Politics

The Pandemic's Lethal Twilight

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=59314">Jeff Wise, New York Magazine</a>

Monday, 03 May 2021 12:41

Wise writes: "While everyone's excited for 'hot vaxx summer,' a reminder: Americans are still dying of COVID."

One-hundred thousand lives hang in the balance. (image: Intelligencer/Getty Images)

The Pandemic's Lethal Twilight

By Jeff Wise, New York Magazine

03 May 21

hile everyone�s excited for �hot vaxx summer,� a reminder: Americans are still dying of COVID. Not in the same numbers as during last winter�s horrific peak, but still at an agonizing clip, with more than 700 fatalities a day on average. In other words, tens of thousands of otherwise healthy people walking around today will die of it in the months ahead.

Sure, there are plenty of reasons to feel optimistic. We now have highly effective vaccines, and close to half the adult U.S. population has gotten at least one dose, conferring a high degree of protection from the virus. Given that a third or more of the country may have built up immunity through already getting infected, that means we�re in striking distance of herd immunity, which will gradually drive new infections to sufficient rarity that the pandemic will effectively be over nationally. �We have reason to believe we�ll be in a good place by July,� says Justin Lessler, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins.

But it�s not at all clear how we�ll get there. After an unexpectedly successful rollout of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, uptake is now slowing, with many locations now having more doses than people taking them. Meanwhile, new variants of concern are emerging and spreading. One of them, B.1.1.7, first appeared around the New Year and now constitutes the majority of new infections in the United States.

�We�re in a footrace between the vaccine and the variants,� says Columbia University disease modeler Jeffrey Shaman. How that race plays out will make the difference between a gradually weakening pandemic that yields relatively few additional fatalities and one that drives the death toll to another spike. The experience of Michigan, where cases spiked eightfold between February and April even as overall caseloads in the U.S. were broadly declining, could be played out again and again in pockets of vulnerability.

Finding the right path is not an easy question, even for the experts. There�s a fundamental principle in control-systems engineering that in order to effectively manage something, you need to have a model of how it behaves. But from the beginning of the pandemic, researchers have struggled to pin down exactly what the virus is doing.

Part of the problem is the nature of the disease. Modeling COVID is fundamentally different from modeling, say, wildfires, where researchers who track the spread of a blaze can stream data from networked sensors into their supercomputers in real time. With COVID, some of the most important processes are invisible. Infected people can walk around for days spreading the virus before anyone even knows they�re sick. And even today, more than a year after the disease emerged, we still don�t fully understand all the different ways it can pass from one person to another. How much more likely is the disease to spread if you sit students three feet apart rather than six? If you reduce restaurant seating by 55 percent versus 33 percent? No one really knows. �At the microscale process level, right now, the data are just not there,� says Shaman.

Instead, COVID researchers have to infer what the disease is doing and make probabilistic estimates of how it will spread based on assumptions about the pace of vaccination, the infectiousness of variants, the safety measures that the public is carrying out, and so on. This technique can be reasonably effective when the infection rate is changing slowly but has proven woefully inadequate in the face of a sudden acceleration, such as the one that took place last November. At a time when about 40,000 people per day were getting sick, modelers forecast that that rate would hold steady for the next four weeks. Instead, infections soared past 105,000 per day and kept climbing into the new year. �We�ve seen the limitations of what these models can do,� says Nick Reich, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at UMass Amherst. �At these moments of change, unfortunately, they have not been as accurate at these moments where we really want them to be.�

One of the problems is the high degree of randomness of the coronavirus, what experts call �overdispersion� � the fact that the disease is transmitted disproportionately by superspreaders. As a result, a previously sluggish outbreak can suddenly spike. A famous example occurred early in the pandemic in South Korea, where a handful of cases had not led to much transition until a particular woman caught it and then attended several church gatherings and went to a buffet lunch at a hotel. The authorities eventually traced more than half of all the country�s cases back to that single individual.

