Tuesday Reads

Good Morning!!

Can things get any worse? I suppose they always can. But I don’t know how much more horrible news I can handle. I know I’ve said that before, and I just keep plugging along. But It’s not easy. It helps to know that I’m not alone. I know everyone who reads and/or comments on this blog probably feels this way too.

Terrible natural disasters and mass shootings are nothing new. What’s different now is Trump as “president.” That makes every disaster so much worse. Everything he touches turns to shit.

At least when Obama was president, we knew that someone stable, serious, and intelligent was in charge. We knew he would say the right things after a horrible event. We knew that he would be meeting with his cabinet and advisers to find solutions for problems and that he would go to the scenes of tragedies to comfort people who were desperate and grieving. Trump only cares about how events affect him and his fragile ego.

by Alfredo Protti

This morning, as Trump walked to his helicopter to leave for Puerto Rico, he again criticized the people there who are struggling to survive and lied about his administration’s failure to help people in desperate need.

USA Today:

As he took off Tuesday for Puerto Rico, President Trump defended the federal response to the hurricane that ravaged the island two weeks ago.

“In Texas and in Florida we get an A-plus,” he said, citing recovery efforts from earlier hurricanes on the U.S. mainland. “And I’ll tell you what, I think we’ve done just as good in Puerto Rico, and it’s actually a much tougher situation.” [….]

On Sunday, Trump described critics of his government’s response to the humanitarian disaster “politically motivated ingrates.”  Yet some residents took issue with Trump’s tone. “People need water, gasoline and tarps, without the politics,” resident Liza Minnelli Pacheco told USA TODAY.

Trump continued to attack the mayor of San Juan, Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, suggesting that the people of Puerto Rico need to “give us more help,” by “driving trucks.”

Trump made it clear that all he cares about is that officials in Puerto Rico praise him for the government’s response, regardless of how bad has been.

He also addressed the mass shootings in Las Vegas, which resulted in the deaths of 59 people so far and injuries to more than 500 others. He characterized the police response as “a miracle,” and claimed that the shooter was quickly taken out. From Shareblue:

TRUMP: Look, we have a tragedy. What happened in Las Vegas was in many ways a miracle. The police department has done such an incredible job. And we’ll be talking about gun laws in as time goes by.

The facts:

Dancer resting, Edgar Degas

According to the timeline from the Las Vegas police department, it took nearly two hours from the time the gunman started killing people from his hotel room for police to enter the room. When they entered, they found the gunman had already killed himself.

While law enforcement on the ground certainly acted heroically, the police were badly outgunned by the sniper who reportedly had more than a dozen high-powered rifles in his room. He also used  tripods and scopes for his killing spree.

We’ll see what happens on Trump’s PR visit. My guess is he won’t go to any of the most troubled areas or try to comfort any agonized survivors of Hurricane Maria.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t link The National Review, but I found this article on the Las Vegas shooter interesting: Based on the early reports, the Las Vegas shooting is very, very strange. I’m not going to quote from it, because you need to read the whole thing. You might also want to check out the Twitter timeline of Rukmini Callimachi (recommended in the article), who writes about ISIS for The New York Times.

Another good piece to check out Splinter: Every Member of Congress Who Took Money From the NRA and Tweeted ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ to Las Vegas.

In other news, there are some developments in the Russia investigation.

Bloomberg: Mueller Tasks an Adviser With Getting Ahead of Pre-Emptive Pardons.

U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has a distinctly modern problem. The president, judging by his tweets, could try to pardon people in his circle even before prosecutors charge anyone with a crime.

The Orange Trees, Gustave Caillebotte

Mueller’s all-star team of prosecutors, with expertise in money laundering and foreign bribery, has an answer to that. He’s Michael Dreeben, a bookish career government lawyer with more than 100 Supreme Court appearances under his belt.

Acting as Mueller’s top legal counsel, Dreeben has been researching past pardons and determining what, if any, limits exist, according to a person familiar with the matter. Dreeben’s broader brief is to make sure the special counsel’s prosecutorial moves are legally airtight. That could include anything from strategizing on novel interpretations of criminal law to making sure the recent search warrant on ex-campaign adviser Paul Manafort’s home would stand up to an appeal.

“He’s seen every criminal case of any consequence in the last 20 years,” said Kathryn Ruemmler of Latham & Watkins LLP, who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama. “If you wanted to do a no-knock warrant, he’d be a great guy to consult with to determine if you were exposing yourself.”

