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Pink Tests Positive for Coronavirus
Superstar singer P!nk revealed that she has tested positive for COVID-19, becoming the latest celebrity to face a battle with coronavirus amid the global pandemic.
“Two weeks ago my three-year-old son, Jameson, and I were showing symptoms of COVID-19. Fortunately, our primary care physician had access to tests and I tested positive,” she wrote in a post that went up on both Twitter and Instagram on Friday night (April 3). “My family was already sheltering at home and continued to do so for the last two weeks following the instruction of our doctor. Just a few days ago, we were re-tested and are now thankfully negative.”
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She then shared her thoughts on coronavirus testing, something that has become a hot button issue during the crisis. In Los Angeles, where Pink, husband Carey Hart and their two children maintain a home on the Westside of the city near the beach, health officials have expressed frustration over the limited testing capacity. Today, L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said the goal next week is to get 10,000 residents tested per day but thus far, slightly more than 20,000 have been tested.
Pink called testing an “absolute travesty,” adding that it is a “failure of our government to not make testing more widely accessible. This illness is serious and real. People need to know that the illness affects the young and old, healthy and unhealthy, rich and poor, and we must make testing free and more widely accessible to protect our children, our families, our friends and our communities.”
To help the process, the 40-year-old announced that she is making a sizable donation of $1 million to support health care workers on the frontlines.
“I am donating $500,000 to the Temple University Hospital Emergency Fund in Philadelphia in honor of my mother, Judy Moore, who worked there for 18 years in the Cardiomyopathy and Heart Transplant Center. Additionally, I am donating $500,000 to the City of Los Angeles Mayor’s Emergency COVID-19 Crisis Fund. THANK YOU to all of our healthcare professionals and everyone in the world who are working so hard to protect our loved ones. You are our heroes! These next two weeks are crucial: please stay home. Please. Stay. Home.”
The metropolises of the world
I look with satisfaction, but with a slight regret, at the metropolises of the world, how much they did and how they want to make more, regretfully, because of Romania, Bucharest, for example,it’s been so many years without doing anything,not even a bypass belt, of course, the projects were, but that’s just the point.
How are Shanghai (China), Cairo (Egypt), Paris (France – Europe City …), Istanbul (Turkey) and more. For example, Istanbul, where Erdogan is (more than 50,000 people were imprisoned from the bloody attempt to overthrow Erdogan’s military power and assassination last year), and yet what cities they are about to do.
And we ? Where we are ? Highways not , cities not (I remember the mistress posed by a Mayor, a provincial city, the park that he did, with European money, of course) … we do not have anything … did that come Romania?!
Down is a site with cities of the world now :
City of Paris (Europe City)
Giant loss to the Rodna Mountains National Park-Romania
The Rodna Mountains National Park, the second largest in the country and the largest protected area in the Eastern Carpathians, has lost, after almost four decades, the “crown”, namely the biosphere reservation status attributed to it in 1979, In Paris, by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – the Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB-UNESCO). The news fell like a lightning.
The news that the Rodna Mountains National Park is no longer a biosphere reserve came last month from the MAB-UNESCO representative in Romania. “I regret that we have lost this status that elevates us above all (of all protected areas – n.r.). I suffer for that. I was reserving the new biosphere, Retezat and the Danube Delta. It was a title. What will happen? Do not lose man or park other than a crown. This is my regret. Nothing can be done because since 1995 it has been agreed how to place the biosphere reserves and how it should look. In Romania, the only one that meets all the requirements of the biosphere is the Danube Delta, “she added. The Rodna Mountains National Park was established by Law 5/2000, and the biosphere reserve, which was Pietrosul Mare, originally stretched over 3300 hectares, after which the Ministry of the Environment extended this status to the entire park. A Biosphere Reserve is a protected natural area which is assigned an international rating and whose characteristics are defined by UNESCO, in accordance with the needs for the purpose of protecting and conserving a natural habitat zone and its specific biological diversity, Program “Man and the Biosphere Program”.
The International Coordination Council of the UNESCO Program “Man and Biosphere” (MAB) met for the first time in 1971, and the concept of Biosphere Reservation emerged in 1974. The program to create a world-wide network of biosphere reserves Was launched two years after the concept proposal. In 1995 the Seville Conference defined for the first time a strategy and developed a statutory framework that supports accepted principles by all states. In the same year, the UNESCO General Conference adopted the Seville Strategy and Framework. In 1932, 183 hectares of alpine hole in the Pietrosu Mare Peak area (2,303 meters) were declared scientific reserve, being the first such reservation in Romania. The importance of the area, but also its beauty, made the protected area later extended to 3,300 hectares. At present there are four scientific reserves in the Rodna Mountains National Park (Pietrosu Mare – 3,547.6 hectares, Piatra Rea – 291 hectares, Corongiş – 614.9 hectares and Bila-Lala – 1.318.2 hectares), plus six reserves (100 hectares), Izhaarele Mihăiesei (61 hectares), Valea Cormaia (50 hectares), Saca Massif (7,8 hectares), Cobăşel Cave (one hectare) and Natural Reserve Izvorul Bătrâna (0.5 hectare). . Over 2,300 hectares of the Rodna Mountains National Park are declared a strictly protected area because of protected areas of great scientific importance, including wild areas where human intervention was extremely low. It is forbidden to carry out any human activities, except for research, education and ecotourism, but also any activity of exploiting natural resources.
