Music: Tigran Hamasyan — ‘The Dream Voyager’
Five years after the migration crisis, Merkel, not Trump, seems vindicated
Ishaan Tharoor writes: “I’ll put it simply,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared at the end of August 2015. “Germany is a strong country. … We can handle this.” “This” was an epochal influx of migrants and refugees, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Their exodus from the Levant and North Africa had led to chaotic scenes in countries along Germany’s borders, through which tens of thousands of people were making a trek to greater safety after entering Europe in Greece…
Experts warn U.S. covid-19 deaths could more than double by year’s end
The Washington Post reports: The global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic could triple by year’s end, with an additional 1.9 million deaths, while a fall wave of infections could drive fatalities in the United States to 410,000, according to a new forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The estimate reinforces warnings by many experts that cooler, drier weather and increased time spent indoors could boost viral transmission in the Northern Hemisphere…
Covid-19 has killed more law enforcement officers this year than all other causes combined
CNN reports: More police officers have died from Covid-19 this year than have been killed on patrol. That’s according to the Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP), a nonprofit organization that tracks law enforcement fatalities in the line of duty. At least 101 officers have died from Covid-19, while at least 82 have died by other means, as of Thursday, according to ODMP. The organization is working to verify an additional some 150 officers who are presumed to have died after…
Why Trump supporters can’t admit who he really is
Peter Wehner writes: To understand the corruption, chaos, and general insanity that is continuing to engulf the Trump campaign and much of the Republican Party right now, it helps to understand the predicate embraced by many Trump supporters: If Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidency, America dies. During last week’s Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker insisted that life under a Biden presidency would be dystopian. Charlie Kirk, the young Trump acolyte who opened the proceedings, declared, “I am…
How Trump draws on campaign funds to pay legal bills
The New York Times reports: President Trump was proudly litigious before his victory in 2016 and has remained so in the White House. But one big factor has changed: He has drawn on campaign donations as a piggy bank for his legal expenses to a degree far greater than any of his predecessors. In New York, Mr. Trump dispatched a team of lawyers to seek damages of more than $1 million from a former campaign worker after she claimed she…
The neurons that appeared from nowhere
Nayanah Siva writes: The scientists crowded around Yuanchao Xue’s petri dish. They couldn’t identify the cells that they were seeing. “We saw a lot of cells with spikes growing out of the cell surface,” said Xiang-Dong Fu, the research team’s leader at the University of California, San Diego. “None of us really knew that much about neuroscience, and we asked around and someone said that these were neurons.” The team, who were made up of basic cellular and molecular scientists,…
For Schopenhauer, happiness is a state of semi-satisfaction
David Bather Woods writes: On 13 December 1807, in fashionable Weimar, Johanna Schopenhauer picked up her pen and wrote to her 19-year-old son Arthur: ‘It is necessary for my happiness to know that you are happy, but not to be a witness to it.’ Two years earlier, in Hamburg, Johanna’s husband Heinrich Floris had been discovered dead in the canal behind their family compound. It is possible that he slipped and fell, but Arthur suspected that his father jumped out…
Music: Maati Baani — ‘Jogi De Naal’
Trump: Americans who died in war are ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’
Jeffrey Goldberg writes: When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true. Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people…
Most Americans think Trump’s response to the protests across the U.S. is making the situation worse
ABC News reports: A significant majority of Americans believe President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on the unrest in parts of the country is making matters worse — with even members of his own party divided on his approach — a new ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday finds. Trump’s attempt to reframe the race against former Vice President Joe Biden around “law and order,” does not appear to be breaking through. Over half of the country — 55% — in the new…
Michael Forest Reinoehl, suspect in Portland shooting, is killed during arrest
The New York Times reports: Law enforcement agents shot and killed an antifa supporter on Thursday as they moved to arrest him in the fatal shooting of a right-wing activist who was part of a pro-Trump caravan in Portland, Ore., officials said. The suspect, Michael Forest Reinoehl, 48, was shot by officers from a federally led fugitive task force during the encounter in Lacey, Wash., southwest of Seattle, according to four law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation. As part…
Will Americans ever learn the full story about Trump’s relationship with Russia?
Anne Applebaum writes: Fate offered Peter Strzok a place in history that he never sought. The son of an Army officer, Strzok also served in the United States military before joining the FBI’s counterintelligence operation in 1996. He excelled at his job: In 2001, he was part of the team that tracked and arrested a network of Russian “illegals” who had been living in the U.S. for many years under deep cover. But those were not the cases that brought…
Women are more effective leaders than men in tackling the pandemic, the data shows
By Supriya Garikipati, University of Liverpool and Uma S Kambhampati, University of Reading Over the last few months, there has been much discussion of leadership during the pandemic. What constitutes good leadership? Who has performed better and which countries have been worse? One pattern that emerged early on was that female leaders were seen to have handled the crisis remarkably well. Whether it has been New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern or Taiwan under the presidency of Tsai Ing-Wen or Germany…
Here’s why BuzzFeed News is now calling QAnon a ‘collective delusion’
BuzzFeed News reports: What is QAnon? It’s not easy to describe, but one thing we know to be true: It’s not a conspiracy theory — it’s bigger. What started as a thread on the anonymous message board 4chan has long since entered the mainstream: Questions about QAnon have been asked in the White House press room, and a Q follower is poised to be voted into Congress later this year. When QAnon started appearing several years ago, journalists fumbled to…
U.S. court: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal
Reuters reports: Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful – and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth. In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign…