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Scientists may have discovered new secretive organs in the center of your head

Scientists may have discovered new secretive organs in the center of your head

The New York Times reports: After millenniums of careful slicing and dicing, it might seem as though scientists have figured out human anatomy. A few dozen organs, a couple hundred bones and connective tissue to tie it all together. But despite centuries of scrutiny, the body is still capable of surprising scientists. A team of researchers in the Netherlands has discovered what may be a set of previously unidentified organs: a pair of large salivary glands, lurking in the nook…

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Herd immunity is not a plan; it’s magical thinking

Herd immunity is not a plan; it’s magical thinking

Gigi Kwik Gronvall and Rachel West write: Ten months into the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, there is mounting frustration that life is not back to “normal.” Many U.S. schools and businesses remain closed, people are hesitant to fly and enjoy vacations, and in many places, restaurants and indoor activities are sharply limited, with severe economic consequences. With patience wearing thin, it may be tempting to consider policies that give us a return to normalcy, whatever the consequences. This wishful thinking describes the…

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Discord inside the White House task force as coronavirus surges

Discord inside the White House task force as coronavirus surges

The Washington Post reports: As summer faded into autumn and the novel coronavirus continued to ravage the nation unabated, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist whose commentary on Fox News led President Trump to recruit him to the White House, consolidated his power over the government’s pandemic response. Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and…

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How to cover Election Day and beyond

How to cover Election Day and beyond

Vivian Schiller and Garrett M. Graff write: Americans think about elections wrong; they aren’t only about tallying votes to declare a winner. Elections in a democracy are just as much about convincing the loser that he or she actually lost—and that the process was free, fair, and secure enough that the loser can accept the result as legitimate. Now, only weeks before Election Day, there’s a growing realization that the complexity of this year’s electoral landscape—from pandemic-related social distancing and…

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Justice Kavanaugh unlocked ways to fight foreign interference in U.S. elections

Justice Kavanaugh unlocked ways to fight foreign interference in U.S. elections

Ellen L. Weintraub, a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, writes: Among many other recent developments not likely on anyone’s 2020 bingo card, a Supreme Court decision about foreign aid and legalized prostitution has shattered perceived constraints on the authority of the United States to robustly defend its elections against foreign interference. This summer, in U.S. Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-3 decision, with the majority opinion written by Justice…

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FBI examining Hunter Biden’s laptop as foreign op, contradicting Trump’s intel czar

FBI examining Hunter Biden’s laptop as foreign op, contradicting Trump’s intel czar

The Daily Beast reports: The FBI is investigating the purloined laptop materials from Joe Biden’s son as part of a possible foreign disinformation operation, a congressional source told The Daily Beast—an investigation at odds with a statement from President Trump’s director of national intelligence. John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, told Fox Business on Monday that the dissemination of materials from Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop was not part of a Russian disinformation campaign. “The intelligence community doesn’t believe that…

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Six Russian military officers charged in vast hacking campaign

Six Russian military officers charged in vast hacking campaign

The Associated Press reports: Six current and former Russian military officers sought to disrupt through computer hacking the French election, the Winter Olympics and U.S. hospitals and businesses, according to a Justice Department indictment unsealed Monday. It details destructive attacks on a broad range of targets and implicates the same Kremlin unit that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. The indictment accuses the defendants, all said to be officers in the Russian military agency known as the GRU, in hacks…

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Trump’s retread campaign isn’t getting traction

Trump’s retread campaign isn’t getting traction

The Associated Press reports: President Donald Trump stood before a crowd in a state that had once been firmly in his grasp. There were fewer than three weeks left in the campaign, one reshaped by a virus that has killed more than 215,000 Americans, and he was running out of time to change the trajectory of the race. He posed a question. “Did you hear the news?” the president asked the hopeful crowd. “Bruce Ohr is finally out of the…

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American traitors from Benedict Arnold to Donald J Trump

American traitors from Benedict Arnold to Donald J Trump

Charles Kaiser writes: One of the most important qualities a good reporter can have is a very low threshold for outrage. Useful, critical coverage of your subject becomes impossible once nonchalance or indifference has inured you to scandal. This has become a huge problem during Donald Trump’s presidency. Inside the souls of far too many Washington reporters, a never-ending wave of scandals, crimes, indictments and assorted obstructions of justice has washed away this essential capacity for indignation – just when…

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Trump ‘inciting domestic terrorism’ with ‘Lock her up!’ rally chant, says Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

Trump ‘inciting domestic terrorism’ with ‘Lock her up!’ rally chant, says Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

The Guardian reports: Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan who was the subject of a rightwing plot to kidnap and possibly kill her over coronavirus lockdown measures, has accused Donald Trump of “inspiring and incentivising domestic terrorism”. Whitmer spoke after Lara Trump, a campaign surrogate for her father-in-law, insisted the president was merely “having fun” when he attacked Whitmer and responded to chants of “Lock her up!” at a rally in Muskegon. “Lock ’em all up,” the president said. On…

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Trump continues bizarre appeals to suburban women as he campaigns in Covid hotspots

Trump continues bizarre appeals to suburban women as he campaigns in Covid hotspots

Maeve Reston writes: If President Donald Trump loses his reelection bid in November, it will be in part because of his fundamental misunderstanding of the beliefs of “suburban women,” whom he has tried to win back with a series of bizarre and racist appeals that seem more targeted to a stereotype from the 1950s and 1960s than the American women who actually live in those areas today. Many of the female voters who have abandoned Trump recoil from his divisive…

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After Trump, the Republican Party may become even more extreme

After Trump, the Republican Party may become even more extreme

Stanley Greenberg writes: Trump built his base in the insurgent anti-government, anti-immigrant movement that, during the last recession, came to prominence as the Tea Party. Then he forged a pact with evangelical Christians, to whom he promised a steady supply of socially conservative federal judges, including on the Supreme Court. He also built a strong alliance with his party’s anti-abortion-rights observant Catholics—a constituency epitomized by Attorney General William Barr. So Trump campaigns unbowed atop a coalition that, by my estimate,…

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How Kevin Van Ausdal’s ‘voice of reason’ got silenced by QAnon and Marjorie Taylor Greene in 31 days

How Kevin Van Ausdal’s ‘voice of reason’ got silenced by QAnon and Marjorie Taylor Greene in 31 days

The Washington Post reports: Kevin was in his Honda heading west to Indiana as the campaign staff issued a statement on his behalf, titled “A Message from Kevin”: “I am heartbroken to announce that for family and personal reasons, I cannot continue this race for Congress. The next steps in my life are taking me away from Georgia …” And that was the end of 31 days. A week later, Marjorie Taylor Greene was arriving in her Humvee for a…

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Covid-19 is a class issue

Covid-19 is a class issue

John Harris writes: Just as [Britain’s] final exit from the EU comes into view, noise from the media and politics about Covid-19 is sounding discomfortingly similar to the furies that erupted around the 2016 referendum. On one side stands the political right, opposed to lockdown, apparently spurning the advice of experts, and seemingly convinced that a mixture of true-Brit common sense and derring-do will somehow see us through. The left, meanwhile, emphasises the importance of “the science”, and the prospect…

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