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Amid the usual tsunami of social media misinformation that sweeps through a panicked, exhausted population of survivors, the situation in Louisiana is no different in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida.

One such rumor that quickly gained momentum on social media stated that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was paying for evacuees' hotel rooms if they called FEMA's disaster assistance hotline. According to the rumors page, that is not something that the agency does.

With false rumors quickly spreading on Facebook, TikTok and other social media sites, FEMA launched a page Monday that's aimed at reducing the number of myths being shared among those who are seeking food, water, shelter or are looking to start the recovery process.

There's also the issue of the wrong phone number being circulated via texts and social media posts; FEMA's phone number to apply for disaster assistance is 1-800-621-3362, or you can visit DisasterAssistance.gov.

FEMA's rumor control page is likely to be updated in the coming days as more false reports go viral about the assistance the agency provides. The agency also urged residents to always check local sources before sharing key information through social media or text messages.

Roof damage is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, Monday, Aug. 30, 2021, in Houma, La. The weather died down shortly before dawn. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

The Weather Companys primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

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Hurricane Ida Rumors Abound Here's the Truth from FEMA | The Weather Channel - Articles from The Weather Channel | weather.com - The Weather Channel

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In a survey of social media posts, First Nations broke with the mainstream on any number of issues typically considered progressive

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For the rest of Election 44, the National Post will be sharing insights from Polly, an artificial intelligence engine developed at the University of Ottawa that was the only pollster to correctly predict the results of the 2019 election. Unlike typical polls, Polly gauges public opinion through constant computer analysis of public social media posts: If youve ever posted something political to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, youre probably part of Pollys dataset. Today, a look at how First Nations Canadians are approaching Election 44.

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Polly has identified a dataset of roughly 1,500 First Nations social media users, meaning that the user has at one point explicitly posted about their Indian status or their membership in a First Nation.

There are more than a dozen other demographics identified by Polly, including teachers, journalists, political staffers, parents and even Canadians hesitant to take the COVID-19 vaccine.

Across virtually all those other categories, the number one most posted-about issue during Election 44 was the economy. But among First Nations, the economy took a distant second place to posts about racism. Of those posts, unsurprisingly, 60 per cent of them employed negative language.

First Nations were also disproportionately likely to post about taxing the Catholic Church. This issue came up over the summer following the discovery of unmarked graves believed to contain the bodies of children who died at Catholic-run Indian Residential Schools. Of First Nations posts on the topic, 46 per cent appeared to endorse the idea. Thats higher even than activists, where the rate of positive posts was 35 per cent.

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Still, the job market and cost of living remained in the top 10 for First Nation social media posts, as they did for most other Canadian demographics.

However, First Nations broke with the mainstream on any number of issues typically considered progressive.

Not a single First Nations social media post about gun control was positive, and 62 per cent were explicitly negative.

First Nations were also decidedly mixed on the issue of universal basic income. Only 41 per cent posted about it positively, against 37 per cent who saw it negatively. Its a sharp contrast to the government employee category, where 61 per cent of the posts about universal basic income were positive.

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Meanwhile, there were two main categories in which there was almost blowout support among First Nations: Housing programs and pharmacare.

Another popular subject on First Nations social media? Indigenous reconciliation. This issue didnt come close to the top 10 for any other Canadian demographic, but was number three among First Nations.

However, First Nations didnt seem to be as enthused about the topic as everyone else. Schoolteachers, for instance, used positive language in 71 per cent of their posts about reconciliation (and the rate is 73 per cent among government employees).

Among First Nations posts about reconciliation, by contrast, 16 per cent used neutral language and 27 per cent were openly negative.

From now until the bitter end of Election 44, the National Post is publishing a special daily edition of First Reading, our politics newsletter, to keep you posted on the ins and outs (and way outs) of the campaign. All curated by the National Posts own Tristin Hopper and published Monday to Friday at 6 p.m. and Sundays at 9 a.m. Sign up here.

