Music: Marcos Valle & Stacey Kent — ‘Batucada’
Long-haulers are redefining Covid-19
Ed Yong writes: Lauren Nichols has been sick with COVID-19 since March 10, shortly before Tom Hanks announced his diagnosis and the NBA temporarily canceled its season. She has lived through one month of hand tremors, three of fever, and four of night sweats. When we spoke on day 150, she was on her fifth month of gastrointestinal problems and severe morning nausea. She still has extreme fatigue, bulging veins, excessive bruising, an erratic heartbeat, short-term memory loss, gynecological problems,…
Trump shows his contempt for his most fervent supporters
Silas House writes: When I worked as a rural mail carrier in the hills of southeastern Kentucky in the early 2000s, my route snaked along the most mountainous parts of the county. I forded creeks and climbed steep dirt roads. Sometimes I’d have to drive for five miles to get to the next house. I delivered everything, including cages full of baby chickens and new sets of tires. I saw the joy that a parcel of books, clothing, or music…
Mnuchin paved way for U.S. Postal Service shake-up
The New York Times reports: In early February, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin invited two Republican members of the Postal Service’s board of governors to his office to update him on a matter in which he had taken a particular interest — the search for a new postmaster general. Mr. Mnuchin had made clear before the meeting that he wanted the governors to find someone who would push through the kind of cost-cutting and price increases that President Trump had publicly…
William Barr told Murdoch to ‘muzzle’ Fox News Trump critic, Judge Andrew Napolitano, new book says
The Guardian reports: The attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network. Barr’s meeting with Murdoch, at the media mogul’s New York home in October 2019, was widely reported at the time, with speculation surrounding its subject. According to Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, by CNN media reporter Brian…
Outrageous accusations made by We Build the Wall’s founder
The Daily Beast reports: A south Texas butterfly conservationist has a message for Steve Bannon and three others arrested on Thursday for fraud and money laundering in what the feds describe as a border wall fundraising scheme. “I just wish them well in their cavity searches,” says Marianna Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center. Treviño-Wright was targeted by We Build the Wall late last year, when she sought to stop the construction of a barrier beside the center’s…
U.S. cities may face 30 times more exposure to extreme heat by 2100 compared to the early 2000s, study finds
CNN reports: As triple-digit heat tests the limits of California’s electrical grid to keep millions of people cool, it is clear the effects of human-caused global warming are already here. But the extreme heat baking the Western US is a mere preview of what could be coming: A new study finds that in the future, the heat risk facing the country’s biggest cities could be far greater than previously thought. Without cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, major US cities could…
California prisons overwhelmed by Covid outbreaks and approaching fires
The Guardian reports: California’s raging wildfires have created a crisis at multiple state prisons, where there are reports of heavy smoke and ash making it hard to breathe, unanswered pleas for evacuation, and concerns that the fire response could lead to further Covid-19 spread. A massive fire in the Vacaville area, north of San Francisco, has rapidly spread within miles of two state prisons this week, including one that imprisons terminally ill people in hospice care and the elderly and…
Music: Chet Baker & Paul Bley — ‘If I Should Lose You’
The kindness is the point
Zack Beauchamp writes: The defining moment of the 2020 Democratic National Convention was neither a slickly produced policy video nor a speech from a former president. Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s address, arguably the best oration of his long career, wasn’t it either. Instead, it was a testimonial from a 13-year-old boy from New Hampshire named Brayden Harrington. Harrington, like Biden, has a stutter. The two met at a CNN town hall in Concord this February, where Harrington told the candidate…
Senate Republicans provide hard evidence that shreds Trump’s persistent lies about a Russia ‘hoax’
David Ignatius writes: As Democrats accelerate their drive to defeat President Trump in November, they have a potent new weapon in a report by a Republican-led Senate committee that chronicles the “grave counterintelligence threat” posed by the extensive contacts between Trump’s former campaign chairman and a Russian intelligence operative. The final volume of the report by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation arrives late in the game. Still, it offers the detailed accounting of how Russian spies worked with the…
How Alexei Navalny revolutionized opposition politics in Russia, before his apparent poisoning
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (L) poses for a photo at a Moscow rally in support of political prisoners on September 29, 2019. Dmitri Chirciu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images By Regina Smyth, Indiana University The harrowing videos of Alexei Navalny, a blogger who has captured popular frustration in Russia, screaming in agony on Aug. 20, 2020 before being removed unconscious from a plane to a waiting ambulance, demonstrate the Kremlin’s increasing reliance on coercion to control dissent. This attack is…
Facebook plans how to respond if Trump tries to cast doubt on election results
The New York Times reports: Facebook spent years preparing to ward off any tampering on its site ahead of November’s presidential election. Now the social network is getting ready in case President Trump interferes once the vote is over. Employees at the Silicon Valley company are laying out contingency plans and walking through postelection scenarios that include attempts by Mr. Trump or his campaign to use the platform to delegitimize the results, people with knowledge of Facebook’s plans said. Facebook…
The end of Steve Bannon. And Trump too?
Joshua Green writes: Steve Bannon’s arrest on charges that he defrauded donors to a right-wing immigration group for $1 million marks the end of a political era—the era when a Trumpian admixture of economic populism and nativist immigration policy looked as if it could, as Bannon once put it to me, deliver the Republican Party “a hammerlock on the Electoral College.” At the time he made this assessment, in the days after Trump’s 2016 victory, it seemed entirely plausible that…
Voter suppression: Trump pledges to send ‘sheriffs’ and ‘law enforcement’ to polling places on Election Day
CNN reports: President Donald Trump on Thursday said he would send law enforcement officials to polling locations to guard against voter fraud in November’s election, although it’s not clear he has the authority to do so. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have, hopefully, US attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals (sic),” Trump said during an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity. Trump’s comments come…
Humans aren’t inherently selfish – we’re actually hardwired to work together
Franzi/Shutterstock By Steve Taylor, Leeds Beckett University There has long been a general assumption that human beings are essentially selfish. We’re apparently ruthless, with strong impulses to compete against each other for resources and to accumulate power and possessions. If we are kind to one another, it’s usually because we have ulterior motives. If we are good, it’s only because we have managed to control and transcend our innate selfishness and brutality. This bleak view of human nature is closely…