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hat happened to following the science?

Critics complain that the politicians are chancing it rather than being led by the evidence.

as the German sociologist Max Weber argued a century ago, politics can never really follow the science. Pretending that it can is where the trouble starts.

The one-shot coronavirus vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson provides strong protection against severe disease and death from Covid-19, and may reduce the spread of the virus by vaccinated people, according to new analyses posted online by the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday.

The analyses confirmed that Americans are likely to benefit soon from a third effective coronavirus vaccine developed in under a year, as demand for inoculations greatly outstrips supply.

Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine can be stored at normal refrigeration temperatures for at least three months, making its distribution considerably easier than the authorized vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, which require two doses and must be stored at frigid temperatures.

Walter Wallace Jr.'s family is seeking justice but they are not advocating for the officers who killed the 27-year-old Black man to be charged with murder.

According to their attorney, Shaka Johnson, the brief 30 to 40 second video put on display the systematic failings of the Philadelphia Police Department who armed the officers with "a tool by which to assassinate" instead of a less lethal device such as a Taser.

When asked why the family, who has yet to bury Wallace, would not want to pursue murder charges against the two officers who fired seven rounds each into him on Monday, Johnson replied, "Here's why: they were improperly trained and did not have the proper equipment by which to effectuate their job."

In 2015, Mr. Johnson, who would announce his first run for Congress the next year, wrote that he was horrified as he watched Mr. Trump’s debate performance with his wife and children.“What bothered me most was watching the face of my exceptional 10 yr old son, Jack, at one point when he looked over at me with a sort of confused disappointment, as the leader of all polls boasted about calling a woman a ‘fat pig.’”

In one of the most famous exchanges from that debate, Megyn Kelly, a moderator and then a Fox News host, asked Mr. Trump about his history of referring to women as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”“Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Mr. Trump responded. He added that the country’s problem was political correctness, something he didn’t have time for.

Mr. Johnson was horrified.“Can you imagine the noble, selfless characters of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln or Reagan carrying on like Trump did last night?” wrote Mr. Johnson, an evangelical Christian. He noted that voters needed to demand a “much higher level of virtue and decency” than what he had just witnessed.

I tried to sketch out the essence of an actual conservative sensibility and politics: one of skepticism, limited government and an acceptance of human imperfection.

My point was that this conservative tradition had been lost in America, in so far as it had ever been found, because it had been hijacked by religious and political fundamentalism

I saw the fundamentalist psyche — rigid, abstract, authoritarian — as integral to the GOP in the Bush years and beyond, a phenomenon that, if sustained, would render liberal democracy practically moribund. It was less about the policy details, which change over time, than an entire worldview.

In a strict sense, today’s session in Westminster’s Grimond Room was simply a public hearing during an inquiry into whether Johnson consciously misled parliament. Laugh, by all means, at the absurdity of supposing there can be any real doubt about that. Mock, if you wish, the semantic squabbles about whether the greased piglet’s actions and words were inadvertent, reckless, intentional or deliberate.

don’t be misled into dismissing this inquiry as arcane, or as a piece of petty parliamentarism, not real flesh-and-blood politics. That would be terribly, terribly wrong. In procedural, and indeed in moral and historical terms, this inquiry matters a very great deal. A lot hangs on it for Britain. What hangs on it is not merely Johnson’s tattered claims to be an honourable public figure. It is the survival of our representative democracy in an age of demagogic leaders who despise parliamentary norms.

For Johnson to have been anything less than assiduous in following his own rules, and anything other than meticulous in accounting for his and his office’s conduct, put the national effort at risk. Even someone as licentious and morally incontinent as Johnson must have grasped this at some level.

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson said he "blanked" when he couldn't identify the Syrian city of Aleppo in an interview on MSNBC.

Johnson was asked by MSNBC's Mike Barnicle "What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?" he responded "And what is Aleppo?" The comment raised eyebrows among the MSNBC panelists, as it suggested a lack of familiarity with a pressing international conflict: Syria's ongoing civil war.

"As Governor, there were many things I didn't know off the top of my head. But I succeeded by surrounding myself with the right people, getting to the bottom of important issues, and making principled decisions. It worked," Johnson continued in his statement. "That is what a President must do.

