Music: Mia Zabelka — ‘The Order Of Things’
Justice Dept. never fully examined Trump’s ties to Russia, ex-officials say
The New York Times reports: The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia. The special counsel who finished the investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, secured three dozen indictments and convictions of some top Trump advisers, and he produced a report that outlined Russia’s…
Inside Trump’s pressure campaign on federal scientists over a covid-19 treatment
The Washington Post reports: President Trump’s accusatory tweet barreled in at 7:49 a.m. a week ago Saturday: The “deep state” at the Food and Drug Administration was trying to sandbag his election prospects by slowing progress on coronavirus treatments and vaccines until after Nov. 3. Shocked and upset, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, who was tagged in the tweet, immediately began calling his contacts at the White House to find out why the president was angry. During his conversations, he mentioned…
Trump embraces fringe theories on protests and the coronavirus
The New York Times reports: President Trump unleashed an especially intense barrage of Twitter messages over the weekend, embracing fringe conspiracy theories claiming that the coronavirus death toll has been exaggerated and that street protests are actually an organized coup d’état against him. In a concentrated predawn burst, the president posted or reposted 89 messages between 5:49 a.m. and 8:04 a.m. on Sunday on top of 18 the night before, many of them inflammatory comments or assertions about violent clashes…
Trump threatens Portland mayor — ‘he hasn’t seen anything yet’ — after fatal shooting
The New York Times reports: A fatal shooting during a night of political conflict in Portland, Ore., has yet again escalated tensions in the city and further inflamed the issues of crime, protest and race that President Trump is trying to make a focus of presidential politics. A man affiliated with a right-wing group was shot and killed on Saturday as a large group of supporters of President Trump traveled in a caravan through downtown Portland, Ore., which has seen…
Big Oil is in trouble. Its plan: Flood Africa with plastic
The New York Times reports: Confronting a climate crisis that threatens the fossil fuel industry, oil companies are racing to make more plastic. But they face two problems: Many markets are already awash with plastic, and few countries are willing to be dumping grounds for the world’s plastic waste. The industry thinks it has found a solution to both problems in Africa. According to documents reviewed by The New York Times, an industry group representing the world’s largest chemical makers…
How Angela Merkel’s great migrant gamble paid off
The Observer reports: Mohammad Hallak found the key to unlock the mysteries of his new homeland when he realised you could switch the subtitles on your Netflix account to German. The 21-year-old Syrian from Aleppo jotted down words he didn’t know, increased his vocabulary and quickly became fluent. Last year, he passed his end of high school exams with a grade of 1.5, the top mark in his year group. Five years to the month after arriving in Germany as…
Music: Ryan Cohan — ‘Sabra’
An American disaster foretold
Roger Cohen writes: Henry Kissinger this month called François Delattre, the former French ambassador to the United States who is now the secretary general of the Foreign Ministry. Kissinger was concerned about the deteriorating state of U.S.-Chinese relations and the risk that the situation could slip out of control. Delattre told me he has his own concerns in that regard. An October surprise might involve a military incident in the South China Sea that President Trump uses to demonstrate American…
Trump escalates rhetoric on unrest in cities, looking for a campaign advantage
The Washington Post reports: President Trump threatened Friday to invoke the Insurrection Act in American cities and told supporters in New Hampshire they must vote for him to “save democracy from the mob,” an escalation of his campaign rhetoric against demonstrators in the streets. Trump opened his speech in a suburban airport hangar here with a harsh, fiery depiction of major American cities and a detailed monologue about agitators chasing and taunting his supporters and allies outside the White House…
Top intelligence office informs congressional committees it’ll no longer brief on election security
CNN reports: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has informed the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence that it’ll no longer be briefing on election security issues, according to letters obtained by CNN and a senior administration official. Instead, ODNI will primarily provide written updates to the congressional panels, the official said. The official added that other agencies supporting election security, including the Department of Justice, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security, intend to continue…
Kenosha militia event asking attendees to bring weapons was reported 455 times without Facebook acting
BuzzFeed reports: In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of “an operational mistake.” The page and an associated event inspired widespread criticism of the company after a 17-year-old suspect allegedly shot and killed two protesters Tuesday night. The event associated with the Kenosha Guard page, however, was flagged to Facebook at least 455 times…
New study suggests polls are missing shy Trump voters
Bloomberg reports: A new online study finds that Republicans and independents are twice as likely as Democrats to say they would not give their true opinion in a telephone poll question about their preference for president in the 2020 election. That raises the possibility that polls understate support for President Donald Trump. Some 11.7% of Republicans and 10.5% independents said they would not give their true opinion, vs. 5.4% of Democrats, according to the study by CloudResearch LLC, a Queens,…
The usual diagnostic tests may simply be too sensitive and too slow to contain the spread of the coronavirus
The New York Times reports: Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus. Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time. But researchers say the…
Reports of several cases of Covid-19 reinfection — but the implications are complicated
STAT reports: Following the news this week of what appears to have been the first confirmed case of a Covid-19 reinfection, other researchers have been coming forward with their own reports. One in Belgium, another in the Netherlands. And now, one in Nevada. What caught experts’ attention about the case of the 25-year-old Reno man was not that he appears to have contracted SARS-CoV-2 (the name of the virus that causes Covid-19) a second time. Rather, it’s that his second…
Music: Samuel Hällkvist & Natiho Toyota — ‘Kenja’ ft. Mindjuggler