Click on the link to read more about Dreeben and his expertise on presidential pardons.

Politico: Hundreds of White House emails sent to third Kushner family account.

White House officials have begun examining emails associated with a third and previously unreported email account on Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s private domain, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Hundreds of emails have been sent since January from White House addresses to accounts on the Kushner family domain, these people said. Many of those emails went not to Kushner’s or Ivanka Trump’s personal addresses but to an account they both had access to and shared with their personal household staff for family scheduling….

The morning paper Leon Kroll (1884-1974)

The existence of additional accounts on the family domain beyond the two personal accounts used by Kushner and Ivanka Trump and reported earlier raises new questions about the extent of personal email use by the couple during their time as White House aides. Their use of private email accounts for White House business also raises concerns about the security of potentially sensitive government documents, which have been forwarded to private accounts.

The Washington Post: Trump’s company had more contact with Russia during campaign, according to documents turned over to investigators.

Associates of President Trump and his company have turned over documents to federal investigators that reveal two previously unreported contacts from Russia during the 2016 campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

In one case, Trump’s personal attorney and a business associate exchanged emails weeks before the Republican National Convention about the lawyer possibly traveling to an economic conference in Russia that would be attended by top Russian financial and government leaders, including President Vladi­mir Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence.

In the other case, the same Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, received a proposal in late 2015 for a Moscow residential project from a company founded by a billionaire who once served in the upper house of the Russian parliament, these people said. The previously unreported inquiry marks the second proposal for a Trump-branded Moscow project that was delivered to the company during the presidential campaign and has since come to light.

Read the rest at the WaPo.

The Fisherman, Frank Richards, 1890

Finally, a long read from Julia Ioffe at The Atlantic: Did Manafort Use Trump to Curry Favor With a Putin Ally?

On the evening of April 11, 2016, two weeks after Donald Trump hired the political consultant  Paul Manafort to lead his campaign’s efforts to wrangle Republican delegates, Manafort emailed his old lieutenant Konstantin Kilimnik, who had worked for him for a decade in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

“I assume you have shown our friends my media coverage, right?” Manafort wrote.

“Absolutely,” Kilimnik responded a few hours later from Kiev. “Every article.”

“How do we use to get whole,” Manafort asks. “Has OVD operation seen?”

According to a source close to Manafort, the initials “OVD” refer to Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and one of Russia’s richest men. The source also confirmed that one of the individuals repeatedly mentioned in the email exchange as an intermediary to Deripaska is an aide to the oligarch.

The emails were provided to The Atlantic on condition of anonymity. They are part of a trove of documents turned over by lawyers for Trump’s presidential campaign to investigators looking into the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election. A source close to Manafort confirmed their authenticity. Excerpts from these emails were firstreported by The Washington Post, but the full text of these exchanges, provided to The Atlantic, shows that Manafort attempted to leverage his leadership role in the Trump campaign to curry favor with a Russian oligarch close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Manafort was deeply in debt, and did not earn a salary from the Trump campaign.

Click on the link to read the rest of this interesting article.

That’s all the news I can stomach writing about today. What stories are you following?

Thursday Reads: Bad Mood Blogging

Good Afternoon!!

I’m in a bad mood today. Actually, I’ve been feeling this way for a few days. I’ve got some kind of nasty cold, and I keep falling asleep. Nothing in the news seems to interest me., but I still blog because that’s what I do, and if you want to success in blogging you need to be constant, that’s why I learned from resources online as the Blogging Industries – Skyrocket Your Blogging Paycheck and many others.

Am I really supposed to care that Hugh Hefner died? Well I don’t. I found this article at the Guardian that reflects my attitude toward him: I called Hugh Hefner a pimp, he threatened to sue. But that’s what he was, by Suzanne Moore.

Long ago, in another time, I got a call from a lawyer.Hugh Hefner was threatening a libel action against me and the paper I worked for at the time, for something I had written. Journalists live in dread of such calls. I had called Hefner a pimp. To me this was not even controversial; it was self-evident. And he was just one of the many “libertines” who had threatened me with court action over the years.

It is strange that these outlaws have recourse in this way, but they do. But at the time, part of me wanted my allegation to be tested in a court of law. What a case it could have made. What a hoot it would have been to argue whether a man who procured, solicited and made profits from women selling sex could be called a pimp. Of course, central to Playboy’s ideology is the idea that women do this kind of thing willingly; that at 23 they want nothing more than to jump octogenarians.

