Malaria vaccine hailed as potential breakthrough

Malaria vaccine hailed as potential breakthrough

BBC News reports: A malaria vaccine has proved to be 77% effective in early trials and could be a major breakthrough against the disease, says the University of Oxford team behind it. Malaria kills more than 400,000 people a year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa. But despite many vaccines being trialled over the years, this is the first to meet the required target. The researchers say this vaccine could have a major public health impact. When trialled in 450 children…

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How do audiences decide what news to trust? Fairness and accuracy aren’t the only things that matter

How do audiences decide what news to trust? Fairness and accuracy aren’t the only things that matter

Benjamin Toff, Sumitra Badrinathan, Camila Mont’Alverne, and Amy Ross Arguedas write: What do people really mean when they say they do not trust the news media? And what can news organizations do to restore trust where it is deserved? This week, our team of researchers at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published a new report that offers somewhat different answers than those most often focused on by journalists and other researchers (much of which we reviewed in…

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If the apocalypse had an image, it would be of India’s hospitals overwhelmed by the pandemic

If the apocalypse had an image, it would be of India’s hospitals overwhelmed by the pandemic

Rana Ayyub writes: Increasingly, people are dying in plain sight. On Friday, Delhi’s leading Gangaram Hospital issued an SOS that it only had enough oxygen left for two hours and that 25 patients had already lost their lives in the hospital due to oxygen shortages. Videos show people stealing oxygen cylinders for their relatives. One devastating video from the BBC shows a woman trying to help her dying brother regain consciousness. “Bajali, why don’t you wake up?” she cries. As…

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Covid hospitalizations tumble among U.S. senior citizens

Covid hospitalizations tumble among U.S. senior citizens

The Associated Press reports: COVID-19 hospitalizations among older Americans have plunged more than 70% since the start of the year, and deaths among them appear to have tumbled as well, dramatic evidence the vaccination campaign is working. Now the trick is to get more of the nation’s younger people to roll up their sleeves. The drop-off in severe cases among Americans 65 and older is especially encouraging because senior citizens have accounted for about 8 out of 10 deaths from…

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No safer from Covid indoors at 6 feet or 60 feet, MIT researchers say

No safer from Covid indoors at 6 feet or 60 feet, MIT researchers say

CNBC reports: The risk of being exposed to Covid-19 indoors is as great at 60 feet as it is at 6 feet — even when wearing a mask, according to a new study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers who challenge social distancing guidelines adopted across the world. MIT professors Martin Z. Bazant, who teaches chemical engineering and applied mathematics, and John W.M. Bush, who teaches applied mathematics, developed a method of calculating exposure risk to Covid-19 in an indoor…

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White House dances around a big contributor to climate change: Agriculture

White House dances around a big contributor to climate change: Agriculture

Politico reports: President Joe Biden needs the help of the powerful farm industry to reach his sky-high climate goals. But his plans for cutting agricultural emissions might not have enough teeth to take a big bite out of global warming. Biden on Thursday pledged a drastic reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. But the White House hasn’t set any specific targets yet for agriculture, which accounts for 10 percent of all U.S. emissions, according to the EPA. Those…

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The Trump administration is over, but the Trump crisis is not

The Trump administration is over, but the Trump crisis is not

Susan B. Glasser writes: When Walter Mondale, the former Vice-President, died on Monday, C-span circulated a video clip of him on the rostrum of the House of Representatives, from January 6, 1981. It is a remarkable visual snippet of a lost Washington. Mondale and President Jimmy Carter had just been defeated in a landslide by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, receiving only forty-nine Electoral College votes to the Republicans’ four hundred and eighty-nine. The video shows Mondale dutifully…

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Trumpians are having a venomous panic attack

Trumpians are having a venomous panic attack

David Brooks writes: Those of us who had hoped America would calm down when we no longer had Donald Trump spewing poison from the Oval Office have been sadly disabused. There are increasing signs that the Trumpian base is radicalizing. My Republican friends report vicious divisions in their churches and families. Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks. It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man…

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U.K. right-wing extremists, lifted by Trump, now turn to Russia

U.K. right-wing extremists, lifted by Trump, now turn to Russia

The New York Times reports: Two days after supporters of former President Donald J. Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, but failed to reverse his election defeat, a defiant shout sounded from across the ocean. Tommy Robinson, Britain’s loudest amplifier of anti-Islam, far-right anger, insisted the fight was not over. “You need to pick yourselves back up,” Mr. Robinson said in an online video viewed tens of thousands of times. “As Donald Trump says, it’s only just beginning.” A former soccer…

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What Substack is really doing to the media

What Substack is really doing to the media

Will Oremus writes: This week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg granted a rare, live, hourlong interview to a tech journalist, where he revealed the company’s plans for a slew of new audio products. Normally, such a scoopy, wide-ranging interview would be a coup for the media company that landed it. But in this case, there was no traditional media company: The interviewer was Casey Newton, who writes a Substack newsletter called Platformer, and the setting was a new Discord server that…

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The new swing voters: Latinos

The new swing voters: Latinos

Ronald Brownstein writes: The last election’s most unexpected twist is framing one of the most urgent questions confronting both parties today: What explains Donald Trump’s improved performance among Latino voters? The president who began his first national campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists,” drug smugglers, and criminals; who labored to build a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border; who separated undocumented children from their parents; who sought in court to end the “Dreamers” program; who maneuvered to reduce virtually every form of…

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Liz Cheney vs. MAGA

Liz Cheney vs. MAGA

Robert Draper writes: The regular conference meetings of the Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives, held most weeks behind closed doors in the Capitol Visitor Center, tend to be predictable and thus irregularly attended affairs. The party leaders — the House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, the minority whip Steve Scalise and the conference chairwoman Liz Cheney, whose job it is to run these meetings — typically begin with a few housekeeping matters and then proceed with a discussion of…

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Internal report shows how Facebook failed to prevent the ‘stop the steal’ movement

Internal report shows how Facebook failed to prevent the ‘stop the steal’ movement

BuzzFeed News reports: Last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of a House of Representatives committee that his company had done its part “to secure the integrity of the election.” While the social network did not catch everything, the billionaire chief executive said, Facebook had “made our services inhospitable to those who might do harm” in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Less than a week after his appearance, however, an internal company report reached a far…

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Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, is showing the world what courage means

Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, is showing the world what courage means

Anne Applebaum writes: When Alexei Navalny boarded a plane to Moscow on January 17, he turned his life into a metaphor. He knew it, his wife knew it, and everybody else on the plane knew it. So did the millions of people who had watched his documentary videos, who had seen the witty interviews he did on the plane, who have since joined demonstrations in his name. So did the leaders of Russia, including the country’s dictator and president, Vladimir…

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