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Republicans are making four key mistakes

Republicans are making four key mistakes

David Frum writes: It’s not only Georgia. In every state where Republicans control a chamber of the legislature, bills to restrict voting are advancing fast. Arizona and Texas Republicans have acted especially aggressively to choke off unwanted voters in time for 2022. Arizona Republicans propose to reduce the number of days for early voting. They want to purge voter rolls of people who missed the previous election. They want to cut off mail-in balloting five days before Election Day. And…

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First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

By Taylor White This spring, the biotechnology company Oxitec plans to release genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec says its technology will combat dengue fever, a potentially life-threatening disease, and other mosquito-borne viruses — such as Zika — mainly transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. While there have been more than 7,300 dengue cases reported in the United States between 2010 and 2020, a majority are contracted in Asia and the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Centers…

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The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false

The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false

Emma Marris writes: It’s late afternoon, late pandemic, and I’m watching a new nature documentary in bed, after taking the daintiest of hits from a weed pen. The show is called A Perfect Planet, and it is narrated by Sir David Attenborough. I am looking at the red eye of a flamingo, a molten lake surrounding a tiny black pupil. Now I am looking at drone footage of a massive colony of flamingos, the classic sweeping overhead shot, what my…

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How radio astronomy reveals the universe

How radio astronomy reveals the universe

Emily Levesque writes: If you ask an astronomer to choose the single most exciting picture in all of astronomy, many of us will point to a familiar orange ring. At a glance it may not look like much — a fuzzy glowing doughnut, bulging slightly at the bottom and, as of last month, streaked with curving lines — but in reality this unassuming circle is humanity’s first glimpse of a black hole, with the colors chosen not to mimic realism,…

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The jewels of America’s landscape should be returned to America’s original peoples

The jewels of America’s landscape should be returned to America’s original peoples

David Treuer writes: In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.” Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. “None but those who…

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The Biden White House media doctrine: Less can be more

The Biden White House media doctrine: Less can be more

Politico reports: Three months in, Joe Biden’s White House has settled on a firm press strategy: First, do no self-harm. The president is not doing cable news interviews. Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional. The public comments are largely scripted. Biden has opted for fewer sit down interviews with mainstream outlets and reporters. He’s had just one major press conference — though another is coming — and prefers remarks straight to camera for the…

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How to stop the minority-rule doom loop

How to stop the minority-rule doom loop

Adam Jentleson writes: President Joe Biden came into office facing four “converging crises”: COVID-19, climate change, racial justice, and the economy. But after a few weeks of fast action on a pandemic relief plan, a fifth crisis will determine the fate of the rest of his administration, and perhaps that of American democracy itself: the minority-rule doom loop, by which predominantly white conservatives gain more and more power, even as they represent fewer Americans. The doom loop consists of four…

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Hawley hauls in $3M after attempt to block election results

Hawley hauls in $3M after attempt to block election results

Politico reports: Sen. Josh Hawley raised more than $3 million during the first three months of the year, underscoring how the Missouri Republican converted his high-profile opposition to the certification of the 2020 election into big fundraising support. The freshman senator drew widespread attention for leading the Jan. 6 effort to block the acceptance of the Electoral College results, a controversial stand that liberals and some Republicans claim undermined faith in the political system. But he won plaudits from loyalists…

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Sweden’s pandemic experiment

Sweden’s pandemic experiment

Mallory Pickett writes: Sweden’s per-capita case counts and death rates have been many times higher than any of its Nordic neighbors, all of which imposed lockdowns, travel bans, and limited gatherings early on. Over all in Sweden, thirteen thousand people have died from covid-19. In Norway, which has a population that is half the size of Sweden’s, and where stricter lockdowns were enforced, about seven hundred people have died. It’s likely that some simple policy changes—especially shutting down visitations to…

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The Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

The Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

The Guardian reports: Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing. The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff. The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to…

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Making America White again

Making America White again

The Washington Post reports: While concerns about changing views on faith, gender and sexuality were often expressed by many of the former president’s most die-hard supporters, fear about America becoming less White — and less “great” — was at the root of at least some of the loyalty to him. A widely reported 2017 survey from the Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute provided some insight into the views of White working-class voters who backed Trump. Nearly half (48…

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As vaccinations keep rising, so do Covid-19 hospitalizations among those who aren’t vaccinated

As vaccinations keep rising, so do Covid-19 hospitalizations among those who aren’t vaccinated

CNN reports: First, the good news: The United States reported a record-high 4.6 million doses of vaccines administered in one day, according to data published Saturday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Amazing Saturday! +4.63M doses administered over total yesterday, a new record,” tweeted Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, the White House Covid-19 data director. “More than 500K higher than old record last Saturday. Incredible number of doses administered.” The problem is that more than 75% of the US population…

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For immigrants, IDs prove to be a barrier to a dose of protection

For immigrants, IDs prove to be a barrier to a dose of protection

The Washington Post reports: The line started outside, on a street usually teeming with people waiting to enter college bars, and snaked up the stairs of an old firehouse to the Brazilian Worker Center, where shots of the coronavirus vaccine were being administered on this cold New England spring morning. Finally, it was Maria Sousa’s turn. She had been waiting for more than an hour with her husband and daughter when a center volunteer greeted them in Portuguese and guided…

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Official: Chinese vaccines’ effectiveness low

Official: Chinese vaccines’ effectiveness low

The Associated Press reports: In a rare admission of the weakness of Chinese coronavirus vaccines, the country’s top disease control official says their effectiveness is low and the government is considering mixing them to get a boost. Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates,” said the director of the China Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, at a conference Saturday in the southwestern city of Chengdu. Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of doses abroad while trying to promote…

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