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Category: Politics

The Rorschach features of the pandemic

The Rorschach features of the pandemic

David Wallace-Wells writes: “Omicron is in retreat,” declared the January 19 headline of the New York Times’ Morning Newsletter, by David Leonhardt, which reaches millions of inboxes each weekday. That same Wednesday, according to Our World in Data, 3,830 new deaths were reported in the country — not just the highest figure in the Omicron wave but, putting aside a one-day post-Thanksgiving reporting anomaly, the highest since January 2021. In the week that followed, the deaths continued: A few days…

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In China, Covid-era controls may outlast the virus

In China, Covid-era controls may outlast the virus

The New York Times reports: The police had warned Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer, not to go to Shanghai to visit the mother of a dissident. He went to the airport anyway. His phone’s health code app — a digital pass indicating possible exposure to the coronavirus — was green, which meant he could travel. His home city, Changsha, had no Covid-19 cases, and he had not left in weeks. Then his app turned red, flagging him as high…

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UN: 2,000 children recruited by Yemen’s rebels died fighting

UN: 2,000 children recruited by Yemen’s rebels died fighting

The Associated Press reports: U.N. experts said in a new report that nearly 2,000 children recruited by Yemen’s Houthi rebels died on the battlefield between January 2020 and May 2021, and the Iranian-backed rebels continue to hold camps and courses encouraging youngsters to fight. In the report to the U.N. Security Council circulated Saturday, the experts said they investigated some summer camps in schools and a mosque where the Houthis disseminated their ideology and sought to recruit children fight in…

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Removing Boris Johnson from power is like ‘fixing the drains,’ says his former senior adviser

Removing Boris Johnson from power is like ‘fixing the drains,’ says his former senior adviser

New York magazine reports: There is a joke in British political circles that Dominic Cummings exists to destroy prime ministers. After his organization Vote Leave won the Brexit referendum in 2016, David Cameron resigned. Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, stepped down when her Brexit deal was derailed. Now it appears to be the turn of Boris Johnson, Cummings’s former boss. Cummings was his most senior adviser — his de facto chief of staff — and the architect of the Tories’ 2019…

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We still can’t see American slavery for what it was

We still can’t see American slavery for what it was

Jamelle Bouie writes: The historian Marcus Rediker opens “The Slave Ship: A Human History” with a harrowing reconstruction of the journey, for a captive, from shore to ship: The ship grew larger and more terrifying with every vigorous stroke of the paddles. The smells grew stronger and the sounds louder — crying and wailing from one quarter and low, plaintive singing from another; the anarchic noise of children given an underbeat by hands drumming on wood; the odd comprehensible word…

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A federal judge canceled major oil and gas leases over climate change

A federal judge canceled major oil and gas leases over climate change

NPR reports: Late last year, just days after pledging to cut fossil fuels at international climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, the Biden administration held the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history. On Thursday, a federal judge invalidated that sale in the Gulf of Mexico, saying the administration didn’t adequately consider the costs to the world’s climate. The administration used an analysis conducted under former President Donald Trump that environmental groups alleged was critically flawed. The decision represents…

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Why can’t we make equality for women the law of the land?

Why can’t we make equality for women the law of the land?

Jesse Wegman writes: Even if you are a political junkie, there’s a good chance you didn’t realize that the United States Constitution grew 58 words longer this week. Those words, which begin, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” are the text of the Equal Rights Amendment. Section 3 of the amendment states that it takes effect two years after its ratification, which…

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The disillusionment of a young Biden administration official

The disillusionment of a young Biden administration official

Jonathan Blitzer writes: In the spring of 2019, Andrea Flores, then a thirty-one-year-old associate at a law firm in Washington, D.C., received an e-mail from the head of an organization called National Security Action. Its mission sounded lofty and urgent, and also typical for the time: “advancing American global leadership” and “opposing the reckless policies of the Trump Administration.” What distinguished National Security Action was that it would soon become a laboratory for the Biden transition. Flores, who’d worked in…

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NATO won’t put troops in Ukraine, but Western foreigners are volunteering to join the fight against Russia

NATO won’t put troops in Ukraine, but Western foreigners are volunteering to join the fight against Russia

BuzzFeed News reports: He walked and talked and dressed like a Ukrainian soldier — and according to a contract with its armed forces, he is one. But Private Aiden “Johnny” Aslin is a British citizen with a Midlands accent and no formal orders from his home government to be fighting on the battlefields of the Donbas. “It was my own decision to come here,” the 27-year-old told BuzzFeed News in this war-ravaged village, just north of the Sea of Azov….