“How We Got to Now” divides technological history into six thematic areas — glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light.

the ones here function more like departure points for sets of skillfully interwoven narratives. To take the example of glass, we begin with a formation of molten silica, probably by a crashing comet, 26 million years ago in the Libyan desert. In due course we move to the glassmakers of Venice in the 13th century. And then things get more interesting. Monks laboring over religious manuscripts find that curved pieces of glass can aid their vision; a few centuries later, spectacles become popular, because parts of the European population, in response to the invention of the printing press, discover they need corrective lenses to read these new things called books. In time come telescopes and microscopes, which bring forth revolutionary ideas about stars and germs. Fiberglass eventually arrives, and soon we figure out how to make fiber optic glass cables, which carry pulses of laser light and zip petabytes of data around the globe.

I particularly like the cultural observations Johnson draws along the way. The invention and refinement of the glassmaking process, for example, also led to the production of high-quality mirrors. This helped painters like Rembrandt create startling works of self-portraiture; also, it coincided with a new generation of writers, Shakespeare included, willing to examine their characters’ interior lives with unprecedented scrutiny. “The mirror helped invent the modern self,” Johnson asserts. What’s more, “it set in motion a reorientation of society that was more subtle, but no less transformative, than the reorientation of our place in the universe that the telescope engendered.”

While Johnson will stress that the US president has “an absolute duty” to prepare for a possible military option if North Korea is about to attack the United States, the foreign secretary will say diplomatic efforts must be paramount.

Johnson is also to use his speech, extracts of which were released in advance by the Foreign Office, to praise the Iran nuclear deal, another diplomatic effort repeatedly condemned by Trump.

While the government is careful to avoid directly criticising Trump, Johnson is making it very clear by highlighting Tillerson’s method that he does not support the US president’s notably more aggressive approach.

The reality, of course, is that the world is different—it has never been quite as small. It took the Black Death years to reach Europe in the 14th century. It took the coronavirus a matter of weeks.

Battle analogies are everywhere. And for good reason. “The way ahead is hard, and it is still true that many lives will sadly be lost,” Johnson warned. “But in this fight we can be in no doubt that each and every one of us is directly enlisted.” This was Johnson as war leader, urging each and all to do their duty.

In times of national crisis, people turn to what they know—to the myths and caricatures that define them.

The news that a vaccine that has been given to over seven million Americans could cause a rare but serious side effect is understandably concerning. Especially when the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been lauded as a way to reach high-risk and underserved communities, such as people who are homebound.

But I think the pause makes sense. And even though I am a woman and fall within the age group of people who experienced clotting, I am not worried about my own personal risk.

This specific condition, called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, occurs when clots form in a major vein draining blood from the brain, which also can occur with a deficiency in blood platelets. It’s essentially a very specific and unusual type of stroke.

In an interview on conservative talk radio, Sen. Ron Johnson, one of former President Donald Trump’s strongest supporters, said he didn’t feel threatened by rioters violently storming the Capitol. Instead, he said, he might have been scared if the participants were Black Lives Matter or Antifa supporters — a comment with strong racial overtones.

I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn't concerned,”

"Now, had the tables been turned — Joe, this could get me in trouble — had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned," Johnson said.

The United States still is at one of its worst spots of the coronavirus pandemic. Daily deaths are near a peak, and other daily stats still are stunningly high compared to where they'd been before a late 2020 surge.

Yet Covid-19 case and hospitalization numbers have been falling. Vaccines are here, more versions may be near and warmer weather is approaching.

Dr. Anthony Fauci made that prediction last week, assuming 70% to 85% of the US population was vaccinated by end of summer.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Monday that world powers should clinch a global treaty on pandemics to ensure proper transparency after the novel coronavirus outbreak which originated in China.

Johnson said he would be keen to agree a global treaty on pandemics where countries agreed to share data, amid British and U.S. concern over access given to a World Health Organization (WHO) mission to China.

what the world needs to see is a general agreement on how we track data surrounding zoonotic pandemics... and we want a joint agreement on transparency.

anger that should be directed at billionaires is instead directed by them. Facing inequality and exclusion, poor wages and insecure jobs, people are persuaded by the newspapers billionaires own and the parties they fund to unleash their fury on immigrants, Muslims, the EU and other “alien” forces.