If that one person had behaved differently, the course of the pandemic in South Korea might have played out differently. And that same thing is true everywhere. �When people look back at epidemics and pandemics, they�re very apt to attribute reason to everything that happens,� says Lessler. �It�s easy to look at the New York City surge last spring and say, �New York has a lot of international travel, there�s the subway, there�s a lot of high density, of course it was going to happen.� But if that were the case, why wasn�t Chicago like that? Why wasn�t Boston? There�s a large element of random chance. Maybe somebody got on a subway one day when they were shedding virus like mad. We�ll never know. So I think we need to be humble and cognizant of the fact that, you know, when we see an epidemic, we�re really only seeing one realization of that epidemic.�

On a computer, researchers can run their models over and over again to see the different ways they can play out, a technique called �ensemble forecasting.� This can provide not only a sense of how things are most likely to pan out, but also point to outlier possibilities that might not be so obvious. Another form of ensemble forecasting is to pool together the results of a number of different models. Lessler at Johns Hopkins is running a project called the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub that combines the results of models run by six teams at five universities.

For the most recent run, conducted in March, each team was asked to run six-month scenarios based on different assumptions: whether vaccination rates are high or low, and whether the public continues to use masks and social distancing or gives them up prematurely. The goal was not to provide a forecast of what will happen but to suggest �optimistic and pessimistic views of what might happen in the future, to help people plan,� Lesslers says.

The scenarios his contributors came up with mostly jibe with the generally hopeful feeling that�s prevailing these days. �In most of the models we see either a leveling off of cases or a mini bump, and then everything goes down to essentially nothing around mid- to late-summer,� Lessler says. But there was a huge discrepancy in the total number of deaths between the best-case and worst-case scenarios. The death toll today is approximately 575,000. The ensemble scenario projected 628,000 total U.S. deaths if vaccination was widely accepted and people maintained a moderate use of masks and social distancing, versus 776,000 deaths if vaccination remained low and people stopped masking.

To be clear, these projections are not intended as numerical predictions of how many will die, but rather a relative indication of the impact these factors could have. Fortunately the latest short-term forecasts put out by the CDC are looking considerably better than even the more optimistic scenarios modeled a month ago. But the point they make remains valid. Until vaccines and acquired immunity drive down the number of people who can spread the virus, it will continue to spread, and a percentage of those infected will die. �Tens of millions of people are still fully susceptible,� Reich says. �Everyone�s itching to get back to normal, but I think it�s weeks too early. I think all the warnings for us to not let down our guard right now are really well founded because there�s still a lot that could go wrong.�

Remember the idea of flattening the curve? It applies at the end of a pandemic as much as it did at the beginning. �We�re beyond the hump,� says Lessler, �but if it�s a perfectly symmetric curve, we�re going to see as many people infected and die on the downside as you did on the upside. If we flatten the curve more slowly, we could see hundreds of thousands more deaths. If we accelerate the process, then we don�t have to see those deaths.�

Add new comment

FOCUS: The First 100 Days of Biden Were Also the First 100 Without Trump - That's Telling

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9643">Robert Reich, Guardian UK</a>

Monday, 03 May 2021 11:49

Reich writes: "By almost any measure, Joe Biden's first 100 days have been hugely successful. Getting millions of Americans inoculated against Covid-19 and beginning to revive the economy are central to that success."

Robert Reich. (photo: Getty Images)

The First 100 Days of Biden Were Also the First 100 Without Trump - That's Telling

By Robert Reich, Guardian UK

03 May 21

The new president is benefiting not just from bold proposals and actions but from his predecessor�s catastrophic record

y almost any measure, Joe Biden�s first 100 days have been hugely successful. Getting millions of Americans inoculated against Covid-19 and beginning to revive the economy are central to that success.

Two-thirds of Americans support Biden�s $1.9tn stimulus plan, already enacted. His infrastructure and family plans, which he outlined on Wednesday night at a joint session of Congress, also have broad backing. The $6tn price tag for all this would make it the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson�s Great Society. But for most Americans, it doesn�t feel radical.