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Joni Mitchell joins Neil Young’s Spotify protest over anti-vax content

Joni Mitchell joins Neil Young’s Spotify protest over anti-vax content

The Guardian reports: In an act of solidarity between two veteran rock stars with a shared history of espousing progressive causes, Joni Mitchell has joined Neil Young in removing her music from Spotify in protest at it hosting a popular anti-vax podcast. Mitchell, whose 1971 album Blue is regarded as one of the greatest of all time, is the first high-profile musician to take a stand alongside Young against the streaming behemoth. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing…

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Don’t create panic, Ukraine’s Zelensky tells West

Don’t create panic, Ukraine’s Zelensky tells West

BBC News reports: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on the West not to create panic amid the build-up of Russian troops on his country’s borders. He told reporters that warnings of an imminent invasion were putting Ukraine’s economy at risk. On Thursday, US President Joe Biden said he believed Russia could attack its neighbour next month. Russia, however, denies it is planning to invade and on Friday its foreign minister said Moscow did not want war. While Russia has…

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Russia sends medical units to Ukrainian front

Russia sends medical units to Ukrainian front

The Wall Street Journal reports: Moscow has put what appear to be final preparations for an invasion of Ukraine by sending medical units to the front, moving to a level of readiness that it hadn’t reached in past buildups, according Western defense officials. While the moves don’t mean an attack is certain, they are prerequisites for battle and have intensified debates among Western allies over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions. The U.S. and European allies, particularly Germany and France, appear…

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Fox News is increasingly out of step with Republicans on Russia

Fox News is increasingly out of step with Republicans on Russia

David Frum writes: Night after night, the host of the top-rated show on Fox News repeats Vladimir Putin’s talking points justifying aggression against Ukraine and opposing U.S. aid to that threatened sovereign country. Tucker Carlson’s influence is felt across right-wing social media, where it is amplified by figures such as Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Glenn Greenwald, and Mollie Hemingway. A highly visible coterie of socially conservative intellectuals also argues the case against helping Ukraine. Meanwhile, day after day, Republican officeholders…

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The Supreme Court is political and always has been

The Supreme Court is political and always has been

Jack Shafer writes: Everybody is two-faced about the Supreme Court. First, they fuss about the court having become a venue for politics. This was the position Justice Sonia Sotomayor took last month. Someone who votes reliably with the minority of justices who were appointed by Democratic presidents, she received a chorus of hallelujahs from her comrades when she worried aloud during oral arguments in an abortion case that if the court did not decide her way in the case, the…

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In GOP-run Georgia, forty-five times more people were denied the right to vote by mail in 2021 than in 2020

In GOP-run Georgia, forty-five times more people were denied the right to vote by mail in 2021 than in 2020

Mother Jones reports: “States are not engaging in trying to suppress voters whatsoever,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared last year. Facts on the ground in Georgia tell a different story. A new data analysis by Mother Jones shows that the number of voters disenfranchised by rejected mail ballot applications skyrocketed after the GOP-controlled legislature passed sweeping new restrictions on mail voting last year. The law enacted in March 2021 shortened the time people have to request and return…

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Americans’ trust in science now deeply polarized, poll shows

Americans’ trust in science now deeply polarized, poll shows

The Associated Press reports: Republicans’ faith in science is falling as Democrats rely on it even more, with a trust gap in science and medicine widening substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, new survey data shows. It’s the largest gap in nearly five decades of polling by the General Social Survey, a widely respected trend survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago that has been measuring confidence in institutions since 1972. That is unsurprising to more than a dozen…

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