Blockchain Can Make Globalization Work
De-globalization is not just about Brexit and rising U.S. protectionism. It is much more than that. It’s a pervasive negative attitude regarding globalization that includes various autonomous and sometimes antagonistic movements, such as anti-Western universalism in Eurasia, anti-federalism in Eastern Europe, Piketty-type neo-Marxism in Western Europe, as well as the Islamic State and the like from the Mediterranean to Central Asia.
What’s at stake here is the post World War II intellectual construct positing that if people from all civilizations find it profitable to be acquainted through exchange, they will become interdependent and identify with mankind as a whole, peacefully.
Globalization is losing ground fast to de-globalization — the view that a globalized economy generates intolerable inequalities between people, classes, nations and civilizations. To combat inequality, the argument goes, governments need to regain their sovereign rights and close their national borders.
Inequality within societies has widened considerably in recent decades. But this is not because of international trade or movements of people; after all, cross-border trade and migration have been happening for thousands of years. So what is fueling it? To answer that question, we must consider what it is about globalization that is generating returns for the wealthy. The reply: the capacity to combine.
A central aspect of globalization is the careful documentation of the knowledge and legal tools needed to combine sovereign rights and property rights over seemingly useless single assets (electronic parts, legal rights to production, and so on) into complex wholes (an iPhone), and appropriate the surplus value they generate.
It is well-organized knowledge documented in clear and accessible ledgers that faithfully describes not only who controls what and where, but also the rules governing potential combinations, which makes it possible for the multiple components from ten countries to be brought together to manufacture one wooden pencil in Germany; it is also the story behind the hundreds of combinations that are required to assemble a mechanical Swiss watch and the thousands that it took to create flight navigation systems in the U.S. or over the world wide internet.
It is also the knowledge that informs us which authority has the sovereign right to regulate exchange, who has the property rights to any given asset and who can use both of these rights to leverage that asset. That is also how we know what can be leveraged and whether a given document can be used to perform over a dozen functions that are required to make complex combinations, including those acting as pledges against investment, collateral for credit, credentials for receiving public services and property rights containers to capture and store the surplus value created by the combinations.
After two decades of fieldwork in some 20 countries with over 1,000 researchers, my organization, the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), has ascertained that 5 billion people — out of 7.3 billion around the world — are not documented in national ledgers or in anything approaching a manner easy to compare, measure or mix on an international scale. Instead, their entrepreneurial talents and legal rights to assets are recorded in hundreds of scattered records and rules systems throughout their countries, making them internationally inaccessible.
The Missing Links in the Legal Chain and Blockchain
This lack of consolidated, documented knowledge — and not trade — is the principal reason for global inequality. The lawyers and politicians who draft and enact the legislation and regulations that govern globalization are dramatically disconnected from those who are supposed to implement the policies at the local level, and those who write up and control the ledgers that embody the social contracts that are respected on the ground. In other words, the legal chain is missing a few crucial links.
Experience in Japan, the United States and Europe shows that putting in place a straightforward legal approach to ensuring equal rights and opportunities can take a century or more. But there is a faster way: treating the missing links as a break not in a legal chain, but in a knowledge chain.
We at the ILD know something about knowledge chains. We spent 15 years adding millions of people to the globalized legal system by bringing the knowledge contained in marginal ledgers into the legal mainstream — all without the help of sophisticated software. But we do not have decades more to spend on this process; we need to bring in billions more people, and fast, if we want globalization to be less unequal. That will require automation.
Over a year ago, the ILD began — with seed funding from the Omidyar Network and the brilliant and patient coaching of Bill Tai from Silicon Valley — to determine whether information technology, and specifically blockchain (the transparent, secure, and decentralized online ledger that underpins Bitcoin), could enable more of the world’s population to get in on globalization. The answer is a resounding yes.
By translating the language of the legal chain into a digital language — an achievement that required us to develop a set of 21 typologies — we have created a system that could do at least four important things:
First, identify, locate and capture any ledger in the world and make it public;
Second, make compliance effective by digitally placing any international contract in the ledgers — local or global — where the reputation of the contracting parties is at stake and commitment is more likely;
Third, we have been able to compress into 34 binary indicators the questions that computers have to ask captured ledgers to determine which provisions should be made in existing legislation to make globalization a more equal process;
And, fourth, use those same 34 indicators to insert into “blockchain smart contracts” the links missing in the legal chain, so that globalized firms and non-globalized collectives can start making fair deals without needing to wait for local rules to adapt to global legislation.
Maybe the language that will help us globalize in equal terms is not English but the binary language of automation.
Journal From Romania 