Rather than bet it all on a single large-scale program such as universal healthcare � which Bill Clinton failed to accomplish and which Barack Obama turned into a target of Republican fearmongering � Biden has picked an array of popular initiatives, such as preschool, public community college, paid family and medical leave, home care and infrastructure repairs, which are harder to vilify.

Economists talk about pent-up demand for private consumer goods, caused by the pandemic. Biden is responding to a pent-up demand for public goods. The demand has been there for years but the pandemic has starkly revealed it. Compared with workers in other developed nations, Americans enjoy few if any social benefits and safety nets. Biden is saying, in effect, it�s time we caught up.

Besides, it�s hard for Republicans to paint Biden as a radical. He doesn�t feel scary. He�s old, grandfatherly. He speaks haltingly. He�s humble. When he talks about the needs of average working people, it�s clear he knows them.

Biden has also been helped by the contrast to his immediate predecessor � the most divisive and authoritarian personality to occupy the Oval Office in modern memory. Had Biden been elected directly after Obama, regardless of the pandemic and economic crisis, it�s unlikely he and his ambitious plans would seem so benign.

In his address to Congress, Biden credited others for the achievements of his first 100 days. They had been accomplished �because of you�, he said, even giving a nod to Republicans. His predecessor was incapable of crediting anyone else for anything.

Meanwhile, the Republican party, still captive to its Trumpian base, has no message or policies to counter Biden�s proposals. Donald Trump left it with little more than a list of grievances irrelevant to the practical needs of most Americans: that Trump would have been re-elected but for fraudulent votes and a �deep state� conspiracy, that Democrats are �socialists� and that the �left� is intent on taking away American freedoms.

Biden has a razor-thin majority in Congress and must keep every Democratic senator in line if he is to get his plans enacted. But the vacuum on the right has allowed him to dominate the public conversation about his initiatives, which makes passage more likely.

Trump is aiding Biden in other ways. Trump�s yawning budget deficits help normalize Biden�s. When Trump sent $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans last year regardless of whether they had a job, he cleared the way for Biden to deliver generous jobless benefits.

Trump�s giant $1.9tn tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy, none of which �trickled down�, make Biden�s proposals to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for infrastructure and education seem even more reasonable.

Trump�s fierce economic nationalism has made Biden�s �buy American� initiative appear innocent by comparison. Trump�s angry populism has allowed Biden to criticize Wall Street and support unions without causing a ripple.

At the same time, Trumpian lawmakers� refusal to concede the election and their efforts to suppress votes have alienated much of corporate America, pushing executives toward Biden by default.

Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden�s hand. Most Americans were so repulsed by Trump�s overt racism and overtures to white supremacists, especially after the police murder of George Floyd, that Biden�s initiatives to end police brutality and �root out systemic racism�, as he said on Wednesday night, seem appropriate correctives.

The first 100 days of the Biden presidency were also the first 100 days of America without Trump, and the two cannot be separated.

With any luck, Biden�s plans might prove to be the antidote to Trumpism � creating enough decent-paying working-class jobs, along with benefits such as childcare and free community college, as to forestall some of the rightwing dyspepsia that Trump whipped into a fury.

9 comments

FOCUS: Big Pharma Doesn't Want Us to Expand Medicare. We Have to Fight Them

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=24193">Bernie Sanders, Guardian UK</a>

Monday, 03 May 2021 11:28

Sanders writes: "We are beginning to make progress in creating a government that works for all people, and not just the very wealthy. But we still have a very long way to go."

Bernie Sanders. (photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)

Big Pharma Doesn't Want Us to Expand Medicare. We Have to Fight Them

By Bernie Sanders, Guardian UK

03 May 21

By lifting the ban on Medicare negotiating prescription drugs prices we can expand benefits and lower the age of eligibility

e are beginning to make progress in creating a government that works for all people, and not just the very wealthy. But we still have a very long way to go.

