Sam Frizell

Same-sex couples in Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, North Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming will now receive federal benefits

The federal government will recognize same-sex marriage in six new states, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Saturday: Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, North Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming. Holder’s announcement follows the Supreme Court’s decision this month to decline to hear appeals from several states that sought to maintain their marriage bans.

The government will also extend federal benefits to same-sex couples in those six states.

Holder made a similar announcement about seven other states last week, including Colorado, Indiana, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. With Saturday’s announcement, same-sex couples will be recognized by the federal government in 32 states, plus the District of Columbia.

“With each new state where same-sex marriages are legally recognized, our nation moves closer to achieving of full equality for all Americans,” Holder said in a statement Saturday. “We are acting as quickly as possible with agencies throughout the government to ensure that same-sex married couples in these states receive the fullest array of benefits allowable under federal law.”

The 71-year-old former bassist for Cream co-wrote unforgettable hits including "Sunshine of Your Love" and "White Room"

Jack Bruce, Cream’s former bassist, songwriter and singer, has died of liver disease at the age of 71.

“It is with great sadness that we, Jack’s family, announce the passing of our beloved Jack: husband, father, granddad, and all round legend,” his family said in a statement, according to The Guardian. “The world of music will be a poorer place without him but he lives on in his music and forever in our hearts.”

Bruce was the principal singer and songwriter in Cream, co-writing hits including “White Room” and “Sunshine of Your Love” with lyricist Pete Brown. He had an ongoing rivalry with drummer Ginger Baker that guitarist Eric Clapton was often helpless to stop.

Bruce struggled with drug addiction and financial troubles in the 1970s after Cream’s breakup, but continued to play as a session musician and as part of small groups. In 2003 he underwent a liver transplant after being diagnosed with cancer, and played with a reunited Cream for a series of shows in 2005.

[The Guardian]

Among the affected are 450 healthcare workers

The number of cases in the Ebola outbreak has exceeded 10,000, with 4,922 deaths recorded as of October 23, according to a World Health Organization report published Saturday.

Of the 10,141 reported cases, 450 are healthcare workers, more than half of them in Liberia with three in the United States. A total of 244 healthcare workers have died of the disease.

Outside of the three most affected countries in West Africa—Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia—there have been only 27 reported cases of the deadly illness.

In New York and New Jersey, governors Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie have implemented controversial quarantines on all healthcare workers returning from West Africa after a doctor returning from Guinea contracted the disease and was diagnosed in New York.

The cleared nurse will be held in quarantine for 21 days under a strict new policy formulated by New Jersey and New York officials

A nurse who worked with Ebola patients in West Africa has tested negative for the virus after she was quarantined Friday upon arriving in Newark, New Jersey under a controversial new order by the governors of that state and New York.

Kaci Hickox had no symptoms when she landed, but developed a fever while quarantined at Newark International Airport, reports the New York Times. She will undergo additional tests to confirm that she is in fact cleared of Ebola.

Under a new policy announced late Friday afternoon by Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, anyone who had direct contact with Ebola patients in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and enters the country through Newark Liberty and Kennedy International Airport must be quarantined for 21 days.

The new measures go beyond federal guidelines and what infectious disease experts recommend. They were formulated without consulting New York’s health department or New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio.

“We are no longer relying on [Centers of Disease Control and Prevention] standards,” said Gov. Christie.

Health experts say that the travel bans on flights from West Africa proposed by several Republicans in Congress, as well as the new mandatory quarantines in New York and New Jersey, are likely to discourage badly needed healthcare workers from traveling to the area to help contain Ebola.

“There is a notable lack of clarity about the new guidelines announced yesterday by the state authorities in New York and New Jersey,” Sophie Delaunay, executive director of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), for whom Hickox had been working, in a statement following Hickox’s quarantine. “we are attempting to clarify the details of the protocols with each state’s departments of health to gain a full understanding of their requirements and implications.”

Dr. Rick Sacra, who contracted Ebola in Liberia and was flown back to the United States, told the Times the mandatory quarantines “will effectively double the burden on those people, on the loss of productive time.”

Hickox herself said in a first person account published by the Dallas Morning News that her Newark Airport experience was bewildering and frightening. During six hours at the airport she was given only a granola bar and was questioned by a series of people, some of whom did not identify themselves, she said.

“I am scared about how health care workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa,” said Hickox. “I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganization, fear and, most frightening, quarantine.”

According to MSF, Hickox is now at Newark University Hospital, in a tent serving as an isolation ward. The tent is not heated and Hickox is clothed only in paper scrubs.

Hickox’s mother told the Times that Hickox was discouraged by her return from West Africa.

“She’s lived in Burma, Sudan, Uganda and Nigeria, and she’s worked for Doctors Without Borders many times,” Hickox’s mother said. “I think the frustration is that she went and did her good deed and her passion and her serving spirit, and she comes back to America and I just don’t feel they were very welcoming.”

The mandatory quarantines were implemented after Dr. Craig Spencer contracted Ebola in Guinea and was hospitalized Thursday after showing symptoms of the virus.

