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Category: Politics

Epidemiologist behind Sweden’s controversial virus strategy admits mistakes

Epidemiologist behind Sweden’s controversial virus strategy admits mistakes

Bloomberg reports: Sweden’s top epidemiologist has admitted his strategy to fight Covid-19 resulted in too many deaths, after persuading his country to avoid a strict lockdown. “If we were to encounter the same illness with the same knowledge that we have today, I think our response would land somewhere in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done,” Anders Tegnell said in an interview with Swedish Radio. Tegnell is the brains behind Sweden’s controversial approach…

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Trump’s multiple voter registration applications suggest he’s either committing tax fraud or voter fraud

Trump’s multiple voter registration applications suggest he’s either committing tax fraud or voter fraud

The Washington Post reports: President Trump originally tried to register to vote in Florida while claiming his “legal residence” was in another part of the country — Washington, D.C. — according to Florida elections records. The September 2019 registration application listed Trump’s legal residence as 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, the location of the White House. That created a potential problem for Trump: Florida law requires voters to be legal residents of the state. A month later, Trump resubmitted his application…

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As the protests continue, let’s be clear about who is engaged in violence

As the protests continue, let’s be clear about who is engaged in violence

Rebecca Solnit writes: The word “violence” is going to be used a lot to describe the events in US cities over the weekend and all this week. So it’s going to be important to be clear about who is violent and what violence is. Property destruction and harming human beings are profoundly different actions, and with a few exceptions (seemingly interlopers in the protests) virtually all the violence visited on human beings during this round of civil unrest across the…

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Trump’s collaborators

Trump’s collaborators

Anne Applebaum writes: Trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters. Although some of his speeches have continued to use that populist language, he has built a Cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and in business and, of course, his own family. His tax cuts disproportionately benefited…

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I cannot remain silent

I cannot remain silent

Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007-2011, writes: It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump’s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent. Whatever…

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Trump’s war against Americans

Trump’s war against Americans

Kevin Baron writes: President Donald Trump finally got the war he wanted. It isn’t in Afghanistan, or Iraq, Syria, or North Korea. It’s right here in Washington, D.C., where on Monday the president claimed moral and Constitutional authority and ordered federal law enforcement and the U.S. military to turn against Americans who opposed him. After warning over the weekend that out-of-line rabble-rousers across the street from the White House would face “vicious dogs,” Trump instead sicced police, troops, and U.S….

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Police kicked priest out of church near White House so that Trump could have his bible-wielding photo-op

Police kicked priest out of church near White House so that Trump could have his bible-wielding photo-op

Religion News Service reports: Early Monday evening, President Donald Trump stood before the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in downtown Washington and held aloft a Bible for cameras. The photo opportunity had an eerie quality: Trump said relatively little, positioned stoically in front of the boarded-up church, which had been damaged the day before in a fire during protests sparked by the death of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis. The church appeared to be completely abandoned. It was,…

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White supremacist group, Identity Evropa, posing as Antifa, called for violence on Twitter

White supremacist group, Identity Evropa, posing as Antifa, called for violence on Twitter

NBC News reports: A Twitter account claiming to belong to a national “antifa” organization and pushing violent rhetoric related to ongoing protests has been linked to the white nationalist group Identity Evropa, according to a Twitter spokesperson. The spokesperson said the account violated the company’s platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts. Twitter suspended the account after a tweet that incited violence. As protests were taking place in multiple states across the U.S. Sunday night, the…

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How to make this moment the turning point for real change in America

How to make this moment the turning point for real change in America

Barack Obama writes: As millions of people across the country take to the streets and raise their voices in response to the killing of George Floyd and the ongoing problem of unequal justice, many people have reached out asking how we can sustain momentum to bring about real change. Ultimately, it’s going to be up to a new generation of activists to shape strategies that best fit the times. But I believe there are some basic lessons to draw from…

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Worse than 1968

Worse than 1968

Julian Zelizer writes: Trump thrives in a partisan world that is in many ways more dysfunctional than what we saw in 1968. Whereas the tensions of that year revolved around specific issues, like the war and civil rights, we now live in a partisan world where our institutions perpetuate constant red-blue divisions over almost every issue, no matter how large or small they might be. Everything — even wearing masks to prevent a contagious, potentially deadly disease from spreading —…

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Facebook employees challenge Zuckerberg and stage virtual walkout to protest Trump posts

Facebook employees challenge Zuckerberg and stage virtual walkout to protest Trump posts

The New York Times reports: Dozens of Facebook employees, in rare public criticism on Monday of their own company, protested executives’ decision not to do anything about inflammatory posts that President Trump had placed on the giant social media platform over the past week. The employees, who said they refused to work in order to show their support for demonstrators across the country, added an automated message to their digital profiles and email responses saying that they were out of…

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Sweden’s coronavirus experiment has well and truly failed

Sweden’s coronavirus experiment has well and truly failed

Wired reports: There was a familiar refrain from political commentators on certain corners of the internet in the early days of the pandemic – a three-word slogan in the vein of ‘Get Brexit Done’ that popped up wherever people felt the government’s lockdown plans impinged on their rights: what about Sweden? The Nordic country was used as an example of why closing down society in the way that most other European countries have done was unnecessary. Even now, restaurants and…

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The law-enforcement abuses that don’t bother Trump

The law-enforcement abuses that don’t bother Trump

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes write: President Donald Trump has seen abusive law enforcement before—stared it in the face, called it by its name, denounced it. He did not, to be sure, see the killing of George Floyd—the latest African American man to be killed by a police officer—as a reason to condemn abusive policing, although video of Floyd’s death prompted millions of Americans to recoil in horror and sparked outrage, protest, and violence nationwide. The president has been mostly…

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Judge Sullivan says he is not required to ‘rubber stamp’ DOJ’s bid to dismiss Flynn case

Judge Sullivan says he is not required to ‘rubber stamp’ DOJ’s bid to dismiss Flynn case

The Washington Post reports: U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan should not be required to act as a “mere rubber stamp” for the government’s unusual move to undo the guilty plea of President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, the judge’s lawyers told a federal appeals court in Washington on Monday. Sullivan’s attorneys asked the appeals court to stay on the sidelines to give the judge an opportunity to ensure the “integrity of the judicial process” and to rule…

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America must listen to its wounds. They will tell us where to look for hope

America must listen to its wounds. They will tell us where to look for hope

Reverend William Barber writes: No one wants to see their community burn. But the fires burning in Minneapolis, just like the fire burning in the spirits of so many marginalized Americans today, are a natural response to the trauma black communities have experienced, generation after generation. No one wants the fires – even activists on the ground have said this. But they have also shared how their non-violent pleas and protests have gone unnoticed for years as the situation has…

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Trump is the looter

Trump is the looter

David Frum writes: When pro-Trump protesters descended on state capitals to demand reopening, nobody shot at them, not even when they endangered police lives by screaming into their faces, unmasked, during a pandemic. Nobody shot at them when they carried weapons into state legislative buildings to intimidate state legislators and governors. And of course, those protesters received the full-throated endorsement of President Trump. “Liberate Minnesota!” Trump tweeted on April 17. Threats of armed violence by pro-Trump demonstrators forced the shutdown…

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