are far better prepared to respond to a pandemic than we were in 2020,” said Amy Palmer, a spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

For instance, before the coronavirus struck in 2020, the state’s emergency supplies stockpile was barely big enough to crowd two basketball courts.

By the time California ramped up its pandemic response, it had enough personal protective equipment and other disaster supplies to fill 52 football fields. California spent $15.6 billion on direct pandemic response during the covid crisis years, much of it provided by the federal government.

Today, the stockpile fits into about 12½ football fields, though it can seesaw from month to month.

According to the state, the current stockpile includes 101 million face masks, 26 million more than the 90-day supply recommended by the state’s pandemic preparedness guideline.

That includes 88 million N95 masks, more than the emergency services agency said was needed last year. The high-efficiency masks are considered crucial to protect against airborne viruses such as covid-19.

Although the state is building up its stockpile, Palmer could not say if the additional masks are related to fears of bird flu, only that planners are always working “to keep pace with the current risk environment.”

The state’s goal, Palmer said, is to have “an initial supply during emergencies to allow us the time to secure resources,” whether through the federal government or by buying more.

There is no indication of spread between humans in the recent California bird flu cases, and health officials say public risk remains low. Human transmission of bird flu is among several worst-case scenarios for a new pandemic, alongside the possibility of a resurgent mutant coronavirus; wider international spread of mpox, Marburg virus, or Ebola; or an entirely new virus for which there initially is no immunity or vaccine.

Yet, health officials nationwide have struggled to track bird flu transmission. And California has a history of swinging back and forth on preparedness.

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered an increase in California’s pandemic preparedness in 2006 in response to an earlier threat from bird flu. That included three mobile hospitals that could immediately be deployed during disasters.

Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, ended the program in 2011 as state finances went bust. By the time covid struck, the state released 21 million N95 masks, some so old they were past their expiration date.

Now hospitals are required to maintain their own three-month supply of masks, gowns, and other personal protective equipment under a state law passed in 2020. California’s aerosol transmissible disease standard also uniquely requires hospitals and other high-risk workplaces to follow precautions such as using negative pressure isolation rooms and the highest level of protective equipment until more is known about a new pathogen.

“It is difficult to overstate the level of unpreparedness exhibited by hospitals both in and outside of California in dealing with the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19,” according to a legislative analysis. “Harrowing images of nurses walking the corridors of hospitals in makeshift masks and garbage bags became commonplace.”

California Hospital Association spokesperson Jan Emerson-Shea said hospitals “continuously prepare to respond to all types of disasters, including outbreaks of transmissible viruses.”

In addition, Palmer said California has five mobile hospitals acquired from the federal government, though they got little use during the pandemic. She said they have to be maintained, such as making sure pulse oximeters have working batteries.

But, once again, the current deficit has the state trying to strike a balance.

While lawmakers rejected most of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $300 million proposed cut to public health funding, the state slashed funding for its stockpile of personal protective equipment by one-third a year ago after it determined that no additional covid-related purchases were necessary, according to the Department of Finance. California eliminated funding this year for eight 53-foot-long trailers that would have moved stockpiled items between warehouses. It’s also cutting nearly $40 million over the next four years from its $175 million disaster stockpile budget.

The state’s preparedness wasn’t good enough for Californians Against Pandemics, which gathered more than 1 million signatures to put a ballot measure before voters in November. The measure would have increased taxes on people with incomes over $5 million and used that money for pandemic prevention and response.

But that effort collapsed after one of its key financial supporters, former cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried, was convicted of defrauding customers and investors. In exchange for initiative backers dropping the measure, state officials agreed to broaden the scope of the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine, which was created in 2015 to focus on developing new medicines and therapies, to include technologies for preventing another pandemic.

“By harnessing the power of precision medicine, California is moving to the forefront of pandemic preparedness and prevention,” Newsom said at the time.

Rodger Butler, a spokesperson for the state Health and Human Services Agency, said it’s unclear if the precision medicine initiative will receive additional funding.

