Music: Pasteur Lappe — ‘Na Real Sekele Fo’ Ya’
As Covid surges, American hospitals don’t have enough staff
The Atlantic reports: The reports have come in from all across the country: Hospitals are filling up, especially in the Midwest, and they are running out of the staff they need to take care of patients. Last week, the United States broke its record from April for the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients, blowing past 60,000 all the way to 73,000, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. Now new data released by the Department…
Immunity to the coronavirus may last years, new data hint
The New York Times reports: How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination. Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist…
Gobal warming by the numbers because this week the reality is too much
Bill McKibben writes: Sometimes the human trauma of the climate crisis is too painful to recite, and this is one of those times: the busiest hurricane season ever recorded is continuing on into the late fall, with consequences so horrifying one can hardly stand to look. Right now, Hurricane Iota is mashing Central America; it will likely be a few days before we know the precise results. So let’s talk about what has already happened in Honduras, when Hurricane Eta…
Trump fires director of DHS agency who had rejected President’s election conspiracy theories
CNN reports: President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired the Department of Homeland Security official who had rejected Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. Trump announced on Twitter he was firing Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and directly tied it to Krebs’ statement that said there “is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” “The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of…
Trump ‘suppressed’ his own voting base by opposing absentee ballots, says Georgia’s secretary of state
WSB-TV reports: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has started firing back after more than a week of criticism from President Donald Trump. Raffensperger says it was the president’s own attacks on absentee ballots that cost him the election in Georgia. “He would have won by 10,000 votes. He actually suppressed, depressed his own voting base,” Raffensperger said. The Secretary of State said some 24,500 Georgia Republicans who voted absentee in the June primary, didn’t vote in the general election. Raffensperger…
In the Trump era, Real Clear Politics changed its tone, and funding sources
The New York Times reports: For three days after every major news organization declared Joseph R. Biden Jr. the victor of the presidential election, one widely read political site maintained that Pennsylvania was still too close to call. The delay was welcome news to allies of President Trump like Rudolph W. Giuliani and friendly outlets like The Gateway Pundit, which misrepresented the site’s decision in their efforts to spread false claims that Mr. Biden’s lead was unraveling. That site, Real…
Music: Marcos Valle & Moska — ‘Samba de Verão’
The Republican Party is dead. It’s the Trump cult now
Jonathan V. Last writes: Donald Trump is the past, present, and future of the Republican Party. And that is because the GOP is no longer a traditional political party designed to win elections so that it can enact a policy agenda. It is a personality cult built around grievance. To understand its true nature, you must first understand how weak Trump was as an electoral force. It is devilishly hard to unseat an elected president. Trump is only the third…
Georgia secretary of state says fellow Republicans are pressuring him to find ways to exclude legal ballots
The Washington Post reports: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he has come under increasing pressure in recent days from fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), to question the validity of legally cast absentee ballots in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state. In a wide-ranging interview about the election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation over a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia…
Trump coronavirus adviser tells Michigan to ‘rise up’ against new shutdown orders
The Washington Post reports: On Sunday, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) announced a three-week “pause to save lives,” closing colleges, high schools, workplaces and in-person dining as new coronavirus cases have spiked. After she appealed to the Trump administration to intervene in the pandemic, White House coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas responded with a call to action. But instead of supporting Whitmer’s efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus in Michigan, he urged residents to reject the state’s public…
Pfizer vaccine: what an ‘efficacy rate above 90%’ really means
F8 Studio/Shutterstock By Zania Stamataki, University of Birmingham There was – rightfully – a lot of excitement when Pfizer and BioNTech announced interim results from their COVID vaccine trial. The vaccine, called BNT162b2, was reported to have an “efficacy rate above 90%”. This was soon translated in the press to be 90% “effective” at preventing COVID-19. Efficacy, effectiveness – what’s the difference? We academics are very precise in our language and it can be a cause of considerable frustration when…
Trump officials rush to auction off rights to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before Biden can block it
The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration is asking oil and gas firms to pick spots where they want to drill in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as it races to open the pristine wilderness to development and lock in drilling rights before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. The “call for nominations” to be published Tuesday in the Federal Register allows companies to identify tracts on which to bid during an upcoming lease sale on the refuge’s nearly 1.6 million…
A former right-wing media creator on how a ‘different reality’ became so prominent
The New York Times reports: Matthew Sheffield started his first conservative website in 2000, dedicating it to criticizing the former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who Mr. Sheffield believed was a partisan liberal and not critical enough of President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Mr. Sheffield then went on to help create NewsBusters, another right-leaning website that criticized the mainstream media for liberal bias. Later, he became the founding online managing editor of the Washington Examiner, another popular outlet…
A Ukrainian neo-Nazi group is organizing on Facebook despite a year-old ban
BuzzFeed reports: Despite attempts to drive it off the platform, a violent Ukrainian far-right group with ties to American white supremacists is using Facebook to recruit new members, organize violence, and spread its far-right ideology across the world. Although it banned the Azov movement and its leaders more than a year ago, Facebook continues to profit from ads placed by the far-right organization as recently as Monday. Since July, Azov, which sprung up during the Russian invasion in 2014, has…
Music: Marcos Valle — ‘Guanabara’