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In string of wins, ‘Biden Democrats’ see a reality check for the left

In string of wins, ‘Biden Democrats’ see a reality check for the left

The New York Times reports: Nina Turner, the hard-punching Bernie Sanders ally who lost a special election for Congress in Ohio this week, had unique political flaws from the start. A far-left former state legislator, Ms. Turner declined to endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald J. Trump in 2016. Last year, she described voting for President Biden as a grossly unpalatable option. There were obvious reasons Democratic voters might view her with distrust. Yet Ms. Turner’s unexpectedly wide defeat on Tuesday…

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‘Dark times’: Houston’s fourth Covid wave to be the largest yet, medical leaders predict

‘Dark times’: Houston’s fourth Covid wave to be the largest yet, medical leaders predict

Houston Chronicle reports: Fueled by the delta variant, a surge in Houston COVID-19 hospitalizations is growing as fast as at any time during the pandemic so far, and is projected to pass previous records by mid-August — even though roughly half of all eligible Houstonians are fully vaccinated. “We’re heading into dark times,” said Texas Medical Center CEO Bill McKeon. Already, he said, “our ICUs are filled with unvaccinated people.” On Tuesday, Texas Medical Center hospitals listed 1,372 people in…

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Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid. None of them helped

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid. None of them helped

Will Douglas Heaven writes: When covid-19 struck Europe in March 2020, hospitals were plunged into a health crisis that was still badly understood. “Doctors really didn’t have a clue how to manage these patients,” says Laure Wynants, an epidemiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who studies predictive tools. But there was data coming out of China, which had a four-month head start in the race to beat the pandemic. If machine-learning algorithms could be trained on that data to…

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Tucker Carlson has seen the future, and it is fascist

Tucker Carlson has seen the future, and it is fascist

Jonathan Chait writes: In 1919, the progressive journalist Lincoln Steffens visited the nascent Soviet Union and declared, “I have seen the future and it works.” Tucker Carlson’s weeklong visit to Budapest, where he is using his Fox News show as an infomercial for Viktor Orban’s illiberal regime, is being conducted in much the same spirit. “If you care about Western civilization and democracy and families, and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by the leaders of our…

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A Trump bombshell quietly dropped last week, but it should shock us all

A Trump bombshell quietly dropped last week, but it should shock us all

Robert Reich writes: We’ve become so inured to Donald Trump’s proto-fascism that we barely blink an eye when we learn that he tried to manipulate the 2020 election. Yet the most recent revelation should frighten every American to their core. On Friday, the House oversight committee released notes of a 27 December telephone call from Trump to then acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, in which Trump told Rosen: “Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me…

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Mexico sues U.S. gun makers, eyes $10 billion in damages

Mexico sues U.S. gun makers, eyes $10 billion in damages

Reuters reports: Mexico sued several gun makers in a U.S. federal court on Wednesday, accusing them of reckless business practices that supply what it called a “torrent” of illegal arms to violent Mexican drug cartels, leading to thousands of deaths. The lawsuit alleges that units of Smith & Wesson, Barrett Firearms, Colt’s Manufacturing Company, Glock Inc, Sturm, Ruger & Co and others knew their business practices had encouraged illegal arms trafficking into Mexico. The lawsuit cites weapons that had entered…

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Facebook bans academics who researched ad transparency and misinformation on Facebook

Facebook bans academics who researched ad transparency and misinformation on Facebook

The Verge reports: Facebook has banned the personal accounts of academics who researched ad transparency and the spread of misinformation on the social network. Facebook says the group violated its term of service by scraping user data without permission. But the academics say they are being silenced for exposing problems on Facebook’s platform. The researchers were part of NYU Ad Observatory, a project created to examine the origin and spread of political ads on Facebook. As the group explained in…

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Andrew and Chris Cuomo’s media love-ins come back to bite them

Andrew and Chris Cuomo’s media love-ins come back to bite them

Jon Allsop writes: Live by the press conference, die by the press conference. Last year, as the pandemic ravaged his state, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, was widely lauded for the way he communicated. Pundits hailed him as authoritative, reassuring, even sexy; national networks carried his press conferences live, and they won a special Emmy award for Cuomo’s “masterful use of television to inform and calm people.” Then, early this year, Cuomo experienced a vicious narrative shift—he was…

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In the infrastructure bill, a recognition: Climate change is a crisis

In the infrastructure bill, a recognition: Climate change is a crisis

The New York Times reports: The bipartisan infrastructure deal struck this week provides new money for climate resilience unmatched in United States history: Tens of billions of dollars to protect against floods, reduce damage from wildfires, develop new sources of drinking water in areas plagued by drought, and even relocate entire communities away from vulnerable places. But the bill is remarkable for another reason. For the first time, both parties have acknowledged — by their actions, if not their words…

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‘Massive melting event’ strikes Greenland after record heat wave

‘Massive melting event’ strikes Greenland after record heat wave

Live Science reports: Greenland’s enormous ice sheet has been struck by a “massive melting event,” with enough ice vanishing in a single day last week to cover the whole of Florida in two inches (5 centimeters) of water, Danish researchers have found. Since July 27, roughly 9.37 billion tons (8.5 billion metric tons) of ice has been lost per day from the surface of the enormous ice sheet — twice its normal average rate of loss during summer, Polar Portal,…

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What Delta has changed in the Covid pandemic — and what it hasn’t

What Delta has changed in the Covid pandemic — and what it hasn’t

STAT reports: In some respects, the Delta variant has changed everything in the Covid-19 pandemic. In others, the same rules still apply. Before the variant of SARS-CoV-2 began spreading rapidly in the United States, Covid-19 vaccines were drastically cutting the number of cases. They were preventing people from being infected. And vaccinated people who got infected were unlikely to infect others. That’s all still true, even with Delta — if just to a lesser extent. Despite the threat of Delta,…

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Surprise dip in UK Covid cases baffles researchers

Surprise dip in UK Covid cases baffles researchers

Nature reports: Scientists are scratching their heads over the precipitous decline in daily COVID-19 infections in the United Kingdom following their rapid rise earlier in the year. Officially recorded new cases more than halved in just two weeks: from a high of 54,674 on 17 July to 22,287 on 2 August. “Nobody really knows what’s going on,” says epidemiologist John Edmunds at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). In particular, it’s not clear whether this sudden trend…

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Prosecuting Trump for role in Jan. 6 riot got easier thanks to Capitol officers’ testimony

Prosecuting Trump for role in Jan. 6 riot got easier thanks to Capitol officers’ testimony

Mike Ferrara, Shawn Crowley, and Magdalene Zier write: “All of them – all of them were telling us, ‘Trump sent us.” In harrowing, heart-wrenching testimony before a House select committee established to investigate the events of Jan. 6, U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino A. Gonell and his Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police Department colleagues described last week how those they witnessed violently breaching the Capitol explicitly pointed to then-President Donald Trump’s role in causing the insurrection. Although the court…

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From probable to possible: The ideas of Albert O Hirschman

From probable to possible: The ideas of Albert O Hirschman

Michele Alacevich writes: Like most disciplines, the field of development economics came into being not because of disinterested intellectual curiosity but rather due to pressing contemporary events. In the late 1960s, one prominent international civil servant and development economist reflected that: the cue to the continual reorientation of our work has normally come from the sphere of politics; responding to that cue, students turn to research on issues that have attained political importance. Theories are launched, data collected, and the…

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