Music: Nicolá Cruz — ‘Folha de Jurema’ ft. Salvador Araguaya, Spaniol & Artéria FM
Europe’s vaccine suspension may be driven more by politics than science
The New York Times reports: After days of touting the safety of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, Italy’s health minister, Roberto Speranza, took a call from his German counterpart on Monday and learned that Germany was concerned enough about a few cases of serious blood clots among some who had received the vaccine to suspend its use. For Italy and its neighbors, that call could not have come at a worse time. Their vaccine rollouts were already lagging because of shortages, and they…
Some long-haul covid-19 patients say their symptoms are subsiding after getting vaccines
The Washington Post reports: Arianna Eisenberg endured long-haul covid-19 for eight months, a recurring nightmare of soaking sweats, crushing fatigue, insomnia, brain fog and muscle pain. But Eisenberg’s tale has a happy ending that neither she nor current medical science can explain. Thirty-six hours after her second shot of coronavirus vaccine last month, her symptoms were gone, and they haven’t returned. “I really felt back to myself,” the 34-year-old Brooklyn therapist said, “to a way that I didn’t think was…
Democrats, pushing stimulus, admit to regrets on Obama’s 2009 response
The New York Times reports: As Democrats pushed this month to pass the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, they were eager to rebuke Republicans for opposing en masse a measure filled with aid to struggling Americans. But they had another target as well: the core policy of President Barack Obama’s first-term agenda. Party leaders from President Biden on down are citing Mr. Obama’s strategy on his most urgent policy initiative — an $800 billion financial rescue plan in 2009 in…
Russia stoked Ukraine allegations to undermine Biden, U.S. intel agencies say
Politico reports: Russia tried again last year to help then-President Donald Trump win the White House, the U.S. intelligence community said Tuesday in a long-awaited postmortem — adding that a “primary” tactic in that effort was the spreading of corruption allegations involving Democratic challenge Joe Biden and Ukraine. But the effort fell short of the Kremlin-backed efforts to assist Trump in his 2016 contest against Hillary Clinton, the spy community wrote in its unclassified assessment of foreign threats to the…
Nature knows how to avoid network collapse
Ruth DeFries writes: Sometime in the first billion years of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history, a cell emerged in a primordial stew of chemicals brewing in liquid water. At that moment, the predictable chemistry and physics of the early Earth gave way to seething, roiling complexity. Primitive life thrived in the deep sea, where underwater volcanoes vented heat and spilled a cocktail of chemicals into seawater. Once life was underway, the course of the planet and the life it supported became…
Neanderthals helped create early human art, researcher says
The Guardian reports: When Neanderthals, Denisovans and homo sapiens met one another 50,000 years ago, these archaic and modern humans not only interbred during the thousands of years in which they overlapped, but they exchanged ideas that led to a surge in creativity, according to a leading academic. Tom Higham, a professor of archaeological science at the University of Oxford, argues that their exchange explains “a proliferation of objects in the archaeological record”, such as perforated teeth and shell pendants,…
Is consciousness everywhere?
Christof Koch writes: What is common between the delectable taste of a favorite food, the sharp sting of an infected tooth, the fullness after a heavy meal, the slow passage of time while waiting, the willing of a deliberate act, and the mixture of vitality, tinged with anxiety, just before a competitive event? All are distinct experiences. What cuts across each is that all are subjective states, and all are consciously felt. Accounting for the nature of consciousness appears elusive,…
Music: The Knocks — ‘Brazilian Soul’ (ft. Sofi Tukker) (Acoustic Bossa Version)
‘Most influential voice’: Warren’s network spreads throughout Biden administration
Politico reports: Wall Street was relieved when Sen. Elizabeth Warren was passed over for the leadership of the Treasury Department. But now the financial industry faces another threat: President Joe Biden is enlisting a small army of her former aides and allies to run his government. Warren’s expanding network in the upper echelons of the administration includes protégés who helped execute her aggressive oversight of big banks and other corporations as well as friends who share her views of the…
How did so many rich countries get Covid so wrong? How did others get it so right?
David Wallace-Wells writes: “I’m bashing my head as well,” says Devi Sridhar. It is January 2021, and the Florida-born, Edinburgh-based professor of global public health is looking back on the pandemic year, marveling and despairing at opportunities lost. From early last winter, Sridhar has been among the most vocal critics of the shambolic U.K. response — urging categorically more pandemic vigilance, which she believed might have yielded a total triumph over the disease, a cause that has picked up the…
Why the pandemic experts failed
Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal write: A few minutes before midnight on March 4, 2020, the two of us emailed every U.S. state and the District of Columbia with a simple question: How many people have been tested in your state, total, for the coronavirus? By then, about 150 people had been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States, and 11 had died of the disease. Yet the CDC had stopped publicly reporting the number of Americans tested for…
Coca-Cola, Home Depot come out in opposition to Georgia voting restrictions
The Washington Post reports: Civil liberties groups are ratcheting up pressure on major corporations based in Georgia — including Coca-Cola, Aflac, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot and UPS — to oppose a Republican-led effort to make it harder to vote in the Peach State. It’s a continuation of a dynamic that emerged after the Jan. 6 insurrection, when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on the erroneous belief that widespread fraud handed the 2020 election to President Biden: Facing…
Fulton DA’s comfort with racketeering law could influence Trump probe
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports: Frustrated that their successes were limited to the loyal underlings who committed crimes and not the Mafia bosses who orchestrated them, prosecutors developed legal remedies that allowed them to go after the Vito Corleones of the world in addition to the Luca Brasis. Now, nearly 50 years into their existence, it’s not just organized crime figures who find themselves ensnared by the widening reach of racketeering laws. [Continue reading…]
The misinformation campaign was distinctly one-sided
Renée DiResta writes: On the morning of September 21, 2020, three trays of United States mail were discovered in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin. The local sheriff’s office reported that the mail dump included several absentee ballots. When a U.S. Postal Service spokesperson made a similar assertion two days later, a local Fox affiliate, WLUK, reported the statement on its website. And then a national network of conservative commentators and influencers did something that happened again and again last fall:…
U.S. Congress launches probe into multibillion-dollar ‘clean coal’ tax credit
Reuters reports: The U.S. Congress is investigating a multibillion-dollar subsidy for chemically treated coal that is meant to reduce smokestack pollution, after evidence emerged that power plants using the fuel produced more smog not less. The outcome of the probe could play a big role in whether lawmakers vote to renew the subsidy, on track to expire at the end of this year. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is examining the refined coal tax credit program…