Now that he’s dead, the disgusting old sleaze in the smoking jacket is being spoken of as some kind of liberator of women. Kim Kardashian is honoured to have been involved. Righty ho.

I don’t really know which women were liberated by Hefner’s fantasies. I guess if you aspired to be a living Barbie it was as fabulous as it is to be in Donald Trump’s entourage. Had we gone to court, I would like to have heard some of the former playmates and bunnies speak up in court – because over the years they have.

The accounts of the “privileged few” who made it into the inner sanctum of the 29-room Playboy mansion as wives/girlfriends/bunny rabbits are quite something. In Hefner’s petting zoo/harem/brothel, these interchangeable blondes were put on a curfew. They were not allowed to have friends to visit. And certainly not boyfriends. They were given an “allowance”. The big metal gates on the mansion that everyone claimed were to keep people out of this “nirvana” were described by one-time Hefner “girlfriend no 1” Holly Madison in her autobiography thus: “I grew to feel it was meant to lock me in.”

Please go read the rest if, like me, you are disgusted by those who are lionizing Hefner.

Am I supposed to care about the latest GOP pipe dream–cutting taxes for the rich on the backs of the rest of us? I think the headline on this USA Today story by Heidi Przbyla in meant to be sarcastic: Trump’s tax plan could actually benefit wealthy people like him.

President Trump is making one thing clear about his plan to cut taxes: It won’t be a windfall for the richest Americans, including him.

“It’s not good for me, believe me,” Trump said in a speech unveiling the tax reform blueprint on Wednesday.

“We’re targeting relief to working families,” Trump said in Indianapolis. “We will make sure benefits are focused on the middle class, the working men and women, not the highest-income earners.”

A lot would have to change before that’s true.

Trump’s initial plan – backed by Republican leadership on Capitol Hill  – would eliminate the individual Alternative Minimum Tax and estate taxes. It would also tax so-called “pass through” businesses at 25%.

Both of these changes could greatly benefit Trump and his family’s business empire.

Read more at the link. It’s absolutely amazing how stupid Trump and his gang think the people who elected him are.

One thing Trump’s tax “plan” does is end the federal deduction for state and local taxes. The Boston Globe reports: Mass., other blue states are in crosshairs of GOP tax plan.

To offset the huge loss in revenue from his proposed tax cuts, Trump and GOP congressional leaders want to eliminate widely used personal income-tax deductions for state and local income taxes and property taxes, among others.

Massachusetts ranks fifth among states where residents would see the largest average federal tax increase if the deductions are scrapped, behind Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and California.

Homeowners in Massachusetts and throughout New England pay steep property tax bills to support local town government, in addition to their state income taxes. Property taxes are especially high in cities and towns with hefty real-estate values and heavy demand by residents for high-performing public schools, such as Boston’s suburbs.

Being able to deduct those state and local taxes on annual federal tax returns reduces the sting. Some Massachusetts officials quickly opposed eliminating the deductions, saying it would hit many on all rungs of the economic ladder.

“It would have a profound negative impact on working-class families, those struggling to afford to stay in our communities or send their kids to school,” said Mayor Joseph Curtatone of Somerville. “Is their intent to create fiscal disaster?”

One thing I do still care about is that the “president” is loony tunes. Did you see him last night telling the press that “we have the votes” for the health care bill, but the vote had to be put off because one Senator is in the hospital?

USA Today: Trump cites support for health care bill from mystery senator in hospital.

Even though Senate Republicans abandoned plans for a health care vote this week, President Trump says he’s got it in the bag — including support from an unnamed senator that triggered a mystery on Wednesday.

“With one Yes vote in hospital & very positive signs from Alaska and two others (McCain is out), we have the HCare Vote, but not for Friday!” Trump tweeted Wednesday, one day after Senate Republicans’ last-ditch proposal to unwind the Affordable Care Act collapsed.

Yet it was not immediately clear whether any senators are currently in the hospital. Sen. Thad Cochran is recuperating from what his office referred to as treatment for a urological issue back home in Mississippi, but, as he later pointed out in a tweet, he isn’t in the hospital.

Later on Wednesday, the president again spoke of a senator in the hospital while talking to reporters.

