Deaths are mounting in troubled North American nation of US after a massive winter storm swept the country just a week after the country’s former ruler was acquitted of inciting the storming of parliament buildings during the deadly January 6, Day of Pigs putsch.

The unseasonal storm, which has precipitously dropped temperatures in many states in the former secessionist south of the country, affected over 150 million people or nearly half the population, has killed at least 20 in several states. One city official from the far-white, Christianist extremist opposition Republican party was forced to resign after telling Americans desperate for heat, water and power that no one owed them anything and that it was their choice to “sink or swim”.

Mayor Tom Boyd of Colorado City in the separatist state of Texas had told residents in a Facebook post that it was not “the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this!” and that “only the strong will survive and the weak will [perish.]”

The state’s far-white, anti-math, Shite Christianist extremist US Senator, Ted Cruz, had fled with his family to Mexico in a bid to escape the humanitarian crisis ravaging country, which even before the storm had killed nearly 500,000 people and left millions without sufficient food. He was however forced to return home after the Mexican government refused to grant him asylum following howls of protest from outraged Americans.

At the federal level, the autocratic regime of Joe Biden has been slow to respond and is being criticized for hyping its KSh200 trillion infrastructure plan, including a KSh1 trillion gravy-laden high speed rail project close to the ruler’s hometown in the relatively stable north-east, and ignoring desperate pleas from hospitals going without power and water in the south, a stronghold of defenestrated former ruler, Donald “Papa Don” Trump.

Papa Don, who last Saturday narrowly survived a political trial orchestrated by parliamentary allies Biden, is believed by Shite Christianists to the true leader – the divinely appointed Covfefe – who will save the nation from the Al Jibra network, which they believe is using math as a cover to introduce Sharia Law into the US.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Caucasian Spring, which has toppled governments in Italy and the Netherlands, continues to cause jitters among ruling classes in sub-Scandinavian Europe. Slovenian strongman, Janez Jansa, who has been accused of using the coronavirus to undermine democracy, narrowly survived a second vote of confidence in the country’s parliament after the first vote was scuppered in January following mysterious bout of covid -19 which affected opposition MPs. In the Czech Republic, where 1 in 7 adults is an alcoholic, dictatorial prime minister, Andrej Babiš, has ignored a vote in parliament which refused to back an extension of a state of emergency, ostensibly called to help the government tackle the spread of the pandemic. In what observers say is an attempt to ensure he can stop any attempts to oust him, the autocrat has preserved his emergency powers that allow him to limit people’s travel and rights.

Similarly, in Spain, 80 were arrested following violent pro-democracy protests linked to the Caucasian Spring that have spread across cities in the tribal, separatist, semi-autonomous district of Catalonia after the jailing of rapper, Pablo Hasel, who was taken to prison on Tuesday, after barricading himself in a university to avoid arrest. He had been convicted of slandering the country’s powerful monarchy sparking fears of an uprising. In 20I8 another Spanish rapper, Valtònyc, was forced to flee abroad after being convicted of similar offences.

And in the neighboring principality of Andorra, a human rights defender is facing four years in jail after speaking out about women’s rights, including their right to safe abortion, at a United Nations expert forum. The principality is co-ruled by the French President Emmanuel Macron who is one of the two colonial princes who oversee the microstate, a notorious tax haven, under a medieval arrangement.

Finally, a probe in the corrupt, reclusive island kingdom of Britain, which has been experiencing a severe flavor shortage following the implementation of the Brexit peace agreement, has revealed how many public contracts were awarded to friends and associates of strongman Boris Johnson’s former spin doctor, Dominic Cummings, who resigned under a cloud in November. In one instance, a company owned and run by two of his “mates” was paid over Ksh73 million to research the public’s understanding of the coronavirus and the government’s messaging around the pandemic.

Last week, the Caucasian Spring revolution roiling the West intensified as riots broke out across Holland, the world’s sixth largest banana exporter, and a notorious narco-state located in the nether regions of sub-Scandinavian Europe.

The violent demonstrations which started in the capital, Amsterdam on Sunday, have rapidly spread to other major cities, such as Eindhoven in the south of the country. Angry anti-science protesters are demanding fundamental freedoms and defying a curfew that the caretaker administration claims is necessary to contain the rampaging covid-19 pandemic that has claimed nearly 14,000 Dutch lives.

