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They tried to get Trump to care about right-wing terrorism. He ignored them

They tried to get Trump to care about right-wing terrorism. He ignored them

Politico reports: Elizabeth Neumann spent March 13 and 14 of 2019 at a conference in the picturesque Spanish port city of Málaga. The topic: terrorism. Western leaders were deeply worried about the dangers foreign terrorist fighters traveling back from places like Iraq, Libya and Syria would pose to their home countries. And that’s what Neumann expected to dominate the two-day event. Neumann was DHS’s assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the time, handling counterterrorism work from the…

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The Kenosha shooting suspect was in the front row of a Trump rally in January

The Kenosha shooting suspect was in the front row of a Trump rally in January

BuzzFeed reports: The law enforcement–obsessed 17-year-old who was charged with shooting and killing two people and injuring another in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during protests for Jacob Blake appeared in the front row at a Donald Trump rally in January. Kyle Howard Rittenhouse’s social media presence is filled with him posing with weapons, posting “Blue Lives Matter,” and supporting Trump for president. Footage from the Des Moines, Iowa, rally on Jan. 30 shows Rittenhouse feet away from the president, in the front…

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CDC makes ‘potentially dangerous’ guidelines change for people exposed to coronavirus

CDC makes ‘potentially dangerous’ guidelines change for people exposed to coronavirus

The New York Times reports: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly modified its coronavirus testing guidelines this week to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19 — even if they have been recently exposed to the virus. Experts questioned the revision, pointing to the importance of identifying infections in the small window immediately before the onset of symptoms, when many individuals appear to be most contagious. Models suggest that about half of transmission events can be…

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How Mike Pence slowed down the coronavirus response

How Mike Pence slowed down the coronavirus response

Politico reports: Mike Pence had just accepted the biggest assignment of his political life, overseeing the nation’s response to the emerging Covid-19 virus, when White House officials confronted the vice president with an urgent question: what to do about the cruise ships? It was the last weekend of February, and the nation’s top health officials had concluded that cruise lines were a major factor in spreading the virus — each vessel a potential hothouse of invisible infections. Hundreds of passengers…

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U.S. service members injured in Syria after skirmish with Russian forces

U.S. service members injured in Syria after skirmish with Russian forces

Politico reports: U.S. service members were injured after an altercation with Russian forces in northeast Syria on Wednesday, according to a draft military statement and a person familiar with the matter. Four U.S. troops have been diagnosed with mild concussion-like symptoms after the incident involving Russian and coalition armored vehicles, according to the statement reviewed by POLITICO. A second U.S. source briefed on the matter confirmed that multiple U.S. troops were injured. After POLITICO first published this story on Wednesday,…

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Intel officials contradict Trump on voting by mail

Intel officials contradict Trump on voting by mail

Politico reports: The intelligence community has seen no evidence that foreign powers intend to manipulate mail-in voting in the 2020 election, senior Trump administration officials said Wednesday, undercutting a claim by President Donald Trump that such fraud “will be the scandal of our times.” “We have no information or intelligence that any nation-state threat actor is engaging in any activity to undermine the mail-in vote or ballots,” said a top official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,…

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Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis they are fueling

Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis they are fueling

George Monbiot writes: When a major study was published last month, showing that the global population is likely to peak then crash much sooner than most scientists had assumed, I naively imagined that people in rich nations would at last stop blaming all the world’s environmental problems on population growth. I was wrong. If anything, it appears to have got worse. Next week the BirthStrike movement – founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to have children, seek…

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Wade Davis on the unraveling of America

Wade Davis on the unraveling of America

  Wade Davis writes: Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science. In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than…

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Number of voters who are deeply engaged on issue of climate change is rising sharply

Number of voters who are deeply engaged on issue of climate change is rising sharply

The New York Times reports: The number of Americans who feel passionately about climate change is rising sharply, and the issue appears likely to play a more important role in this year’s election than ever before, a new survey shows. What’s more, despite the turmoil caused by overlapping national and global crises, support for action to curb climate change has not diminished. Backing for government to do more to deal with global warming, at 68 percent in May of 2018,…

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Why do some people catch coronavirus without getting sick?

Why do some people catch coronavirus without getting sick?

By Emily Laber-Warren, Undark, August 24, 2020 One of the reasons Covid-19 has spread so swiftly around the globe is that for the first days after infection, people feel healthy. Instead of staying home in bed, they may be out and about, unknowingly passing the virus along. But in addition to these pre-symptomatic patients, the relentless silent spread of this pandemic is also facilitated by a more mysterious group of people: the so-called asymptomatics. According to various estimates, between 20 and…

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FDA ‘grossly misrepresented’ blood plasma data for Covid patients, scientists say

FDA ‘grossly misrepresented’ blood plasma data for Covid patients, scientists say

The New York Times reports: At a news conference on Sunday announcing the emergency approval of blood plasma for hospitalized Covid-19 patients, President Trump and two of his top health officials cited the same statistic: that the treatment had reduced deaths by 35 percent. Mr. Trump called it a “tremendous” number. His health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, a former pharmaceutical executive, said, “I don’t want you to gloss over this number.” And Dr. Stephen M. Hahn,…

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The platform the GOP is too scared to publish

The platform the GOP is too scared to publish

David Frum writes: Republicans have decided not to publish a party platform for 2020. This omission has led some to conclude that the GOP lacks ideas, that it stands for nothing, that it has shriveled to little more than a Trump cult. This conclusion is wrong. The Republican Party of 2020 has lots of ideas. I’m about to list 13 ideas that command almost universal assent within the Trump administration, within the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and Senate,…

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Trump has now siphoned $2.3 million of campaign-donor money into his private business

Trump has now siphoned $2.3 million of campaign-donor money into his private business

Forbes reports: Donald Trump continued to shift money from his donors to his business last month, as his reelection campaign paid his private companies for rent, food, lodging and other expenses, according to a review of the latest Federal Election Commission filings. The richest president in American history, who has yet to donate to his 2020 campaign, has now moved $2.3 million of contributions from other people into his private companies. The most recent expenses look familiar. The president accepted…

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Time for humans to learn what other animals are saying

Time for humans to learn what other animals are saying

Michelle Nijhuis writes: Bryony Lavery’s 2018 play Slime revolves around seven young interns at the Third Annual Slime Crisis Conference, which takes place at an unspecified time in a not-too-distant future. It is a multispecies gathering, convened in response to a toxic slime that is taking over the world’s oceans. The interns’ job is to interpret the squawks, squeaks, and groans of the cormorants, seals, guillemots, toads, and other animals in attendance, and to encourage all species to participate in…

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