Group items tagged

“doctors in the hospital did not identify the first SARS case immediately, because not all the criteria for the identification of SARS that had been defined by the WHO had been made available to Taiwan: unaware that the WHO was going to revise these particular criteria very soon, the medical personnel did not classify the patient as a SARS case and thus did not institute sufficient measures to prevent the spread of the virus right from the beginning.” Lindemann adds that, although it was not the only reason for Taiwan’s inadequate reaction to the SARS outbreak, government officials claimed that the lack of WHO assistance “made a bad situation worse.”

The average daily death toll in the United States is inching back toward 1,000, and hospitals nationwide are strained with patients. The president-elect said that Americans would need to rely on basic precautions, like wearing masks, to “get back to normal as fast as possibl

The country now averages 900 deaths each day, and 28 states added more cases in the seven-day period ending Sunday than in any other weeklong stretch of the pandemic. No states are reporting sustained reductions in cases.

Coronavirus hospitalizations, perhaps the clearest measure of how many people are severely ill, are approaching record levels set during earlier surges of the pandemic, according to data collected by the Covid Tracking Project

At the White House, which has been the site of several high-profile outbreaks in recent months, Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, tested positive for the coronavirus on Monday, according to a spokesman for the agency. He became the latest in a long list of administration officials, including Mr. Trump himself, to contract the virus.

At least three people who attended an election party at the White House last week, including Mr. Carson, have tested positive for the virus. At the event, several hundred people gathered in the East Room for several hours, many of them not wearing masks as they mingled while watching the election returns.

Beyond the impact of the virus itself, when Mr. Biden takes office, he will face a sobering economic reality.

More than half of the states issued mask mandates at some point this year, and some officials have tried targeted shutdowns on bars and indoor dining. But public health officials acknowledge that there is little public appetite for a return to full lockdowns.

Mr. Biden, moving to signal to Americans that he is prepared to take charge after a chaotic year, named a new coronavirus task force headed by a former commissioner of food and drugs, Dr. David Kessler; a former surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy; and a Yale public health expert, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith.

The president-elect vowed to “spare no effort” in fighting the virus, with the goal of getting the economy “running at full speed again.”

His comments contrasted Mr. Trump’s. The president has spent the past eight months dismissing or playing down the need for Americans to wear masks, saying frequently — and falsely — that public health experts disagree about masks’ effectiveness.

Vice President Mike Pence, who serves as the chairman of Mr. Trump’s coronavirus task force, convened the group on Monday after meeting about once a week over the past several months. But Mr. Trump, who remains in office until January, is openly at odds with his own virus advisers, including about mask wearing.

There were 10 million fewer Americans working in October than in February, according to the Labor Department, and the pace of job growth has slowed every month since June.

“The virus is winning the war by now,” Mr. Pritzker said, urging the public to wear masks. “The situation has worsened considerably in certain areas of the state.”

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio warned on Monday that the city was “getting dangerously close” to a second wave and said that further lockdowns were possible if New Yorkers did not regain control of the virus. “Unfortunately, it could mean even having to shut down parts of our economy again,” he said.At Mr. Biden’s closed-door briefing with his Covid advisory board, which took place remotely over a video conference call on Monday, three leaders of the panel provided updates on the pandemic while others members of the group introduced themselves, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

He told lawmakers that officials in the government had failed to heed his warnings about acquiring masks and other supplies

President-elect Joe Biden's team has magnified the giant hurdles that loom for government officials as they try to ensure the smooth delivery of millions of vaccine doses within the 50 states and cities with different ideas about the best way to administer them.

Trump told guests that with the help of "certain very important people -- if they have wisdom and if they have courage -- we're going to win this election." The crowd chanted "four more years."

the crucial question is whether Trump and his administration are equipping the incoming Biden administration with the knowledge and tools they need to carry out an unprecedented vaccination operation as Trump's White House grudgingly passes the baton.

Trump is pursuing a new round in his quixotic bid to overturn the November election by attempting to intervene in a lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court.

