Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

In Alaska’s Covid crisis, doctors must decide who lives and who dies

In Alaska’s Covid crisis, doctors must decide who lives and who dies

The New York Times reports: There was one bed coming available in the intensive care unit in Alaska’s largest hospital. It was the middle of the night, and the hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, had been hit with a deluge of coronavirus patients. Doctors now had a choice to make: Several more patients at the hospital, most of them with Covid-19, were in line to take that last I.C.U. spot. But there was also someone from one of…

Read More Read More

Why Kyrsten Sinema’s tactics may backfire

Why Kyrsten Sinema’s tactics may backfire

Harry Enten writes: Democratic hopes for passing big legislation through the Senate rely on Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both have made things difficult for Senate Democrats because they are moderates who have been hesitant to pass big spending packages. But while Democrats are lucky to have a Democrat of any ideological persuasion representing West Virginia, they may not be getting the best bang for their buck from Sinema. Sinema has, for the last few…

Read More Read More

How memories persist where bodies and even brains do not

How memories persist where bodies and even brains do not

Thomas R Verny writes: I began exploring the concept of cellular memory – the idea that memory can be stored outside the brain, in all the body’s cells – after reading an article on Reuters headlined ‘Tiny Brain No Obstacle to French Civil Servant’ in 2007. It seems that a 44-year-old French man had gone to hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. Doctors learned that the patient ‘had a shunt inserted into his head to drain…

Read More Read More

How John Eastman counseled Donald Trump to retain power by overturning the election

How John Eastman counseled Donald Trump to retain power by overturning the election

In an editorial, the New York Times says: However horrifying the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol appeared in the moment, we know now that it was far worse. The country was hours away from a full-blown constitutional crisis — not primarily because of the violence and mayhem inflicted by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters but because of the actions of Mr. Trump himself. In the days before the mob descended on the Capitol, a corollary attack —…

Read More Read More

Rudy Giuliani is in an excruciating legal predicament — and could very well flip

Rudy Giuliani is in an excruciating legal predicament — and could very well flip

Peter Stone writes: Giuliani is being treated, by all appearances, as a dead man walking. America’s Mayor, as he was once known, has been abandoned by his most powerful friend [Donald Trump]. He has lost his megaphone at Fox News and is now going around with a begging bowl for money. And at the center of Giuliani’s legal troubles is a web of overlapping federal investigations, including a criminal probe focusing on him personally, which some experts say could force…

Read More Read More

The conservatives who are preparing for civil war

The conservatives who are preparing for civil war

Emma Green writes: “Let me start big. The mission of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization,” says Ryan Williams, the organization’s president, looking at the camera, in a crisp navy suit. “We’ve always aimed high.” A trumpet blares. America’s founding documents flash across the screen. Welcome to the intellectual home of America’s Trumpist right. As Donald Trump rose to power, the Claremont universe—which sponsors fellowships and publications, including the Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind—rose with…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More