Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

‘Covid is taking over’: Brazil’s coronavirus catastrophe

‘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 –…

Read More Read More

Europe confronts a Covid-19 rebound as vaccine hopes recede

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…

Read More Read More

The world isn’t building back better after the pandemic

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…

Read More Read More

The imperious rise and accelerating fall of Andrew Cuomo

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…

Read More Read More

What fueled humans’ big brains? Controversial paper proposes new hypothesis

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,…

Read More Read More

Can Cyrus Vance, Jr., nail Trump?

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…

Read More Read More

Joe Biden knew he was onto something long before we did

Joe Biden knew he was onto something long before we did

Jamelle Bouie writes: Last year, as he steamrolled his way to victory in the Democratic presidential primaries, Joe Biden told CNN that the pandemic was “probably the biggest challenge in modern history, quite frankly.” “I think it may not dwarf but eclipse what F.D.R. faced,” he added. Biden referred to Franklin Roosevelt again in an interview with Evan Osnos of The New Yorker. “I’m kind of in the position F.D.R. was,” he said. And a week before the election, Biden…

Read More Read More

Long Covid is raising awareness about pervasive undercared-for chronic suffering

Long Covid is raising awareness about pervasive undercared-for chronic suffering

Vox reports: Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency room doctor in New York City, was no stranger to dangerous viruses when a brush with one landed him in Bellevue Hospital for 19 days. But it was only after he was discharged, and declared virus-free, that the really bizarre symptoms set in. Back at home, he noticed he couldn’t taste anything for several days. For months, he was tired all the time and his joints felt heavy and painful. When he woke…

Read More Read More

Facebook struggles to worm its way out of its polarization problem

Facebook struggles to worm its way out of its polarization problem

BuzzFeed News reports: Facebook has created a ”playbook” to help its employees rebut criticism that the company’s products fuel political polarization and social division. The document, which cites a range of academic studies but does not include recent data from the company’s own research teams, was posted to Facebook’s internal Workplace discussion forum by Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Pratiti Raychoudhury, vice president of research, earlier this week. During a Thursday webinar for employees, Cox said the document would…

Read More Read More

Andrew Cuomo’s toxic governorship

Andrew Cuomo’s toxic governorship

Rebecca Traister writes: Joel Wertheimer took a job in Andrew Cuomo’s administration in February 2017, straight from his position in Barack Obama’s White House. He came on alongside almost 30 other new hires, many of whom had also worked for the outgoing president or on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and were seeking a progressive professional path through the Trump years. Some saw New York State government as a bulwark against what they feared Trumpism would bring. Others hoped it could be…

Read More Read More

Refugee flights canceled as Biden fails to lift Trump cutback

Refugee flights canceled as Biden fails to lift Trump cutback

The New York Times reports: More than 715 refugees from around the world who expected to start new lives in the United States have had their flights canceled in recent weeks because President Biden has postponed an overhaul of his predecessor’s sharp limits on new refugee admissions. Agencies that assist refugees poised to enter the country were notified by the State Department this week that all travel would be suspended until the president sets a new target for admissions this…

Read More Read More

How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

Karen Hao writes: Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, was apologizing to his audience. It was March 23, 2018, just days after the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy that worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, had surreptitiously siphoned the personal data of tens of millions of Americans from their Facebook accounts in an attempt to influence how they voted. It was the biggest privacy breach in Facebook’s history, and Quiñonero had been previously scheduled…

Read More Read More

Seattle’s virus success shows what could have been

Seattle’s virus success shows what could have been

The New York Times reports: Facing the nation’s first widespread coronavirus outbreak, some of Washington State’s top leaders quietly gathered on a Sunday morning last March for an urgent strategy session. The virus had been rampaging through a nursing home in the Seattle suburbs. By the time the meeting began, the region had recorded most of the nation’s first 19 deaths. New cases were surfacing by the hour. As the meeting’s presentation got to the fifth slide, the room grew…

Read More Read More

Joe Biden’s background presidency

Joe Biden’s background presidency

Philip Bump writes: When he was running for president last year, one of Joe Biden’s pitches to voters was that, if he won, they would be able to stop paying attention to the White House all the time. “Remember when you didn’t have to think about the president every single day,” one ad from Biden’s campaign began, “and instead there was someone in that office who thought about you?” After four years of President Donald Trump dominating the country’s attention…

Read More Read More