There were signs Wednesday, however, that cooperation is slowly beginning to take shape behind the scenes. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that he has met with Biden's team -- a rare acknowledgment of the former vice president's victory from a top Trump official -- and he insisted that he wants "to make sure they get everything that they need."

"Twenty million people should get vaccinated in just the next several weeks, and then we'll just keep rolling out vaccines through January, February, March as they come off the production lines," Azar said, trying to offer a note of reassurance about continuity during an interview on CNN's New Day.

The vaccine distribution challenges surrounding a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic would normally be at the top of the agenda for any commander-in-chief. But unsurprisingly, Trump is refusing to acknowledge the potential problems as he spreads disinformation to his supporters, and his administration -- at his behest -- continues to target Biden's son Hunter, who revealed Wednesday that his taxes are under federal investigation.

"Unless a court makes some other decision, the Electoral College is the defining outcome of the presidential race," Moran said. Asked what would be next if Trump doesn't concede, Moran said: "There is a transition that just occurs -- occurs under our laws under the Constitution."

Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican, said "it is unhealthy for the well-being of the country" to continue debating the outcome of the election "once the presidential race has been determined."

The attorney representing Trump, John Eastman, is known for recently pushing a racist conspiracy theory -- that Trump himself later amplified -- claiming Vice President-elect Kamala Harris might not be eligible for the role because her parents were immigrants.

With hopes riding on the vaccine authorization discussion Thursday, the country continued to grapple with an alarming rise in cases around the country as medical professionals began to see the post-Thanksgiving spike materialize and some regions reverted to shutdowns to try to preserve hospital capacity.

"This is by far, the worst surge to date," Colfax said. "The reality is unfortunately proving to be as harsh as we expected. ... The vaccine will not save us from this current surge -- there is simply not enough time."

"The more terrible truth is that over 8,000 people, ... who were beloved members of their family, are not coming back. And their deaths are an incalculable loss to their friends and their family, as well as our community."

Though Trump has said that the vaccination program will "quickly and dramatically reduce deaths," a new White House task force report warns that the vaccine "will not substantially reduce viral spread, hospitalizations, or fatalities until the 100 million Americans with comorbidities can be fully immunized, which will take until the late spring."

The FDA is expected to conduct its authorization review between December 11 and the 14, with first shipment of the vaccine going out by December 15. Needles, syringes and other materials to deliver the vaccines are already on their way to states.

Gen. Gustave Perna, said that 2.9 million doses of vaccine will go out in the first shipment from Pfizer once the FDA grants emergency use authorization.

Initially the federal government expected to receive 6.4 million doses from Pfizer as the first shipment. But because the vaccine is administered in two doses, the math is more complicated. About 500,000 doses will be set aside as a reserve supply, and the remaining number was divided in half to set aside what is needed for the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, which brought down the total in the first shipment to 2.9 million doses.

"We just want to make sure that Americans understand exactly the science that went into this, understand the gold standard of the FDA and the approval process. We want to make sure that the vaccines are actually administered, and we're afraid that that won't happen," Ostrowski said.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit Tuesday. The President on Wednesday filed a motion to intervene -- basically a request to join the lawsuit

Trump has suggested publicly that he hopes his nominees -- Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch -- will side with him on any election dispute.

since Republican delegations outnumber Democratic delegations, Trump would win.

"In a nutshell the President is asking the Supreme Court to exercise its rarest form of jurisdiction to effectively overturn the entire presidential election," said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and University of Texas Law School professor.

The court has thus far shown no desire to intervene in the presidential election.

On Tuesday, it rejected the plea from Pennsylvania Republicans to invalidate the state's presidential tallies. It issued one sentence and noted zero dissents. (Justices don't always have to make their votes public.)

"Our Country is deeply divided in ways that it arguably has not been seen since the election of 1860," Trump's motion to intervene states. "There is a high level of distrust between the opposing sides, compounded by the fact that, in the election just held, election officials in key swing states, for apparently partisan advantage, failed to conduct their state elections in compliance with state election law."

First the court would have to allow Paxton to file the suit. Then the court would have to block certification of the Electoral College vote, determine that the four states had allowed massive amounts of "illegal" votes, have the states revisit their vote counts and then resubmit the numbers.