“He can’t vote because he’s in the hospital,” Trump said. “We have two other votes that are coming and we will have them, but the problem is we can’t have them by Friday because reconciliation ends on Friday. So we’ll have to do it in January or February.”

WTF?! And “journalists” are just laughing this off. Trump needs an immediate MRI and psychological evaluation. This man is not well, and he controls the nuclear arsenal. This is not a joke!

I also still care about all the people who are suffering the aftereffects of the September hurricanes, including our own J.J. Does Trump care? That would be a definite “no.” Check this out at The Hill: Trump administration requiring Puerto Rico evacuees to pay transportation costs.

People evacuated by the U.S. from hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico must sign promissory notes ensuring they fully repay transportation costs to the Defense Department, according to the State Department.

Evacuees from Dominica and other countries hit by the hurricanes also must sign the promissory notes, though their repayments would go through the State Department.

Marketwatch first reported that the evacuees from Puerto Rico were required to put up the promissory notes.

The notes fall under a longstanding but discretionary policy meant to ensure that evacuees pay transportation costs, which are based on “the price of the last commercial one-way, full-fare (not discounted) economy ticket prior to the crisis.”

How are rescue efforts going in Puerto Rico? It’s hard to tell, but this from Bloomberg isn’t good: Mountains of Aid Are Languishing on the Docks in Puerto Rico.

Thousands of cargo containers bearing millions of emergency meals and other relief supplies have been piling up on San Juan’s docks since Saturday. The mountains of materiel may not reach storm survivors for days.

Distributors for big-box companies and smaller retailers are unloading 4,000 20-foot containers full of necessities like food, water and soap this week at a dock in Puerto Rico’s capital operated by Crowley Maritime Corp. In the past few days, Tote Maritime’s terminal has taken the equivalent of almost 3,000. Even with moves to ease shipping to the island, like the Trump administration’s waiver of the Jones Act on Thursday, the facilities have become choke points in the effort to aid survivors of Hurricane Maria.

“There are plenty of ships and plenty of cargo to come into the island,” said Mark Miller, a spokesman for Crowley, based in Jacksonville, Florida. “From there, that’s where the supply chain breaks down — getting the goods from the port to the people on the island who need them.”

About 30 minutes before Wednesday’s 7 p.m. curfew, there were few signs of life at the Crowley port besides circling bats. The ground was muddy and the chain-link fence protecting the containers listed to the side. Without street or traffic lights, the area was dark, except for one illuminated crane holding a yellow container waiting to be set down in a row of its blue and red fellows.

Read the rest at the link.

That’s all I have for you today. What stories are you following?

Tuesday Reads: Puerto Rico’s Humanitarian Crisis

Good Morning!

The image above is from a flyover of Puerto Rico. You can see more on a twitter feed from NYT Primatology. For the past few days I’ve been dealing with a cold that is so draining it has destroyed my obsession with Trump news. The one thing I can still work up outrage over is what is happening in Puerto Rico. Of course that’s about Trump too. He obviously doesn’t give a shit about PR because he’s a motherfucking white supremacist.

BBC News: Does Trump care about Puerto Rico’s hurricane victims?

A quick glance at Donald Trump’s Twitter feed over the weekend – arguably the president’s preferred method of communication – gave no hint of the unfolding humanitarian crisis.

Instead, his attention was firmly focused on whether or not American footballers knelt or stood during the national anthem.

After he noticed he was being criticized for ignoring the U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico, Trump sent a series of cruel and unfeeling tweets.

This from a man who is blatantly profiting from the office he holds and who has declared bankruptcy six times to avoid paying what he owed to banks.

Back to the BBC article:

…when compared to Mr Trump’s response to the two hurricanes which preceded Maria, there does appear to be an imbalance.

Mr Trump sent at least one tweet out a day about Texas for a week after Hurricane Harvey barrelled into its coastline on 26 August, causing great damage and leaving at least 47 people dead.

By 2 September, he had asked Congress for $7.8bn (£6bn) as an initial amount to help rebuild the area.

Mr Trump also visited Texas twice within a week.

In the days after Hurricane Irma hit Florida on 10 September, Mr Trump sent a flurry of tweets – although not as many as with Texas – and visited the area within five days.

So far, no date has been set for a visit to Puerto Rico, although one is planned.

The wreckage from Hurricane Maria in Arecibo, P.R., on Saturday. Many Americans don’t realize that Puerto Ricans are also citizens. Credit Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

The Washington Post: Trump declares Puerto Rico is in ‘deep trouble’ as questions mount about his commitment.

