Music: Chris Gall & Bernhard Schimpelsberger — ‘Myriad’
Almost a third of black Americans know someone who died of Covid-19
The Washington Post reports: Nearly 1 in 3 black Americans know someone personally who has died of covid-19, far exceeding their white counterparts, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll that underscores the coronavirus pandemic’s profoundly disparate impact. The nationwide survey finds that 31 percent of black adults say they know someone firsthand who has been killed by the virus, compared with 17 percent of adults who are Hispanic and 9 percent who are white. Adding in those who know someone…
How the coronavirus escapes an evolutionary trade-off that helps keep other pathogens in check
An artistic rendering of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19 illness. Getty Images / s-cphoto By Athena Aktipis, Arizona State University and Joe Alcock, University of New Mexico Viruses walk a fine line between severity and transmissibility. If they are too virulent, they kill or incapacitate their hosts; this limits their ability to infect new hosts. Conversely, viruses that cause little harm may not be generating enough copies of themselves to be infectious. But SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes…
Coronavirus spike rattles Senate Republicans
Politico reports: As coronavirus cases spike across the country, President Donald Trump and his top officials say everything is mostly under control. But Senate Republicans are pressing them to show a little urgency. The latest outbreaks are also reshaping the GOP’s political and legislative strategy, with Republicans planning to focus more on health care in the next coronavirus relief bill. And they’re flashing rare frustration at the Trump administration for its decision to wind down federally supported testing sites. “Frankly…
Trump still has no second term message beyond his own grievances
In an editorial, the Trump-friendly Wall Street Journal says: Trump’s base of 35% or so will never leave, but the swing voters who stood by him for three and a half years have fallen away in the last two months. This includes suburban women, independents, and seniors who took a risk on him in 2016 as an outsider who would shake things up. Now millions of Americans are close to deciding that four more years are more risk than they…
‘State-sanctioned violence’: U.S. police fail to meet basic human rights standards
The Guardian reports: Police in America’s biggest cities are failing to meet even the most basic international human rights standards governing the use of lethal force, a new study from the University of Chicago has found. Researchers in the university’s law school put the lethal use-of-force policies of police in the 20 largest US cities under the microscope. They found not a single police department was operating under guidelines that are compliant with the minimum standards laid out under international…
Racist violence in Wilmington’s past echoes in police officer recordings today
Crystal R. Sanders writes: In Wilmington, N.C., three city police officers were fired Wednesday after being caught on camera making racist and disparaging comments about a fellow black officer, a black magistrate and a black arrestee. As the officers discussed the nationwide protests sparked after George Floyd’s killing, one remarked that he believed a civil war was on the horizon. He went on to admit that he planned to buy a new assault weapon because “we are just going to…
The secretive government agency planting ‘cyanide bombs’ across America
The Guardian reports: The call came over Tony Manu’s police radio one March day in 2017: some sort of pipe had exploded in the hills outside Pocatello, Idaho and the son of a well-known local doctor was hurt, or worse. Manu, a long-time detective with the county sheriff’s office, was shocked. A pipe bomb in Pocatello? “We were like, ‘Holy shit,’” says Manu. He hit the gas and screeched up winding mountain roads outside of town. “I thought maybe [the…
Music: Esbjörn Svensson Trio — ‘Eighty-Eight Days in My Veins’
A devastating new stage of the pandemic
The Atlantic reports: For the past few weeks in the United States, the awful logic of the coronavirus seemed to have lifted. Stores and restaurants reopened. Protesters flocked to the streets. Some people resumed going about their daily lives, and while many wore face masks, many others did not. Yet cases continued to ebb. Even though the U.S. had adopted neither the stringent lockdowns nor the trace-and-isolate strategies seen in other countries, its number of confirmed COVID-19 cases settled into…
How conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic
Christopher Ingraham writes: Coronavirus infections have surged in a number of states, setting the United States on a markedly different pandemic trajectory than other wealthy nations. There are many reasons our response to the pandemic tied to nearly 120,000 U.S. deaths has faltered, experts say, including the lack of a cohesive federal policy, missteps on testing and tracing, and a national culture emphasizing individualism. In recent weeks, three studies have focused on conservative media’s role in fostering confusion about the…
Trump says the coronavirus is ‘going away.’ CDC says cases in U.S. may be 10 times higher than reported
NBC News reports: President Donald Trump keeps spinning a tale about COVID-19 that is at odds with his own administration’s disease experts and data compiled by his own coronavirus task force, which was obtained exclusively by NBC News. In Trump’s telling, the deadly pandemic isn’t really a serious threat to the public and rising infection rates are simply due to increased testing. “It’s going away,” he said Tuesday at an event in Phoenix. But on the same day, the coronavirus…
Quarantine bubbles – when done right – limit coronavirus risk and help fight loneliness
Quaranteams offer a way to limit the risk of infection while also maintaining social contacts and mental health. Oqvector / iStock Getty Images Plus via Getty Images By Melissa Hawkins, American University After three months of lockdowns, many people in the U.S. and around the world are turning to quarantine bubbles, pandemic pods or quaranteams in an effort to balance the risks of the pandemic with the emotional and social needs of life. I am an epidemiologist and a mother…
Ad agency counting BMW, PayPal and Pepsi as clients joins Facebook boycott
CNBC reports: Advertising agency Goodby Silverstein, owned by the Omnicom Group, has announced that it intends to join the ”#StopHateForProfit” campaign and pull advertising from Facebook next month. The agency’s clients include the likes of BMW, HP, PayPal, Pepsi, Doritos, and Adobe. Last week, a group of six organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Sleeping Giants and Color of Change, called on Facebook advertisers to halt their spending on the social media…
The dirty secret behind Ben Shapiro’s extraordinary success on Facebook
Popular Information reports: The success of The Daily Wire, the website run by right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, on Facebook is mind-boggling. The site has a small staff and primarily aggregates content from Twitter and other news outlets. Typically, its articles are very short, usually less than 500 words, and contain no original reporting. And yet, last month, The Daily Wire was the seventh-ranked publisher on Facebook, according to the analytics service NewsWhip. Articles published in The Daily Wire attracted 60,616,745…
Policing is doing what it’s meant to do — and that’s the problem
Todd May and George Yancy write: On June 6, one of us attended a memorial vigil for George Floyd. The opening speaker first thanked the local Police Department for keeping the vigil safe and then went on to distinguish between the majority of police officers who do their job helping and protecting people and the few who are racist and violent. His remarks echoed those made by Barack Obama on May 29, in his public statement on the killing of…