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Facebook struggles to suppress uproar over Instagram’s harmful effects on teens

Facebook struggles to suppress uproar over Instagram’s harmful effects on teens

The New York Times reports: Over the past few weeks, top Facebook executives assembled virtually for a series of emergency meetings. In one gathering last weekend, half a dozen managers — including Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, and Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs — discussed pausing the development of an Instagram service for children ages 13 and under, said two people briefed on the meeting. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, weighed in to approve the decision, the…

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How military leadership assisted Portugal’s vaccination success

How military leadership assisted Portugal’s vaccination success

The New York Times reports: Portugal’s health care system was on the verge of collapse. Hospitals in the capital, Lisbon, were overflowing and the authorities were asking people to treat themselves at home. In the last week of January, nearly 2,000 people died as the virus spread. The country’s vaccine program was in a shambles, so the government turned to Vice Adm. Henrique Gouveia e Melo, a former submarine squadron commander, to right the ship. Eight months later, Portugal is…

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Merck pill intended to treat Covid-19 succeeds in key study

Merck pill intended to treat Covid-19 succeeds in key study

The Wall Street Journal reports: Merck and its partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics LP said their experimental Covid-19 pill helped prevent high-risk people early in the course of the disease in a pivotal study from becoming seriously ill and dying, a big step toward providing the pandemic’s first easy-to-use, at-home treatment. The pill cut the risk of hospitalization or death in study subjects with mild to moderate Covid-19 by about 50%, the companies said Friday. The drug, called molnupiravir, was performing so…

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Evidence of northernmost Stone Age hunters found above the Arctic Circle

Evidence of northernmost Stone Age hunters found above the Arctic Circle

Live Science reports: Ancient cut marks on mammoth bones unearthed on a remote island in the frozen extremes of Siberia are the northernmost evidence of Paleolithic humans ever found, according to archaeologists. The bones from the woolly mammoth skeleton, dated to about 26,000 years ago, were excavated this summer by a Russian expedition to Kotelny Island, in the far northeast of Siberia — 615 miles (990 kilometers) north of the Arctic Circle. The team pieced together more than two-thirds of…

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Joe Manchin, America’s climate decider-in-chief, is also a coal baron

Joe Manchin, America’s climate decider-in-chief, is also a coal baron

Mark Hertsgaard writes: Joe Manchin has never been this famous. People around the world now know that the West Virginia Democrat is the essential 50th vote in the US Senate that president Joe Biden needs to pass his agenda into law. That includes Biden’s climate agenda. Which doesn’t bode well for defusing the climate emergency, given Manchin’s longstanding opposition to ambitious climate action. It turns out that the Senator wielding this awesome power – America’s climate decider-in-chief, one might call…

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The Democrats’ last best shot to kill the filibuster

The Democrats’ last best shot to kill the filibuster

Ronald Brownstein writes: From multiple directions, the crisis over the filibuster is peaking for Democrats. In just the past week, the casualty count of Democratic priorities doomed by the filibuster has mounted; both police and immigration reform now appear to be blocked in the Senate, and legislation codifying abortion rights faces equally dim prospects. Simultaneously, the party has tied itself in knots attempting to squeeze its economic agenda into a single, sprawling “reconciliation” bill, because that process offers the only…

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How immunizations helped create America

How immunizations helped create America

David Leonhardt writes: The United States owes its existence as a nation partly to an immunization mandate. In 1777, smallpox was a big enough problem for the bedraggled American army that George Washington thought it could jeopardize the Revolution. An outbreak had already led to one American defeat, at the Battle of Quebec. To prevent more, Washington ordered immunizations — done quietly, so the British would not hear how many Americans were sick — for all troops who had not…

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Covid is killing rural Americans at twice the rate of people in urban areas

Covid is killing rural Americans at twice the rate of people in urban areas

NBC News reports: Rural Americans are dying of Covid at more than twice the rate of their urban counterparts — a divide that health experts say is likely to widen as access to medical care shrinks for a population that tends to be older, sicker, heavier, poorer and less vaccinated. While the initial surge of Covid-19 deaths skipped over much of rural America, where roughly 15 percent of Americans live, nonmetropolitan mortality rates quickly started to outpace those of metropolitan…

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Microsoft’s million-tonne carbon dioxide removal purchase — lessons for net zero

Microsoft’s million-tonne carbon dioxide removal purchase — lessons for net zero

Lucas Joppa et al write: In January this year, Microsoft made a major announcement: it had paid for the removal of 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Among its purchases were projects to expand forests in Peru, Nicaragua and the United States, as well as initiatives to regenerate soil across US farms. Microsoft will pay the Swiss firm Climeworks to operate a machine in Iceland that pulls CO2 from the air and injects it into the ground,…

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How Miami seduced Silicon Valley

How Miami seduced Silicon Valley

Benjamin Wallace writes: The flood of new Miamians who have arrived, full or part time, during the pandemic includes tech investors (Peter Thiel, David Sacks), cryptocurrency bulls (Anthony Pompliano, Ari Paul), new-media tycoons (Bryan Goldberg, Dave Portnoy), start-up founders (Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Steven Galanis), and many more who aren’t yet billionaires but think the Magic City will give them their best shot. They’re breaking sales records for dock-accessed mansions by day and packing the new branches of Carbone and Red…

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Belonging among the beasts and the gods in Mayan cosmology

Belonging among the beasts and the gods in Mayan cosmology

Jessica Sequeira writes: Animals are everywhere in the Popol Vuh. They leap and lick and crawl and bite and squawk and hoot and screech and howl. They are considered sacred, not as disembodied beings in some faraway place, but in their coexistence with humans, day by day in the forests. The Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent, with its gorgeous blue-green plumage, birthed the world from a vast and placid ocean. The Popol Vuh provides the narrative of this creation of humankind…

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Why Biden is patient as Democrats panic

Why Biden is patient as Democrats panic

Peter Nicholas writes: Defeating the pandemic may matter more politically than passing any bill. Last week, I observed a focus group made up of five white women, three of whom voted for Biden in 2020, the other two for Trump. How much do you follow news about the pandemic? the moderator asked. “It’s literally the first thing that everybody talks about,” said an independent voter from the Atlanta suburbs who backed Trump in 2016 and then switched to Biden in…

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We’re already barreling toward the next pandemic

We’re already barreling toward the next pandemic

Ed Yong writes: A year after the United States bombed its pandemic performance in front of the world, the Delta variant opened the stage for a face-saving encore. If the U.S. had learned from its mishandling of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, it would have been better prepared for the variant that was already ravaging India. Instead, after a quiet spring, President Joe Biden all but declared victory against SARS-CoV-2. The CDC ended indoor masking for vaccinated people, pitting two of…

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Kyrsten Sinema’s positions have angered some Democrats in Arizona

Kyrsten Sinema’s positions have angered some Democrats in Arizona

The New York Times reports: Jade Duran once spent her weekends knocking on doors to campaign for Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the stubbornly centrist Democrat whose vote could seal the fate of a vast Democratic effort to remake America’s social safety net. But no more. When Ms. Sinema famously gave a thumbs down to a $15 minimum wage and refused to eliminate the filibuster to pass new voting rights laws this year, Ms. Duran, a Democrat and biomedical engineer from Phoenix,…

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