Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Redirect military budgets to tackle climate change and pandemics

Redirect military budgets to tackle climate change and pandemics

Denise Garcia writes: Despite threats to human existence from climate change, biodiversity loss and a pandemic that’s devastating economies and paralysing societies, countries still spend recklessly on destructive weapons for wars they will never fight. As an academic who advises the United Nations on arms control and the military uses of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, I have long argued that nations should prioritize ‘human security for the common good’ over military spending. That means ensuring people can live to…

Read More Read More

America’s coronavirus crisis will end — but not soon

America’s coronavirus crisis will end — but not soon

Juliette Kayyem write: A weary friend of mine—another working mom—recently texted to say she couldn’t decide which aspect of daily life during the coronavirus pandemic was worse: “the insanity or the monotony.” Either way, the misery will not end when 2020 does. The new year will inherit many of the same problems that have become so grindingly familiar in 2020. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got some Americans’ hopes up with its recent instruction that states should be…

Read More Read More

Trump fixates on the promise of a vaccine — real or not — as key to reelection bid

Trump fixates on the promise of a vaccine — real or not — as key to reelection bid

The Washington Post reports: President Trump is so fixated on finding a vaccine for the novel coronavirus that in meetings about the U.S. pandemic response, little else captures his attention, according to administration officials. Trump has pressed health officials to speed up the vaccine timeline and urged them to deliver one by the end of the year. He has peppered them with questions about the development status and mass-distribution plans. And, in recent days, he has told some advisers and…

Read More Read More

A rural Virginia community thought it could escape the pandemic but now has among the highest number of new cases in the state

A rural Virginia community thought it could escape the pandemic but now has among the highest number of new cases in the state

The Washington Post reports: In the brightest red corner of Virginia, where “Trump Digs Coal” signs dot the Appalachian mountain hollers, Jerry Estep first brushed off the coronavirus as an urban plague. Now he won’t leave home in this tiny town, population 980, without a mask. “I was just going out like normal, but that’s not normal no more,” said Estep, 77, a retired florist with longtime health woes that could make a case of the coronavirus especially lethal. “I…

Read More Read More

‘Reign of terror’: A summer of police violence in Los Angeles

‘Reign of terror’: A summer of police violence in Los Angeles

The Guardian reports: Los Angeles police officers have continued to kill civilians at alarming rates and under questionable circumstances in the last three months, despite a summer of unprecedented activism and growing political pressure from lawmakers. Most recently, two deputies with the Los Angeles sheriff’s department (LASD) fatally shot a bicyclist, 29-year-old Dijon Kizzee, who was fleeing after officers tried to stop him for an alleged “vehicle code” violation. The killing on Monday of yet another Black man in South…

Read More Read More

Here’s what the media must do to fend off an election-night disaster

Here’s what the media must do to fend off an election-night disaster

Margaret Sullivan writes: You might think that 2000 would have adequately prepared the media — and the American public — for the complete unpredictability of what may happen in November 2020 as a nation votes in the midst of a pandemic with a sitting president who is busy creating mistrust in the system and threatening not to accept a defeat. But there’s not much reason for confidence. Recall the 2018 midterms when some media figures rushed to judgment again. “It’s…

Read More Read More

How local customs in Uruguay have changed in response to the pandemic

How local customs in Uruguay have changed in response to the pandemic

MIT Technology Review spoke to Rafael Radi and Fernando Paganini, advisors to the Uruguayan government: The first cases in Uruguay were confirmed on March 13, and the national working group that we convened of about 60 people met with the president on April 16. There were two main arms, one in health and one in data science and modeling. The number of cases never really built up to the point where we had no control. You could almost track our…

Read More Read More

Five years after the migration crisis, Merkel, not Trump, seems vindicated

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…

Read More Read More

Experts warn U.S. covid-19 deaths could more than double by year’s end

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…

Read More Read More

Covid-19 has killed more law enforcement officers this year than all other causes combined

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…

Read More Read More

Why Trump supporters can’t admit who he really is

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…

Read More Read More

How Trump draws on campaign funds to pay legal bills

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…

Read More Read More

The neurons that appeared from nowhere

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,…

Read More Read More

For Schopenhauer, happiness is a state of semi-satisfaction

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…

Read More Read More