Mass confusion over Trump’s endgame as Washington barrels toward shutdown, economic crisis

Mass confusion over Trump’s endgame as Washington barrels toward shutdown, economic crisis

The Washington Post reports: As President Trump rapidly approached a Monday deadline to avert a government shutdown, aides and lawmakers appeared flummoxed about his strategy, left to interpret musings from his Twitter feed while he golfed and otherwise remained out of public view. A large spending bill that Congress passed last week must be signed into law by midnight on Monday to prevent many federal agencies from dramatically scaling back their operations. After Congress passed the bill, Trump posted a…

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‘This just has to get done’: Lawmakers push Trump to sign the relief bill

‘This just has to get done’: Lawmakers push Trump to sign the relief bill

The New York Times reports: Lawmakers on Sunday urged President Trump to sign a sweeping $900 billion aid package after millions of Americans lost their unemployment coverage on Saturday as the president put the fate of the measure in limbo by pushing for bigger relief checks. Mr. Trump’s resistance to signing the bill risks leaving millions of unemployed Americans without crucial benefits, jeopardizes other critical assistance for businesses and families set to lapse at the end of the year, and…

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Texas fracking billionaires drew Covid-19 aid while investing in rivals

Texas fracking billionaires drew Covid-19 aid while investing in rivals

The Wall Street Journal reports: As the coronavirus pandemic and low oil prices walloped U.S. frackers this spring, Texas billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks got a $35 million relief loan to help one of their fracking companies stay afloat. At the same time, they were on a buying spree in the country’s oil patch. Since spring, businesses controlled by the Wilks brothers have hunted for deals among fracking firms going through bankruptcy and taken or increased stakes in at least…

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Rep. Kinzinger calls efforts to overturn election ‘a scam’

Rep. Kinzinger calls efforts to overturn election ‘a scam’

Politico reports: “This is a scam,” said Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of continued efforts by President Donald Trump and some House Republicans to overturn the election of President-elect Joe Biden. Kinzinger, speaking Sunday morning on CNN’s “State of the Union,” said: “The reality is there is no impetus to overthrow an election,” and added that even if there were reasons to do so, there is not a constitutional mechanism to overturn a presidential election after states have formally certified…

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Americans’ acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy

Americans’ acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy

Robert Reich writes: Most of the 74,222,957 Americans who voted to re-elect Donald Trump – 46.8%of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election – don’t hold Trump accountable for what he’s done to America. Their acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy. Nearly forty years ago, political scientist James Q Wilson and criminologist George Kelling observed that a broken window left unattended in a community signals that no one cares if windows are broken there. The broken…

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A ‘great cultural depression’ looms for legions of unemployed performers

A ‘great cultural depression’ looms for legions of unemployed performers

The New York Times reports: In the top echelons of classical music, the violinist Jennifer Koh is by any measure a star. With a dazzling technique, she has ridden a career that any aspiring Juilliard grad would dream about — appearing with leading orchestras, recording new works, and performing on some of the world’s most prestigious stages. Now, nine months into a contagion that has halted most public gatherings and decimated the performing arts, Ms. Koh, who watched a year’s…

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The mysterious link between Covid-19 and sleep

The mysterious link between Covid-19 and sleep

James Hamblin writes: The newly discovered coronavirus had killed only a few dozen people when Feixiong Cheng started looking for a treatment. He knew time was of the essence: Cheng, a data analyst at the Cleveland Clinic, had seen similar coronaviruses tear through China and Saudi Arabia before, sickening thousands and shaking the global economy. So, in January, his lab used artificial intelligence to search for hidden clues in the structure of the virus to predict how it invaded human…

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The U.K. coronavirus mutation is worrying but not terrifying

The U.K. coronavirus mutation is worrying but not terrifying

Sara Reardon writes: A new mutated form of the novel coronavirus that appears more transmissible than the original has raised alarm in the U.K. and around the world. It does not appear to cause more severe disease, and the newly available vaccines do seem to protect people against it. Yet on December 19—after an announcement that the variant, dubbed B.1.1.7, had suddenly accumulated 17 mutations and was spreading rapidly in the U.K.—the nation’s prime minister Boris Johnson announced stricter lockdowns…

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Could Covid-19 have wiped out the Neandertals?