Mayor Darrell Steinberg talks about Sacramento Republic FC’s new stadium. An award-winning film based on a UC Davis historian’s book about “suicide by proxy.” Finally, how to use comedy to talk about depression and suicide.

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Elon Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency Dogecoin spiked by as much as 20% Wednesday after the Tesla mogul was tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to lead a newly created “Department of Government Efficiency” — or DOGE. The meme coin, which features an image of a Shiba Inu breed dog and was created…

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President-elect Donald Trump has appointed successful businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to help ferret out and identify budget items to cut to save the U.S. treasury money. Trump has created a new initiative that is being called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) according to reports on Tuesday. “I am pleased to announce that […]

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1. Unrest over deaths of 10 ‘militants’ spills over to Assam, Mizoram; ‘extra-judicial killings’ by CRPF, sa  The Times of India
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The son of a high-ranking ex-financial official in Ecuador who was a Florida banker says he's guilty for his part in a international multi-million dollar bribery and money laundering scheme which involved his father.

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The Chemical and Non-Metallic Products Senior Staff Association of Nigeria has decried the policies of the Bola Tinubu-led government, saying that they are adversely affecting chemical and non-metallic products in Nigeria. National President of the association, Mr Segun David, made the remarks at the opening session of the 29th Annual National Management/Industrial Relations Seminar on

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Donald Trump, US President-Elect, has appointed Elon Musk, chief executive officer (CEO) of Tesla and SpaceX, to lead a soon to be established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk, was a staunch supporter of Trump during the electioneering leading up to the November 5 presidential election in which the former president defeated Vice-President Kamala Harris […]

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mexico city — Legislators from Mexico's ruling party reelected the head of the National Human Rights Commission on Wednesday despite widespread opposition and her failure to call out the government for abuses.  The reelection of Rosario Piedra Ibarra in a party-line Senate vote appeared to be another example of the ruling Morena party's attempts to weaken independent oversight bodies. Morena has proposed eliminating a host of other oversight, transparency and freedom-of-information agencies, claiming they cost too much to run.  Mexico's civic and nonprofit rights groups have been almost unanimous in their criticism of Piedra's reelection.  "This is an undeserved prize for a career marked by inaction, the loss of independence and the weakening of the institution," the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez human rights center wrote on social media.  Piedra is a committed supporter of former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who left office on September 30. She once affirmed that none of the deaths caused by the armed forces under his administration were illegal or unjustified, and she shared the former president's delight in attacking and criticizing other independent human rights groups.  Commission issues few recommendations Since her first election in 2019, Piedra has done little to investigate allegations of massacres or extrajudicial killings by soldiers and members of the militarized National Guard, to whom Lopez Obrador gave sweeping powers.  Despite receiving over 1,800 citizen complaints against the armed forces between 2020 and 2023, her commission issued only 39 recommendations, and most of the few military cases her commission did follow up on involved abuses committed under previous administrations.  The rights commission has the power to make non-binding recommendations to government agencies. If they do not agree to follow the recommendations, they are at least required by law to explain why.  Piedra has almost exclusively focused the commission's work on issuing recommendations in cases where people have not received proper health care at government-run hospitals. Those recommendations accomplish little, because they don't address the underlying problem of underfunded, poorly equipped hospitals forced to handle too many patients.  At times Piedra acted as if human rights violations no longer existed under Lopez Obrador. In 2019, she expressed disbelief when asked about the killing of journalists, despite the fact that almost a dozen were killed in Lopez Obrador's first year in office.  "Are they killing journalists?" she said with an expression of disbelief.  'Her actions appear to support impunity ' Piedra comes from a well-known activist family: Her mother founded one of Mexico's first groups to demand answers for families whose relatives had been abducted and disappeared by the government in the 1960s and '70s. But even her mother's group, the Eureka Committee, did not support Piedra's reelection.  "Her actions appear to support impunity for the perpetrators of governmental terrorism, and the government's line of obedience and forgetting" rights abuses, the committee wrote in a statement.  Piedra broke with two important traditions: she was a member of the ruling party up until she was elected to her first term in 2019. The job has usually gone to nonpartisan human rights experts.  And she has openly endorsed and supported government policies and actions. Previous heads of the commission had a more critical relationship with the government.  Piedra also failed to make the final cut for candidates for the post this year in a congressional examination of their qualifications, but was put on the ballot anyway.  That's important because similar evaluation committees will decide who gets on the ballot in judicial reforms that make federal judges stand for election next year. Activists worry that the same kind of favoritism will come into play in the election of judges.  "This decision comes after a selection process in which she (Piedra) wasn't found to be the most qualified," a coalition of rights groups said in a statement. "That reveals the political, partisan considerations that put her onto the ballot."  She also apparently falsified a letter of recommendation; a bishop and human rights activist said a letter she presented to support her reelection had not been signed by him.  Piedra will serve under new President Claudia Sheinbaum, another devoted follower of Lopez Obrador, who took office October 1. On Sheinbaum's first day in office, the army killed six migrants near the Guatemalan border; 10 days later, soldiers and National Guard killed three bystanders in the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo while chasing suspects.  Sheinbaum's third week in office was capped by the killing of a crusading Catholic priest who had been threatened by gangs, and a lopsided encounter in northern Sinaloa state in which soldiers killed 19 drug cartel suspects, but suffered not a scratch themselves. That awakened memories of past human rights abuses, like a 2014 incident in which soldiers killed about a dozen cartel suspects after they had surrendered.  The purportedly leftist government has been quick to criticize human rights groups and activists who expose abuses.  In June, an outspoken volunteer advocate for missing people found an apparent body dumping ground with human remains in Mexico City, embarrassing ruling party officials who had done little to look for such clandestine grave sites. City prosecutors lashed out at her, claiming "the chain of custody" of the evidence had been manipulated, which could lead to charges. 

