The Covid policy that really mattered wasn’t a policy

The Covid policy that really mattered wasn’t a policy

Ezra Klein writes: If the C.D.C. had recommended better masks from the beginning, how many people would have worn them and for how long? If the Biden administration had flooded stores with cheap rapid tests, would people have used them? If boosters had been pushed earlier, and more loudly, would the United States no longer trail peer nations in vaccinations? Put differently: How much would getting our pandemic policies right have mattered? It’s easy to speak as if policy smoothly…

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Climate change enters the therapy room

Climate change enters the therapy room

The New York Times reports: It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl. Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children. She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth….

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How Big Oil used Facebook to push Joe Manchin to kill Build Back Better

How Big Oil used Facebook to push Joe Manchin to kill Build Back Better

Vice News reports: Last August, during the hottest summer in U.S. history, the Senate began debating the country’s most ambitious plan ever to fight the climate crisis: President Biden’s sweeping Build Back Better bill. The next day, Big Oil swung into action against it. The industry knew exactly who to target: the voters of Sen. Joe Manchin, the all-powerful Democrat who infamously refused to support Build Back Better, and this week, declared the plan “dead.” America’s top oil industry group,…

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One year later: The Texas freeze revealed a fragile energy system and inspired lasting misinformation

One year later: The Texas freeze revealed a fragile energy system and inspired lasting misinformation

Inside Climate News reports: Texas is recovering from this week’s winter storm, nearly a year after a much more severe set of storms led to a devastating failure of the electricity system and about 250 deaths. The February 2021 storms showed the fragility of the grid at a time when climate change is contributing to an increase in extreme weather. But the most enduring legacy of the 2021 blackouts may be the spread of a falsehood: the idea that the…

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Dismal Russian record in occupied eastern Ukraine serves as warning

Dismal Russian record in occupied eastern Ukraine serves as warning

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions were once the engines of the country’s economy and dominated its politics. They produced its richest man, billionaire industrialist Rinat Akhmetov, as well as former President Viktor Yanukovych, ousted by the street protests that triggered the Russian invasion in 2014. Since then, however, the two areas—now nominally independent “people’s republics” inside the larger regions of Luhansk and Donetsk—have turned into impoverished, depopulated enclaves that increasingly rely…

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More people ill at the same time than in any period since the 1918-1919 flu pandemic

More people ill at the same time than in any period since the 1918-1919 flu pandemic

The Wall Street Journal reports: The world is living through a unique moment: In the past five or six weeks, the Omicron coronavirus variant has likely gotten more people sick than any similar period since the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, according to global health expert While Omicron infections have peaked in many places, February is likely to see similar case loads as the variant continues to spread before it flames out, causing worker shortages from hospitals to factories and spurring debate…

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Why ‘trust us’ is often reason enough not to trust the government

Why ‘trust us’ is often reason enough not to trust the government

Charlie Savage writes: The dramatic national security stories recounted in two official news briefings on Thursday centered on very different subjects, but they featured the same indignant pushback to questioning reporters: just trust us, unless you are more inclined to believe America’s enemies. Pressed for evidence supporting an official narrative about how children had died during a commando raid in Syria — specifically, that an ISIS leader’s bomb, not American forces, had killed them — the White House press secretary,…

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Trump’s ‘circular firing squad’ threatens GOP midterm gains

Trump’s ‘circular firing squad’ threatens GOP midterm gains

Politico reports: Nine months before the midterm elections, nearly everything is falling the Republican Party’s way, from President Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings to rising gas prices and a seemingly never-ending pandemic. Yet as the Republican National Committee concluded its winter meeting here on Friday, it was censuring two of its own, Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), and decrying the House’s Jan. 6 select committee for what Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair, called the “persecution of ordinary…

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GOP dubs January 6 attack ‘legitimate political discourse’

GOP dubs January 6 attack ‘legitimate political discourse’

The New York Times reports: The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it. The Republican National Committee’s voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at…

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Cyberattack on News Corp, believed linked to China, targeted emails of journalists, others

Cyberattack on News Corp, believed linked to China, targeted emails of journalists, others

The Wall Street Journal reports: News Corp was the target of a hack that accessed emails and documents of journalists and other employees, an incursion the company’s cybersecurity consultant said was likely meant to gather intelligence to benefit China’s interests. The attack, discovered on Jan. 20, affected a number of publications and business units including The Wall Street Journal and its parent Dow Jones; the New York Post; the company’s U.K. news operation; and News Corp headquarters, according to an…

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New database reveals impact humans are having on evolution

New database reveals impact humans are having on evolution

Wired reports: Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates. “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages,” he wrote in On the Origin of Species, his famous 1859 treatise on natural selection. But by the 1970s, scientists were finding evidence that Darwin might be wrong—at least about the timescale. Peppered moths living in…

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The reason Putin would risk war

The reason Putin would risk war

Anne Applebaum writes: There are questions about troop numbers, questions about diplomacy. There are questions about the Ukrainian military, its weapons, and its soldiers. There are questions about Germany and France: How will they react? There are questions about America, and how it has come to be a central player in a conflict not of its making. But of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers…

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U.S. exposes what it sees as Russian effort to fabricate pretext for invasion of Ukraine

U.S. exposes what it sees as Russian effort to fabricate pretext for invasion of Ukraine

The New York Times reports: The United States has acquired intelligence about a Russian plan to fabricate a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine using a faked video that would build on recent disinformation campaigns, according to senior administration officials and others briefed on the material. The plan — which the United States hopes to spoil by making public — involves staging and filming a fabricated attack by the Ukrainian military either on Russian territory or against Russian-speaking people in…

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Biden officials mount last-minute push for electric Postal Service trucks

Biden officials mount last-minute push for electric Postal Service trucks

Bloomberg reports: Biden administration officials are pushing the U.S. Postal Service to buy more electric vehicles instead of spending billions on gas-powered models as it replaces its aging fleet. The efforts, mounted by the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, follow separate warnings by activists that the Postal Service’s plan to buy mostly conventional delivery trucks downplayed the potential climate benefits of a shift to electric, non-emitting alternatives. The Postal Service’s plan “represents a crucial…

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