Music: Alan Pasqua — ‘Badlands’
What a week’s disasters tell us about the climate crisis and the pandemic
The New York Times reports: The hits came this week in rapid succession: A cyclone slammed into the Indian megacity of Kolkata, pounding rains breached two dams in the Midwestern United States, and on Thursday came warning that the Atlantic hurricane season could be severe. It all served as a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 325,000 people so far, is colliding with another global menace: a fast-heating planet that acutely threatens millions of people, especially the world’s…
A vision of our post-lockdown future
Barclay Bram writes: Xu Jiao was anxious to get back in the gym. Living in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, she had gone through two months of lockdown. The pandemic hadn’t been particularly bad in the city. To date there have been 144 confirmed cases and three deaths, according to official statistics. Still, as with much of China, the lockdown had been severe. Almost everything had been closed and Xu Jiao, in her mid-30s, had to show a…
Covid-19’s deadly rampage through a South African hospital
Science reports: On 9 March, a patient who had recently traveled to Europe and had symptoms of COVID-19 visited the emergency department of St Augustine’s, a private hospital in Durban, South Africa. Eight weeks later, 39 patients and 80 staff linked to the hospital had been infected, and 15 patients had died—fully half the death toll in KwaZulu-Natal province at that time. Now, scientists at the University of KwaZulu-Natal have published a detailed reconstruction of how the virus spread from…
Why don’t Trump’s supporters hold him to their own standard of masculinity?
Tom Nichols writes: Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. The president’s inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold…
As Trump removes federal watchdogs, some loyalists replacing them have ‘preposterous’ conflicts
The Washington Post reports: The political appointee President Trump installed last week to investigate waste, fraud and abuse at the Transportation Department is the same official in charge of one of the agency’s key divisions. That means Howard “Skip” Elliott is now running an office charged with investigating his own actions. Elliott serves simultaneously as the Transportation Department’s inspector general and head of the department’s pipeline and hazardous materials agency, whose mission includes enforcement of safety regulations on nearly 1…
Bishops turn on Boris Johnson for defending his chief aide, Dominic Cummings
The Guardian reports: Church of England bishops have fired a volley of unprecedented criticism at Boris Johnson over his defence of actions taken by his chief aide, Dominic Cummings. One suggested the church could decline to work with the government during the coronavirus crisis “unless we see clear repentance, including the sacking of Cummings”. More than a dozen bishops questioned the integrity of the prime minister following his press conference on Sunday, in which he refused to acknowledge that Cummings…
A Covid-19 vaccine hasn’t even been developed and yet the conspiracy theories are already here
The Atlantic reports: In March, when a woman in Seattle volunteered for a COVID-19 vaccine trial, rumors immediately began circulating that she was a crisis actor who had received a fake vaccine. She is, in fact, real, and so is the prospective vaccine she got, as the Associated Press asserted in a follow-up story. In Oxford, England, another volunteer for a separate COVID-19 vaccine trial became the subject of a fake news story that purported she had died after a…
Music: Foehn Trio — ‘Pili-Pili’
What happens if Trump refuses to accept defeat?
The New York Times reports: In October, President Trump declares a state of emergency in major cities in battleground states, like Milwaukee and Detroit, banning polling places from opening. A week before the election, Attorney General William P. Barr announces a criminal investigation into the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. After Mr. Biden wins a narrow Electoral College victory, Mr. Trump refuses to accept the results, won’t leave the White House and declines to allow the Biden transition…
On the front lines of the pandemic, grocery workers are in the dark about risks
The Washington Post reports: By the end of April, employees at a Walmart in Quincy, Mass., were panicking: Sick colleagues kept showing up at work. Other employees disappeared without explanation. The store’s longtime greeter was in the hospital and on a ventilator, dying from covid-19. Local health officials grew alarmed as employees and their relatives reported sick co-workers. Shoppers called to complain about crowded conditions. “We have had consistent problems with Walmart,” wrote Ruth Jones, Quincy’s health commissioner, in an…
Billions are going to zillionaires under the guise of pandemic relief
Nicholas Kristof writes: While President Trump and his allies in Congress seek to tighten access to food stamps, they are showing compassion for one group: zillionaires. Their economic rescue package quietly allocated $135 billion — yes, that’s “billion” with a “b” — for the likes of wealthy real estate developers. My Times colleague Jesse Drucker notes that Trump himself, along with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may benefit financially from this provision. The fine print was mysteriously slipped into the March…
We don’t need to open churches to practice our faith
Father Edward L. Beck writes: President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he considers houses of worship and their religious services essential. I won’t argue that point. Although obviously not essential for all, they are deemed so by some. Fair enough. He went on: “The governors need to do the right thing and allow these very important essential places of faith to open right now, this weekend. If they don’t do it, I will override the governors.” But who says…
China’s move to rein in Hong Kong is just the start
The New York Times reports: China’s move to strip away another layer of Hong Kong’s autonomy was not a rash impulse. It was a deliberate act, months in the making. It took into account the risks of international umbrage and reached the reasonable assumption that there would not be a significant geopolitical price to pay. As a provocative move, it is just the latest. With the world distracted by the pandemic’s devastating toll, China has taken a series of aggressive…
Parts of Siberia are hotter than Washington, with temperatures nearly 40 degrees above average
The Washington Post reports: Siberia is in the throes of a heat wave that would be considered warm even by the standards of those living outside the Arctic Circle. In Washington, for example, the temperature has been stuck in the 60s all week, reaching a maximum of 73 degrees Thursday. Yet several stations in North Central Siberia, including areas near or above the Arctic Circle, are seeing temperatures climb well into the 80s. On Friday, the town of Khatanga, Siberia,…
East Africa facing ‘triple threat’ from coronavirus, locusts and flooding
The Independent reports: The impact of three separate crises affecting swathes of east Africa at the same time has left hundreds of thousands of people at risk of hunger and sickness, aid workers operating in the region have warned. Like much of the world, countries in the Horn of Africa and other eastern states have been forced to introduce lockdown measures to limit the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus. However the virus has arrived in the region at the same…