If the court refuses to take up the lawsuit, it's another nail in the coffin for Trump's hopes to reverse his election loss.

If it acts in the other direction, it will be another dramatic and unprecedented turn in the 2020 election, guaranteeing the President will continue to challenge Biden's victory.

"There's nothing unique about Texas' claims here, most of which have already been brought in other suits against the same four states," said Vladeck, noting that if Trump and other states are joining in, it could weaken the suggestion the Texas case is unique.

The GOP "used to be a party for states' rights," Ginsberg said. "I can't imagine something that is less faithful to the principle of states' rights than a Texas attorney general trying to tell other states how to run their elections."

Sen. John Cornyn, the senior Texas Republican, told CNN that "I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it. Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say-so on how other states administer their elections?

"Using the Covid-19 pandemic as a justification," Paxton wrote, officials in the battleground states "usurped their legislatures' authority and unconstitutionally revised their state's election statutes." He said they had done so through "executive fiat." He pointed specifically to mail-in ballots, which he said were placed "in drop boxes" with "little or no chain of custody," which weakened signature verification and witness requirements, which he called "the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote."

The court could act after those filings arrive or wait until Texas files a brief replying to the arguments made by the battleground states. The justices acted quickly in rejecting the Pennsylvania lawsuit on Tuesday, but they could bide their time as they have in other election-related cases.

The President's campaign has been represented by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and attorney Jenna Ellis. In the current motion, however, Trump is being represented by John Eastman.

Trump has also asked GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas -- the former solicitor general of the state -- to represent him at the Supreme Court in the unlikely event it hears oral arguments.

Biden could help control the virus, some say, by encouraging Americans to wear masks, but he could also mandate changes to make workplaces safer.

Many economists believe additional congressional spending is vital right now, but if that's not feasible, then it's worth considering what Biden could do autonomously.

"It is my belief that the new president — President Biden — within the first few weeks of becoming president can simply sign an executive order and eliminate, end, $50,000 of student debt from every student,"

the best way the president can directly stimulate the economy is by tackling the public health crisis and ensuring vaccines are deployed efficiently.

"The Trump administration stretched the bounds of what maybe almost anyone thought would be possible with multiple billions of dollars to payments to farmers [and] diversions of billions of dollars from defense budget to building the wall,"

The president also adopted a number of COVID-19 relief measures without Congress, issuing a moratorium on evictions and taking disaster money away from FEMA to pay for expanded temporary unemployment assistance.

Shierholz also questions how much some of these unilateral moves — such as canceling student loan debt, which might provide a "more equitable economy" in the long run — would actually tackle the immediate financial problems people are facing.

But the president can't dole out more money to state governments — Congress would need to allocate those funds.

"The thing he'll have to resort to is trying to lean on his nearly 50 years of experience in Washington," Shierholz said. "That is what it will come down to. Can President Biden convince [current Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell to move on some of that stuff because that is what it will take to get the stimulus that is needed."

when Senators John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, tried to advance the legislation setting up the Latino museum on the National Mall.

“My objection to the creation of a new Smithsonian museum or series of museums based on group identity — what Theodore Roosevelt called hyphenated Americanism — is not a matter of budgetary or legislative technicalities,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s a matter of national unity and cultural inclusion.”

“Surely in a year where we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, this is the time, this is the moment to finally pass the legislation unanimously recommended by an independent commission to establish an American women’s history museum in our nation’s capital,”

He argued that Latinos were just as entitled to their own cultural institution as African-Americans and Native Americans, to whom Smithsonian museums have been dedicated in recent years.

That concern, along with budgetary ones, has been one of the main points of opposition to a Latino museum in recent years amid extensive lobbying campaigns in its favor.

“The so-called critical theory undergirding this movement does not celebrate diversity; it weaponizes diversity,” he said. “It sharpens all those hyphens into so many knives and daggers. It has turned our college campuses into grievance pageants and loose Orwellian mobs to cancel anyone daring to express an original thought.”

Even if Congress approved the museums, it would likely take about another decade to open their doors.

