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‘Most influential voice’: Warren’s network spreads throughout Biden administration

‘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…

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How did so many rich countries get Covid so wrong? How did others get it so right?

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…

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Why the pandemic experts failed

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…

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Coca-Cola, Home Depot come out in opposition to Georgia voting restrictions

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…

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Fulton DA’s comfort with racketeering law could influence Trump probe

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

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:…

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U.S. Congress launches probe into multibillion-dollar ‘clean coal’ tax credit

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…

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A year in America’s first Covid epicenter

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…

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The stimulus bill is the most economically liberal legislation in decades

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…

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Trump was supposed to be a political Godzilla in exile. Instead, he’s adrift

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…

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Georgia voting rights activists pressure big corporations to oppose GOP-backed ballot restrictions

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…

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Police shrugged off the Proud Boys, until they attacked the Capitol

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…

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Capitol rioter boasted he could access powerful weapons to ‘take back’ country, prosecutors say

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…

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Traditional healers are preserving their knowledge, and with it, the biodiversity of Brazil’s savanna

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…

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