By now you�ve heard the big headlines about the American Rescue Plan that Joe Biden signed into law in March: the $1,400 direct payments, the massive expansion of the child tax credit, the extension of unemployment benefits and the production and distribution of tens of millions of vaccine doses that are desperately needed if we are going to crush this pandemic.

What you might not have heard is that we have made primary healthcare far more accessible by doubling funding for community health centers and tripling funding to get doctors, dentists and nurses into medically underserved areas. Kids who have been stuck at home for the past year will now be able to do activities this summer because of major new funding for summer and after-school programs.

These are major steps forward.

But in this time of unprecedented crises, it is not enough. Joe Biden knows that, I know that and you know that.

The agenda the president laid out in his speech on Wednesday gives Congress a good road map, but we need to go further if we are going to seriously combat the enormous economic, social, health and environmental crises facing our country.

As chairman of the Senate budget committee, I�ll take an active role in helping to draft much of this new legislation. There are a number of critical areas we will address including our nation�s crumbling infrastructure, the need to combat climate change and provide childcare for every American family. But right now, I wanted to talk to you about one area I will be especially focused on.

It is outrageous that more than 50 years after Medicare was enacted seniors still do not receive basic hearing, vision and dental coverage. Many seniors are unable to read a newspaper because they can�t afford eyeglasses, they can�t talk with their grandchildren because they can�t afford hearing aids and they have trouble eating because they can�t afford dentures.

It is also time to acknowledge that we must lower Medicare eligibility for the millions of older workers who are in desperate need of healthcare.

This pivotal moment in American history is the time for a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress to do what the American people want. We must expand Medicare benefits and lower the age of Medicare eligibility. Using our majority to take this step is not only the right thing to do for the American people � it�s good politics as well.

These steps might seem expensive, and they are. But here is something amazing. We can pay for the entire cost of these additions to Medicare by allowing the program to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs.

As incredible as it sounds the Medicare program is not allowed by law to negotiate with drug companies over the cost of medications seniors purchase. The lobbying power of the big drug companies means they are ripping off the government and charging the American people any price they want. Not only that. Because of the power of the pharmaceutical industry all Americans are forced to pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. This absurdity must end.

Negotiating drug prices is what every other major country on earth does. The Veterans Administration does it. Only Medicare is prohibited from taking this obvious step.

What we are fighting for now is the very definition of a win-win-win situation. Seniors pay lower prices for prescription drugs and receive hearing, vision and dental care. Millions more Americans become eligible to participate in the Medicare program. And we lower prescription drug costs for all Americans.

It�s almost insane to think that we would have to fight for these commonsense policies that are supported in overwhelming numbers by he American people. But it comes as no surprise that the pharmaceutical industry will use all of their power in Washington DC to try to stop them from taking place. From 1999 to 2018 drug companies spent $4.7bn lobbying the federal government. That is $233m every year. That is in addition to more than $400m in campaign contributions to federal candidates and committees and $900m to state candidate and committees.

The pharmaceutical industry, the most powerful lobby in Washington, believes that their wealth and power can prevent Congress and the president from taking action to expand Medicare and lower prescription drug prices. Well, I disagree. I believe that in the days and weeks ahead, if all of us make our voices heard we can show how powerful the American people can be when we stand together and fight back. We will not allow the greed of the pharmaceutical industry to stand in the way of Americans getting healthcare and reasonably priced prescription drugs.

As a nation we are now beginning to make some real progress in protecting the interests of the working class. Not surprisingly, the Establishment and defenders of the status quo are resisting. But, in this pivotal moment, if we have the courage to educate, organize and go forward, we will win this struggle. At the end of the day a strong grassroots movement of millions of Americans fighting for justice can and will defeat the power of Organized Money.

7 comments

The Cyber Ninjas Have Called in Men With Badges to Protect Them From Antifa

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104">Charles Pierce, Esquire</a>

Monday, 03 May 2021 08:33

Pierce writes: "It is not getting any more dignified out in Arizona."