Could Covid-19 have wiped out the Neandertals?

John Hewitt writes: Everybody loves Neandertals, those big-brained brutes we supposedly outcompeted and ultimately replaced using our sharp tongues and quick, delicate minds. But did we really, though? Is it mathematically possible that we could yet be them, and they us? By the same token, could not the impossibly singular Mitochondrial Eve, her contemporary Y-chromosome Adam, and even the “Out of Africa” hypothesis simply be convenient fictions paleogeneticists tell each other at conferences to give their largely arbitrary haplotype designations…

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How civilization broke our brains

How civilization broke our brains

Derek Thompson writes: Several months ago, I got into a long discussion with a colleague about the origins of the “Sunday scaries,” the flood of anxiety that many of us feel as the weekend is winding down and the workweek approaches. He said that the culprit was clear, and pointed to late-stage capitalism’s corrosive blend of performance stress and job insecurity. But capitalism also exists Monday through Saturday, so why should Sunday be so uniquely anxiety-inducing? The deeper cause, I…

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The triumph of Trump’s kleptocracy

The triumph of Trump’s kleptocracy

Franklin Foer writes: Paul Manafort came of age in New Britain, Connecticut. His father, the garrulous mayor of that decaying factory town, taught him how to cobble together an electoral coalition, passing down the tricks of the trade that became the basis for the son’s lucrative career as a political consultant. But as the local hardware manufacturers fled to foreign shores, the Mafia moved into town. To hear the local papers tell the story—or to read the counts alleged in…

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Instead of draining the swamp, Trump grants clemency to former congressmen convicted of federal crimes

Instead of draining the swamp, Trump grants clemency to former congressmen convicted of federal crimes

The Washington Post reports: As Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in 2016, his vow to “drain the swamp” included outrage at past use of presidential pardons. Citing the way President Bill Clinton had pardoned a fugitive financier during his last week in office, Trump fumed, “People couldn’t believe it.” Yet now, in the closing days of his term, Trump has added to his portfolio of pardons and commutations several people who seemed to exemplify the very swamp that Trump…

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Inside Trump and Barr’s last-minute killing spree

Inside Trump and Barr’s last-minute killing spree

ProPublica reports: In its hurry to use its final days in power to execute federal prisoners, the administration of President Donald Trump has trampled over an array of barriers, both legal and practical, according to court records that have not been previously reported. Officials gave public explanations for their choice of which prisoners should die that misstated key facts from the cases. They moved ahead with executions in the middle of the night. They left one prisoner strapped to the…

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Giuliani told to preserve all records as lawyers for Dominion warn legal action is ‘imminent’

Giuliani told to preserve all records as lawyers for Dominion warn legal action is ‘imminent’

CNN reports: A defamation law firm representing Dominion Voting Systems has sent letters to White House counsel Pat Cipollone and President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani instructing them to preserve all records related to the company at the center of Trump’s conspiracy theories and warning Giuliani that legal action is “imminent.” Through two well-known defamation attorneys, Dominion Voting Systems sent letters to Cipollone and Giuliani Tuesday, demanding Giuliani stop making “defamatory claims against Dominion” and ensure there is “no…

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Trump stirs chaos in Washington

Trump stirs chaos in Washington

Politico reports: President Donald Trump has once again thrown Washington into chaos, making uneven demands that have left lawmakers baffled and Americans coping with a global pandemic uncertain when they’ll be getting long-promised financial help. On Tuesday night, Trump blindsided all of Washington — including his own staff — with a series of eleventh-hour demands to amend coronavirus relief and government funding legislation that his own administration had helped carefully craft and supported. Overnight and into Wednesday, senior Republicans, Hill…

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Herd immunity may be further away than most Americans realize

Herd immunity may be further away than most Americans realize

Donald G. McNeil Jr. reports: At what point does a country achieve herd immunity? What portion of the population must acquire resistance to the coronavirus, either through infection or vaccination, in order for the disease to fade away and life to return to normal? Since the start of the pandemic, the figure that many epidemiologists have offered has been 60 to 70 percent. That range is still cited by the World Health Organization and is often repeated during discussions of…

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