The decision on the new target comes just in time for the United Nations climate summit this Saturday

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said it was “worth losing a night’s sleep” over the climate deal. “I don’t want to imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t been able to achieve such a result,”

the details and language in the agreement were kept vague after many hours of often tense negotiations, leaving it up to the commission to hammer out the specifics.

The overnight discussions on climate, which has been declared as one of the European Union’s top priorities, have been obstructed by the familiar divisions between the wealthier Western European countries pushing for more ambitious targets, and a handful of Eastern European states, led by Poland, that depend heavily on coal.

In a gesture toward Eastern European governments, the E.U. leaders decided the target has to be reached by the bloc collectively — effectively giving coal-dependent countries more time to transition their energy consumption.

Five years after the Paris climate accords first brought together rich and poor countries in a politically binding agreement pledging to stem the rise of global temperatures, the European Commission laid out plans in March for a climate law that would make the bloc carbon neutral by 2050.

some climate activists expressed skepticism at the time, saying that it lacked intermediate goals and key details as to how the target would be turned into reality.

“European leaders have agreed a new target, with new money, and an outline of what will be needed to deliver,”

In the climate talks, Poland and Hungary — along with the Czech Republic and other heavily coal-dependent nations — said it was unfair that they be held to the same standard as other nations whose economies already drew on a wider mix of energy sources.

“We have an agreement which on the one hand allows us to realize the E.U. target, and on the other creates conditions for a just transition of the Polish economy and the energy sector,”

While Biden promised to reverse Trump's most restrictive immigration policies, he did not include immigration among his four top priorities: the coronavirus pandemic, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change.

Biden is largely expected to go back to the priorities that were in place at the end of the Obama administration.

the Biden administration must be careful not to unwind Trump's restrictions too quickly before getting their own processing system in place — or they will risk a new surge at the border.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said Aguirre "crossed the line from dirty politics to commission of a violent crime and we are lucky no one was killed."

"His alleged investigation was backward from the start — first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened," Ogg said.

Claims of voter fraud during this year's election — by President Trump, Aguirre and others — have been debunked. Evidence that President-elect Joe Biden won the election hasn't stopped Trump and others from challenging the results in court — an effort that has also repeatedly failed. This week, the Electoral College made Biden's victory official.

Aguirre's scheme was reportedly part of a paid investigation by the Liberty Center group, whose CEO is Republican activist Steven Hotze. It was later discovered that Aguirre was paid $266,400 by the organization for this involvement.

Liberty Center for God and Country's Facebook page says the organization's goal "is to provide the bold and courageous leadership necessary to restore our nation to its Godly heritage by following the strategy that our pilgrim forefathers gave us."

hould be "tarred and feathered" for coronavirus lockdown measures in the state.

ould be "

state

tarred

he had raised more than $600,000 over a three-week period

That fundraising push, Hotze said, "prevented the Democrats from carrying out their massive election fraud scheme in Harris County, and prevented them from carrying Texas for Biden. Our efforts saved Texas."

Aguirre and two other unidentified companions with the Liberty Center watched the victim for four days prior to the Oct. 19 attack, according to police records. They were convinced that there were 750,000 fraudulent ballots in the man's vehicle and home.

Aguirre said the victim was using Hispanic children to sign the ballots because children's fingerprints wouldn't appear on any database, according to the affidavit. He also claimed Facebook's founder gave $9.37 billion for "ballot harvesting."

The victim was driving his box truck during the early morning hours of Oct. 19, when he noticed a black SUV pull into his lane, almost hitting him. A few seconds later, the driver of the SUV later identified as Aguirre, allegedly slammed into the back of the man's vehicle. When the victim pulled over and got out to check on Aguirre, the former police officer allegedly pointed a gun at the victim and demanded he get on the ground.

