Vaccinated people may spread the virus, though rarely, CDC reports

Vaccinated people may spread the virus, though rarely, CDC reports

The New York Times reports: In yet another unexpected and unwelcome twist in the pandemic, fully immunized people with so-called breakthrough infections of the Delta variant may spread the virus to others just as easily as unvaccinated people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report published on Friday. The vaccines remain powerfully effective against severe illness and death, and infections in vaccinated people are thought to be comparatively rare. But the revelation follows a series of…

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Breakthrough Covid cases are on the rise among the vaccinated

Breakthrough Covid cases are on the rise among the vaccinated

NBC News reports: At least 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans have tested positive for Covid and 1,400 of those have died, according to data collected by NBC News. The 125,682 “breakthrough” cases in 38 states found by NBC News represent less than .08 percent of the 164.2 million-plus people who have been fully vaccinated since January, or about one in every 1,300. The number of cases and deaths among the vaccinated is very small compared to the number among the unvaccinated….

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Trump pressured DOJ to call election ‘corrupt,’ ex-official wrote

Trump pressured DOJ to call election ‘corrupt,’ ex-official wrote

Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump pressured top Justice Department officials to publicly call the 2020 election “illegal” and “corrupt” and “leave the rest to me,” according to handwritten notes released by a House committee on Friday. The notes, written by former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard P. Donoghue, shine additional light on the Trump’s unprecedented effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory during his waning days in office, based on false claims of fraud. Donoghue’s notes detail a Dec….

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Justice Department says IRS must give Trump tax returns to Congress

Justice Department says IRS must give Trump tax returns to Congress

The Associated Press reports: The Justice Department says the Treasury Department must provide the House Ways and Means Committee former President Donald Trump’s tax returns, apparently ending a long legal showdown over the records. During the Trump administration, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he wouldn’t turn over the tax returns because he concluded they were being sought by Democrats who control the House of Representatives for partisan reasons. The committee sued for the records under a federal law that says…

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The ‘teenage anti-imperialist’

The ‘teenage anti-imperialist’

Omar Sabbour writes: [T]he teenage anti-imperialist is not a teenager. Indeed, many politicisied adolescents are amongst the most willing to partake in risks to bring about radical change, their sense of right, justice, and their passion are often a crucial part of activist and advocacy movements. They break from the mould that often surrounds them through their engagement with issues and causes that may be beyond the narrow concerns immediately directly affecting their lives. And while the analyses of young…

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The MyPillow guy really could destroy democracy

The MyPillow guy really could destroy democracy

Anne Applebaum writes: MyPillow has long been an important advertiser on Fox News, so much so that even Trump noticed [Mike] Lindell (“That guy is on TV more than I am”), but has since widened its net. MyPillow spent tens of thousands of dollars advertising on Newsmax just in the week following the January 6 attack on the Capitol. And now Lindell is spending on more than just advertising. Last January—on the 9th, he says carefully, placing the date after…

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She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story

She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story

Karen Hao writes: The world first learned of Sophie Zhang in September 2020, when BuzzFeed News obtained and published highlights from an abridged version of her nearly 8,000-word exit memo from Facebook. Before she was fired, Zhang was officially employed as a low-level data scientist at the company. But she had become consumed by a task she deemed more important: finding and taking down fake accounts and likes that were being used to sway elections globally. Her memo revealed that…

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GOP could retake the House in 2022 just by gerrymandering four Southern states

GOP could retake the House in 2022 just by gerrymandering four Southern states

Ari Berman reports: Before Georgia voted for Joe Biden, the biggest upset in recent state politics came when Democrat Lucy McBath became the first Black person to represent Newt Gingrich’s former congressional district. Georgia’s Sixth District, home to the affluent northern suburbs of Atlanta, was long a bastion of deep-red Republicanism, represented by Gingrich for 20 years. But that changed in 2018, when college-educated white voters shifted their allegiance to the Democrats and joined with an influx of Black, Latino,…

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Behind the masks, a mystery: How often do the vaccinated spread the virus?

Behind the masks, a mystery: How often do the vaccinated spread the virus?

The New York Times reports: The recommendation that vaccinated people in some parts of the country dust off their masks was based largely on one troublesome finding, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New research showed that vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant carry tremendous amounts of the virus in the nose and throat, she said in an email responding to questions from The New York Times. The finding contradicts what…

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Something strange is happening in Britain. Covid cases are plummeting instead of soaring

Something strange is happening in Britain. Covid cases are plummeting instead of soaring

The Washington Post reports: This is a puzzler. Coronavirus cases are plummeting in Britain. They were supposed to soar. Scientists aren’t sure why they haven’t. The daily number of new infections recorded in the country fell for seven days in a row before a slight uptick Wednesday, when the country reported 27,734 cases. That’s still almost half of where the caseload was a week ago. The trajectory of the virus in Britain is something the world is watching closely and…

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Chinese officials and Taliban meet in Tianjin as U.S. exits Afghanistan

Chinese officials and Taliban meet in Tianjin as U.S. exits Afghanistan

CNN reports: China’s Foreign Minister met with senior leaders of the Taliban in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin on Wednesday in the latest sign of warming ties between Beijing and the resurgent Islamist group. During a meeting with Taliban’s co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who heads the group’s political committee, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi described the Taliban as an important military and political force in Afghanistan, and said he expected the Taliban to play an important role in…

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Cats’ genomes are surprisingly similar to humans’

Cats’ genomes are surprisingly similar to humans’

Katherine J. Wu writes: The genome of a mouse is, structurally speaking, a chaotic place. At some point in its evolutionary past, the mouse shuffled its ancestral genome like a deck of cards, futzing up the architecture that makes most other mammalian genomes look, well, mammalian. “I always consider it the greatest outlier,” Bill Murphy, a geneticist at Texas A&M University, told me. “It’s about as different from any other placental mammal genome as you can find, sort of like…

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The intellectual far right contemplates an ‘American Caesar’

The intellectual far right contemplates an ‘American Caesar’

Damon Linker writes: A former director of communications for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (where he was briefly my boss) and former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, [Michael] Anton penned the most notorious and rhetorically scalding case for supporting Trump. Published in early September 2016 in the Claremont Review of Books online, “The Flight 93 Election” portrayed Trump as a final, last-ditch opportunity for conservatives to wrest control of the country back from those (like Hillary Clinton) who…

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Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual

Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual

Margaret Sullivan writes: Back in the dark ages of 2012, two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, wrote a book called “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its dire effect on American democracy. In a related op-ed piece, these writers made a damning statement about Washington press coverage, which treats the two parties as roughly equal and everything they do as deserving of similar coverage. Ornstein and Mann didn’t use the…

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