Music: Bokanté and Metropole Orkest — ‘Fanm’
American democracy isn’t dead yet, but it’s getting there
Susan B. Glasser writes: When Joe Biden was a Presidential candidate, he carried around a wonkish book of international comparative politics by two Harvard professors, “How Democracies Die,” from 2018, to explain the urgency of his campaign against Donald Trump. He touted the book in an interview with my colleague Evan Osnos, marked up passages with notes and observations, and even, one of the book’s authors told me this week, recommended it to a random stranger he met while riding…
Covid’s deadliest phase may come soon
Zeynep Tufekci writes: If world leaders don’t act now, the end of the Covid pandemic may come with a horrible form of herd immunity, as more transmissible variants that are taking hold around the world kill millions. There’s troubling new evidence that the B.1.617.2 variant, first identified in India, could be far more transmissible than even the B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in Britain, which contributed to some of the deadliest surges around the world. In countries with widespread vaccination, like…
U.S. is said to have unexamined intelligence to pore over on virus origins
The New York Times reports: President Biden’s call for a 90-day sprint to understand the origins of the coronavirus pandemic came after intelligence officials told the White House they had a raft of still-unexamined evidence that required additional computer analysis that might shed light on the mystery, according to senior administration officials. The officials declined to describe the new evidence. But the revelation that they are hoping to apply an extraordinary amount of computer power to the question of whether…
Russia appears to carry out hack through system used by U.S. aid agency
The New York Times reports: A newly disclosed effort by Russian intelligence to hijack the email system of a United States government agency prompted leading Democrats on Friday to urge stronger action against Moscow for accelerating cyberattacks ahead of President Biden’s summit next month with President Vladimir V. Putin. The latest hack was brought to light late Thursday by Microsoft and other private firms. They exposed how Russia’s S.V.R., the same intelligence agency that Washington has blamed for a range…
Germany agrees to pay Namibia €1.1bn over historical Herero-Nama genocide
The Guardian reports: Germany has to agreed to pay Namibia €1.1bn (£940m) as it officially recognised the Herero-Nama genocide at the start of the 20th century, in what Angela Merkel’s government says amounts to a gesture of reconciliation but not legally binding reparations. Tens of thousands of men, women and children were shot, tortured or driven into the Kalahari desert to starve by German troops between 1904 and 1908 after the Herero and Nama tribes rebelled against colonial rule in…
Is a grand theory of everything finally within reach?
James Wells writes: When trying to explain what motivates me as a physicist, the film A Passage to India (1984) comes to mind. Based on the play by Santha Rama Rau, adapted from the novel by E M Forster, it describes the fallout from a rape case in the fictional city of Chandrapore, during the British Raj in India in the 1920s. What keeps the viewer’s attention is the subtlety of the relationships between the characters – particularly the fragile…
Music: Bokanté — ‘Limyè’
Study finds nearly one-in-five Americans believe QAnon conspiracy theories
Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann write: Washington, we have a problem — politically, informationally and societally — when 15 percent of Americans agree with the QAnon statement that the U.S. government, media and financial worlds “are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.” Or when 20 percent agree with this statement: “There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.”…
Democrats are running out of time
Ronald Brownstein writes: Anxiety is growing among a broad range of civil-rights, democracy-reform, and liberal groups over whether Democrats are responding with enough urgency to the accelerating Republican efforts to both suppress voting and potentially overturn future Democratic election victories. With the congressional calendar dominated by President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar spending proposals, these activists are expressing concern that neither the administration nor Democratic congressional leaders are raising sufficient alarms about the threats to voting rights proliferating in red states, or…
The GOP is far from being finished with its post-election reckoning
Politico reports: It’s been less than two weeks since South Carolina Republicans rejected Lin Wood’s Q-Anon-inspired run for state party chair. In Arizona, the GOP is still consumed with infighting over a farcical review of November election results. Now comes Nevada, where open warfare has broken out in recent days between state and local party officials over a pro-Trump insurgency involving far-right activists with ties to the Proud Boys. More than six months after the November election, the forces unleashed…
Despite pandemic economic shutdown, global warming continues to accelerate
NPR reports: The average temperature on Earth is now consistently 1 degree Celsius hotter than it was in the late 1800s, and that temperature will keep rising toward the critical 1.5-degree Celsius benchmark over the next five years, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization. Scientists warn that humans must keep the average annual global temperature from lingering at or above 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the most catastrophic and long-term effects of climate change. Those include…
Even without definitive proof, the lab-leak theory is a call for action
Daniel Engber writes: Last summer, Michael Imperiale, a University of Michigan virologist and 10-year member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, published an essay on the need to “rethink” some basic research-safety practices in light of the coronavirus pandemic. But he and his co-author—another biosecurity-board veteran—did want to make one thing clear: There was no reason to believe that sloppy or malicious science had had anything to do with the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; to suggest otherwise…
Had Covid (or been vaccinated)? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime
Nature reports: Many people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 will probably make antibodies against the virus for most of their lives. So suggest researchers who have identified long-lived antibody-producing cells in the bone marrow of people who have recovered from COVID-19. The study provides evidence that immunity triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection will be extraordinarily long-lasting. Adding to the good news, “the implications are that vaccines will have the same durable effect,” says Menno van Zelm, an immunologist at Monash…
As American forces retreat, the Taliban advances across Afghanistan
The New York Times reports: Ammunition was depleted inside the bedraggled outposts in Laghman Province. Food was scarce. Some police officers hadn’t been paid in five months. Then, just as American troops began leaving the country in early May, Taliban fighters besieged seven rural Afghan military outposts across the wheat fields and onion patches of the province, in eastern Afghanistan. The insurgents enlisted village elders to visit the outposts bearing a message: Surrender or die. By mid-month, security forces had…
Music: Banda Magda — ‘Thiamandi’