Trump rally. (photo: Jason Armond/Getty Images)

The Cyber Ninjas Have Called in Men With Badges to Protect Them From Antifa

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

03 May 21

It is not getting any more dignified out in Arizona.

t the end of Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam�s underrated classic, a bit of leftover concentrated evil, disguised as an overdone Sunday roast left in a toaster oven, explodes, taking out the parents of Kevin, the movie�s young hero. You have to be very careful not to leave hunks of fleshy concentrated evil behind.

But enough about Louis DeJoy.

Camp Runamuck�s legacy to the United States Postal Service, which is now and always will be one of the crown jewels of this constitutional republic, ought to be reaching the end of his campaign of calculated vandalism. The Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday voted to advance three of the president�s nominees to the Postal Service�s board. This would establish a Democratic majority on the board, a development that Democrats and the postal workers union have long sought with the assumption that a Democratic majority would dispense with Postmaster DeJoy.

Not so fast, says Bloomberg.

Both incumbent Democratic board members including Chairman Ron Bloom have expressed support for DeJoy, whose restructuring of the service has drawn widespread criticism. Bloom in February told House lawmakers that �the board of governors believes that the Postmaster General in very difficult circumstances is doing a good job.� He told The Atlantic magazine for an article published April 21 that DeJoy �earned my support.� It would be a stunning turnabout for a former Trump donor whose replacement was urged in a letter last month signed by 50 lawmakers, and had been accused of letting service slow during an election that drew a surge in mail-in voting.

As recently as this past week, DeJoy was beefing about the USPS in an intemperate tantrum of a response to criticism of his stewardship of the service. If he somehow survives in his position�and, it should be noted, as a member of this president�s cabinet�there is going to be hell to pay in several quarters of the government.

You didn�t think we were going to go a day without checking on the Cyber Ninjas out in Arizona, did you? It appears that things are getting a little testy in and around the ongoing farce. Men With Badges, who are not police, have appeared. Check out the video from CNN. And the other day, a judge ruled that the Cyber Ninjas had to release the details of what in the hell they�re doing with 2.1 million ballots that they got their Cyber Ninja mitts on. On Friday, the documents were released and, in the immortal words of Little Richard, �Oooh, my soul!� Somebody get the net. From NBC News:

The documents offer a detailed look at the conspiratorial thinking behind an extraordinary partisan hunt for fraud some six months after former President Donald Trump lost the election and began pushing the lie that it was stolen from him.

After Ducey declined to provide National Guard resources, the companies then prepared their own security plan and threat assessment, outlining potential threats to the recount that included Antifa, a network of loosely organized radical groups frequently blamed by Trump allies for violence despite little evidence. In an �extreme threat scenario,� the assessment suggests that a coordinated attack involving a chemical fire and disrupted traffic could allow the recount facility to be breached. �Antifa will likely use the backed-up traffic in those six lanes to slow police and fire response to any permitter breach operation,� the assessment says, adding that this could lead to �nearly unmitigated access� to the facility.

Personally, given the choice between this festival of fools and the Crazy Times Carnival next door, I think Antifa�s probably over riding the Tilt-A-Whirl. At least there�s cotton candy and fried dough.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: �If You�re a Viper� (Fats Waller): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: This week was Duke Ellington�s 121st birthday. (He and Willie Nelson share April 29.) Here�s the Duke from 1933. One of the only stories my father told about World War II that made him smile was about the time his ship tied up in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and he and some shipmates went uptown to hear the Ellington band. They all went to Ebbets Field the next day to see Preacher Roe on the mound. Must�ve been a helluva weekend. History is so cool.

One of the pet topics around the shebeen has been the ever-increasing likelihood that at least some of the world�s next wars are going to be fought not over oil, but over water. A steadily heating planet is beating the hell out of aquifers all over the world. This week, a dispute over a water source set off fighting between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. From the BBC:

The fighting has focused on water facilities in territory claimed by both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Like many parts of Central Asia, the border between the two countries has been a focus of tension for the past 30 years. Before that, it mattered little which bit of territory belonged to whom as people could move freely between Soviet Republics. But the collapse of the USSR generated hard borders - and potential violence. The meandering boundary between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan is particularly tense as over a third of its 1,000-km (600-mile) length is disputed. Restrictions on access to land and water that communities regard as theirs have often led to deadly clashes in the past. The latest fighting was the heaviest in years and has raised fears of a wider conflict between two impoverished neighbours.