From the White House, his Manhattan tower and his Florida resort, Donald Trump tweets furiously against “elites”. Dominic Cummings hones the same message as he moves between his townhouse in Islington, with its library and tapestry room, and his family estate in Durham. Clearly, they don’t mean political or economic elites. They mean intellectuals: the students, teachers, professors and independent thinkers who oppose their policies. Anti-intellectualism is a resurgent force in politics.

Myths of national greatness and decline abound. Make America Great Again and Take Back Control propose a glorious homecoming to an imagined golden age. Conservatives and Republicans invoke a rich mythology of family life and patriarchal values. Large numbers of people in the United Kingdom regret the loss of empire.

In the coming days or weeks, he may be kicked out of office by his own MPs. More likely, he will cling on in 10 Downing Street under the permanent threat of eviction. Either way, he no longer controls the fate of his own premiership.

Downing Street indulged in routine late-night booze-ups while the rest of the country was under strict lockdown. The prime minister’s disingenuous attempts to wriggle out of being blamed did him no good—indeed, they served only to reveal his and his wife’s own carousing.

Double standards at the top tend to corrupt the whole of public life. More important, it raises two other of Mr Johnson’s attributes that plague post-Brexit Britain.

Richard M. Nixon always denied it: to David Frost, to historians and to Lyndon B. Johnson, who had the strongest suspicions and the most cause for outrage at his successor’s rumored treachery. To them all, Nixon insisted that he had not sabotaged Johnson’s 1968 peace initiative to bring the war in Vietnam to an early conclusion. “My God. I would never do anything to encourage” South Vietnam “not to come to the table,” Nixon told Johnson, in a conversation captured on the White House taping system.

A newfound cache of notes left by H. R. Haldeman, his closest aide, shows that Nixon directed his campaign’s efforts to scuttle the peace talks, which he feared could give his opponent, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, an edge in the 1968 election. On Oct. 22, 1968, he ordered Haldeman to “monkey wrench” the initiative.

The conduit was Anna Chennault, a Republican doyenne and Nixon fund-raiser, and a member of the pro-nationalist China lobby, with connections across Asia.

criticism of the film’s depiction of the president has come not just from Johnson loyalists, but from some historians who said they admired other aspects of the film.“Everybody has to take license in movies like this, and it can be hard for nit-pickers like me to suspend nit-picking,” Diane McWhorter, the author of “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution,” said in an interview.“But with the portrayal of L.B.J.,” she continued, “I kept thinking, ‘Not only is this not true, it’s the opposite of the truth.’ ”

“The debate isn’t just about L.B.J., but about how American politics works,” said Professor Zelizer, who teaches history at Princeton. “Is it a matter of powerful elected leaders, or average people who put their bodies on the line?”

Some civil rights historians, while questioning Mr. Califano’s wording, agreed with his broader point that Johnson and Dr. King were partners, not adversaries.“Selma was not Johnson’s idea, but he was happy that King was out there mounting a voting rights campaign,”

EU referendum: Leaving EU 'big gamble' for UK security

David Cameron will face MPs later as he presents his case for the UK remaining within the 28-member organisation.But Mayor of London Boris Johnson has again insisted that the country has a "great future" outside the EU.

The prime minister will outline details to MPs in a Commons statement, starting at 15.30 GMT, of last week's deal with EU leaders on reforms to the terms of the UK's membership, which paved the way for him to call a referendum on EU membership on 23 June.

Boris Johnson can change from bonhomie to a dark fury in seconds. His normally joky demeanour flashes into a sarcastic snarl, his skin reddens and blotches, his eyes dart into an intense narrow glare and on the worst occasions his lips curl back to reveal wisps of spittle.

The all-out favourite to be our next prime minister has the fiercest and most uncontrollable anger I have seen. A terrifying mood change can be triggered instantly by the slightest challenge to his entitlement or self-worth.

he was temperamentally unsuitable to be entrusted with any position of power, let alone the highest office of all, in charge of the United Kingdom and its nuclear codes.