While Aguirre had his knee into the man's back, according to the affidavit, he ordered two other people arrived on the scene to search the victim's truck. One of them then drove the truck as Aguirre kept the man pinned to the ground. The truck was found abandoned a few blocks away about 30 minutes after the incident. When police searched the victim's truck, only air-conditioner parts and tools were found. No ballots were discovered in the truck or in the man's home. Aguirre was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Ex-Houston Police Officer

An ex-captain in the Houston Police Department was arrested Tuesday for allegedly running a man off the road and assaulting him in an attempt to prove a bizarre voter-fraud conspiracy pushed by a right-wing organization.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

In an America demographically reeling from immigration upheaval and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early twentieth century. Elitists, utopians and so-called "progressives" fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world.

They reinvented Galton's eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: populate the earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic and biological kind--and less or none of everyone else.

How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior--the so-called "unfit."

Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point eight was euthanasia.

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a "lethal chamber" or public locally operated gas chambers.

Applied Eugenics also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."

Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own.

One institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to forty percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln.

Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.

Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. While Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."

In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe upon returning from Germany ebulliently bragged to a key colleague, "You will be interested to know, that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought.…I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."

More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's eugenic institutions. By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in 21st-Century money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, later to become the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry

Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's eugenic complex of institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the Institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The Institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the Institute, once again, was Hitler's medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin's organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.

Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society declared of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing around…the Germans were calling a spade a spade."

Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found them, he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent the paperwork back to Verschuer's institute for evaluation. Often, cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to Berlin's eugenic institutes.

In the fall of 1950, the University of Münster offered Verschuer a position at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. In the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian Society of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the Japanese Society for Human Genetics.

Human genetics' genocidal roots in eugenics were ignored by a victorious generation that refused to link itself to the crimes of Nazism and by succeeding generations that never knew the truth of the years leading up to war. Now governors of five states, including California have issued public apologies to their citizens, past and present, for sterilization and other abuses spawned by the eugenics movement.

The talks are continuing, though Pelosi and McConnell say they are committed to completing a bill before the end of the year. Leaders plan to attach the coronavirus measure to an omnibus spending bill. Doing so may require them to pass an additional short-term funding stopgap to allow committees to write legislative language for the COVID-19 provisions. The federal government is scheduled to run out of money on Dec. 18 so a temporary bill would avoid any brief shutdown as both chambers process the package.

The proposal is expected to include more money for the Paycheck Protection Program and for vaccine distribution.

But he noted that the package was a "down payment" and that Congress would need to pass another bill in the early part of 2021.

Instead, a bipartisan group of more moderate lawmakers from both parties launched their own working group to craft a workable agreement. Groups like these frequently emerge, but it is rare that leaders fully embrace their proposals.

The biggest change to the legislation produced by the bipartisan group is the addition of a new round of stimulus checks. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., have demanded that checks be included in the package and have considered blocking any legislation that does not include the funds.

All or nothing, nothing or all.

it was not hard to discern what was happening: Reports of Trump supporters refusing to wear masks in big-box stores or indoor campaign events seemed to make liberals more inclined to wear masks even when outdoors with few people around; seeing mask wearing turned into a political statement, more partisan talisman than necessary tool, in turn made many conservatives less likely to mask up indoors when the circumstances justified it.

It might be tempting to chalk up the uniformity of Germans’ behavior to their penchant for rule-following

No, it seems to me that the likelier explanation for the less polarized approach to virus mitigation behavior is that Germany is, well, much less polarized. Politics are so consensus-driven here that for the past eight years Germany has had a governing coalition consisting of the two largest parties.

The difference between the share of Germans on the ideological right and left who thought there should have been fewer restrictions on public activity was 20 percentage points, a Pew survey found early this summer. In the United States, the difference between right and left on that question was a whopping 45 points, by far the largest gap of any country surveyed

The overall effect is of an environment set at a lower temperature, far closer to normalcy, where the public space is not forever on the verge of flaring into a divisive battleground of signaling, judgments and resistance.

Mr. Scholz invoked the unity and sense of purpose that Germany had demonstrated during the pandemic as his model for bringing the country together to confront other challenges, such as climate change. “We saw in this corona crisis that we can hold together, that solidarity is possible in this country,” he said.

the right to abortion cannot be a constitutional right because states restricted abortion in 1868 at the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment. Mississippi argues that the public in 1868 would have understood the 14th Amendment to permit state restrictions on abortion to continue.