The country, a traditional hub for marijuana trade, has been overrun by violent organized criminal gangs dealing in hard drugs, with minors as young as 12 distributing narcotics and a spate of gruesome murders. The country is politically fragile following the resignation of its repressive coalition government two weeks ago, following anger over a child-benefit scandal which impoverished thousands of Dutch families.

Many analysts consider the toppling of Prime Minister  Mark Rutte, who is still in office pending fresh elections in March, as the trigger for the Caucasian Spring which has already claimed Donald “Papa Don” Trump, the far-white ruler of food-insecure, oil-rich United States; Julie Payette, the colonial governor of Canada; and Giuseppe Conte, Prime Minister of chronically unstable, crime-ridden Italy.

Meanwhile, in the ethnically divided, kingdom of Britain, where the nonagenarian Queen Elizabeth II has clung to power for nearly 70 years, corrupt strongman, Boris Johnson, apologized and took responsibility for his regime’s handling of the pandemic which has now claimed over 100,000 British lives on the wet and inhospitable island.

The beleaguered nation has had its pain compounded by the Brexit peace deal it signed with 27 countries in Off-white Europe which has increased hardship and food shortages in the restive, separatist, tribal enclaves of North Ireland and Scotland. Even worse, the harsh terms of the peace deal have grounded a major fishing boat, the Kirkella, which supplies up to 12 percent of the fish sold in the kingdom’s fish and chips shops, threatening one of the few local delicacies in the island’s otherwise unpalatable boiled diet. Analysts fear the resulting flavour shortage could spark even more unrest and bring the Caucasian Spring to the reclusive nation’s shores.

In an effort to calm rising ethnic tensions, and distract from the outrage over the covid deaths, Prime Minister Johnson also visited the northern tribal district of Scotland, ignoring warnings from the embattled separatist leader, Nicola Sturgeon, that it would not be safe and he was “not welcome”.

Across the Atlantic, the article of impeachment of defenestrated tyrant, “Papa Don” Trump, adopted by the lower house of the North American country’s Parliament, was tabled in the Senate, which is set to try the former ruler for inciting the Day of Pigs insurrection three weeks ago, when a mob stormed the parliament buildings, threatening lawmakers, including then Vice-President, Mike Pence.

Chances are slim that he will be convicted given the fanatical support he still enjoys from far-white, anti-math, Shite Christianist extremists, including in the Senate. Shite Christianists believe Papa Don is the divinely ordained Covfefe (Leader) who will defeat the mythical Al-Jibra network that they believe is using Islamist mathematics to introduce Sharia Law to the US and to interfere with elections.

Extremists in the Senate have already challenged the constitutionality of the trial and in what some consider a demonstration of the Covfefe’s powers, 45 of them voted in support of the motion to throw it out on the grounds that Papa Don was no longer in office. One of them, Marco Rubio, who represents the south eastern peninsula state of Florida, a Papa Don stronghold which hosts his headquarters, says the US is not yet ready to begin holding former rulers accountable as did mature third world democracies.

Although the motion ultimately failed, given that 67 out of 100 Senators are required to convict, it is unlikely that the trial, the second for Papa Don, will end in anything other than acquittal. However, a bulletin from the country’s Homeland Security has warned of increased threats of terror attacks Shite Christianist militants in the interior of the country amid intelligence warnings of dangers of travel outside the coastal capital of Washington DC.

At the same time, Joe Biden, the aging, newly-oathed ruler has been ruling by decree, signing nearly two dozen Executive Orders along with many more proclamations and memoranda in his first week alone. This has dashed hopes that the millionaire former opposition leader, the oldest man to ever become ruler of the volatile, ethnically polarized, covid-ravaged nation, will lead efforts to reform the imperial presidency.

If we covered coronavirus like we covered Ebola

In 2014, I spent more than six months covering Ebola in West Africa, two of them in the “hot zone” of Liberia. Global press coverage spurred clichéd response back home in the USA, from negative stereotypes about culture and hygiene to irrational panic. This is a piece of satire that imagines covering America’s global health emergency in the same way the US looked at one “over there”—revealing both the absurdity of imperial exceptionalism and the unwelcome fact that the weaknesses of the American “superpower” are not so different from those in so-called “s**hole countries.” But of course they are. Yet most of us are schooled to see the familiar as better than the foreign, and it’s easy to forget that we share the same weaknesses—and the same risks—as those we are taught, implicitly and explicitly, to see as less capable, less valuable, less worthy.

