Arterial Blockage: The giant container ship Ever Given blocking the Suez canal has been partially refloated, raising hopes that one of the world’s most important maritime passageways will re-open soon.

   It’s not over yet. Although the ship has been swung parallel to shore, the bulbous bow is still stuck in rocks and clay. 

  Even when the Ever Given is on the move again, it will take days to clear the backup of 300 or more ships waiting to pass through the canal.

  Egypt had been considering unloading some of the 18,000 cargo containers on the stuck ship to free it from the banks of the Suez Canal.

  Workers had removed  27,000 cubic feet of sand from around the ship with no results for days. Finally, 10 tugboats and an unusually high tide lifted and moved the 200,000-ton ship.

Black Lives: Opening arguments are expected today in the trial of the white former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin accused of murdering the unarmed black man, George Floyd. Chauvin is charged with second- and third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. 

  A lot is at stake there. The NY Times reports that looming over the debate about public safety and policing in Minneapolis is worry about public reaction to a verdict. After a jury acquitted four police officers of the infamous 1991 beating of black motorist Rodney King, Los Angeles erupted in rioting. 

  The court house in Minneapolis is surrounded by fencing and barbed wire.

  The Times says of Minneapolis, “Residents all over town still complain of officers using excessive force, like during a recent confrontation in which a white officer appeared to wind up and punch a Black teenager. And officers accuse some community members of antagonizing them.”

New Wave: Cases of Covid-19 are climbing even while deaths are dipping.

  This morning diagnosed cases are up 15 percent over the past two weeks. Another 507 Americans died in the past day.

  Medical experts say variants of the original virus are one of the causes. The variant labelled B.1.1.7 is particularly worrisome because it is 50 percent more transmissible than the original. 

 But variants are not the only cause of the new surge. Relaxed restrictions in some states, the return of indoor dining, and even spring break in the South are all helping to increase spread of the disease.

  No surprise, cases are on the rise in Florida, the epicenter of Spring Break where the governor has relaxed restrictions. The state is averaging 5,000 new cases a day.

  So far, 549,335 Americans have died of the disease and 96.3 million doses of vaccine have been administered.

Free to Speak: The team of doctors and scientists advising former President Trump on the pandemic delivered a series of bombshells last night on CNN, but none more so than Dr. Deborah Birx who said hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been avoided. 

  “I look at it this way,” Birx said. “The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge.” But, she said,  “All of the rest of them,” about 450,000 deaths, “in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially” if Trump and his administration had been more open and aggressive.

  Birx said she was restrained from spreading the word nationally about the danger of the virus because Trump didn’t want her taking the spotlight.

  Other members of the pandemic team said the administration misled the public about the availability of testing.

  Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accused Trump’s health secretary, Alex Azar of pressuring him to revise scientific reports. “Now he may deny that, but it’s true,” Dr. Redfield said in an interview with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Azar, in a statement, denied it.

Myanmar: The Myanmar military shot and killed as many as 100 protesters and other civilians in two dozen cities Saturday as the populace faces off with the army over its seizure of government. 

  The widespread killings, which took place in more than two dozen cities across the country, came a day after military-run television threatened protesters with getting “shot in the back and the back of the head” if they persisted in opposing military rule. Many of Saturday’s victims were bystanders and some were children.

The Spin Rack: Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed a law that will allow doctors to refuse to treat someone because of moral or religious objections. They won’t be able to deny emergency care, but doctors could turn away anyone who’s gay, lesbian, or unmarried and pregnant. — Four people were killed by flooding in the Nashville area. One man died in his car and another was swept away after escaping his vehicle. Two people died when floodwaters hit a homeless encampment.

Cancellations: The race and inclusion editor at USA Today  was fired for tweeting that mass shooters are always “angry white men.” Statistics of mass shootings since 1981 say she was only 54 percent correct.

  In San Francisco, the black vice president of the school board was pushed out for posting what were described as “harmful tweets” about Asians. Alison Collins

had written that Asian American teachers, students, and parents had used “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”

Come and get Me Sucka’:  In the midst of the debate about guns and assault rifles, the wimpy South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham who can’t even stand up to Donald Trump, says he owns an AR-15 and would use it if he had to.

  Graham told Fox News host Chris Wallace. “If there’s a natural disaster in South Carolina where the cops can’t protect my neighborhood, my house will be the last one that the gang will come to, because I can defend myself.”

  Or, maybe they wouldn’t go to his house because nobody likes him.

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