I went to a party with 14 other vaccinated people; 11 of us got Covid

I went to a party with 14 other vaccinated people; 11 of us got Covid

Allan Massie writes: I was sitting on an examination table at an urgent care clinic in Timonium, giving my history to a physician’s assistant. An hour later, she would call me to confirm that I was positive for COVID-19. Given the way that I felt, it was what I expected. But it wasn’t supposed to happen: I’ve been fully vaccinated for months. Five days earlier, I had gone to a house party in Montgomery County. There were 15 adults there,…

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What Mike Fanone can’t forget

What Mike Fanone can’t forget

Molly Ball reports: It wasn’t a cop bar; that was the point. They weren’t there to meet other cops. They were there to meet girls. The three police officers took seats at the wine bar in D.C.’s trendy Navy Yard neighborhood—exposed concrete walls, leather banquettes, $13 tuna tartare—and despite its being a wine bar, despite the Wednesday night half-price-wine special, they ordered beers. May 12, 2021, was a balmy night, and dozens of newly vaccinated young urbanites mingled out on…

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Facebook is an ad tech company. That’s how we should regulate it

Facebook is an ad tech company. That’s how we should regulate it

Nathalie Maréchal writes: Another day, another Facebook accountability scandal. On Wednesday, Facebook shut down the accounts of NYU researchers Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy on the grounds that their Ad Observer tool violated Facebook users’ privacy. At first blush, this seems absurd: the users in question voluntarily installed the Ad Observer plug-in in their browser for the express purpose of sharing targeting info related to the political ads they see on Facebook with the researchers. Dig a little deeper, and…

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Trump is planning a much more respectable coup next time

Trump is planning a much more respectable coup next time

Richard L. Hasen writes: In recent weeks, we’ve gotten an even greater glimpse into Donald Trump’s efforts to discredit and overturn the results of the 2020 election. From the clownish ongoing audit in Arizona to the revelation of Jeffrey Clark’s insane and rejected December plan for the Department of Justice to cajole legislatures in states Biden won into overturning those results to the attorneys being sanctioned for their frivolous Trump election lawsuits, the 2020 election subversion attempt is being shown…

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In string of wins, ‘Biden Democrats’ see a reality check for the left

In string of wins, ‘Biden Democrats’ see a reality check for the left

The New York Times reports: Nina Turner, the hard-punching Bernie Sanders ally who lost a special election for Congress in Ohio this week, had unique political flaws from the start. A far-left former state legislator, Ms. Turner declined to endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald J. Trump in 2016. Last year, she described voting for President Biden as a grossly unpalatable option. There were obvious reasons Democratic voters might view her with distrust. Yet Ms. Turner’s unexpectedly wide defeat on Tuesday…

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‘Dark times’: Houston’s fourth Covid wave to be the largest yet, medical leaders predict

‘Dark times’: Houston’s fourth Covid wave to be the largest yet, medical leaders predict

Houston Chronicle reports: Fueled by the delta variant, a surge in Houston COVID-19 hospitalizations is growing as fast as at any time during the pandemic so far, and is projected to pass previous records by mid-August — even though roughly half of all eligible Houstonians are fully vaccinated. “We’re heading into dark times,” said Texas Medical Center CEO Bill McKeon. Already, he said, “our ICUs are filled with unvaccinated people.” On Tuesday, Texas Medical Center hospitals listed 1,372 people in…

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Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid. None of them helped

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid. None of them helped

Will Douglas Heaven writes: When covid-19 struck Europe in March 2020, hospitals were plunged into a health crisis that was still badly understood. “Doctors really didn’t have a clue how to manage these patients,” says Laure Wynants, an epidemiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who studies predictive tools. But there was data coming out of China, which had a four-month head start in the race to beat the pandemic. If machine-learning algorithms could be trained on that data to…

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Tucker Carlson has seen the future, and it is fascist

Tucker Carlson has seen the future, and it is fascist

Jonathan Chait writes: In 1919, the progressive journalist Lincoln Steffens visited the nascent Soviet Union and declared, “I have seen the future and it works.” Tucker Carlson’s weeklong visit to Budapest, where he is using his Fox News show as an infomercial for Viktor Orban’s illiberal regime, is being conducted in much the same spirit. “If you care about Western civilization and democracy and families, and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by the leaders of our…

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A Trump bombshell quietly dropped last week, but it should shock us all

A Trump bombshell quietly dropped last week, but it should shock us all

Robert Reich writes: We’ve become so inured to Donald Trump’s proto-fascism that we barely blink an eye when we learn that he tried to manipulate the 2020 election. Yet the most recent revelation should frighten every American to their core. On Friday, the House oversight committee released notes of a 27 December telephone call from Trump to then acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, in which Trump told Rosen: “Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me…

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Mexico sues U.S. gun makers, eyes $10 billion in damages

Mexico sues U.S. gun makers, eyes $10 billion in damages

Reuters reports: Mexico sued several gun makers in a U.S. federal court on Wednesday, accusing them of reckless business practices that supply what it called a “torrent” of illegal arms to violent Mexican drug cartels, leading to thousands of deaths. The lawsuit alleges that units of Smith & Wesson, Barrett Firearms, Colt’s Manufacturing Company, Glock Inc, Sturm, Ruger & Co and others knew their business practices had encouraged illegal arms trafficking into Mexico. The lawsuit cites weapons that had entered…

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Facebook bans academics who researched ad transparency and misinformation on Facebook

Facebook bans academics who researched ad transparency and misinformation on Facebook

The Verge reports: Facebook has banned the personal accounts of academics who researched ad transparency and the spread of misinformation on the social network. Facebook says the group violated its term of service by scraping user data without permission. But the academics say they are being silenced for exposing problems on Facebook’s platform. The researchers were part of NYU Ad Observatory, a project created to examine the origin and spread of political ads on Facebook. As the group explained in…

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Andrew and Chris Cuomo’s media love-ins come back to bite them

Andrew and Chris Cuomo’s media love-ins come back to bite them

Jon Allsop writes: Live by the press conference, die by the press conference. Last year, as the pandemic ravaged his state, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, was widely lauded for the way he communicated. Pundits hailed him as authoritative, reassuring, even sexy; national networks carried his press conferences live, and they won a special Emmy award for Cuomo’s “masterful use of television to inform and calm people.” Then, early this year, Cuomo experienced a vicious narrative shift—he was…

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In the infrastructure bill, a recognition: Climate change is a crisis

In the infrastructure bill, a recognition: Climate change is a crisis

The New York Times reports: The bipartisan infrastructure deal struck this week provides new money for climate resilience unmatched in United States history: Tens of billions of dollars to protect against floods, reduce damage from wildfires, develop new sources of drinking water in areas plagued by drought, and even relocate entire communities away from vulnerable places. But the bill is remarkable for another reason. For the first time, both parties have acknowledged — by their actions, if not their words…

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‘Massive melting event’ strikes Greenland after record heat wave

‘Massive melting event’ strikes Greenland after record heat wave

Live Science reports: Greenland’s enormous ice sheet has been struck by a “massive melting event,” with enough ice vanishing in a single day last week to cover the whole of Florida in two inches (5 centimeters) of water, Danish researchers have found. Since July 27, roughly 9.37 billion tons (8.5 billion metric tons) of ice has been lost per day from the surface of the enormous ice sheet — twice its normal average rate of loss during summer, Polar Portal,…

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