A new, deadly disease is exploding virtually unchecked in the United States of America, threatening the global economy and public health worldwide.

The US, as it is known, is the largest economy in the world, a position secured unfairly by its imposition of the US dollar as the global trading currency. The country regularly styles itself as “the leader of the free world”.

That leadership has failed miserably in recent weeks, as a pathogen known as SARS-CoV-2, or “coronavirus” for short, has spread, with very little detection, across the country of more than 300 million people.

“It’s spreading like wildfire from person to person,” said Papi Kabongo, a bus driver in Kinshasa whose uncle, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, discovered Ebola in 1976.

“There are clear, simple, easy things we know can help, but people there don’t listen. They don’t even wash their hands!”

The spread has largely overrun the country’s crumbling healthcare system and outmanoeuvred its byzantine insurance infrastructure. Doctors now fear there will not be enough beds or ventilators for the critically ill, nor enough supplies to protect healthcare workers.

“We’ve been telling them for years, ‘Your system is fragile. You need to be ready for this’”, said Albert Williams, Liberia’s minister of health during that country’s unprecedented Ebola outbreak. “But they’re deeply uninterested in international cooperation or advice”.

A frightened population has begun hoarding chloroquine pills following the recommendation of the American president, Donald Trump, who has acted as a kind of “witch doctor”, or traditional healer, during the outbreak. Trump has said he believes the pills may treat the disease. A supposed preventive dose has already killed one man, in the hot, dusty region of Arizona.

Some US government officials have made efforts to encourage or require people to distance themselves from each other—measures which are known to have helped contain or end outbreaks in China, South Korea and Hong Kong—but the US president, Donald Trump, is prioritising the economy over public health, and Americans themselves have largely refused official advice.

Meanwhile, traditional American social practices, as well as entrenched cultural values like individualism, have greatly contributed to the spread of coronavirus, whose carriers can be highly contagious even without showing any symptoms.

“If I get corona, I get corona. At the end of the day, I’m not going to let it stop me from partying”, said Brady Sluder, a student on spring break in the infamous party town of Miami, Florida. “I’ve been waiting, we’ve been waiting for Miami spring break for a while”.

Experts say that even young, healthy individuals can contract the disease without their knowledge, putting anyone they come into contact with at risk.

“Before you know you have it, maybe you’ve given it to five people. And who did they give it to? And if they are elderly, you maybe have signed their death warrant”, said Muhammed Abubakar, dean of humanities at National University in Abuja. “This is a sad example of American exceptionalism in its purest form”.

In addition to Americans’ almost magical belief in their immunity to rules of all kinds, the country has faced a serious erosion of trust in official institutions in recent decades.

“These people don’t trust their government,”, said Emmanuel Mawema, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Zimbabwe-Harare. “They still manage to hold what we would technically call elections, but the wider society has been broken for a long time.”

This breakdown in trust has a deep history. Though the country has not experienced violent conflict recently, the United States is wrought with long-standing political divisions between its urban and rural tribes, which have repeatedly renounced efforts to find common ground.

“It’s almost as if they are opposed to the common good on principle”, said Tesfaye Haile, who spent eight years as Ethiopia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. “This kind of division and the institutional inertia it creates is simply the way of life there”.

Experts say the US is poised to soon look like neighbouring Europe, where cases of the virus have soared in recent weeks, and doctors in some countries are disconnecting life-support services from patients over 65.

“In countries like the US, where life is cheap, it can create painful choices”, said Simon Odhiambo, who directs the Global Human Rights Network, headquartered in Nairobi. “We’ve been saying for years that health is a human right all states must respect, or it can put everyone at risk. This is what we meant”.

Other countries, too, fear the failures of the United States will put their own populations at risk.

“We don’t have any cases right now”, said South Sudanese President Salva Kiir. “We’ve closed the airport and our land borders. This may create real economic hardship for our people, but we won’t allow anyone coming from or through the United States to put our people at risk. It’s a matter of national security”.

CORRECTION: Europe is not a neighbour of the United States. We regret the error.

Ends

All the names here are fictitious, unless otherwise indicated (with a link to verifiable, accurate information).