Music: Marcos Valle — ‘Jet Samba’
House accelerates oversight of Postal Service as uproar grows, demanding top officials testify at ‘urgent’ hearing
The Washington Post reports: The House Oversight Committee will hold an emergency hearing on mail delays and concerns about potential White House interference in the U.S. Postal Service, inviting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and Postal Service board of governors Chairman Robert M. Duncan to testify Aug. 24, top Democrats announced on Sunday. Democrats have alleged that DeJoy, a former Republican National Convention finance chairman, is taking steps that are causing dysfunction in the mail system and could wreak havoc in…
The Postal Service scandal doesn’t belong only to Donald Trump. Mitch McConnell played a big role
Mark Sumner writes: Once upon a time, most Americans would have been hard-pressed to name the postmaster general. That fabled time was any time before May of this year, when Donald Trump replaced Postmaster General Megan Brennan with Louis DeJoy. And yes, I had to look up Megan Brennan. What position of power did Brennan occupy before taking over the Postal Service under Barack Obama? None. Brennan started as a mail carrier at the Postal Service in 1986, delivering letters…
FDA clears saliva test for Covid-19, opening door to wider testing
STAT reports: The Food and Drug Administration on Saturday authorized emergency use of a new and inexpensive saliva test for Covid-19 that could greatly expand testing capacity. The new test, which is called SalivaDirect and was developed by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health, allows saliva samples to be collected in any sterile container. It is a much less invasive process than the nasal swabs currently used to test for the virus that causes Covid-19, but one that…
Long after the fire of a Covid-19 infection, mental and neurological effects can still smolder
STAT reports: Early on, patients with both mild and severe Covid-19 say they can’t breathe. Now, after recovering from the infection, some of them say they can’t think. Even people who were never sick enough to go to a hospital, much less lie in an ICU bed with a ventilator, report feeling something as ill-defined as “Covid fog” or as frightening as numbed limbs. They’re unable to carry on with their lives, exhausted by crossing the street, fumbling for words,…
Oil companies wonder if it makes economic sense to continue oil exploration
Bloomberg reports: A few dots near the bottom corner of the world map in the southern Atlantic, the Falkland Islands were once at the forefront of a new era for the oil industry as companies scoured the planet for resources. Yet a decade after the discovery of as much as 1.7 billion barrels of crude in surrounding waters, the British overseas territory known for sheep rearing and tension with Argentina looks as remote as ever. Rather than the next frontier,…
Sanders defends Harris as vice presidential pick
Politico reports: Sen. Bernie Sanders defended Sen. Kamala Harris on Sunday, saying that despite Democratic Party infighting over policy proposals, a majority of progressives understand the importance of defeating President Donald Trump come November. Sanders spoke highly of Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick, noting that she’s “incredibly smart [and] incredibly tough.” “I think she’s an asset for the Biden campaign, and I think she’s going to do great on the campaign trail,” the Vermont independent said of the California senator…
Facebook algorithm found to ‘actively promote’ Holocaust denial
The Guardian reports: Facebook’s algorithm “actively promotes” Holocaust denial content according to an analysis that will increase pressure on the social media giant to remove antisemitic content relating to the Nazi genocide. An investigation by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK-based counter-extremist organisation, found that typing “holocaust” in the Facebook search function brought up suggestions for denial pages, which in turn recommended links to publishers which sell revisionist and denial literature, as well as pages dedicated to the…
Music: Marcos Valle & Patrícia Alví — ‘Wanda Vidal’
American democracy cannot survive four more years of Trump
Ronald Brownstein writes: President Donald Trump’s open admission yesterday that he’s sabotaging the Postal Service to improve his election prospects crystallizes a much larger dynamic: He’s waging an unprecedented campaign to weaponize virtually every component of the federal government to partisan advantage. Trump is systematically enlisting agencies, including the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security, that traditionally have been considered at least somewhat insulated from political machinations to reward his allies and punish those…
An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it
Lyz Lenz writes: On Monday, Iowa was leveled by what amounted to a level-two hurricane. But you wouldn’t know that from reading, listening to or watching the news. While the storm did garner some coverage, mostly via wire stories, its impact remains underreported days later. The dispatches, focused on crop damage and electrical outages, have been shouted down by the coverage of the veepstakes and the fate of college football. Conservatives’ consternation over the new Cardi B single has gotten…
Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service deserve sustained, red-alert coverage from the media
Margaret Sullivan writes: Can something as dull-sounding as the workings of the Post Office compete with former Trump attorney’s new tell-all book, whose foreword includes lines like: “From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise — I was an active and eager participant.” Can it break into…
UPS, FedEx warn they cannot carry ballots like U.S. Postal Service
Reuters reports: United Parcel Service and FedEx on Friday shot down social media calls that they step in to deliver mail-in ballots from the U.S. Postal Service, which is warning states of potentially “significant” delays. “State ballots must be postmarked to be considered valid and only the USPS has lawful postmarking status. Therefore UPS, FedEx and other private parties cannot technically be involved in shipping ballots,” UPS told Reuters in a statement. “FedEx does accept individual ballots, and we advise…
Israel-UAE deal could open up U.S. weapons sales to Gulf kingdom, experts say
Reuters reports: Normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates could pave the way for more U.S. weapons sales to the Gulf Arab country, according to experts. Israel and the UAE announced on Thursday that they will normalize diplomatic ties and forge a broad new relationship under an accord that U.S. President Donald Trump helped broker. The agreement makes the UAE only the third Arab state after Egypt and Jordan to make such a deal with Israel, which…
Mitochondria may hold keys to anxiety and mental health
Elizabeth Landau writes: Carmen Sandi recalls the skepticism she faced at first. A behavioral neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, she had followed a hunch that something going on inside critical neural circuits could explain anxious behavior, something beyond brain cells and the synaptic connections between them. The experiments she began in 2013 showed that neurons involved in anxiety-related behaviors showed abnormalities: Their mitochondria, the organelles often described as cellular power plants, didn’t work well —…
On the origin of an interstellar species
Caleb Scharf writes: Once upon a time there was a molecule. That molecule, when it reacted with other molecules, set in motion a story that would result in the universe making another molecule almost exactly like that first one. Then that new molecule, when it reacted with other molecules, set in motion a story that would result in another molecule almost exactly like it. And all across the galaxy there were molecules setting stories in motion. A fundamental property of…