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ELECTION INSIGHTS: Why First Nations hate gun control, love housing programs - National Post

After a perfect first month and an excellent performance in May (0.75 ERA), New York Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman had a rough June, with an 11.42 ERA in 8.2 innings. After MLB started checking pitchers for foreign substances on the ball on June 21, he was never quite the same.

June and July were ugly months for Chapman. We have no evidence to say he was using sticky stuff before the crackdown (lots of pitchers did), but his performance started to dip considerably and his command and control began to disappear.

Yes, some pitchers use foreign substances on the ball to increase spin rate, but others do it for control and command. Sticky stuff provides the hurler with a better grip on the ball, and thats what Chapman has been failing miserably since June: his walks have skyrocketed, and he was never a control artist to begin with.

He was unusable for a stretch. The Yankees had to endure some ugly outings. But right now, the pitcher seems to be pointing in the right direction, albeit still with some control issues.

Consider that the Yankees stopper has a 6.23 ERA in his last 30 games, a span covering 26 innings. He has handed 24 free passes over those 26 frames, which is simply unsustainable.

However, he has been better in his last 15 games (1.88 ERA with a 9/21 BB/K ratio in 14.1 innings) and in his last seven (2.84 ERA).

He seems to be taking baby steps while he works through his issues in a Yankees uniform. For the look of things, he could have a blip or two with walks in this new era of pitching without the help of sticky substances, but at least there have been some positive signs recently.

Some of his recent outings with the Yankees have been hard to watch. He has had to be taken out of the game a couple of times after getting some traffic on the bases via walks. But lets also consider the fact that he has a 1.76 ERA in 15.1 inning since July 6, when things started to click for the Bombers.

Baby steps.

Excerpt from:
Yankees: Aroldis Chapman still has control issues, but is slowly turning things around - Empire Sports Media

The Taliban are expected to announce a new government in Afghanistan within hours, as chaos in the country deepened and aid experts warned of imminent economic collapse.

More than two weeks after the Islamist militia seized control, sources told Agence-France Presse that the cabinet could be presented after morning prayers on Friday and Ahmadullah Muttaqi, a Taliban official, said on social media that a ceremony was being prepared at the presidential palace in Kabul.

The private broadcaster Tolo said an announcement was imminent. The movements supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, is expected to have ultimate power over a new governing council, with a president below him, Taliban officials have said.

The Islamist militants governed Afghanistan through an unelected leadership council, brutally enforcing a radical form of sharia law, from 1996 until 2001, when they were ousted by US-led forces. Since their return, they have promised a softer brand of rule.

However, the US, the EU and others have cast doubt on the groups assurances, saying formal recognition of the new government and any economic aid that would follow will depend on the Talibans actions in power.

Were not going to take them at their word, were going to take them at their deeds, the US undersecretary of state, Victoria Nuland, said. The EU has said the new rulers will not be recognised until they form an inclusive government, respect human rights and provide unfettered access for aid workers.

Haibatullah, a religious scholar from Kandahar whose son was a suicide bomber, is expected to play a theocratic role similar to that played by Irans supreme leader. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder and deputy leader of the movement who was imprisoned in Pakistan, is likely to be appointed head of government.

Other Taliban officials expected to hold senior positions include Sirajuddin Haqqani, another deputy leader, and Mohammad Yaqoob, the son of the Talibans founder Mullah Muhammad Omar, who died in 2013.

The new government will face enormous challenges. The UN has warned of a looming humanitarian catastrophe across the country of 40 million people amid a severe drought, growing food insecurity and the upheavals of a 20-year war that forced thousands of families to flee their homes.

Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the World Food Programmes country director in Afghanistan, told Reuters: In the current context there are no national safety nets Since 15 August when the Taliban took over, we have seen the crisis accelerate and magnify with the imminent economic collapse that is coming this countrys way.

The situation that we have unfolding at the moment is absolutely horrendous and could morph into just a humanitarian catastrophe, she said, adding that since the Taliban takeover civil servants salaries were not being paid, the currency had depreciated, and banks have limited weekly withdrawals to $200.

