Cincinnati elects its first Asian American mayor, Aftab Pureval

Aftab Pureval won Cincinnati’s race for mayor on Tuesday, according to unofficial results, making the 39-year-old lawyer the first Asian American elected to lead the city.

Pureval defeated David Mann, a city councilor and fellow Democrat who previously served as mayor and in Congress, 66 percent to 34 percent with all precincts counted, according to unofficial results from the Hamilton County Board of Elections. Pureval will succeed term-limited Mayor John Cranley, who is seeking Ohio’s Democratic nomination for governor in 2022.

"Words can’t express how honored and excited I am to be the next Mayor of Cincinnati," Pureval said in a tweet late Tuesday. "Tonight, we made history! Let’s get to work!"

A son of immigrants, the half-Indian, half-Tibetan Pureval is viewed as a rising political star in the state. He was elected clerk of courts in 2016 after running ads with a stuffed duck quacking his name — “Aftab!” — in a campaign reminiscent of the old Aflac insurance commercials.

Pureval, a former federal prosecutor and in-house attorney for Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, was a prized recruit for a competitive House seat in 2018 but lost to Rep. Steve Chabot, a long-entrenched Republican. Before launching his mayoral campaign, he expressed interest in running for the seat that Republican Sen. Rob Portman is giving up next year. During their final debate last month, Pureval pledged to serve a full four-year term as mayor.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/cincinnati-elects-its-first-asian-american-mayor-aftab-pureval-n1282921
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Some GOOD news out of Ohio!

Leading athletics coach Rana Reider to be investigated over sexual misconduct claims

One of the world’s leading track and field coaches is to be investigated by the US Center for SafeSport after multiple complaints of sexual misconduct were made against him, the Guardian can reveal.

Rana Reider has earned a glittering reputation in the sport after guiding several Olympic and world champions to glory, including the Tokyo 2020 Olympic 200m gold medallist Andre de Grasse and the world triple jump champion Christian Taylor. The American also trains numerous other elite athletes, including Britain’s Adam Gemili and Daryll Neita, from his Florida-based Tumbleweed Track Club.

However, the 51-year-old American’s behaviour off the track is to be scrutinised by the US Center for SafeSport organisation, a powerful and independent body that handles investigations and complaints into abuse and misconduct in Olympic sports.

The Guardian has also learned that the allegations against Reider have led to UK Athletics warning Gemili and Neita to cease contact with their renowned coach or their membership into the World Class Programme, including lottery funding, will be suspended. A similar message has been conveyed to other British athletes who were considering moving to the US to train under Reider.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/nov/03/leading-athletics-coach-rana-reider-to-be-investigated-over-sexual-misconduct-claims

Is Bill Gates a modern witch? COVID conspiracy theories involving billionaire similar to witch hunt

Bill Gates is planning to microchip the world through a COVID-19 vaccine. The 5G networks scattered around the world are causing people to catch coronavirus. COVID-19 was spread by Maine lobsters shipped to China.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given birth to some outrageous conspiracy theories packed with misinformation like the ones above, and new research from UCLA sheds light on how these false narratives developed.

One of the researchers on the project was University of California, Berkeley professor Timothy Tangherlini, who teaches a class on the application of social network analysis methods to the study of Old Norse sagas.

"The narrative structures are of course the same – as humans growing up in cultural groups, we've become incredibly adept at telling stories that help explain how the world works, and why it looks the way it does," Tangherlini told USA TODAY.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/11/03/bill-gates-conspiracies-share-many-similarities-witch-hunts/8554819002/

Chinese Censorship in Overdrive After Tennis Star Accuses Ex-Top Leader of Sexual Assault

A top Chinese tennis player has made shocking allegations of sexual assault by a former leader, the first time a senior member of the ruling Communist Party was accused of sexual misconduct since the start of a budding #MeToo movement in the country.

Peng Shuai, a former Wimbledon doubles champion, alleged on Tuesday night she was coerced into having sex with ex-Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli three years ago. The claims, which have not been corroborated, were posted on her verified account on the microblogging site Weibo. Peng is currently 35 years old, and Zhang, who retired in 2018, is 75 and married.

The explosive allegations were swiftly deleted by Weibo before midnight on Tuesday, and screenshots were censored on various Chinese platforms. Social media sites now forbid users from commenting on posts containing the names of Peng and Zhang. Weibo suspended its tennis fan forum.

Some internet users managed to read Peng’s post by circumventing the Great Firewall, and tried to spread the message with euphemisms and emojis.

But even oblique references to the case have been removed. Movie review site Douban took down the page of Korean drama Prime Minister and I, after the title was used to refer to Peng’s allegations.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvn8b5/china-tennis-metoo-peng-shuai

Why the secret symbols of magic and witchcraft fascinate us

Earlier this summer, a collection of Sylvia Plath's personal items went up for sale at Sotheby's. It included intimate love letters, recipe cards, a rolling pin, family photo albums and her and Ted Hughes's gold wedding bands. The rings sold for a respectable $38,000 (£28,000) – but this was mere pocket change compared to the most sought after item in the lot: Plath's personal tarot deck. Originally expected to fetch between $6,000 (£4,351) and $9,000 (£6,527), it eventually went for $206,886 (£150,037).

The Tarot de Marseille deck was a 24th birthday gift from Hughes. Plath wrote in her journals of her wish to get better at reading tarot – but it played an important part in her art, too. She references the practice in her poem Daddy ("With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck/ And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack&quot , while The Hanging Man takes its name from a tarot card.

