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Here’s what WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China found about the origins of the coronavirus

Here’s what WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China found about the origins of the coronavirus

By Dominic Dwyer, University of Sydney As I write, I am in hotel quarantine in Sydney, after returning from Wuhan, China. There, I was the Australian representative on the international World Health Organization’s (WHO) investigation into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Much has been said of the politics surrounding the mission to investigate the viral origins of COVID-19. So it’s easy to forget that behind these investigations are real people. As part of the mission, we met the man…

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The Democrats’ last chance to save democracy

The Democrats’ last chance to save democracy

Michael Klarman writes: Supporters of Donald Trump assaulted the capitol on January 6, 2021, but American democracy has been under siege for far longer—from both former President Trump and the Republican Party. Trump’s transgressions against democracy are well known: They include having attacked the press as the “enemy of the people,” assailed sitting judges, politicized the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies, undermined transparency in government, encouraged political violence, and delegitimized elections. The Republican Party’s undermining of democracy began much…

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Trump is extremely mad that prosecutors will see his tax returns

Trump is extremely mad that prosecutors will see his tax returns

Jonathan Chait writes: Donald Trump’s yearslong quest to prevent the public, Congress, or law-enforcement officials from seeing his tax statements came to a resounding end with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling. He did not take the defeat in stride. Instead, the former president released a statement that, even by Trumpian standards, brims with anger. Trump’s response bears every hallmark of an authentically Trump-authored text, as opposed to the knockoff versions produced by his aides. It is meandering, filled with run-on…

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Biden deprioritizes the Middle East

Biden deprioritizes the Middle East

Politico reports: President Joe Biden is tired of dealing with the Middle East — and, barely a month into his tenure, the region has noticed. The signals are not meant to be subtle, his advisers say. The president has made only one call to a head of state in the Middle East — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday — which itself was delayed by more than three weeks and followed calls to other allies and even adversaries like…

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How John Gray’s philosophy helped me understand my war experience

How John Gray’s philosophy helped me understand my war experience

Andy Owen writes: I first read the English philosopher John Gray while sitting in the silence of the still, mid-afternoon heat of Helmand Province in Afghanistan. In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), Gray showed how the United States’ president George W Bush and the United Kingdom’s prime minister Tony Blair framed the ‘war on terror’ (which I was part of) as an apocalyptic struggle that would forge the new American century of liberal democracy, where…

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By summer, the pandemic may feel like it’s behind us — even if it’s not

By summer, the pandemic may feel like it’s behind us — even if it’s not

James Hamblin writes: Until very recently, Anthony Fauci had been citing August as the month by which the U.S. could vaccinate 70 to 80 percent of the population and reach herd immunity. Last week, he suddenly threw out May or early June as a window for when most Americans could have access to vaccines. Despite some concerns about new coronavirus variants, Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me that he doesn’t see viral…

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Why Texas Republicans fear the Green New Deal

Why Texas Republicans fear the Green New Deal

Naomi Klein writes: Since the power went out in Texas, the state’s most prominent Republicans have tried to pin the blame for the crisis on, of all things, a sweeping progressive mobilization to fight poverty, inequality and climate change. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday on Fox News. Pointing to snow-covered solar panels, Rick Perry, a former governor who was later an energy secretary for the Trump…

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‘Mark changed the rules’: How Facebook went easy on Alex Jones and other right-wing figures

‘Mark changed the rules’: How Facebook went easy on Alex Jones and other right-wing figures

BuzzFeed News reports: In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened. Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and…

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Defeated and impeached, Trump still commands the loyalty of the GOP’s voters

Defeated and impeached, Trump still commands the loyalty of the GOP’s voters

USA Today reports: If there’s a civil war in the Republican Party, the voters who backed Donald Trump in November’s election are ready to choose sides. Behind Trump. An exclusive Suffolk University/USA TODAY Poll finds Trump’s support largely unshaken after his second impeachment trial in the Senate, this time on a charge of inciting an insurrection in the deadly assault on the Capitol Jan. 6. By double digits, 46%-27%, those surveyed say they would abandon the GOP and join the…

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Oath Keeper claims she was VIP security at Trump rally before riot and says she met with Secret Service agents

Oath Keeper claims she was VIP security at Trump rally before riot and says she met with Secret Service agents

CNN reports: A leader in an alleged Oath Keepers conspiracy in the US Capitol insurrection claims she was given a VIP pass to the pro-Trump rally on January 6, had met with Secret Service agents and was providing security for legislators and others, including in their march to the Capitol, according to a new court filing. Attorneys for Ohio Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins detail how the efforts among paramilitants who are now accused of conspiracy on January 6 were closer…

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Statehood for Washington, D.C., is a matter of justice

Statehood for Washington, D.C., is a matter of justice

Anne Applebaum writes: The city has changed dramatically even in my lifetime. When I was growing up in D.C. in the 1970s and ’80s, it still felt like a small town. It didn’t have much traffic. It had no outer suburbs. It had few restaurants outside of Duke Zeibert’s or the Palm, owned by New Yorkers, where congressmen went to eat shrimp cocktail. The fashionable went to New York to buy dresses, if they wanted something special; everyone else went…

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Texas crisis exposes a nation’s vulnerability to climate change

Texas crisis exposes a nation’s vulnerability to climate change

The New York Times reports: Even as Texas struggled to restore electricity and water over the past week, signs of the risks posed by increasingly extreme weather to America’s aging infrastructure were cropping up across the country. The week’s continent-spanning winter storms triggered blackouts in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and several other states. One-third of oil production in the nation was halted. Drinking-water systems in Ohio were knocked offline. Road networks nationwide were paralyzed and vaccination efforts in 20 states were…

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Trump gears up for war with his own party

Trump gears up for war with his own party

Politico reports: There’s no longer a chief of staff to screen his calls and he keeps no predictable working hours. So an unspoken rule has governed Donald Trump’s calendar since he left Washington last month: To sit down with the former president, you must belong to his posh Palm Beach club or know how to contact him directly. But even that won’t always do it. For weeks now, Trump has rejected meetings with everyone from former South Carolina governor and…

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Feds now say right-wing extremists responsible for majority of deadly terrorist attacks last year

Feds now say right-wing extremists responsible for majority of deadly terrorist attacks last year

Jana Winter reports: The U.S. government is acknowledging for the first time that right-wing extremists were responsible for the majority of fatal domestic terrorist attacks last year, according to an internal report circulated by the Department of Homeland Security last week and obtained by Yahoo News. A review of last year’s domestic terrorist incidents by a DHS fusion center — which shares threat-related information between federal, state and local partners — found that although civil unrest and antigovernment violence were…

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