Quarantine Day #154.
Last night I went to bed at 10:45pm and quickly fell
asleep. I got up 2-3 times during the night, finally waking/getting up at 7:15.
Last night I played 4 games on Chess.com, winning 3
and losing 1. It was only the 1st game where I had the white pieces
and my opponent resigned after his 6th move as he was going to lose
a piece. The other day I bought a new course on the Stonewall Dutch and I was
happy to be able to play it tonight. In the 2nd game my opponent
castled queenside which allowed me to pick up a free pawn and fork both his
knights on the 10th move. He moved the wrong rook and ended up with
his rook off to the side. Two moves later I forked his bishop and queen and he
moved the bishop and lost his queen. He resigned after our 14th move.
The 3rd game didn’t match any real opening and I soon had the
advantage. At one point I had a mate in 3 but missed it and instead gave up a
rook. I ended up holding on pretty well but I lost on time. I was able to play
the Stonewall Dutch again in the last game and I had the advantage from start
to finish and checkmated him on the 41st move.
I talked to the portero and learned there are 5 doormen
working our apt complex. Two work the day shift, 2 work the night shift and one
has the day off.
I left the apt at 9:30 and did my typical 45-minute
walk. I then stopped at the small grocery store and purchased 3 bags of milk.
The global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic approached
775,000, after a hopeful start to the week in the U.S., which saw the lowest
daily number of new cases in nearly eight weeks.
The U.S. logged 35,112 new coronavirus cases on Monday,
according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the fewest since June
24, when it logged 34,935. Sunday’s count of 42,048 new cases had been the
lowest since June 29.
Nearly 22 million people have been infected world-wide,
according to Johns Hopkins data, and 774,160 have died. In the U.S., some 5.443
million have been infected and 170,548 have died, Johns Hopkins figures show.
Less than half of
American adults say they would get a government-approved coronavirus vaccine if
one becomes widely available, new data from the NBC News/SurveyMonkey
Weekly Tracking Poll show, with
the majority unsure about getting the vaccine or saying they're ruling it out
entirely.
Prime
Minister Jacinda Ardern on Tuesday slapped down Donald Trump's talk of an
out-of-control coronavirus "surge"
in New Zealand as "patently wrong."
She
expressed dismay after the U.S. president exaggerated the new virus outbreak in
New Zealand as a "huge surge" that Americans would do well to avoid.
"Anyone who is following,"
Ardern said, "will quite easily see that New Zealand's nine cases in a day
does not compare to the United States' tens of thousands."
"Obviously, it's patently
wrong," she added of Mr. Trump's remarks, in unusually blunt criticism
from an American ally.
New Zealand had been hailed as a global
success story after eradicating
local transmission of the virus and Ardern was lauded as the
"anti-Trump."
But the recent discovery of a cluster in Auckland forced the
country's largest city back into lockdown.
A sprawling
report released Tuesday by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent
three years investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election laid out
an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin
officials and other Russians, including at least one intelligence officer and
others tied to the country’s spy services.
The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, drew to a close one of the
highest-profile congressional investigations in recent memory and could be the last word
from an official government inquiry about the expansive Russian campaign to
sabotage the 2016 election.
It provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary
set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr.
Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the
Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were
eager for the help from an American adversary.
President Donald Trump inveighed
against mail-in voting at a White House event on women's suffrage – where he
said the practice would be such a 'disaster' it might force a redo of the
November election.
COVID-19 has now struck mink farms in the
United States, too. Yesterday, roughly 10 days after farmers in Utah reported a
rash of mink deaths, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed the SARS-CoV-2 virus had infected the weasellike mammals, which
are raised for their fur.
Infections of mink have already been documented in other countries,
including Denmark, the Netherlands, and Spain. In June, authorities in these
countries gassed hundreds of thousands of animals, concerned that the mink
could harbor the virus indefinitely, enabling infections to persist among farm
animals—and potentially spread to humans.
The
Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee made
criminal referrals of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and Sam Clovis to federal prosecutors in
2019, passing along their suspicions that the men may have misled the committee
during their testimony, an official familiar with the matter told NBC News.
The official confirmed reports in the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, which reported on the matter last week. A
criminal referral to the Justice Department means Congress believes a matter
warrants investigation for potential violation of the law.
The committee detailed its concerns in a letter to
the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C., in June 2019, the official
said.
Former
Acting Attorney General Sally
Yates excoriated President Donald
Trump for what she called a relentless attack on democracy in a
blistering speech at the Democratic
National Convention on Tuesday, urging voters to unite behind former
Vice President Joe Biden.
Yates,
who was abruptly
fired by Trump in January 2017 when she refused to defend his
executive order that sought to ban travelers from seven predominantly Muslim
countries, called the move just the start of his efforts to undermine “democratic
institutions and countless dedicated public servants.”
“From
the moment President Trump took office, he’s used his position to defend
himself rather than our country,” Yates said Tuesday. “Rather than standing up
to Vladimir Putin, he fawns over a dictator who is still trying to interfere in
our elections.”
Despite
Donald Trump’s attempts to quash You’ve
Been Trumped Too, my film will finally be available to all
Americans this week after a four-year legal battle. “There could hardly be a
more urgent or relevant film than this,” wrote one
of Britain’s leading reviewers, astonished by the revelations in the
documentary. At long last Americans can finally decide for themselves.
The muzzling of You’ve Been Trumped Too is a warning that the
free speech we take for granted, especially in the United States, is always
vulnerable to suppression by the rich and powerful. Though You’ve Been Trumped Too was
completely cleared by libel lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic, just
the threat of
court action by the Trump Organization put a chill through distributors,
publicists, and media organizations that are normally champions of free speech.
The saga
is just the latest chapter in my own 10-year journey of trying to hold Donald
Trump to account for his actions. As a former BBC journalist, I took it as a
compliment when a New
York Times reviewer commented that I “can’t be brushed off.” But it has also meant
becoming caught up in the president’s Twitter storms, fending off legal threats
at every turn, and being the subject of a violent arrest by a police force
which bent to Donald Trump’s tune.
Despite former
president Bill Clinton's diminished role in the Democratic Party, he made
a "cogent argument" against President Trump's handing of the coronavirus pandemic on the second night of the Democratic
National Convention, "Fox News
Sunday" anchor Chris
Wallace said Tuesday.
In the lunchtime news
it was reported that so far 7,000 Colombian healthcare workers have contracted the
Coronavirus.
We had some more rain
in the afternoon.
I had a nap of at least
an hour.
I beat Teresa in parcheesi
today 5 games to 4.
My friend Glenn is
moving from Sabaneta to Envigado. It appears he will be about 7 blocks away but
not as the bird flies.
Per Johns Hopkins it
appears that at least worldwide the number of new coronavirus cases has finally
leveled off.
The
US has 5,389,740 ð 5,436,026 ð 5,485,220 coronavirus cases
with 169,600+ ð 170,100+ ð 171,300+ deaths.
Per
Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 468,332 ð 476,660 ð 489,122 cases with 15,619 deaths. Medellin has 35,412 ð 36,055 ð 36,956 cases, an increase of 901 from August 17th
to 18th. Envigado has a total of 1,992 cases, an increase of 40 from
August 17th to 18th.
Joke of
the day
There are so
many coronavirus jokes out there it’s now a pundemic.
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