The New York Times reports: Erin Fangmann grew up in a military family, has been married to a captain in the Air Force for 18 years and has voted Republican all her life, including for Donald J. Trump. But as with a number of other veterans, troops and military family members who have watched the president with alarm, her support has evaporated. “He has hurt the military,” said Ms. Fangmann, who lives in Arizona, one of several states in play…
The New York Times reports: In Boston, Los Angeles and Milwaukee, about one in every 10 dollars of local government spending goes to the police. In Minneapolis, it’s about one in every 20 dollars. American society has not settled on what that number should be — how much of a priority the police ought to have, alongside schools and parks and housing and health care. But the police share of spending has grown over the past 40 years, even as…
Mariame Kaba writes: Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century. Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police. There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were…
Ars Technica reports: Much about how the new coronavirus spreads from one victim to the next remains a maddening mystery. But amid all the frantic efforts to understand transmission, there is one finding that appears consistent: that it is inconsistent. Some people—most, even—don’t spread the virus to anyone in the course of their infection. Others infect dozens at a time. It’s a phenomenon that looked, at first, like anomalous anecdotes—a large outbreak from a Washington choir practice, a South Korean…
The Los Angeles Times reports: When he stepped onto a beach on Hong Kong’s uninhabited Soko Islands, Gary Stokes was surprised to find — amid the discarded water bottles, shopping bags and usual piles of plastic waste — a new type of garbage washing ashore. Masks. Dozens and dozens of disposable masks. On that overcast morning in late February, just weeks after Hong Kong had recorded its first coronavirus case, the environmental activist collected more than 70 discarded masks from…
M. C. Langley/Shutterstock/The Conversation By Michelle Langley, Griffith University; Oshan Wedage, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and Patrick Roberts, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Archaeological excavations deep within the rainforests of Sri Lanka have unearthed the earliest evidence for hunting with bows and arrows outside Africa. At Fa-Hien Lena, a cave in the heart of Sri Lanka’s wet zone forests, we discovered numerous tools made of stone, bone, and tooth – including…
Wired reports: Hoof it through the national parks of the western United States—Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon—and breathe deep the pristine air. These are unspoiled lands, collectively a great American conservation story. Yet an invisible menace is actually blowing through the air and falling via raindrops: Microplastic particles, tiny chunks (by definition, less than 5 millimeters long) of fragmented plastic bottles and microfibers that fray from clothes, all pollutants that get caught up in Earth’s atmospheric systems and…
SFGate reports: We’ve all heard it many times: Wear a face covering — indoors, outdoors, on trains and buses. At work, in the supermarket and at church. But now a new modeling study out of Cambridge and Greenwich universities suggests that face masks may be even more important than originally thought in preventing future outbreaks of the new coronavirus. To ward off resurgences, the reproduction number for the virus (the average number of people who will contract it from one…
Yascha Mounk writes: A second wave of the coronavirus is on the way. When it arrives, we will lack the will to deal with it. Despite all the sacrifices of the past months, the virus is likely to win—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it already has. In absolute terms, the United States has been hit harder than any other country. About a quarter of worldwide deaths have been recorded on these shores. And while the…
The Independent reports: There were activists with bullhorns, and artists painting designs on the street. Stalls collected donations for the homeless and others offered vegan curry. There were people posing for images in front of a boarded-up police station, while others sat on the grass. There were people of colour, and there were white people, lots of white people. But the “ugly anarchists” denounced by Donald Trump on Twitter that very morning? Could it be they existed only in his…
Reuters reports: Most Americans, including a majority of President Donald Trump’s Republican Party, support sweeping law enforcement reforms such as a ban on chokeholds and racial profiling after the latest death of an African American while in police custody, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Thursday. The national survey on June 9-10, shows the public broadly on the side of Democratic lawmakers, who proposed a series of changes to police departments (here) in the United States as protesters…
The Daily Beast reports: As President Donald Trump prepared to return to the campaign trail amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, administration officials and several close advisers warned him of the dangers that could come with packing a venue full of his political supporters. He was not dissuaded. “He’s been [gently] reminded of the concerns,” said a senior administration official, regarding the potential for spreading the virus at large public gatherings. “The president said something like, ‘My team will make sure…
Politico reports: President Donald Trump repeatedly endangered national security — and committed a series of potentially impeachable offenses — to boost his reelection prospects, former national security adviser John Bolton argues in a forthcoming White House memoir. Bolton writes that the House should have broadened its impeachment inquiry to other areas of his foreign policy, contending that he can document — and identify witnesses to — “Ukraine-like transgressions … across the full range of his foreign policy,” according to a…
The Hill reports: When throngs of tourists and revelers left their homes over Memorial Day weekend, public health experts braced for a surge in coronavirus infections that could force a second round of painful shutdowns. Two weeks later, that surge has hit places like Houston, Phoenix, South Carolina and Missouri. Week-over-week case counts are on the rise in half of all states. Only 16 states and the District of Columbia have seen their total case counts decline for two consecutive…