USA: Putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank: Trump gets help from Kushner and rails against new 'witch-hunt' at coronavirus briefing

Donald Trump sparked fresh criticism on Thursday by deploying his son-in-law Jared Kushner at a White House coronavirus taskforce briefing and accusing Democrats of launching a fresh “witch-hunt”.

Kushner, a senior adviser to the US president who is married to his daughter Ivanka, made a surprise appearance on the podium and said Trump had instructed him to “break down every barrier needed to make sure the teams can succeed”.

Kushner added: “The president also wanted us to make sure that we think outside the box, make sure we’re finding all the best thinkers in the country, making sure we’re getting all the best ideas.”

But by way of example, Kushner said Trump became concerned about supply shortages after hearing about them “just this morning” from “friends of his in New York” – implying the president responds to anecdotes rather than the state governor or public health officials.

“We went to the president today,” Kushner continued. “And earlier today, the president called Mayor [Bill] de Blasio to inform him that we are going to send a month of supply to New York public hospital system.”

The vice-president, Mike Pence, later said there would be 200,000 masks sent to New York.

Kushner said: “We’ll be doing similar things with all the different public hospitals that are in the hotspot zones and making sure that we’re constantly in communications with the local communities.”

Media reports have suggested that Kushner, a property developer with no medical expertise, is running a “shadow taskforce” – a rival power base that conflicts with the official task force led by Pence.

Read more at: Trump gets help from Kushner and rails against new 'witch-hunt' at coronavirus briefing | World news | The Guardian

IRMA: Florida's electric grid system outdated and inadequate to meet natural disaster challenges

Outdated power supply lines into most Florida/US homes

Is it the Category 3 Hurricane Irma that cut the power to more than 3 million Florida Power & Light customers, or an under-invested Florida grid system that caused these unacceptable power outages, with even more outages expected before the storm is done.

Outages stood at 3,636,550 customer accounts just after 5 a.m. Monday September 11, and were expected to increase throughout the night.

Including 492,980 customers whose power was at some point restored, outages have affected more than about 3 million accounts, or 6 million people in FPL’s 35-county territory.

The fact of all this drama is that both America's electrical hardware and software components are still dealing with "a legacy of under - investment."

Annual electrical transmission investment in the U.S. grew only about 24% in the past 15 years.

U.S. electricity reliability to homes is mainly still based on overhead pole supported wired systems, instead of one, like in most civilized countries in the world, which is laid underground.
 
Consequently the U.S. has significantly higher rates of power loss than countries like France (only 53 minutes lost per year on average) or the Netherlands (only 29 minutes)

In the case of Florida, FPL, the nation's fourth largest utility, already came under heavy criticism after Florida's spate of hurricanes in 2005, which exposed lax attention to maintenance issues, like updated power line poles, tree-trimming and what was widely considered an outdated grid system.

The latter may not have allowed for sufficient redundancy, or the ability to adjust to strains and funnel power via different routes.

And while not much has been done about fixing the power grid infra-structure,  many South Floridians have still been socked with bill increases of as much as $100 a month over the past years.

Critics argue that this is totally unnecessary for a profitable utility like FT to do,  since they have an increasing revenue stream, as a result of 125,000 or more new residents entering Florida each year.

But Florida, like the rest of the US has neglected its power infrastructure, and customers, unfortunately, are paying the price for this neglect.

"Isn't it time to do something about this Florida Governor Rick Scott".

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From EU-Digest