Appeals court ruling suggests little legal traction for Trump’s anti-Twitter campaign

Appeals court ruling suggests little legal traction for Trump’s anti-Twitter campaign

Politico reports: A ruling that emerged from a powerful federal appeals court in Washington on Wednesday morning is strong evidence that the courts are unlikely to be receptive to President Donald Trump’s claims that he and his political supporters are being silenced by social media platforms like Twitter. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit resoundingly rejected a lawsuit the conservative legal organization Freedom Watch and right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer filed in 2018 against four major technology companies:…

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The Central Park bird watcher, that incident and his feelings on the woman’s fate

The Central Park bird watcher, that incident and his feelings on the woman’s fate

The New York Times reports: His binoculars around his neck, Christian Cooper, an avid birder, was back in his happy place on Wednesday: Central Park during migration season. He was trying to focus on the olive-sided flycatchers and red-bellied woodpeckers — not on what had happened there two days earlier. That was when Mr. Cooper, who is black, asked a white woman to put her dog on a leash. When she did not, he began filming. In response, the woman…

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Trump sees a ‘rigged election’ ahead, while Democrats see a constitutional crisis in the making

Trump sees a ‘rigged election’ ahead, while Democrats see a constitutional crisis in the making

Politico reports: First he lit into Michigan and Nevada, threatening to withhold federal funding because of his assertion that both states were preparing to commit voter fraud through mail-in ballot applications. Then President Donald Trump followed up Sunday with two more broadly-worded warnings that November would be “the greatest Rigged Election in history.” “The Democrats are trying to Rig the 2020 Election, plain and simple!” the president claimed. Trump’s increasingly amped-up rhetoric surrounding the integrity of the November election is…

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After the pandemic: No one knows what’s going to happen

After the pandemic: No one knows what’s going to happen

Mark Lilla writes: The best prophet, Thomas Hobbes once wrote, is the best guesser. That would seem to be the last word on our capacity to predict the future: We can’t. But it is a truth humans have never been able to accept. People facing immediate danger want to hear an authoritative voice they can draw assurance from; they want to be told what will occur, how they should prepare, and that all will be well. We are not well…

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New research rewrites history of when Covid-19 arrived in U.S. — pointing to missed chances to stop it

New research rewrites history of when Covid-19 arrived in U.S. — pointing to missed chances to stop it

Helen Branswell writes: New research has poured cold water on the theory that the Covid-19 outbreak in Washington state — the country’s first — was triggered by the very first confirmed case of the infection in the country. Instead, it suggests the person who ignited the first chain of sustained transmission in the United States probably returned to the country in mid-February, a month later. The work adds to evidence that the United States missed opportunities to stop the SARS-CoV-2…

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American cities are built for cars, but the coronavirus could change that

American cities are built for cars, but the coronavirus could change that

Doug Gordon writes: As the Covid-19 crisis wears on, a surprising tool has emerged in the effort to slow transmission: city streets. The car has long been king in America’s cities, with spacious roadways edged by narrow sidewalks. But with many sidewalks barely large enough for the six feet required for social distancing purposes, urban residents now find themselves struggling to comply with regulations during even a brief grocery trip. Some have started walking in largely traffic-free streets to get…

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More than a fifth of people in England believe Covid-19 is a hoax

More than a fifth of people in England believe Covid-19 is a hoax

The Independent reports: More than a fifth of people believe that the coronavirus crisis is a hoax, new research suggests. The study, conducted by the University of Oxford, saw 2,500 English adults take part in the Oxford Coronavirus Explanations, Attitudes, and Narratives Survey between 4-11 May 2020. The team of clinical psychologists state that the data from the survey indicates a large number of adults in England do not agree with the scientific and governmental consensus on the Covid-19 pandemic….

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Facebook saw evidence it promotes divisiveness and extremism but Zuckerberg wasn’t interested

Facebook saw evidence it promotes divisiveness and extremism but Zuckerberg wasn’t interested

Business Insider reports: Facebook had evidence suggesting that the company’s algorithms encourage polarization and “exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” but top executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg killed or weakened proposed solutions, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The effort to better understand Facebook’s impact on user behavior started in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and its internal researchers determined that, contrary to the company’s mission of connecting the world, its products were having the opposite effect, according…

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The mercenaries who have thrived off Libya’s chaos

The mercenaries who have thrived off Libya’s chaos

The New York Times reports: Two former British marines piloted their boats, a pair of military-grade inflatables, across the Mediterranean from Malta. Six helicopters were flown in from Botswana using falsified papers. The rest of the team — soldiers of fortune from South Africa, Britain, Australia and the United States — arrived from a staging area in Jordan. To anyone who asked, the mercenaries who slipped into the war-pocked port of Benghazi, Libya, last summer said they had come to…

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What a week’s disasters tell us about the climate crisis and the pandemic

What a week’s disasters tell us about the climate crisis and the pandemic

The New York Times reports: The hits came this week in rapid succession: A cyclone slammed into the Indian megacity of Kolkata, pounding rains breached two dams in the Midwestern United States, and on Thursday came warning that the Atlantic hurricane season could be severe. It all served as a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 325,000 people so far, is colliding with another global menace: a fast-heating planet that acutely threatens millions of people, especially the world’s…

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A vision of our post-lockdown future

A vision of our post-lockdown future

Barclay Bram writes: Xu Jiao was anxious to get back in the gym. Living in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, she had gone through two months of lockdown. The pandemic hadn’t been particularly bad in the city. To date there have been 144 confirmed cases and three deaths, according to official statistics. Still, as with much of China, the lockdown had been severe. Almost everything had been closed and Xu Jiao, in her mid-30s, had to show a…

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Covid-19’s deadly rampage through a South African hospital

Covid-19’s deadly rampage through a South African hospital

Science reports: On 9 March, a patient who had recently traveled to Europe and had symptoms of COVID-19 visited the emergency department of St Augustine’s, a private hospital in Durban, South Africa. Eight weeks later, 39 patients and 80 staff linked to the hospital had been infected, and 15 patients had died—fully half the death toll in KwaZulu-Natal province at that time. Now, scientists at the University of KwaZulu-Natal have published a detailed reconstruction of how the virus spread from…

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Why don’t Trump’s supporters hold him to their own standard of masculinity?

Why don’t Trump’s supporters hold him to their own standard of masculinity?

Tom Nichols writes: Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. The president’s inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold…

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As Trump removes federal watchdogs, some loyalists replacing them have ‘preposterous’ conflicts

As Trump removes federal watchdogs, some loyalists replacing them have ‘preposterous’ conflicts

The Washington Post reports: The political appointee President Trump installed last week to investigate waste, fraud and abuse at the Transportation Department is the same official in charge of one of the agency’s key divisions. That means Howard “Skip” Elliott is now running an office charged with investigating his own actions. Elliott serves simultaneously as the Transportation Department’s inspector general and head of the department’s pipeline and hazardous materials agency, whose mission includes enforcement of safety regulations on nearly 1…

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