This is not a new argument—it formed the basis of then-Justice William Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe and was made repeatedly by Justice Antonin Scalia over the course of his career on the bench, including in his dissent in Casey

Chief Justice John Roberts recognized in his confirmation testimony, it is “completely circular,” using state practice to interpret the constraints the 14th Amendment was written to impose on the states.

the text and history of the 14th Amendment provide no support for the idea that the courts should look to state practice in 1868 to define the scope of the amendment’s protections.

For good reason, state practice in 1868 has never been a measure of what fundamental, personal rights are guaranteed against state infringement by the 14th Amendment. This is illustrated not only by Roe and Casey—which explicitly rejected the idea that the state practice in 1868 fixes the fundamental rights for all future generations—but also by many other landmark Supreme Court rulings vindicating the 14th Amendment’s promise of liberty for all.

In 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court struck down a restriction on the use of birth control dating back to 1879, holding that it infringed on the right of a married couple to choose whether to start a family and bear children.

In 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment protected a right to sexual intimacy by LGBTQ adults, despite a very long history of laws that prohibited same-sex intimacy and sexual conduct. In Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, the Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment guaranteed the right to marry a loved one of the same sex, even though marriage had historically been limited to a union of a man and a woman. Both decisions drew on Loving to safeguard bedrock rights to love, marry, and form a family, ensuring equal dignity to LGBTQ persons.

If the fundamental rights protected by the 14th Amendment are determined by looking to state practice in 1868—as Mississippi and its allies urge—Loving’s holding protecting the right to marry as a fundamental right would be in doubt, as would many other landmark precedents, including Lawrence and Obergefell.

It explicitly rejects Loving’s reasoning, arguing that the Supreme Court was wrong to recognize a fundamental right to marry in that case. It claims that Lawrence and Obergefell are “lawless” rulings and urges the Supreme Court in Dobbs to leave “those decisions hanging by a thread.”

But opponents of the law — including some Republicans who have supported abortion rights — argue that it would go far beyond the landmark court precedent, stripping states of much of their ability to regulate abortion and impose measures intended to make the procedure safe. They say it would lead to many more abortions in the late stages of pregnancy.

“This legislation is really about a mandate by the federal government that would demand abortion on demand, without any consideration for anyone, including the conscience of the provider,” said Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington and a chief foe of the bill.

in parts of sub-Saharan Africa children contract malaria six times a year on average. Each year more than 260,000 African children die of it before their fifth birthdays.

Those who survive often suffer lifelong harm, including stunting, a form of impaired growth that affects the ability to learn.

the WHO says that the vaccine was found to be safe after more than 2.3m doses had been administered—clearing the air on three “safety signals” that had popped up in an earlier trial.

new law will help combat gender stereotypes

opponents see this as government overreach

But should it be government’s role to tell businesses how to display such merchandise?

the new toys law shows that California is intent on managing “minute” issues “down to a level I never thought it would go, in regards to state-level involvement”.

Mr Newsom also signed a new law requiring public universities and schools to offer menstrual supplies on campus.

it may come as no surprise that politicians are using their power to advance issues their party cares about, such as gender equality

mostly symbolic

California is becoming more involved in businesses’ and people’s daily lives

As the state pushes forward with its efforts to combat climate change, “there is probably no dimension of life that will be untouched by California’s decarbonisation agenda”

signed a law banning the sale of new gas-powered leaf-blowers and lawnmowers

signed an executive order banning the sale of gas-powered cars from 2035

Some cities are even talking about banning the use of natural gas in new homes and businesses, a measure which would, in effect, bar gas stoves.

“advance a cultural agenda”,

He draws a connection between the toys law and red-state governors, including Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida, who are forbidding companies to require employees to wear masks and get vaccinated

Texas and Florida are interfering with the freedom of businesses to decide their own policies.

According to Mr Cain of Stanford, “It’s not like one party is for freedom and the other isn’t. Both parties are for different forms of intrusion.”

