Music: Ton Risco & Jacobo de Miguel — ‘Pormenor’
Countries with levels of police brutality comparable to that in the U.S. are called ‘police states’
Laurence Ralph writes: Public outcry over the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd earlier this year has ignited mass demonstrations against structural racism and police violence in the United States. The protests have reached every American state and spread to countries around the world; they arguably constitute the most broad-based civil rights movement in American history. Protests against the brutalization of communities of color by the U.S. criminal justice system have been growing for years, but the…
I couldn’t find Trump’s ‘anarchists’ in Portland
Nicholas Kristof writes: I’ve been on the front lines of the protests here, searching for the “radical-left anarchists” who President Trump says are on Portland streets each evening. I thought I’d found one: a man who for weeks leapt into the fray and has been shot four times with impact munitions yet keeps coming back. I figured he must be a crazed anarchist. But no, he turned out to be Dr. Bryan Wolf, a radiologist who wears his white doctor’s…
Federal forces agree to withdraw from Portland
The Oregonian reports: For weeks, it was unclear how Oregon leaders could defuse the increasingly violent standoff between federal officers and protesters in downtown Portland and convince Homeland Security officers to leave. Gov. Kate Brown’s administration says that proved relatively easy in the end because the Trump administration was clearly looking for a way out. Trump administration officials did not demand any concessions or pledges from Brown before they agreed officers would depart, Brown’s chief of staff Nik Blosser told…
Together, you can redeem the soul of our nation
Shortly before his death, John Lewis wrote: While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the…
U.S. economy contracted at fastest quarterly rate on record
The Washington Post reports: The U.S. economy shrank 9.5 percent from April through June, the largest quarterly decline since the government began publishing data 70 years ago, and the latest, sobering reflection of the pandemic’s economic devastation. The second quarter report on gross domestic product covers some of the economy’s worst weeks in living memory, when commercial activity ground to a halt, millions of Americans lost their jobs and the nation went into lockdown. Yet economists say the data should…
Trump’s idea of delaying the election is swiftly rejected by congressional Republicans
Reuters reports: President Donald Trump on Thursday raised the idea of delaying the Nov. 3 U.S. elections, an idea immediately rejected by both Democrats and his fellow Republicans in Congress – the sole branch of government with the authority to make such a change. Critics and even Trump’s allies dismissed the notion as unserious and simply an attempt to distract from devastating economic news. Trump’s statement on Twitter comes as the United States is enduring the greatest crises of a…
Medieval onion and garlic remedy kills antibiotic-resistant biofilms in the lab
Science Alerts reports: As deadly bacteria grow ever more resistant to modern antibiotics, some researchers have turned to ancient medical manuscripts for clues. And it looks like a medieval salve dating back 1,000 years might succeed where many modern antibiotics are starting to fail. The “ancientbiotic”, as the researchers are calling it, was found in one of the earliest known medical textbooks from medieval England, known as Bald’s Leechbook. While many of the remedies included in this tome have not…
Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘Bad Kids to the Back’
China is what Orwell feared
Ross Andersen writes: Northwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories. Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles. The institute is a basic research facility. Its computer scientists inquire into artificial intelligence’s fundamental mysteries. Their more practical innovations—iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases,…
Forging a right-left coalition may be the only way to end the War on Drugs
Conor Friedersdorf writes: Nearly 30 years ago, the PBS program Firing Line convened a debate about the War on Drugs, which has contributed more than any other criminal-justice policy to deadly street violence in Black neighborhoods and the police harassment, arrest, and mass incarceration of Black Americans. Revisiting the debate helps clarify what it will take to end that ongoing policy mistake. Congressman Charlie Rangel led one side in the 1991 clash. Born in 1930, Rangel served in the Korean…
‘Umbrella Man’ went viral. He was a white supremacist trying to spark violence, police say
The Washington Post reports: With an umbrella in his left hand and a hammer in his right, the man in black lobbed his weapon so nonchalantly into an auto parts shop’s windows that it surprised many others in Minneapolis marching nearby in a May 27 protest after George Floyd’s death. Soon after the abrupt attack, the mostly calm demonstration near a police precinct erupted into looting and arson — the first fire in riots that eventually caused $500 million in…
From the start, federal agents demanded a role in suppressing anti-racism protests
The New York Times reports: From the earliest days of the recent protests against police brutality and racism, some top federal law enforcement officials viewed the demonstrators with alarm and called for an aggressive federal response that two months later continues to escalate. A memo from the deputy director of the F.B.I., dated June 2, demanded an immediate mobilization as protests gathered after George Floyd’s death while he was in police custody a week earlier. David L. Bowdich, the F.B.I.’s…
America’s coronavirus epidemic had one epicenter but now it has many
The New York Times reports: Once again, the coronavirus is ascendant. As infections mount across the country, it is dawning on Americans that the epidemic is now unstoppable, and that no corner of the nation will be left untouched. As of Wednesday, the pathogen had infected at least 4.3 million Americans, killing more than 150,000. Many experts fear the virus could kill 200,000 or even 300,000 by year’s end. Even President Trump has donned a mask, after resisting for months,…
School closures in spring linked to drastic decrease in Covid-19 cases and deaths
STAT reports: When state officials were deciding whether to shutter their schools back in March, the evidence they had to work with was thin. They knew kids easily catch and spread influenza — and that school holidays and closures have helped slow its spread. But they weren’t sure if the same was true for Covid-19. Now, a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that closing all of a state’s schools was associated with a…
When the first farmers arrived in Europe, inequality evolved
Laura Spinney writes: Eight thousand years ago small bands of seminomadic hunter-gatherers were the only human beings roaming Europe’s lush, green forests. Archaeological digs in caves and elsewhere have turned up evidence of their Mesolithic technology: flint-tipped tools with which they fished, hunted deer and aurochs (a now extinct species of ox), and gathered wild plants. Many had dark hair and blue eyes, recent genetic studies suggest, and the few skeletons unearthed so far indicate that they were quite tall…