Back in the day, we used to call these �brushfire wars,� and a lot of them were simple proxy conflicts with roots in the Cold War. Once the Soviet bloc came apart, long-suppressed ethnic slaughter broke out in Europe. Then came what we�re living through now, resource wars, nations fighting over whatever comes into short supply, and millions fleeing to escape the conflicts, and to find what no longer is theirs. If you�re wondering why the Pentagon considers the climate crisis a national-security threat, look, at the moment, to Central Asia.

The Prime Minister of America has another bit of business he�d like to discuss. From the Washington Post:

Manchin, a key swing vote in the closely divided Senate, said he believed a constitutional amendment, rather than legislation, would be required to admit D.C. as a state. His stance deals a major blow to statehood advocates who were hoping for his support after the bill passed the House last week. Manchin cited findings from the Justice Department under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and comments from then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in reaching his decision.

And thus does the fate of constitutional government depend on all of us carefully monitoring Hoppy Kercheval�s radio program.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Science Times? It�s always a good day for dinosaur news!

A duckbilled dinosaur species was recently discovered in Japan which rewrites what has been known about how the so-called hadrosaurs spread all over the world. According to a Mail Online report, it was previously believed that hadrosaurs, known for their broad, flat snouts, wandered from North America to Asia before they went extinct 66 million years ago.However, the fossilized remains of the Yamatosaurus izanagii, a never-before-seen species reveals the route was actually the opposite�

According to the co-author of the study, Dr. Anthony Fiorillo from Southern Methodist University in the United States, he believes that dinosaurs in Asia possibly spread to the Americas through the Bering Land Bridge. This report also specified that the dinosaur is the second new species of hadrosaur discovered in Japan, which was attached to mainland Asia, during the dinosaur era.

You can never take what you know about them for granted. They�ve been extinct for 70 million years, but they still have surprises up their (metaphorical) sleeves, and that�s why they lived then to make us happy now.

Happy Arbor Day to all my friends in Nebraska, where they aren�t building the Keystone XL pipeline. Arbor Day, after all, was invented there by a newspaperman named J. Sterling Morton. Go plant a tree. You�ll feel better about the world.

I�ll be back on Monday with whatever happens to Rudy Giuliani over the weekend. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, wear the damn mask, and take the damn shots.

4 comments

Explosive Video Reveals Biden Plot to Use His Power to Improve Living Conditions

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</a>

Sunday, 02 May 2021 12:24

Borowitz writes: "An explosive video that emerged last night appears to show President Joe Biden plotting to use his power to improve living conditions in the United States."

Joe Biden at a campaign event. (photo: Phil Roeder/Flickr)

Explosive Video Reveals Biden Plot to Use His Power to Improve Living Conditions

By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker

02 May 21

The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."

n explosive video that emerged last night appears to show President Joe Biden plotting to use his power to improve living conditions in the United States.

In the video, in which Biden is flanked by Vice-President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the President seemingly admits to having a radical scheme to use taxpayers� money for the benefit of taxpayers.

After the video was unearthed, the response from Republicans to Biden�s controversial plot was swift and ferocious.

�Joe Biden works hard to project a �nice guy� image, but this tape reveals the real Joe Biden,� said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. �A man who, all along, has been scheming to expand education and child care.�

Senator Rand Paul said that the video, if authentic, should prompt an immediate congressional investigation.

�Joe Biden promised the American people that, if elected, he would do nothing,� he said. �Joe Biden has broken that promise.�

6 comments

More Articles...

<< Start < Prev 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 Next > End >>

Page 124 of 3432

THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.

Name:	*
Username:	*
E-mail:	*
Password:	*
Confirm password:	*
Fields marked with an asterisk (*) are required.