Music: Arve Henriksen, Skúli Sverrisson & Hilmar Jensson — ‘Mín’
Trump allies say the virus has almost run its course while experts most Americans remain at risk
The New York Times reports: In the last week, leading epidemiologists from respected institutions have, through different methods, reached the same conclusion: About 85 to 90 percent of the American population is still susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the current pandemic. The number is important because it means that “herd immunity” — the point at which a disease stops spreading because nearly everyone in a population has contracted it — is still very far off. The evidence came from…
Covid-19: The most complicated vaccine campaign ever
Sarah Zhang writes: On the day that a COVID-19 vaccine is approved, a vast logistics operation will need to awaken. Millions of doses must travel hundreds of miles from manufacturers to hospitals, doctor’s offices, and pharmacies, which in turn must store, track, and eventually get the vaccines to people all across the country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with state and local health departments, coordinates this process. These agencies distributed flu vaccines during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic…
Threat to evacuate U.S. diplomats from Iraq raises fear of war
Reuters reports: Washington has made preparations to withdraw diplomats from Iraq after warning Baghdad it could shut its embassy, two Iraqi officials and two Western diplomats said, a step Iraqis fear could turn their country into a battle zone. Any move by the United States to reduce its diplomatic presence in a country where it has up to 5,000 troops would be widely seen in the region as an escalation of its confrontation with Iran, which Washington blames for missile…
In Trump’s eyes, evangelical leaders are ‘all husters’
McKay Coppins writes: One day in 2015, Donald Trump beckoned Michael Cohen, his longtime confidant and personal attorney, into his office. Trump was brandishing a printout of an article about an Atlanta-based megachurch pastor trying to raise $60 million from his flock to buy a private jet. Trump knew the preacher personally—Creflo Dollar had been among a group of evangelical figures who visited him in 2011 while he was first exploring a presidential bid. During the meeting, Trump had reverently…
An insider’s account of how the Mueller investigation fell flat
Garrett M. Graff writes: Andrew Weissmann headed the prosecution of Paul Manafort on Robert Mueller’s team. His new memoir, Where Law Ends, is an elegy for the Russia investigation that never was—one in which the special counsel’s office was actually able to crack the oddball collection of grifters who populated Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, from Paul Manafort to George Papadopoulos, and figure out the actual truth of their relationship with an expansive cast of Russian oligarchs and intelligence…
Supreme Court reform is not revenge
Lawrence Goldstone writes: Following Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Democrats, not surprisingly, are outraged at Republicans’ course reversal on filling a vacancy during an election year. Two proposals are gaining momentum among commentators and progressive activists: expanding the number of justices and instituting term limits. These ideas almost always seem to smack of political revenge. But to think only in terms of getting even is to miss the point. Each of these notions is in line with what the Founders…
Mysterious circles in the desert explained by the Turing pattern
Science Alert reports: It was 1952, and Alan Turing was about to reshape humanity’s understanding of biology. In a landmark paper, the English mathematician introduced what became known as the Turing pattern – the notion that the dynamics of certain uniform systems could give rise to stable patterns when disturbed. Such ‘order from disturbance’ has become the theoretical basis for all sorts of strange, repeated motifs seen in the natural world. It was a good theory. So good, in fact,…
Music: Arve Henriksen, Skúli Sverrisson & Hilmar Jensson — ‘Undan’
Vote like the future of humanity depends on it — because it does
Bill McKibben writes: To understand the planetary importance of this autumn’s presidential election, check the calendar. Voting ends on November 3rd — and by a fluke of timing, on the morning of November 4th the United States is scheduled to pull out of the Paris Agreement. President Trump announced that we would abrogate our Paris commitments during a Rose Garden speech in 2017. But under the terms of the accords, it takes three years to formalize the withdrawal. So on…
Trump campaign strategy to deter millions of Black Americans from voting in 2016
Channel 4 News has exclusively obtained a vast cache of data used by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign on almost 200 million American voters. It reveals that 3.5 million Black Americans were categorised by Donald Trump’s campaign as ‘Deterrence’ – voters they wanted to stay home on election day. Tonight, civil rights campaigners said the evidence amounted to a new form of voter “suppression” and called on Facebook to disclose ads and targeting information that has never been made…
Trump’s ‘biggest fear’ is ‘massive’ IRS bills and potential tax fraud charges, says Michael Cohen
Yahoo News reports: Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime former personal attorney, has a theory. He believes the president is terrified of receiving a large bill from the Internal Revenue Service. “His biggest fear is … he will end up with a massive tax bill, fraud penalties, fines, and possibly even tax fraud,” Cohen said in an interview with Yahoo News on Monday, the morning after the New York Times published a report detailing how Trump, a self-described billionaire, paid zero…
Trump’s taxes show he’s a national security threat
Timothy L. O’Brien writes: Due to his indebtedness, his reliance on income from overseas and his refusal to authentically distance himself from his hodgepodge of business, Trump represents a profound national security threat – a threat that will only escalate if he’s re-elected. The tax returns also show the extent to which Trump has repeatedly betrayed the interests of many of the average Americans who elected him and remain his most loyal supporters. I have some history with Trump and…
New document reveals scope and structure of Operation Warp Speed and underscores vast military involvement
STAT reports: When President Trump unveiled Operation Warp Speed in May, he declared that it was “unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.” The initiative — to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics — lacks the scale, and the degree of secrecy, of the effort to build the atomic bomb. But Operation Warp Speed is largely an abstraction in Washington, with little known about who works there other than its top leaders, or how it…
Overheard: CDC Director Robert Redfield voices alarm over influence of Trump’s new coronavirus task force adviser
NBC News reports: The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has grown increasingly concerned that President Donald Trump, pushed by a new member of his coronavirus task force, is sharing incorrect information about the pandemic with the public. Dr. Robert Redfield, who leads the CDC, suggested in a conversation with a colleague Friday that Dr. Scott Atlas is arming Trump with misleading data about a range of issues, including questioning the efficacy of masks, whether young people…
First compelling evidence of organisms that eat viruses as a food source
Science Alert reports: Eat or be eaten: It’s an edict of Mother Nature that connects every corner of the biosphere in a sprawling web of producers, consumers, detritivores, and scavengers. Every corner but one, it seems. Just what the hell dines on viruses? Scientists may have just discovered the answer. Given the fact that the viral biomass dusting our landscape, drifting through the atmosphere, and floating in our oceans could easily add up to tens of millions of tonnes of…