Monday night’s tweets were the first from Trump about Puerto Rico since Wednesday, when the hurricane made landfall and Trump declared “we are with you.”

Power remains out on much of the island, and officials say they are facing numerous logistical challenges, including damage to airports and ports. But FEMA says its response has been robust, including the deployment of 10,000 federal workers….

Trump’s lack of public attention to Puerto Rico has been striking in part because of the major focus he put on helping Texas and Florida recover from earlier hurricanes, a factor many analysts have cited in explaining Trump’s recent uptick in his job approval numbers.

During a briefing Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was peppered with questions about Trump’s priorities, including his focus on Puerto Rico.

She noted that Trump had dispatched Brock Long, the FEMA administrator, and Tom Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser, to assess the damage in Puerto Rico.

“The federal response has been anything but slow,” Sanders said. “In fact, there’s been an unprecedented push through of billions of dollars in federal assistance that the administration has fought for. … And once we have a greater insight into the full assessment of damage, then we’ll be able to determine what additional funds are needed.”

Really? People have no electricity, water, or food, but they are still “assessing the damage” days after the storm hit? It looks to me as if Trump has another Katrina on his hands. I need to see the evidence that he’s actually doing something before I buy the administration’s happy talk.

I don’t know if this is for real or not, but it sure sounds like it:

https://twitter.com/RogueSNRadvisor/status/912692343685316608

ABC News: Water and some food scarce as Puerto Rico emerges from storm.

Supermarkets are gradually re-opening in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico but the situation is far from normal and many customers are going home disappointed.

Most food stores and restaurants remain closed. That is largely because power is out for most of the island and few have generators or enough diesel to power them. The shops that were open Monday had long lines outside and vast empty shelves where they once held milk, meat and other perishables. Drinking water was nowhere to be found.

Mercedes Caro shook her head in frustration as she emerged from the SuperMax in the Condado neighborhood of San Juan with a loaf of white bread, cheese and bananas.

“There is no water and practically no food,” she said. “Not even spaghetti.”

Maria Perez waited outside a Pueblo supermarket in a nearby part of San Juan, hoping to buy some coffee, sugar and maybe a little meat to cook with a gas stove that has enough propane for about a week more. “We are in a crisis,” she said. “Puerto Rico is destroyed.”

Jose Garcia Vicente holds a piece of plumbing he picked up, as he shows his destroyed home, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, in Aibonito, Puerto Rico on Sep 25, 2017. (Photo: AP/Gerald Herbert)
Read more at http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/-put-people-above-debt—puerto-rico-official-urges-amid-maria-s-devastation-9252902

Bloomberg: ‘This Is Chaos’: Sweltering Puerto Rico on Day 6 Without Power.

A nursing home in San Juan made desperate pleas for diesel as its power generator ran low. An elderly man was carried out on a stretcher after going a week without dialysis. Children wearing nothing but diapers camped out on balconies to stay cool.

Hurricane Maria, which smashed into the island six days ago and devastated its power grid, couldn’t have come at a worse time. This is Puerto Rico’s hottest season of the year — and virtually no one has air conditioning. Crews have arrived to begin the arduous task of resurrecting what was already an aging and long-neglected electricity system. But that’ll take weeks, if not months — meaning more sleepless nights for those like Juan Bautista Gonzalez.

“It’s brutal,” said Gonzalez, a 36-year-old carpenter who was sitting on a stoop in Old San Juan, rubbing his forehead in frustration. “No one can sleep. I spend all night tossing and turning. This is chaos.”

The destruction that Maria exacted upon Puerto Rico’s fragile grid when it slammed ashore as a Category 4 storm is unprecedented. More than half of the territory’s towers may be down, at least 90 percent of its distribution lines damaged or destroyed and almost all overhead transmission lines affected, according to the American Public Power Association and Energy Department. All told, Maria could result in $40 billion to $85 billion in insured losses across the Caribbean.

In the 32 years that National Guard brigadier general Wendul G. Hagler II has served, he said, “It’s about as large a scale damage as I have ever seen.” Just before Maria hit, Hagler visited the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the majority of homes and businesses also remain without power and face a slow recovery.

Miguel Olivera and his wife Diana Aponte show a picture from his time in service.