Tarot has been a muse for countless writers, artists and designers in their work – TS Eliot wrote of the "wicked pack of cards" in The Waste Land, Salvador Dalí created his own deck, while Andy Warhol made a film of the Velvet Underground having their cards read. Earlier this year, fashion house Dior cast models as the characters from a deck of tarot cards for its spring/ summer 2021 couture show (Christian Dior himself had his cards read before every show). Recently, the costume designer for the sci-fi film Dune revealed that tarot cards were a source of inspiration.

arot has been a muse for countless writers, artists and designers in their work – TS Eliot wrote of the "wicked pack of cards" in The Waste Land, Salvador Dalí created his own deck, while Andy Warhol made a film of the Velvet Underground having their cards read. Earlier this year, fashion house Dior cast models as the characters from a deck of tarot cards for its spring/ summer 2021 couture show (Christian Dior himself had his cards read before every show). Recently, the costume designer for the sci-fi film Dune revealed that tarot cards were a source of inspiration.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211102-why-the-secret-symbols-of-magic-and-witchcraft-fascinate-us
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Article gets better. As a (very) beginning Tarot reader I found it interesting

Republican get-out-the-vote strategy worked ... for Democrats

Last month, a week into early voting, Knoxville City Council incumbents and Democratic operatives were getting nervous as conservatives, many who had never voted in a city election before, cast ballots in droves.

The hope, they said, was that the last few days of early voting and Election Day would bring progressives out to vote. In the meantime, the Democratic party apparatus that had largely been dormant leading up to the election sprung into action, running phone banks and knocking on doors. In the last seven days, staffers called more than 10,000 voters.

As results rolled in Tuesday night, Democrats had their answer: While Knox County government is firmly controlled by Republicans, the city shines blue.

https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/politics/2021/11/02/knoxville-knox-county-tennessee-city-council-election-results-2021-democrats-gop/6191913001/
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It worked somewhere, anyway, if not in Virginia! *sourly eying my morning coffee*

Marching band goes hard on flawless 'Sesame Street' tribute

Republicans Are Already Claiming the Virginia Election Has Been Rigged

This is how it’s going to be forever: Republicans and conservatives will claim that any election they lose is fraudulent. Donald Trump established this as the playbook for his party-cum-cult. And the full embrace of this authoritarian and dangerous tactic has been evident in the much-watched and tight-as-a-tick governor’s race in Virginia between Republican Glenn Youngkin and Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

Days before the final balloting on November 2, right-wingers and Republicans began hurling the accusation: The Democrats are stealing this election. They had no evidence. They were just beating this tribal drum. But the aim was to create an echo chamber for the delegitimization of the election should McAuliffe, the former governor, prevail.

The strategy is simple: repeat the phony charge over and over to block full public acceptance of an unfavorable result. And this attack has come from multiple directions. Steve Bannon, the once-indicted-and-Trump-pardoned strategist has inserted himself into the race, and appearing on a Virginia-based talk show on October 29 to discuss the election, warned, “They’re Democrats. They’re going to try to steal it. They can’t win elections they don’t steal, right? They understand this. This is what they did in ’20. It’s time now to start calling them out.”

At a Youngkin rally on October 27, country singer John Rich, who was campaigning for the Republican, suggested to the crowd that a Democratic conspiracy involving Stacey Abrams was afoot: “Why the hell is Stacey Abrams in Virginia right now? What is that? What is she doing up here? We know what she’s doing up here. She’s working on it… Do you really think California voted for Gavin Newsom again? I don’t think so. Stacey Abrams was probably out there, too.” Abrams had been campaigning in Virginia for McAuliffe, much as Rich was doing for Youngkin. (Newsom survived the recall election with 61.9 percent of the vote.)

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/11/republicans-are-already-claiming-the-virginia-election-has-been-rigged/
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Because of course they are......

Who is dying of Covid? People who are younger, white and Southern, according to latest numbers

Younger, Southern, rural and white.

Those are increasingly the kinds of people who are dying of Covid-19, as the demographics of those hit hardest by the coronavirus have shifted since the pandemic first hit the United States. The country’s most recent, devastating Covid wave, fueled by the highly contagious delta variant, showed the strength of the virus even in the face of mounting vaccinations, with more than 100,000 deaths reported in the past three months.

Many of those deaths were reported in places — and in populations — that had been largely spared the worst effects of the disease until now.

An NBC News analysis of what changed from the first 100,000 Covid deaths in the U.S. to the most recent 100,000 deaths shows key geographic and demographic shifts in the evolution of the pandemic. Covid hot spots moved from densely populated cities concentrated in the Northeast and on the West Coast to Southern states and more rural regions. The disease also shifted from disproportionately affecting older adults and people with underlying conditions into a more indiscriminate killer among those who were unvaccinated.

They are deaths that were largely preventable.

“This has become a disease of the unimmunized,” said Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and associate director for health sciences at the school’s Global Health Institute.

https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/new-faces-of-covid-deaths/index.html

Surprise! Marjorie Three Names is Not Vaccinated!

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who apologized earlier this year for comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust, ripped "vaccine Nazis" on Tuesday while saying she's not vaccinated.

"They're ruining our country, these vaccine Nazis," Greene complained in an interview with Steve Bannon's podcast.

"I'm sorry. I know I'm using the word Nazi and everybody gets mad when I say it, but that's exactly what they are," she added.

In May, Greene drew bipartisan criticism for a comment comparing a House rule on face coverings to the Holocaust, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., calling her comments "appalling." Greene later apologized after a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in June. “There is no comparison to the Holocaust,” she said. “And there are words that I have said in remarks that I've made that I know are offensive, and for that, I want to apologize.”

Greene, who's been cited by the House sergeant at arms for refusing to wear a mask on the House floor on at least 20 occasions and spurned a mask while sheltering in place with other lawmakers on Jan. 6, also told Bannon that she has not been vaccinated against Covid-19.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-says-she-s-not-vaccinated-rips-n1283008