washington — Former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, one of the country's best-known conservative lawyers who served two Republican presidents and successfully argued on behalf of same-sex marriage, died Wednesday. He was 84. The law firm Gibson Dunn, where Olson had practiced since 1965, announced his death on its website. No cause of death was given. Olson was at the center of some of the biggest cases of recent decades, including a win on behalf of George W. Bush in the 2000 Florida presidential election recount dispute that went before the U.S. Supreme Court. "Even in a town full of lawyers, Ted's career as a litigator was particularly prolific," said Mitch McConnell, the longtime Senate Republican leader. "More importantly, I count myself among so many in Washington who knew Ted as a good and decent man." Bush made Olson his solicitor general, a post the lawyer held from 2001 to 2004. Olson had previously served in the Justice Department as an assistant attorney general during President Ronald Reagan's first term in the early 1980s. During his career, Olson argued 65 cases before the Supreme Court, according to Gibson Dunn. "They weren't just little cases," said Theodore Boutrous, a partner at the law firm who worked with Olson for 37 years. "Many of them were big, blockbuster cases that helped shape our society." Those included the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a 2010 case that eliminated many limits on political giving, and a successful challenge to the Trump administration's decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. "He's the greatest lawyer I've ever worked with or seen in action," said Boutrous, who worked so closely with Olson that they were known at Gibson Dunn as "the two Teds." "He was an entertaining and forceful advocate who could go toe to toe with the Supreme Court justices in a way few lawyers could. They respected him so much." One of Olson's most prominent cases put him at odds with many fellow conservatives. After California adopted a ban on same-sex marriage in 2008, Olson joined forces with former adversary David Boies, who had represented Democrat Al Gore in the presidential election case, to represent California couples seeking the right to marry. During closing arguments, Olson contended that tradition or fears of harm to heterosexual unions were legally insufficient grounds to discriminate against same-sex couples. "It is the right of individuals, not an indulgence to be dispensed by the state," Olson said. "The right to marry, to choose to marry, has never been tied to procreation." A federal judge in California ruled in 2010 that the state's ban violated the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court let that decision stand in 2013. "This is the most important thing I've ever done, as an attorney or a person," Olson later said in a documentary film about the marriage case. He told The Associated Press in 2014 that the marriage case was important because it "involves tens of thousands of people in California, but really millions of people throughout the United States and beyond that to the world." His decision to join the case added a prominent conservative voice to the rapidly shifting views on same-sex marriage across the country. Boies remembered Olson as a giant in legal circles who "left the law, our country, and each of us better than he found us. Few people are a hero to those that know them well. Ted was a hero to those who knew him best." Olson's personal life also intersected tragically with the nation's history when his third wife, well-known conservative legal analyst Barbara Olson, died on September 11, 2001. She was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. His other high-profile clients have included quarterback Tom Brady during the "Deflategate" scandal of 2016 and technology company Apple in a legal battle with the FBI over unlocking the phone of a shooter who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, in 2015. The range of his career and his stature on the national stage were unmatched, said Barbara Becker, managing partner of Gibson Dunn. In a statement, she described Olson as "a titan of the legal profession and one of the most extraordinary and eloquent advocates of our time."

