Music: Os Tincoas — ‘Deixa a Gira Girà’
A year in America’s first Covid epicenter
James Ross Gardner writes: America’s coronavirus nightmare began on the last day of February, in a leap year. On that scarce, quadrennial appendage of a date, the twenty-ninth, we learned of what was then believed to be the first Covid-19 fatality in the U.S. A man in his fifties had died of the virus at a Kirkland hospital, about ten miles northeast of Seattle. Though there had been a few other, as yet non-fatal cases, the death marked an obvious…
The stimulus bill is the most economically liberal legislation in decades
Nicholas Lemann writes: Traditionally, every new Democratic President starts out by passing a big economic package (and every new Republican President starts out by passing a tax cut). Jimmy Carter’s, in 1977, cost twenty billion dollars. Bill Clinton’s, in 1993, was mainly a tax increase, aimed at eliminating the federal deficit. Barack Obama’s, in 2009, which passed during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, cost eight hundred billion, some of it spending increases, some tax relief. The American…
Trump was supposed to be a political Godzilla in exile. Instead, he’s adrift
Politico reports: He backed away from creating a third party and has soured on the costly prospect of launching his own TV empire or social media startup. His vow to target disloyal Republicans with personally-recruited primary challengers has taken a backseat to conventional endorsements of senators who refused to indulge his quest to overturn the 2020 election. And though he was supposed to build a massive political apparatus to keep his MAGA movement afloat, it’s unclear to Republicans what his…
Georgia voting rights activists pressure big corporations to oppose GOP-backed ballot restrictions
CNBC reports: Civil rights and activist groups are turning up the pressure on large Georgia companies like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines to oppose sweeping voting restrictions proposed by Republican state legislators. “We’ve got the power of organized people. They’ve got the power of organized money. And between us and them, we could put pressure on these legislators or, worst case scenario, the governor to kill these bills,” Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told CNBC. Groups including Black Voters…
Police shrugged off the Proud Boys, until they attacked the Capitol
The New York Times reports: A protester was burning an American flag outside the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland when Joseph Biggs rushed to attack. Jumping a police line, he ripped the man’s shirt off and “started pounding,” he boasted that night in an online video. But the local police charged the flag burner with assaulting Mr. Biggs. The city later paid $225,000 to settle accusations that the police had falsified their reports out of sympathy with Mr. Biggs, who…
Capitol rioter boasted he could access powerful weapons to ‘take back’ country, prosecutors say
Politico reports: A Texas man who joined a mob at the Capitol on Jan. 6 told two rioters he had set up a security company as a front to access law enforcement-grade weaponry that could be used to “take back our country,” according to private, encrypted messages revealed Saturday by prosecutors. Guy Reffitt, who drove from Texas to Washington, D.C., also said in recorded conversations that he and others were carrying firearms during the siege of the Capitol. He also…
Traditional healers are preserving their knowledge, and with it, the biodiversity of Brazil’s savanna
Sarah Sax writes: Since Lucely Pio was a little girl, she has been collecting medicinal plants in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savanna. At 5, she walked through the grasslands and forests of the Cerrado with her grandmother, a midwife and healer, who taught her about where to find and how to harvest the thousands of different plants that only existed there. When picking leaves and flowers, they would arise in the dark hours of the morning, before the sun came…
Music: Jazzanova — ‘Let It Go’
‘Covid is taking over’: Brazil’s coronavirus catastrophe
The Guardian reports: It was midway through February when André Machado realized Brazil’s coronavirus catastrophe was racing into a bewildering and remorseless new phase. “The floodgates opened and the water came gushing out,” recalled the infectious disease specialist from the Our Lady of the Conception hospital in Porto Alegre, one of the largest cities in southern Brazil. Since then, Machado’s hospital, like health centres up and down the country, has been engulfed by a deluge of jittery, gasping patients –…
Europe confronts a Covid-19 rebound as vaccine hopes recede
The Wall Street Journal reports: The European Union’s fight against Covid-19 is stuck in midwinter, even as spring and vaccinations spur hope of improvement in the U.S. and U.K. Contagion is rising again in much of the EU, despite months of restrictions on daily life, as more-virulent virus strains outpace vaccinations. A mood of gloom and frustration is settling on the continent, and governments are caught between their promises of progress and the bleak epidemiological reality. Virus infections and deaths…
The world isn’t building back better after the pandemic
Akshat Rathi writes: The exuberance of vaccine rollouts in rich countries is masking an ugly reality. Greenhouse gas emissions are already creeping higher than before the pandemic as economies come back to life. That shouldn’t be a total surprise. Even as governments around the world have spent trillions of dollars to aid their nation’s recoveries, only a tiny fraction has gone toward initiatives that would also cut pollution. Many politicians, including U.S. president Joe Biden, have adopted the phrase “build…
The imperious rise and accelerating fall of Andrew Cuomo
The New York Times reports: Last spring, when the coronavirus outbreak was surging in New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s daily briefings became appointment television for many, as he authoritatively ticked through the latest statistics on infections, hospital beds and deaths. Behind the scenes, Mr. Cuomo was often obsessed with another set of numbers: his ratings. He would sometimes quiz aides as soon as he ended a broadcast about which networks carried him live and exactly when they cut away…
What fueled humans’ big brains? Controversial paper proposes new hypothesis
Stephanie Pappas writes: Over the course of the Pleistocene epoch, between 2.6 million years ago and 11,700 years ago, the brains of humans and their relatives grew. Now, scientists from Tel Aviv University have a new hypothesis as to why: As the largest animals on the landscape disappeared, the scientists propose, human brains had to grow to enable the hunting of smaller, swifter prey. This hypothesis argues that early humans specialized in taking down the largest animals, such as elephants,…
Music: Toco — ‘Guarapiranga’
Can Cyrus Vance, Jr., nail Trump?
Jane Mayer writes: On February 22nd, in an office in White Plains, two lawyers handed over a hard drive to a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney, who, along with two investigators, had driven up from New York City in a heavy snowstorm. Although the exchange didn’t look momentous, it set in motion the next phase of one of the most significant legal showdowns in American history. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered former President Donald Trump to comply with a…