The emerging movement for police and prison abolition

The emerging movement for police and prison abolition

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes: The murder of George Floyd last spring provoked an unprecedented outpouring of protests, and a rare national reckoning with both racism and police violence. Public officials across the country pledged police reform. On April 20th, Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, was found guilty of murder. It is rare for police to be prosecuted, let alone punished. I remember my incredulous reaction, in 1992, when my mother called to…

Read More Read More

Ransomware cyberattack forces shutdown of largest fuel pipeline in the U.S.

Ransomware cyberattack forces shutdown of largest fuel pipeline in the U.S.

CNBC reports: The operator of the country’s largest fuel pipeline, Colonial Pipeline, fell victim to a cybersecurity attack on Friday that involved ransomware, forcing it to temporarily shut down all pipeline operations, the company said in a statement on Saturday. The firm has hired a third-party cybersecurity firm to launch a probe into the incident and has contacted law enforcement and other federal agencies. The cyberattack has affected some of its IT systems too. Colonial Pipeline, which transports nearly half…

Read More Read More

NASA reboots its role in fighting climate change

NASA reboots its role in fighting climate change

Nature reports: NASA is best known for exploring other worlds, whether that’s sending astronauts to the Moon or flying helicopters on Mars. But under US President Joe Biden, the space agency intends to boost its reputation as a major player in studying Earth — especially with an eye towards fighting climate change. “Biden made clear that climate is a priority,” says Waleed Abdalati, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colorado. “There’s a clear role…

Read More Read More

If we want to save the planet, the future of food is insects

If we want to save the planet, the future of food is insects

Richard Godwin writes: My first attempts at feeding insects to friends and family did not go down well. “What the hell is wrong with you?” asked my wife when I revealed that the tomato and oregano-flavoured cracker bites we had been munching with our G&Ts were made from crickets. “Hang on, I’m vegetarian!” cried our friend – which prompted a slightly testy discussion on whether insects count as meat, how many thousand arthropods equate to one mammal and considering almost…

Read More Read More

India is hiding its Covid crisis – and the whole world will suffer for it

India is hiding its Covid crisis – and the whole world will suffer for it

Ankita Rao writes: A few years ago, as Narendra Modi came into power, I worked on an investigative report about India hiding its malaria deaths. In traveling from tribal Odisha to the Indian national health ministry in New Delhi, my colleague and I watched thousands of cases disappear: some malaria deaths, first noted in handwritten local health ledgers, never appeared in central government reports; other malaria deaths were magically transformed into deaths of heart attack or fever. The discrepancy was…

Read More Read More

New study estimates more than 900,000 people have died from Covid in U.S.

New study estimates more than 900,000 people have died from Covid in U.S.

NPR reports: A new study estimates that the number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. is more than 900,000, a number 57% higher than official figures. Worldwide, the study’s authors say, the COVID-19 death count is nearing 7 million, more than double the reported number of 3.24 million. The analysis comes from researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, who looked at excess mortality from March 2020 through May 3, 2021,…

Read More Read More

Louisiana chemical plants thriving off slavery

Louisiana chemical plants thriving off slavery

Anya Groner writes: It’s not by chance that 158 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, rural Black communities bear the environmental consequences of Louisiana’s biggest industry. Overlay a map of southern Louisiana’s petrochemical and petroleum plants with archival maps of the area’s plantations, and you’ll find that in many cases the property lines match up. “One oppressive economy begets another,” Barbara L. Allen, a professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and the author of Uneasy…

Read More Read More

A climate dystopia in Northern California

A climate dystopia in Northern California

Naomi Klein writes: It’s a ritual that has been repeated many times over the coldest months of Northern California’s winter. The Chico police arrive between 9 a.m. and noon on a Thursday, perhaps in the hopes of catching people when they are home. Home, in this case, being flimsy tents, draped in tarps, many of them strung up between pine trees, secured to fences, or hidden beneath highway overpasses. The cops read out orders and sometimes hand out flyers: You…

Read More Read More

The age of misinformation in which ‘belonging is stronger than facts’

The age of misinformation in which ‘belonging is stronger than facts’

Max Fisher writes: There’s a decent chance you’ve had at least one of these rumors, all false, relayed to you as fact recently: that President Biden plans to force Americans to eat less meat; that Virginia is eliminating advanced math in schools to advance racial equality; and that border officials are mass-purchasing copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’s book to hand out to refugee children. All were amplified by partisan actors. But you’re just as likely, if not more so,…

Read More Read More

How America became the money laundering capital of the world

How America became the money laundering capital of the world

Peter Stone writes: In March, federal agents raided the Beverly Hills premises of a company called U.S. Private Vaults. According to a subsequent grand jury indictment, U.S. Private Vaults was a money laundering operation where drug dealers and others could anonymously stash fentanyl, guns, and “huge stacks of $100 bills” in safe deposit boxes. U.S. Private Vaults didn’t really bother to hide its business, boasting in ads, “We don’t even want to know your name.” It also shared its strip…

Read More Read More

Washington has enabled Israeli extremism

Washington has enabled Israeli extremism

Khaled Elgindy writes: Two weeks ago, Jerusalem was rocked by violence as bands of Jewish Israeli extremists rampaged through Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem chanting “death to Arabs.” Making their way through the city, mobs hurled rocks at Palestinian homes and assaulted passersby suspected of being Arabs or leftists, even stopping cars along the main north-south road that divides Israeli West Jerusalem from occupied East Jerusalem to check whether drivers were Jews or Arabs, usually subjecting the latter to an…

Read More Read More

U.S. support for Covid vaccine patent waivers puts pressure on EU and UK

U.S. support for Covid vaccine patent waivers puts pressure on EU and UK

Sarah Boseley writes: It was a “seismic decision” by Joe Biden, the US president, say campaigners who have fought for the demolition of patent protection on vaccines and drugs for decades. The US administration has amazed supporters and critics alike by throwing its considerable weight behind the pleas of South Africa, India and about 100 developing countries at the World Trade Organization to overturn patents on Covid vaccines in the interests of getting more of them, more cheaply and faster,…

Read More Read More

Biden is betting that boldness is better than moderation

Biden is betting that boldness is better than moderation

Ronald Brownstein writes: Some of the changes are obvious: Compared with the economic strategies of former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Joe Biden is proposing more new spending and more new taxes than either of his Democratic predecessors, and he’s abandoned their support for negotiating new free-trade agreements. But Biden is also diverging from his predecessors’ approaches in ways that have drawn much less attention—yet may prove even more consequential. Particularly on racial-, gender-, and class-inequality issues, Biden’s separation…

Read More Read More

‘Turning the corner’: U.S. Covid outlook reaches most hopeful point yet

‘Turning the corner’: U.S. Covid outlook reaches most hopeful point yet

The New York Times reports: After weeks of coronavirus patients flooding emergency rooms in Michigan, the worst Covid-19 hot spot in the nation, hospitalizations are finally falling. On some recent days, entire states, including Wisconsin and West Virginia, have reported zero new coronavirus deaths — a brief but promising respite from the onslaught of the past year. And in New York and Chicago, officials encouraged by the recent progress have confidently vowed to fully reopen in the coming weeks, conjuring…

Read More Read More