Sophie McBain writes: Patsy Hage began hearing voices when she was eight years old. She was playing with her brother in the attic when her scarf caught alight on a candle. She would always remember running downstairs to her mother, her clothing on fire, convinced she was going to die. She was rushed to hospital and treated for serious burns. It was in hospital that the voices first started talking to her. She heard them for the rest of her…
BuzzFeed News reports: When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faces Congress on Thursday, to testify about extremism online, he will do so as hundreds of far-right militias, including some whose members were charged in the deadly insurrection on the US Capitol, continue to organize, recruit, and promote violence on the platform. More than 200 militia pages and groups were on Facebook as of March 18, according to a new report published Wednesday by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a nonprofit watchdog…
The Wall Street Journal reports: Before sunset Monday, a few dozen Asian-Americans outfitted in neon vests and jackets combed the streets of this New York City neighborhood. They weren’t police officers. They were students, retail workers and retirees equipped with little more than a cellphone in the event they came across someone being harassed or attacked. Their mission: to stop would-be attackers from hurting other Asians, whether it be by calling the police for help or stepping in themselves. “It’s…
The New York Times reports: In the fall, after Samar Khan came down with a mild case of Covid-19, she expected to recover and return to her previous energetic life in Chicago. After all, she was just 25, and healthy. But weeks later, she said, “this weird constellation of symptoms began to set in.” She had blurred vision encircled with strange halos. She had ringing in her ears, and everything began to smell like cigarettes or Lysol. One leg started…
Bill McKibben writes: If we’re really going to change, sooner or later we’ll have to actually make a change. The latest front in the fight against fossil fuels—so far, one confined to a couple of California towns—concerns what might be the most iconic element of the American commercial landscape: the gas station. Beginning in 2019, activists from the Coalition Opposing New Gas Stations have questioned whether there’s a need for big new versions of the filling station, or whether—since both…
NBC News reports: Spring has arrived, and the American disease that lay dormant during the pandemic — deprived of oxygen by the intense national focus on the presidential election — has made a bloody return. In less than a week, two gunmen separated by 1,400 miles have taken 18 lives. And experts who study and chronicle mass killings warned Tuesday that there could be more as the nation reverts to a more normal way of life. “This is a moment…
Science News reports: Attentive parenting appears across the animal world, but adoption is rarer, especially when youngsters taken in aren’t kin. Now researchers have witnessed bonobos adopting infants from outside of their own communities. Two females, each from a different bonobo group, in the Luo Scientific Reserve in Congo took charge of orphans — grooming them, carrying them and providing food for at least a year. Two instances of adopted outsiders are known in other nonhuman primates, but this is…
Joseph Blocher and Reva Siegel write: Why regulate guns? The standard answer is that gun laws can prevent needless deaths and physical injury. But this is not a complete accounting. As gun-brandishing protesters and armed invasions of legislatures demonstrate, guns inflict more than physical injuries—they transform the public sphere on which a constitutional democracy depends. America must regulate guns not only to protect life, but to protect its citizens’ equal freedoms to speak, assemble, worship, and vote without fear. If…
Vox reports: After a mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, on Monday, Americans are once again confronting the country’s unique relationship with guns. America is certainly an exceptional country when it comes to firearms. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But the relationship is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most homicidal — in large part due to the easy access many…
STAT reports: U.S. health officials raised concerns early Tuesday that positive results that AstraZeneca announced Monday for its Covid-19 vaccine may have been based on “an incomplete view of the efficacy data” from a clinical trial and relied on “outdated information,” throwing another curveball in the saga of the company’s vaccine. In a statement issued soon after midnight Tuesday morning, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said it had been informed about the data questions by the data…
Vice reports: Last March, Lisa O’Brien began experiencing mild symptoms of what she thought might be COVID-19: scratchy throat, body aches, fatigue. But with no fever and just a hint of a cough, she decided to wait on a COVID test. Then new symptoms appeared, including chills and shortness of breath. After two weeks they were alarming enough for her to get tested: Negative. But the negative result didn’t resolve her health problems. Four weeks out, O’Brien was barely able…
Tom K. Wong, Gabriel De Roche and Jesus Rojas Venzor write: Last week, at the U.S. border with Mexico, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) declared that the recent increase in unaccompanied minors attempting to enter the United States was a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration.” We looked at data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to see whether there’s a “crisis” — or even a “surge,” as many news outlets have characterized it….
The New York Times reports: In late January, a small group of dedicated volunteers from the conservative Heritage Action for America met with Republican legislators in Georgia, delivering a letter containing detailed proposals for rolling back access to voting. Within days, bills to restrict voting access in Georgia began flooding the Legislature. Of the 68 bills pertaining to voting, at least 23 had similar language or were firmly rooted in the principles laid out in the Heritage group’s letter and…
Brian Klaas writes: In a newly released report, U.S. intelligence agencies outline how Russia yet again sought to subvert American democracy. The findings confirm that the Kremlin tried to plant damaging disinformation about Joe Biden among associates of then-President Donald Trump. That report and others that preceded it are important, because the foreign threat to American democracy is real and growing. But they should not distract us from a disturbing reality: The most serious danger to the United States from…