The Atlantic reports: For the past several months, Bloomberg has been the wild card. He made the risky move of skipping all four early nominating states to bet it all—or at least half a billion dollars of his personal fortune—on Super Tuesday. For a brief moment, the strategy seemed to be working. He rose to the top tier in polling for many of the contests. Then came a miserable Nevada debate and a reconsideration of how he would actually perform…
Politico reports: Just hours after Joe Biden surged to the top of the Democratic presidential pack, Senate Republicans announced a new phase of their investigation targeting the former vice president and his son Hunter. Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told reporters on Wednesday that he is likely to release an interim report within one to two months on his panel’s probe of Hunter Biden’s ties to a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma. “These are questions that Joe Biden…
The Washington Post reports: The coronavirus outbreak sweeping through Iran has delivered a jarring blow to the senior ranks of its government, infecting about two dozen members of parliament and at least 15 other current or former top figures, according to official reports. Among those sickened have been a vice president, a deputy health minister, and an adviser to the head of the judiciary, and the virus has struck at the pinnacle of power, killing an adviser to Supreme Leader…
Farhad Manjoo writes: Let us pray, now, for science. Pray for empiricism and for epidemiology and for vaccines. Pray for peer review and controlled double-blinds. For flu shots, herd immunity and washing your hands. Pray for reason, rigor and expertise. Pray for the precautionary principle. Pray for the N.I.H. and the C.D.C. Pray for the W.H.O. And pray not just for science, but for scientists, too, as well as their colleagues in the application of science — the tireless health…
The New York Times reports: The coronavirus has found a crack in the nation’s public health armor, and it is not one that scientists foresaw: diagnostic testing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botched its first attempt to mass produce a diagnostic test kit, a discovery made only after officials had shipped hundreds of kits to state laboratories. A promised replacement took several weeks, and still did not permit state and local laboratories to make final diagnoses. And the…
Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes write: President Trump rode out the Mueller investigation. He survived impeachment. He has waved away dozens of lesser scandals as though they were nothing more than gnats. But now he faces a challenge unlike any he has confronted before: The coronavirus is continuing its spread around the globe and has arrived in the United States, causing widespread alarm and a precipitous drop in the stock market. Americans should all hope he succeeds in mitigating the…
A train attendant in Nanchang, China, gestures in solidarity with medical staff departing for the city of Wuhan, Feb. 13, 2020. STR/AFP via Getty Images By Yuqi Na, Fordham University The coronavirus known as COVID-19 has killed more than 3,000 people and spread into Europe and Latin America, raising fears of a global pandemic. But in China, where the outbreak began, it took just one death to unleash the grief and fury of a nation. On Feb. 7, 34-year-old Dr….
The Daily Beast reports: Vice President Mike Pence said Monday evening that there has been no ban on domestic travel despite the growing number of 2019 novel coronavirus deaths in the United States. But one government agency is effectively directing its employees not to travel, domestically or internationally, at least for the next several weeks. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has banned all temporary duty assignment (TDY) travel as coronavirus cases continue to surge across the globe, according to…
The Washington Post reports: Senior lawmakers want the intelligence community to make public what its officials have been willing to say only in classified settings: that Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the death of Washington Post contributing columnist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi. The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Democratic vice chairman sent a letter Monday to the acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, urging him to reconsider his agency’s…
Charlie Warzel writes: Constant connectivity defines 21st-century life, and the infrastructure undergirding it all is both digital (the internet and our social media platforms) and physical (the gig economy, e-commerce, global workplaces). Despite a tumultuous first two decades of the century, much of our connected way of life has evaded the stress of a singular global event. The possibility of a global pandemic currently posed by the new coronavirus threatens to change that altogether. Should the virus reach extreme levels…
Andrew Marantz writes: In September, at a resort hotel in the Coachella Valley, the California Republican Party held its fall convention. Brad Parscale—forty-four, six feet eight, balding, prolifically bearded—walked onstage in shirtsleeves and tilted the microphone upward, mumbling a self-deprecating joke about being “awkwardly tall.” Parscale has lived in a red county in California and a blue county in Texas, and he now splits his time between Washington, D.C., and two luxury properties in South Florida, yet he still speaks…
George Packer writes: When Donald Trump came into office, there was a sense that he would be outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited. The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions. They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history,…
George T. Conway III writes: President Trump is treating the judiciary the way he treats the media. But the harm created by these attacks could be far greater. In 2016, CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Trump off camera why he persisted in going after journalists. In one of those sporadic moments in which he reveals the raw truth, Trump replied, according to Stahl, “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write…
The New York Times reports: Every year, hundreds of departing employees at Bloomberg L.P. are presented with a choice: Either leave the company empty-handed or accept a generous financial package and agree to never speak ill of the company. Many take the money. The result is that some employees at Michael R. Bloomberg’s company are barred from publicly describing misconduct and what they perceived as an entrenched culture of bullying, where women are often objectified and sometimes face discrimination, according…
Zack Beauchamp reports: On a cool November night in the West Bank, Murad Shteiwi walked me through the streets where he had been shot. Shteiwi is an activist leader in the town of Kufr Qaddum, a quiet village near the northern city of Nablus. Israel closed the road between Kufr Qaddum and Nablus during the second intifada in the 2000s to prevent Palestinians from getting too close to the nearby Israeli settlement Qadumim. A drive to Nablus that should take…
The Washington Post reports: Minutes before President Trump was preparing Wednesday to reassure a skittish nation about the coronavirus threat, he received a piece of crucial information: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had identified in California the first U.S. case of the illness not tied to foreign travel, a sign that the virus’s spread in the United States was likely to explode. But when Trump took to the lectern for a news conference intended to bring transparency to…