Food stocks distributed by the UN are likely to run out for much of the country by the end of September, the organisations humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan has said, with shortages of food and other necessities already widely reported.

Hours-long queues have formed outside banks and prices in Kabuls bazaars have soared. In one spot of brighter news, however, Western Union said on Thursday that it was restarting money transfer services to the country; many Afghans rely on remittances from relatives abroad to survive.

Afghanistan desperately needs money, but despite assurances from the new Taliban-appointed central bank head, the Taliban are unlikely to get swift access to roughly $10bn (7.25bn) in assets mostly held abroad by the Afghan central bank.

In a sign of where Afghanistan may now turn for international assistance, Zabiullah Mujahid, an official spokesman for the new regime, told the Italian newspaper la Repubblica that China was our main partner and represents a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity for us as the Chinese government is ready to invest and rebuild our country.

Mujahid said the Taliban care a lot about the one belt, one road project. We own rich copper mines, which, thanks to the Chinese, will be modernised. Finally, China represents our ticket to the markets around the world.

Asked about the Talibans relationship with Russia, he said relations with Moscow were mainly political and economic. Russia continues to mediate for us and with us to create the conditions for an international peace.

The Taliban have promised to allow safe passage out of the country for any foreigners or Afghans left behind by the massive airlift that ended with the withdrawal of the last US troops on Monday, but Kabul airport remained closed on Thursday.

Domestic flights from the airport, which will be vital for humanitarian operations, would resume on Friday, Al Jazeera reported, adding that while a Qatari technical team was assessing damage, the return of international air traffic that would allow further evacuations would take some time.

Meanwhile, Taliban forces and fighters loyal to the resistance leader Ahmad Massoud continued to fight the Panjshir valley north of Kabul, with each side claiming it had inflicted heavy casualties.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said Taliban fighters had entered Panjshir and taken control of some territory. The National Resistance Front of Afghanistan rebel grouping, however, said it had full control of all passes and entrances and had driven back all incursions.

With Reuters and AFP

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Afghanistan: Taliban expected to announce new government - The Guardian

The most urgent question in the world for the past 20 months has been: Whats the best way to stop the spread of the coronavirus? But its a frustrating question to answer definitively, since even the most logical solutions have been shrouded in what Ive called the fog of pandemic.

For example, covering your nose and mouth seems like a sensible way to block virus particles that come out of the mouth and go into the nose. But designing a perfect masking study is hard when state-by-state behavior differs from official masking policies, and when everybodys wearing a different material over their face. Limiting indoor dining seems like it would help contain a virus that spreads via indoor talking, but we dont have enough high-quality data to know for sure whether it makes a huge difference. Targeted shutdowns seem likely to prevent social mixing in the short term, but designing an experiment that proves their long-term effectiveness is devilishly difficult.

By contrast, the trials that proved the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines used the gold standard of scientific research, by randomly assigning people to treatment and control groups and then carefully measuring the effect of the medical intervention. If only we had something almost like this for, say, masking: a careful, randomized, real-world experiment on the effect of masks.

Well, now we have it. This week, a group of scientists from Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and other institutions published the final results of a randomized study of community-wide masking behavior in Bangladesh. The study encompassed roughly 350,000 people in 600 villages. The researchers randomly selected certain villages for an intervention that included giving out free masks, paying villagers to remind people to cover their face, and having village leaders and religious figures such as imams emphasize the importance of masks. The researchers also paid villagers to count properly worn masks in public places, including markets and mosques. To gather data on coronavirus transmission, the team asked about symptoms and conducted blood tests to determine who came down with COVID-19 over the course of the study.

Read: Vaccines are great. Masks make them even better.

Their conclusion? Masks work, period. Surgical masks are particularly effective at preventing coronavirus transmission. And community-wide mask wearing is excellent at protecting older people, who are at much higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19.