With additional reporting by Alice Park/New York

[NYT]

Frightened nurses gritted their teeth and cared for the dying man

Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian national who unknowingly traveled to the United States carrying Ebola, died of the virus ten days after he was admitted to Texas Presbyterian Hospital. In the intervening period, Duncan was cared for by nurses who risked their lives to save him.

In interviews that will be aired Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes, the nurses describe for the first time trying to treat Duncan before his death. They recall holding the dying man’s hand as Duncan’s own family was not permitted in the room for fear of contracting the disease.

“I was very frightened,” says intensive care nurse Sidia Rose, according to transcripts of the interview. “I was. But — and I just dried my tears, rolled down my sleeves, so to speak, and — went on about my night.”

John Mulligan treated Duncan in his final hours of intensive care. “By the time he had — I saw him on October 1st — his — his nausea and vomiting had pretty much subsided. That aspect of it was over. He had a rectal tube in place so he didn’t — he was — had gotten so weak, he couldn’t get up to the commodes anymore. So that was to help contain all of his very infectious body fluids that we were dealing with,” Mulligan recalls.

“On the first day he didn’t say much. He — he was — you could look in his eyes and tell he just didn’t feel good,” Mulligan continues. “And we offered him words of encouragement. We let him know that we’re here, whatever you need — let us know and we’ll get it. And we held his hand and talked to him and comforted him because his family couldn’t be there. I mean, you can’t take that risk with this type of disease of exposing, you know, loved ones, as much as you want them there. It’s just not a possibility.”

Duncan died on October 8. Two nurses contracted the disease from their contact with Duncan, but at least one has since recovered.

Unconfirmed reports suggest multiple students were injured in the shooting

That's a controversial fruit you're eating there

On Friday, shareholders for banana empire Chiquita will vote on a merger with European fruit distributor Fyffes, a decision that would create the world’s largest banana-selling company, to be headquartered in Ireland. Not because bananas grow plentifully in County Cork or the hills of Connemara, or because bananas are replacing potatoes anytime soon. It’s more likely because Ireland has among the lowest corporate tax rates in the banana-eating world.

Chiquita’s shareholders are deciding on a tax inversion, a nifty trick to avoid paying taxes in America, one that has recently ruffled everyone from President Obama to Warren Buffet. (Chiquita told the Wall Street Journal that it’s not motivated by tax incentives, but Fyffe’s executive chairman told the New York Times that there could be tax benefits in the future.)

But Chiquita, whose bananas you have most definitely eaten, has done way more controversial things.

Before it was today’s Chiquita, with one-fifth of global banana market share, it was United Fruit, an even more massive banana conglomerate known to generations of Latin Americans as “the Octopus.” It had tentacles all over the Americas, grasping corridors of power everywhere south of the United States. United Fruit was despised in Latin America, so much so that its simulacrum made it into literature by a Nobel Prize-winning author. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez wrote of “the Banana Company” arriving in the jungle town of Maconda, bringing with it “dictatorial foreigners… to run the town” using “hired assassins with machetes.”

Then, in 1970, after years of earning a bad reputation, United Fruit appeared to have been saved. Here’s how TIME described what happened, in 1973:

As the scenario for an underground comic book, the story would sound unreal: a U.S. company widely reviled in Central America as an exploiter of plantation laborers runs into a rising tide of Third World nationalism. Workers turn intransigent, and profits slump. Then a secretary interrupts a board meeting in Boston with news that an unknown buyer has cornered a huge block of the stock. He turns out to be an ex-rabbinical student who ousts the old management and transforms the company into an empire of steers, root-beer stands and ice-cream parlors. South of the border, he speeds the replacement of Yanqui plantation superintendents with native managers and raises wages sharply. Peace, harmony and profit reign.

But the ex-rabbinical student, named Eli Black, slipped cruelly on the banana conglomerate he had purchased. In 1975, a week after the Securities and Exchange Commission discovered that Black bribed the Honduran economics minister $1.25 million for lower banana export taxes, Black committed suicide. United Fruit renamed itself Chiquita Brands International in 1990, and worked to clear up its image.

All clear the image was not, however. For one thing, a lengthy TIME investigation published in 2000 linked Chiquita CEO Carl Lindner’s significant political contributions to preferential trade policies pushed by the Clinton Administration. European tariffs were keeping Lindner’s Chiquita bananas out of their market, so the argument went, and Lindner wanted the U.S. to put pressure on Europe to relax its restrictions. So Lindner wrote generous checks to the Democrats, allegedly to get the U.S. to threaten to increase U.S. tariffs on European goods. “The Clinton Administration was ready to mount a global trade war on Lindner’s behalf,” TIME reported, after Lindner showed he would “dispense cash to the Democrats.” And a few years later, in 2007, Chiquita acknowledged it had paid $1.7 million to Columbia’s paramilitary groups until February 2004, according to TIME.

If the shareholders agree to move Chiquita across the pond — Fyffes shareholders hold their vote next week — it won’t be the most controversial thing the company has done. And that’s just the history of one company, selling a fruit that appears to attract controversy wherever it goes: even the 1920s hit song “Yes! We Have No Bananas” has inspired disagreement.

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