Arthur C. Brooks writes: We are living in a time of fear. The coronavirus pandemic has threatened our lives, health, and economy in ways most Americans have never experienced. We have no idea what the future will bring. According to the American Psychological Association’s annual “Stress in America” survey, the percentage of people in the U.S. who say that “the future of our nation is a significant source of stress” rose to 83 percent in June 2020, up from 63…
CNBC reports: Previously public data has already disappeared from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website after the Trump administration quietly shifted control of the information to the Department of Health and Human Services. Since the pandemic began, the CDC regularly published data on availability of hospital beds and intensive care units across the country. But Ryan Panchadsaram, who helps run a data-tracking site called Covid Exit Strategy, said that when he tried to collect the data from the…
CNBC reports: President Donald Trump on Wednesday finalized a rollback to the country’s landmark environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act, by speeding up approval for federal projects like pipelines, highways and power plants. NEPA was signed into law by President Richard Nixon 50 years ago and requires federal agencies to consider the environmental consequences of infrastructure projects before they are approved. The law has also been vital in allowing communities to weigh in on how such projects impact climate…
By Ryan McCarthy, ProPublica, July 16, 2020 On April 3, Terrence K. Williams, a politically conservative actor and comedian who’s been praised by President Donald Trump, assured his nearly 3 million followers on Facebook that Democrats would light ballots on fire or throw them away. Wearing a red “Keep America Great” hat, Williams declared, “If you mail in your vote, your vote will be in Barack Obama’s fireplace.” The video has been viewed more than 350,000 times. On May 8,…
The more politicized an issue, the harder it is for people to absorb contradictory evidence. Drew Angerer/Getty Images News via Getty Images By Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest University Bemoaning uneven individual and state compliance with public health recommendations, top U.S. COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci recently blamed the country’s ineffective pandemic response on an American “anti-science bias.” He called this bias “inconceivable,” because “science is truth.” Fauci compared those discounting the importance of masks and social distancing to “anti-vaxxers” in their…
Dexter Filkins reports: In early May, officials with the C.I.A. reached out to Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who served as a lead investigator in the months before the September 11th attacks, to say they had learned that Al Qaeda militants were plotting against him. The officials asked Soufan not to disclose many details, but, he told me, “The information was specific enough that they felt that they had to inform me.” Two weeks later, Soufan, who lives in…
The Guardian reports: Animal farming and fossil fuels have driven global emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane to the highest level on record, putting the world on track for dangerously increased heat levels of 3C to 4C. Since 2000 discharges of the odourless, colourless gas have risen by more than 50m tonnes a year, equivalent to 350m cars or double the total emissions of Germany or France, according to the latest Methane Budget study by a global team of…
Asheville Citizen Times reports: In an extraordinary move, the Asheville City Council has apologized for the North Carolina city’s historic role in slavery, discrimination and denial of basic liberties to Black residents and voted to provide reparations to them and their descendants. The 7-0 vote came the night of July 14. “Hundreds of years of Black blood spilled that basically fills the cup we drink from today,” said Councilman Keith Young, one of two African American members of the body…
The Atlantic reports: Anthony Fauci isn’t about to quit, despite the White House’s clumsy attempts to stain his public image. More so now than at any other point in their uneasy partnership, it seems that if President Donald Trump wants to be rid of Fauci, he’ll need to fire him. In recent days especially, the White House has stepped up efforts to discredit Fauci, a move he describes as “bizarre.” “Ultimately, it hurts the president to do that,” Fauci told…
The Washington Post reports: When the United States began shutting down this spring, a virus that emerged months earlier as a mysterious outbreak in a Chinese provincial capital had infected a total of fewer than 200,000 people worldwide. So far this week, the planet has added an average of more than 200,000 cases every day. The novel coronavirus — once concentrated in specific cities or countries — has now crept into virtually every corner of the globe and is wreaking…
The New York Times reports: The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public. The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the…
Bill Press writes: Jan. 20, 2021. EXCLUSIVE TO THE HILL: According to official documents obtained by our team of White House correspondents, President Trump’s last official act as president, just minutes before leaving the White House to head directly for Mar-A-Lago, pointedly boycotting incoming President Joe Biden’s Inauguration, was to issue one final presidential pardon. In a brief written statement, Trump said, “Under absolute powers bestowed on me as president under Article II of the Constitution, I am awarding a…
Russell E. Travers writes: If the intelligence community needs to correct understatements of threat (no, the Islamic State is not defeated) or correct overstatements of threat (no, data doesn’t suggest a significant threat from refugees), that’s not a “deep state” undermining the president; that’s a professional civil service doing its job. Just like the civil servants at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department and everywhere else in the government. A century ago,…
John M. Barry writes: When you mix science and politics, you get politics. With the coronavirus, the United States has proved politics hasn’t worked. If we are to fully reopen both the economy and schools safely — which can be done — we have to return to science. To understand just how bad things are in the United States and, more important, what can be done about it requires comparison. At this writing, Italy, once the poster child of coronavirus…