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A devastating new stage of the pandemic

A devastating new stage of the pandemic

The Atlantic reports: For the past few weeks in the United States, the awful logic of the coronavirus seemed to have lifted. Stores and restaurants reopened. Protesters flocked to the streets. Some people resumed going about their daily lives, and while many wore face masks, many others did not. Yet cases continued to ebb. Even though the U.S. had adopted neither the stringent lockdowns nor the trace-and-isolate strategies seen in other countries, its number of confirmed COVID-19 cases settled into…

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How conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic

How conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic

Christopher Ingraham writes: Coronavirus infections have surged in a number of states, setting the United States on a markedly different pandemic trajectory than other wealthy nations. There are many reasons our response to the pandemic tied to nearly 120,000 U.S. deaths has faltered, experts say, including the lack of a cohesive federal policy, missteps on testing and tracing, and a national culture emphasizing individualism. In recent weeks, three studies have focused on conservative media’s role in fostering confusion about the…

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Trump says the coronavirus is ‘going away.’ CDC says cases in U.S. may be 10 times higher than reported

Trump says the coronavirus is ‘going away.’ CDC says cases in U.S. may be 10 times higher than reported

NBC News reports: President Donald Trump keeps spinning a tale about COVID-19 that is at odds with his own administration’s disease experts and data compiled by his own coronavirus task force, which was obtained exclusively by NBC News. In Trump’s telling, the deadly pandemic isn’t really a serious threat to the public and rising infection rates are simply due to increased testing. “It’s going away,” he said Tuesday at an event in Phoenix. But on the same day, the coronavirus…

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Quarantine bubbles – when done right – limit coronavirus risk and help fight loneliness

Quarantine bubbles – when done right – limit coronavirus risk and help fight loneliness

Quaranteams offer a way to limit the risk of infection while also maintaining social contacts and mental health. Oqvector / iStock Getty Images Plus via Getty Images By Melissa Hawkins, American University After three months of lockdowns, many people in the U.S. and around the world are turning to quarantine bubbles, pandemic pods or quaranteams in an effort to balance the risks of the pandemic with the emotional and social needs of life. I am an epidemiologist and a mother…

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Ad agency counting BMW, PayPal and Pepsi as clients joins Facebook boycott

Ad agency counting BMW, PayPal and Pepsi as clients joins Facebook boycott

CNBC reports: Advertising agency Goodby Silverstein, owned by the Omnicom Group, has announced that it intends to join the ”#StopHateForProfit” campaign and pull advertising from Facebook next month. The agency’s clients include the likes of BMW, HP, PayPal, Pepsi, Doritos, and Adobe. Last week, a group of six organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Sleeping Giants and Color of Change, called on Facebook advertisers to halt their spending on the social media…

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The dirty secret behind Ben Shapiro’s extraordinary success on Facebook

The dirty secret behind Ben Shapiro’s extraordinary success on Facebook

Popular Information reports: The success of The Daily Wire, the website run by right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, on Facebook is mind-boggling. The site has a small staff and primarily aggregates content from Twitter and other news outlets. Typically, its articles are very short, usually less than 500 words, and contain no original reporting. And yet, last month, The Daily Wire was the seventh-ranked publisher on Facebook, according to the analytics service NewsWhip. Articles published in The Daily Wire attracted 60,616,745…

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Policing is doing what it’s meant to do — and that’s the problem

Policing is doing what it’s meant to do — and that’s the problem

Todd May and George Yancy write: On June 6, one of us attended a memorial vigil for George Floyd. The opening speaker first thanked the local Police Department for keeping the vigil safe and then went on to distinguish between the majority of police officers who do their job helping and protecting people and the few who are racist and violent. His remarks echoed those made by Barack Obama on May 29, in his public statement on the killing of…

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‘Coming back and biting us’: U.S. sees Covid-19 resurgence

‘Coming back and biting us’: U.S. sees Covid-19 resurgence

The Associated Press reports: Hospital administrators and health experts warned desperately Wednesday that parts of the U.S. are on the verge of becoming overwhelmed by a resurgence of the coronavirus, lamenting that politicians and a tired-of-being-cooped-up public are letting a disaster unfold. The U.S. recorded a one-day total of 34,700 new COVID-19 cases, the highest in two months, according to the count kept by Johns Hopkins University. The number of new cases per day is now running just short of…

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The right way to breathe during the coronavirus pandemic

The right way to breathe during the coronavirus pandemic

Breathing in through the nose is an integral part of meditation and delivers virus-fighting gases to the lungs. triloks / Getty Images By Louis J. Ignarro, University of California, Los Angeles Inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth. It’s not just something you do in yoga class – breathing this way actually provides a powerful medical benefit that can help the body fight viral infections. The reason is that your nasal cavities produce the molecule nitric oxide, which…

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How Facebook allows climate misinformation to bypass its fact-checking process

How Facebook allows climate misinformation to bypass its fact-checking process

E&E News reports: A team of climate scientists working as approved fact checkers for Facebook evaluated a post last year by a White House-connected group that claims the world needs to burn more fossil fuels. The researchers found that the post by the CO2 Coalition was based on cherry-picked information to mislead readers into thinking climate science models are wrong about global warming. The post, which was published originally in the conservative Washington Examiner, was an opinion piece that had…

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Who is really to blame for climate change?

Who is really to blame for climate change?

Jocelyn Timperley writes: One of the most frustrating things about the climate crisis is that the fact that earlier action could have prevented it. With every passing year of inaction, the emissions cuts needed to limit global warming to relatively safe levels grow steeper and steeper. Many groups have been accused of being at blame for this ongoing lack of action, from fossil fuel companies and wealthy countries, to politicians, rich people and sometimes even all of us. Others may…

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As Trump slumps, his campaign fixes on a target: Women

As Trump slumps, his campaign fixes on a target: Women

The Washington Post reports: Before the coronavirus pandemic shut down Tampa’s hotels and put her out of work, Audrey Scaglione said she expected to vote for Donald Trump a second time. Now the contract food service worker finds herself struggling to decide. “I’m just really unsure right now,” said Scaglione, who says she leans Republican but also previously voted for Barack Obama. “It is so hard to tell. I don’t think I can.” She has not heard much from former…

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With annexation plan looming, Israel grapples with reality of apartheid

With annexation plan looming, Israel grapples with reality of apartheid

Meron Rapoport writes: On 15 June 1967, five days after the end of the Middle East war, the Israeli cabinet met for the second time since the ceasefire was announced. Menachem Begin, the historical leader of the nationalistic Herut party – which would later become Likud – had joined the government only a few days before the war, having previously been treated as a pariah by the successive Zionist “social democrat” ruling parties in the first 19 years of Israel’s…

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The origin of scientists

The origin of scientists

Jessica Riskin writes: A few years ago, when my daughter was in middle school, she had to study for a quiz on “the five steps of the scientific method.” She had no problem memorizing five words in a given order, but she also had to be ready to explain them, and there she ran into trouble, until she was seized by a bright idea: here was a chance for her mother, who taught and wrote about the history of science,…

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