To some, this conclusion might sound like the work of liberal conspiracists to permanently swaddle our faces in tyrannical cloth. To others, it might sound like very old news. After all, you might think, if people were masking successfully during the 1918 flu pandemic, why do we need a 2021 study to prove the benefits of the practice? But the Bangladesh study is still perhaps the most important research done during the pandemic outside of the vaccine clinical trials, because it gives us randomized-trial data to bolster the flimsier assumptions and conclusions of observational research. We finally have a sense of not just whether masks work but how much universal masking could reduce transmission. The answer is: quite a lot.

The randomly assigned pro-masking policy reduced the number of confirmed, symptomatic COVID-19 cases in the intervention group by nearly 10 percent, relative to the control group. That might not sound like a huge effect. But the intervention increased masking from 14 percent to only 43 percent; 100 percent masking would have likely had a much larger effect.

Even more impressively, the villages that implemented pro-masking policies saw a 34 percent decline in COVID-19 among seniors, for whom the disease is most deadly. This could be because older villagers are more likely to properly wear masks, or because they are more likely to have symptomatic infections if they come into contact with the coronavirus.

The study also found clear evidence that surgical masks are better at reducing the spread of symptomatic COVID-19 than cloth masks. In focus groups, Bangladeshi participants said they preferred cloth masks because they seemed to be more durable. But the researchers found that, on the one hand, surgical masks were more efficient, even after being washed 10 times with soap and water. On the other hand, we found only mixed evidence about cloth masks, Jason Abaluck, a co-author of the study and a professor at Yale, told me. People wearing cloth masks had fewer symptoms, such as coughs, than the control group, which suggests some effect. But cloth-mask wearers didnt have significantly fewer coronavirus antibodies as determined by blood tests. We cannot reject that [cloth masks] have zero or only a small impact on symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections, Abaluck wrote along with Mushfiq Mobarak of Yale, Laura Kwong of UC Berkeley, Stephen Luby and Ashley Styczynski of Stanford, and other researchers.

Creating a social norm is hard work. The pro-masking intervention in this study was aggressive, extensive, and expensive. In all, the researchers distributed more than 1 million masks. Free distribution of masks was important. But of all the interventions, mask promotionthat is, paying individuals to remind people on the street to cover their faceseemed to have the biggest effect. Reminders from people in the village almost acted as booster shots for masking, Abaluck told me. The research team is currently working on scaling up its intervention in countries including Pakistan, India, and Nepal.

Read: Masks are back, maybe for the long term

Subtler efforts to change behavior failed to do much in the Bangladeshi study. Texting reminders made little difference. Talking about altruism and protecting the community made little difference. Offering cash rewards made little difference. Asking people to post pro-mask signs or to verbally commit to wearing masks in the future made little difference. The behavioral nudges failed to nudge behavior.

People with strong opinions about masks should be cautious about how they incorporate this study into their advocacy. On the debate over masking in primary schools, this study doesnt have much to directly offer, since the surveillance staff recorded mask-wearing behavior only among people who looked older than 18. On the debate about masking in specific places such as movie theaters and crowded arenas, this study also doesnt directly apply. Our study cant distinguish between outdoor and indoor transmission, Abaluck said. Given other research, its likely that masks are most effective in indoor, unventilated spaces. But our study doesnt tell us explicitly whether, say, parks or restaurants or schools are likely places for transmission.

So where does this leave us? In the past year and a half, masking in the United States has gone from being a point of confusion to a partisan flash point. Republicans who have discovered a special enemy in the specter of masking often point back to the morass of conflicting information from the beginning of the pandemic. Yes, Anthony Fauci infamously advised against masking. Yes, the World Health Organization refused to endorse it for months.

But that was a different time. Wisely navigating a pandemic requires that we marry a healthy skepticism with a willingness to change our minds when presented with high-quality evidence. Based on the results of this study and other observational research, we should go forward with a more confident thesis about face coverings: Community-wide usage of surgical masks clearly reduces the spread of the coronavirus, especially in the unventilated indoor environments where it seems to spread most efficiently.

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The Masks Were Working All Along - The Atlantic