CNN: Puerto Rican combat vet, down to last insulin dose, says Hurricane Maria worse than war.

Miguel Olivera, now 75, survived combat and being impacted by Agent Orange in Cambodia as the US waged war against the Viet Cong decades ago.

Now, at home in Puerto Rico, he is facing another threat to his life — a fridge without power.

He needs insulin to survive but his last vial is sitting, at risk of spoiling, in that refrigerator that can no longer keep it cool.

His town, Aguas Buenas, in the mountains above San Juan, was left tattered by Hurricane Maria. The lush tropical foliage is gone — as if a massive lawnmower came from the sky and shredded it all.

Olivera and his wife Diana Aponte, 73, sheltered from the storm inside their home — it’s built on concrete stilts sunk into the hillside, and Aponte feared it would slide into the ravine.

Water came through the shutters as the wind howled outside, and at one point the couple huddled on the living room floor, prepared to die together.

“The hurricane is worse” than combat, Olivera says.

The Daily Beast: Even the National Guard Can’t Communicate in Puerto Rico.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—Master Sgt. Shaun Withers was nervously waiting in his office at the 165th Airlift Wing of the Air National Guard’s strip in Savannah, Georgia, on Sunday morning. Outside a C-130 loaded up with supplies for Puerto Rico also waited in the dark.

“We’re ramping up, today is day one,” Withers said, adding the flight had been postponed several times.

Just then the phone rang, and Withers jumped up.

“It’s a go! Wheels up at 0100 hours!”

It was the fifth and last flight for that day.

“Our first flights brought back 103 members of Puerto Rico’s National Guard, evacuated before Maria hit,” Withers said. “They had not heard from their families since.”

National Guard personnel evacuate Toa Ville resident Luis Alberto Martinez after the passing of Hurricane Maria, in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico, Friday, September 22, 2017.

This is an important article, and I can’t do it justice with excerpts. Please read the whole thing. Here’s just a bit more:

“Last night we slept in the operations room,” said Capt. Jeff Rutkowski, sitting in a small break room with five other members of his unit, the 115th Fighter Wing Air National Guard from Madison, Wisconsin.

They’ve been brought in to fix areas left without communication.

“There’s no communication, that’s the problem,” Rutkowski said, adding “we’re innovators, we bridge the networks.”

Without working cellphones or the internet, no one could coordinate. The newly arrived teams frantically borrowed each others’ vehicles to go find out what was going on, where they should go, who they should report to, what was being planned, who was doing what, establish a simple meeting.

No internet meant, too, there was no way of knowing what were urgent priorities in San Juan and throughout the country.

“I’ve never experienced work without being able to communicate,” said an exasperated Michelle Alvarez-Rea, a public affairs officer in charge of multiple media requests.

But Trump is too busy shoring up his base with racist rallies and tweets to deal with this crisis. We’ve got to get rid of him!

One more from The Guardian: Puerto Rico is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. Where is the media?

Hurricane Maria – the most powerful hurricane to hit Puerto Rico in 89 years – devastated the island when it hit early Wednesday morning. If the US government doesn’t act swiftly, 3.5 million people will face a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

Currently, large swathes of the island have no water, power or cell phone coverage. An incredible 1,360 out of 1,600 cellphone towers are down. According to some reports, it could take four to six months for electricity to be restored. Hospitals and other emergency services are struggling to cope.

As Maria made landfall, many Puerto Ricans on the US mainland and elsewhere scrambled to get news of their loved ones on the island. Most, if not all of us, turned to social media. Why? Because we couldn’t trust major media outlets in the United States to give us in-depth coverage of the devastation. Our disasters, we figured, just don’t rate high enough in their eyes.

Sadly – we were proven right. The destruction in Puerto Rico received relatively little media attention compared to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Traditional broadcasters deployed a meager team of reporters. Even the Hispanic broadcasters on the mainland proved wanting in their coverage.

That’s why we relied on social media to relay vital information to family and friends. We used it to tell them which gas stations were open, which markets were still selling food and which banks still had cash. Social media became our life line.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump – usually very active on social media himself – was silent throughout the weekend on Puerto Rico. Instead of standing with those suffering, he chose instead to pick a fight with the NFL. Judging by his actions so far, few trust that he will do anything to bring attention to the devastation on the island, let alone address it in a meaningful way.

Read more at the link.

That’s all I’ve got. What else is happening? Plenty, I know. What stories are you following?