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Fauci: ‘Bizarre’ White House behavior only hurts Trump

Fauci: ‘Bizarre’ White House behavior only hurts Trump

The Atlantic reports: Anthony Fauci isn’t about to quit, despite the White House’s clumsy attempts to stain his public image. More so now than at any other point in their uneasy partnership, it seems that if President Donald Trump wants to be rid of Fauci, he’ll need to fire him. In recent days especially, the White House has stepped up efforts to discredit Fauci, a move he describes as “bizarre.” “Ultimately, it hurts the president to do that,” Fauci told…

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Global surge in coronavirus cases is being fed by the developing world — and the U.S.

Global surge in coronavirus cases is being fed by the developing world — and the U.S.

The Washington Post reports: When the United States began shutting down this spring, a virus that emerged months earlier as a mysterious outbreak in a Chinese provincial capital had infected a total of fewer than 200,000 people worldwide. So far this week, the planet has added an average of more than 200,000 cases every day. The novel coronavirus — once concentrated in specific cities or countries — has now crept into virtually every corner of the globe and is wreaking…

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Trump administration strips CDC of control of coronavirus data

Trump administration strips CDC of control of coronavirus data

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public. The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the…

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Trump’s final presidential pardon: himself

Trump’s final presidential pardon: himself

Bill Press writes: Jan. 20, 2021. EXCLUSIVE TO THE HILL: According to official documents obtained by our team of White House correspondents, President Trump’s last official act as president, just minutes before leaving the White House to head directly for Mar-A-Lago, pointedly boycotting incoming President Joe Biden’s Inauguration, was to issue one final presidential pardon. In a brief written statement, Trump said, “Under absolute powers bestowed on me as president under Article II of the Constitution, I am awarding a…

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I’m a former civil servant. We are professionals, not a ‘deep state’

I’m a former civil servant. We are professionals, not a ‘deep state’

Russell E. Travers writes: If the intelligence community needs to correct understatements of threat (no, the Islamic State is not defeated) or correct overstatements of threat (no, data doesn’t suggest a significant threat from refugees), that’s not a “deep state” undermining the president; that’s a professional civil service doing its job. Just like the civil servants at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department and everywhere else in the government. A century ago,…

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The pandemic may get much, much worse. We must act now

The pandemic may get much, much worse. We must act now

John M. Barry writes: When you mix science and politics, you get politics. With the coronavirus, the United States has proved politics hasn’t worked. If we are to fully reopen both the economy and schools safely — which can be done — we have to return to science. To understand just how bad things are in the United States and, more important, what can be done about it requires comparison. At this writing, Italy, once the poster child of coronavirus…

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New Biden plan sees millions of jobs in aggressive climate action

New Biden plan sees millions of jobs in aggressive climate action

The Verge reports: On Wednesday, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden revealed a revamped climate and energy plan that raises spending, expands efforts to address racial disparities, and sets an earlier deadline for cutting greenhouse gases. Biden’s plan aims to eliminate carbon pollution from the power sector by 2035. Biden had previously committed to reaching a 100 percent “clean energy economy” by 2050. The plan comes with a $2 trillion price tag over four years, higher than his previous ten-year…

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We ran the CDC. No president ever politicized its science the way Trump has

We ran the CDC. No president ever politicized its science the way Trump has

Tom Frieden, Jeffrey Koplan, David Satcher and Richard Besser write: As America begins the formidable task of getting our kids back to school and all of us back to work safely amid a pandemic that is only getting worse, public health experts face two opponents: covid-19, but also political leaders and others attempting to undermine the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the debate last week around reopening schools more safely showed, these repeated efforts to subvert sound public…

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Trump mired in self-pity as polls sink and pandemic worsens

Trump mired in self-pity as polls sink and pandemic worsens

Bloomberg reports: President Donald Trump swept to power by championing the hardships of forgotten men and women, but his re-election bid has so far centered on the plight of just one person: himself. Trump is struggling to respond to a resurgent pandemic, an economic downturn and nationwide protests for racial justice. The coronavirus has weakened the central plank of his campaign — the economy — while mostly scuttling the rallies that he thrives on. While all those crises raged, Trump…

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The Anglo-America flailing states

The Anglo-America flailing states

Pankaj Mishra writes: ‘The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models…

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Anne Applebaum: How my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit

Anne Applebaum: How my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit

Nick Cohen writes: Anne Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match. When she asks who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies. Or, rather, her former friends. For if they are now embarrassed to have once known her,…

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Mary Trump has not indicted her uncle. She has indicted the whole family

Mary Trump has not indicted her uncle. She has indicted the whole family

Michael Kruse writes: Donald Trump is the damaged product of an absent mother and a sociopathic father. That’s in essence Mary Trump’s assessment in her ultra-anticipated instant bestseller that’s due out Tuesday—Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. For anybody who’s done the reading these last five years—from Wayne Barrett’s biography that was published in 1992 to Gwenda Blair’s multigenerational study from 2000 to psychology experts’ more recent efforts to explain this president—it’s…

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The role of cognitive dissonance in the pandemic

The role of cognitive dissonance in the pandemic

Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris write: Members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth in 1997, a spaceship would be traveling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When the manager asked why, they complained that the telescope was defective,…

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Global ‘catastrophe’ looms as Covid-19 fuels inequality

Global ‘catastrophe’ looms as Covid-19 fuels inequality

The Observer reports: The pandemic has exposed and reinforced deep inequalities across the world, with the true extent yet to be seen, according to a major new report. The crisis in the poorest countries threatens to escalate into a catastrophe as job losses and food insecurity mount. “The economic, social and political impacts are only starting to unfold,” says Building Back with Justice: Dismantling Inequalities after Covid-19, to be published by Christian Aid later this month. The number of people…

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Shoot the messenger: White House seeks to discredit Fauci amid coronavirus surge

Shoot the messenger: White House seeks to discredit Fauci amid coronavirus surge

NBC News reports: The White House is seeking to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, as President Donald Trump works to marginalize him and his dire warnings about the shortcomings in the U.S. coronavirus response. In a remarkable broadside by the Trump administration against one of its own, a White House official told NBC News on Sunday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.”…

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Angela Merkel skewers Trump: ‘You cannot fight the pandemic with lies’

Angela Merkel skewers Trump: ‘You cannot fight the pandemic with lies’

Stephen Collinson with Caitlin Hu write: Angela Merkel may not scream down the phone at President Donald Trump — but she knows how to insert a dagger. Trump, as well as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, must have felt his ears burning when the German Chancellor demolished their approaches to the coronavirus in a speech Thursday. “As we are experiencing firsthand, you cannot fight the pandemic with lies and disinformation any more than you can fight it with…

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