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AFTER Pakistan floated the idea of ‘climate diplomacy’ to tackle cross-border pollution in light of smog which has engulfed vast tracts of India and Pakistan, a US official indicated on the sidelines of COP29 that the White House may throw its weight behind any initiative taken in this regard.

Last month, Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz expressed her government’s intention to approach India to jointly counter the air pollution, which mostly comes from vehicular and industrial emissions, and is exacerbated in winter due to stubble burning.

Talking to Dawn on the sidelines of COP29 in Baku, Ali Zaidi — national climate adviser to the Biden administration — said the US was “100 per cent supportive” of partnership-based approaches to tackle problems that cannot be solved in isolation.

“In the US, we have this thing called the ‘good neighbour rule’, which governs smog. It actually was developed when we witnessed exactly this phenomenon in the US. So you know when it comes to cross-border pollution and cross-border issues, we are 100pc suportive of partnership-based approaches to tackle problems that cannot be solved on their own,” he said in response to a question about smog, which has made life unbearable for millions in Pakistan.

The White House official said the US was already active in the Hindu Kush — often referred to as ‘The Third Pole’ for housing the most glaciers in the world outside the polar regions — to better coordinate the mitigation response, because environmental impacts from glaciers do not isolate themselves to one jurisdiction.

“I think the regional solutions are a necessary complement to this sort of multilateral dialogue,” he said, referring to the COP summit.

The adviser said regional cooperation among relevant parties to address climate change would have more impact than putting “another ornament on a 1,000-page document (COP)”.

In response to a question about the failure of the world to help Pakistan after the 2022 floods caused damages to the tune of $30 billion, he said the global community needed to reinvent its approach to rebuilding from disasters, particularly by investing in pre-disaster mitigation.

According to the White House official, the US took a really long time to reengineer its thinking domestically in terms of building resilience into the recovery.

He favoured approaches that ran “consistent with the financial position” of states that needed to do rebuilding, saying there was a need to mobilise more countries to move more capital to help with adaptation and mitigation in these vulnerable countries.

In response to a question about the loan-laden climate finance framework, he said, “If you are targeting projects that have very clear cash flow and a strong counterparty then debt works just fine.”

He agreed some concessionary capital did need to come in depending on the technological aspect, the richness of the resources and the maturity of the market, while referring to India’s solar projects.

Vulnerable areas need significant grant-based aid, but there is still a need to figure out how to monetise risk reduction associated with adaptation finance and that’s why it was difficult to do. These places are going to soak up more grant-based finance, he said.

Speaking about the Trump-led US administration all set to take over from the Biden administration, he appeared optimistic, saying the states in the US will figure out how to provide the policy support even if the federal government stopped being part of it. About the US, he said it should remain part of the dialogue and be the author of the roadmap that will govern the contours of climate finance for decades to come.

Produced as part of the 2024 Climate Change Media Partnership, a journalism fellowship organised by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and the Stanley Centre for Peace and Security.

Published in Dawn, November 14th, 2024