Donald Trump doesn’t know how to end this war. He was counting that Iran is not going to retaliate so he thought this will end in a few days.
Iran had always threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz but it hasn’t really closed it off in a literal sense. Missiles and mines were just enough to spook tankers, hence, the “tanker war” in the 1908s during the Iran x Iraq war. The US needed to escort tankers that wanted to cross the Strait of Hormuz because the Oil Crisis of the 1970s was not yet a far-off memory that time.
Now Iran is doing the same with drones. Insurance companies do not want to underwrite these tankers that needed to cross the Strait so the shippers decided that it’s not worth the hassle and financial risk. And a little fact check: the US hasn’t escorted any tanker despite claims by Trump administration that the US Navy did.
Such liars, these bastards.
And financially, there’s a reason insurers balked at covering ships through the strait. “Even if you were to offer a subsidized price,” Henagan says, “it’s a war zone. Certain boats are going to sink, and DFC is going to have to pay out the insurance.”
The agency has a finite budget. It can’t feasibly insure “all maritime trade” in the area, he says. Approving applications will also take time, Henagan notes.
And, of course, even if they can get insurance coverage, many companies still won’t want to risk losing their ships. — NPR
Diesel at PHP 100/liter by next week? This is insane!
We only have 30 days of fuel left.
This. This.
A Hiligaynon lullaby sung in an American hospital drama, finally recognizing that Filipinos exist in US healthcare system. My aunts and uncles who migrated to the US were all in healthcare. Isa Briones (who plays Dr. Santos in The Pitt in this video) is the daughter of Jon Jon Briones, The Engineer in Ms Saigon when Lea Salonga was still playing Kim.
The Pitt also have two Pinoy nurses — Perlah and Princess — who gossiped in Tagalog about their colleagues right before their faces. They were even doubting whether the resident doctor, Dr. Santos, was even Pinoy because she’s so white. They just had a hunch that Dr. Santos could understand their chatter.
But this Hiligaynon lullaby cemented that Dr. Santos, indeed, was Pinoy.
The Pitt just recently won an Emmy.
The criticism that ER received years ago was that everyone was white. Where were the Indian doctors? The Pinoy nurses? About a third of foreign-born nurses in the US are Pinoy and 18% of all the nurses in California alone are Filipinos. We keep losing Filipino RNs to US, Europe, and the Middle East. There is also a growing population of healthcare workers in Australia. My cousin-in-law is a nurse in Ireland so my cousin, who had a very good job here, had to quit and follow her husband in Cork, Ireland. A Harvard Medical-graduate cousin of mine is a pediatrician and is still practicing there in Boston together with her Indian physician husband, who also graduated from Harvard.
Finally, a medical drama with some POC.
