Music: Emilio Santiago & Marcos Valle — ‘Valeu’
Young, healthy people like me are getting very, very sick from Covid-19
Mara Gay writes: The day before I got sick, I ran three miles, walked 10 more, then raced up the stairs to my fifth-floor apartment as always, slinging laundry with me as I went. The next day, April 17, I became one of the thousands of New Yorkers to fall ill with Covid-19. I haven’t felt the same since. If you live in New York City, you know what this virus can do. In just under two months, an estimated…
‘We’re the Wild West,’ Gov. Tony Evers says after Wisconsin Supreme Court blocks stay-at-home order
The Washington Post reports: On Wednesday night in the heart of downtown Platteville, Wis., just hours after the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the state’s stay-at-home order, Nick’s on 2nd was packed wall to wall, standing room only. It was sometime after 10 p.m. when “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” by the Hollies came over the sound system and a bartender took out his camera. In a Twitter broadcast, he surveyed the room of maskless patrons crammed together,…
Michigan cancels legislative session to avoid armed protesters
Bloomberg reports: Michigan closed down its capitol in Lansing on Thursday and canceled its legislative session rather than face the possibility of an armed protest and death threats against Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The gathering, meant to advocate opening the state for business despite the coronavirus pandemic, followed one April 30 that resulted in pictures of protesters clad in military-style gear and carrying long guns crowding the statehouse. They confronted police and taunted lawmakers. The shutdown was done with little…
Judge slams the brakes on William Barr’s abuse of power
Elie Honig writes: Just when it seemed that Attorney General William Barr would get away with intentionally tanking his own Justice Department’s conviction of President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a federal judge on Wednesday slammed on the brakes and now is demanding real answers. There’s a common saying that the courts are the final bulwark against tyranny. “Tyranny” may be a bit much here, but Judge Emmet Sullivan certainly seems to be taking a stand against…
Burr to step down as intel panel chairman as stock scandal deepens
Politico reports: Sen. Richard Burr will step down temporarily as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee while under investigation by the FBI for his stock trading, a political earthquake that shocked Republican senators on Thursday and upended the Senate’s daily business. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Burr informed him he would step aside at the end of the day on Friday, news that followed the FBI serving him a search warrant and seizing his cell phone Wednesday evening…
EPA opts against limits on toxic water contaminant tied to fetal damage
The New York Times reports: The Trump administration will not impose any limits on perchlorate, a toxic chemical compound that contaminates water and has been linked to fetal and infant brain damage, according to two Environmental Protection Agency staff members familiar with the decision. The decision by Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the E.P.A., appears to defy a court order that required the agency to establish a safe drinking-water standard for the chemical by the end of June. The policy,…
‘Blue state bailouts’? Some states like New York send billions more to federal government than they get back
Eight states send far more to the federal government through taxes than they see in annual federal spending. Noam Galai/Getty Images By Laura Schultz, SUNY Empire State College When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, expressed reluctance to fund coronavirus relief for hard-hit cities and states, suggesting they would be “blue state bailouts,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had a quick retort. “We put into that pot $116 billion more than we take out,” Cuomo said. “Kentucky takes…
Music: Marcos Valle & Stacey Kent — ‘Amando Demais’
The value of leaders who can lead
The Atlantic reports: In March, when the severity of the coronavirus pandemic was becoming clear but many of the world’s leading nations had yet to formulate a response to it, one country was springing into action. Within 10 days of identifying its first case, it went into lockdown: Its borders were sealed, schools and restaurants were closed, and face masks were made mandatory in public places, with some of the country’s most visible public figures, including its president and prime…
CDC is ‘almost certainly underestimating’ Covid-19 death toll but Trump wants numbers even lower
The Daily Beast reports: President Donald Trump and members of his coronavirus task force are pushing officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change how the agency works with states to count coronavirus-related deaths. And they’re pushing for revisions that could lead to far fewer deaths being counted than originally reported, according to five administration officials working on the government’s response to the pandemic. Though he has previously publicly attested to the accuracy of the COVID-19 death…
Former vaccine chief Rick Bright warns of ‘darkest winter in modern history’ without ramped up coronavirus response
CNN reports: Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted director of a key federal office charged with developing medical countermeasures, will testify before Congress on Thursday that the Trump administration was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic and warn that the the US will face “unprecedented illness and fatalities” without additional preparations. “Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to develop a national coordinated response, based in science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged, causing unprecedented…
What makes Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden’s indispensable partner
Jamelle Bouie writes: Joe Biden built his political career as the New Deal order came to an end, one of a generation of Democrats who sought to reconcile the Democratic Party to the Reagan revolution by placing distance between the party and the racial and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. His was a politics attuned to the worries and fears of suburban white voters, from busing and crime to guns and drugs. Now, of course, those politics are…
Sweden’s coronavirus strategy isn’t what it seems
Ishaan Tharoor writes: As societies battened down the hatches and imposed quarantines, one European country appeared to take a different approach. In Sweden, there have been no invasive lockdowns to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. Restaurants and even nightclubs are operating, though under guidelines to enforce social distancing. Schools for students under the age of 16 remain open. Large gatherings are restricted to a maximum of 50 people, a far cry from the enforced confinement imposed on entire cities…
Scientist who fought Ebola and HIV reflects on facing death from Covid-19
Science reports: Virologist Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, fell ill with COVID-19 in mid-March. He spent a week in a hospital and has been recovering at his home in London since. Climbing a flight of stairs still leaves him breathless. Piot, who grew up in Belgium, was one of the discoverers of the Ebola virus in 1976 and spent his career fighting infectious diseases. He headed the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS…
FBI accidentally reveals name of Saudi official suspected of directing support for 9/11 hijackers
Yahoo News reports: The FBI inadvertently revealed one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive secrets about the Sept. 11 terror attacks: the identity of a mysterious Saudi Embassy official in Washington who agents suspected had directed crucial support to two of the al-Qaida hijackers. The disclosure came in a new declaration filed in federal court by a senior FBI official in response to a lawsuit brought by families of 9/11 victims that accuses the Saudi government of complicity in the…