WZBC 90.3 FM Newton

Chuck Collins: Coronavirus Health and Economic Crisis Exacerbates U.S. Inequality; Collin Rees: Seeking Pandemic Relief, Oil Industry Lobbies for Billions in Federal Bailout Funds; Jaisal Noor: On May Day, Workers Demand Safe Workplaces and Fair Wages; Bob Nixon: This Week’s Under-reported News Summary.

Journalism is a lot like police work: It often requires shoe-leather reporting and showing up where things are happening. A pandemic makes that more difficult. When the ability to move around and investigate firsthand is hampered, lots of misinformation can be propagated by governments seeking to manage and control information. Ahead of Sunday’s World Press Freedom Day, we spoke with Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, about the role of the media in the current pandemic and how different countries are trying to restrict its work.

Ttech competitors Google and Facebook have collaborated in creating a tracking app. It allows users to voluntarily share data through Bluetooth Low Energy transmissions and approved apps from health organizations. It would keep extensive data on phones that have been in close proximity with each other. Official apps from public health authorities will get access to this data, and users who download them can report if they’ve been diagnosed with COVID-19. The system will also alert people who download them to whether they were in close contact with an infected person. Our guest is Senior Staff Attorney Adam Schwartz from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Our failure to investigate, and directly address, the origins of COVID-19 almost certainly guarantees our failure to protect ourselves from future, possibly even more deadly, pandemics. Thousands of viruses and other pathogens, such as the bat coronavirus and the avian flu, are being collected in the wild by Chinese, U.S. and international researchers. These viruses are then analyzed and weaponized in secretive, accident-prone labs like the Wuhan Virology Lab in China or the U.S. Army Lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Coronaviruses typically have a narrow host range, infecting one or just a few species, such as bats. However, gene engineers can manipulate viruses such as COVID-19 for “gain of function” to enable them to infect other species (i.e. human cells), interfere with immune system response and readily spread through the air. A disturbing number of these so-called “dual use” Biowarfare/Biodefense labs have experienced leaks, accidents and thefts over the past three decades.

Today we feature Israeli historian and activist Jeff Halper in conversation with Palestinian scholar and activist, Awad Abdulfattah, who have been working together in a group developing a plan for a one state democratic civil society in all of historic Palestine. The webinar was moderated by Michael Spath, director of the Indiana Center for Peace in the Middle East, who begins the conversation.

Beasley is Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme. He warns the Security Council: a famine of “Biblical proportions” is developing in the 2020 pandemic. Then California author Richard Heinberg works through the fragile food chain and resilient action. As Heinberg points out, In many respects the pandemic highlights long-standing food problems. If we are to avert not just this food crisis but the next one as well, deeper changes to the current system are needed. We must redesign the relationships between food producers, processors, retailers, and consumers so as to shorten supply chains and create more slack in the system.