Again and again, the Facebook Papers show staffers sounding alarms about the dangers posed by the platform—how Facebook amplifies extremism and misinformation, how it incites violence, how it encourages radicalization and political polarization. Again and again, staffers reckon with the ways in which Facebook’s decisions stoke these harms, and they plead with leadership to do more.

And again and again, staffers say, Facebook’s leaders ignore them.

Facebook has dismissed the concerns of its employees in manifold ways.

One of its cleverer tactics is to argue that staffers who have raised the alarm about the damage done by their employer are simply enjoying Facebook’s “very open culture,” in which people are encouraged to share their opinions, a spokesperson told me. This stance allows Facebook to claim transparency while ignoring the substance of the complaints, and the implication of the complaints: that many of Facebook’s employees believe their company operates without a moral compass.

When you stitch together the stories that spanned the period between Joe Biden’s election and his inauguration, it’s easy to see Facebook as instrumental to the attack on January 6. (A spokesperson told me that the notion that Facebook played an instrumental role in the insurrection is “absurd.”)

what emerges from a close reading of Facebook documents, and observation of the manner in which the company connects large groups of people quickly, is that Facebook isn’t a passive tool but a catalyst. Had the organizers tried to plan the rally using other technologies of earlier eras, such as telephones, they would have had to identify and reach out individually to each prospective participant, then persuade them to travel to Washington. Facebook made people’s efforts at coordination highly visible on a global scale.

The platform not only helped them recruit participants but offered people a sense of strength in numbers. Facebook proved to be the perfect hype machine for the coup-inclined.

In November 2019, Facebook staffers noticed they had a serious problem. Facebook offers a collection of one-tap emoji reactions. Today, they include “like,” “love,” “care,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry.” Company researchers had found that the posts dominated by “angry” reactions were substantially more likely to go against community standards, including prohibitions on various types of misinformation, according to internal documents.

In July 2020, researchers presented the findings of a series of experiments. At the time, Facebook was already weighting the reactions other than “like” more heavily in its algorithm—meaning posts that got an “angry” reaction were more likely to show up in users’ News Feeds than posts that simply got a “like.” Anger-inducing content didn’t spread just because people were more likely to share things that made them angry; the algorithm gave anger-inducing content an edge. Facebook’s Integrity workers—employees tasked with tackling problems such as misinformation and espionage on the platform—concluded that they had good reason to believe targeting posts that induced anger would help stop the spread of harmful content.

By dialing anger’s weight back to zero in the algorithm, the researchers found, they could keep posts to which people reacted angrily from being viewed by as many users. That, in turn, translated to a significant (up to 5 percent) reduction in the hate speech, civic misinformation, bullying, and violent posts—all of which are correlated with offline violence—to which users were exposed.

Facebook rolled out the change in early September 2020, documents show; a Facebook spokesperson confirmed that the change has remained in effect. It was a real victory for employees of the Integrity team.

But it doesn’t normally work out that way. In April 2020, according to Frances Haugen’s filings with the SEC, Facebook employees had recommended tweaking the algorithm so that the News Feed would deprioritize the surfacing of content for people based on their Facebook friends’ behavior. The idea was that a person’s News Feed should be shaped more by people and groups that a person had chosen to follow. Up until that point, if your Facebook friend saw a conspiracy theory and reacted to it, Facebook’s algorithm might show it to you, too. The algorithm treated any engagement in your network as a signal that something was worth sharing. But now Facebook workers wanted to build circuit breakers to slow this form of sharing.

Experiments showed that this change would impede the distribution of hateful, polarizing, and violence-inciting content in people’s News Feeds. But Zuckerberg “rejected this intervention that could have reduced the risk of violence in the 2020 election,” Haugen’s SEC filing says. An internal message characterizing Zuckerberg’s reasoning says he wanted to avoid new features that would get in the way of “meaningful social interactions.” But according to Facebook’s definition, its employees say, engagement is considered “meaningful” even when it entails bullying, hate speech, and reshares of harmful content.

This episode, like Facebook’s response to the incitement that proliferated between the election and January 6, reflects a fundamental problem with the platform

Facebook’s megascale allows the company to influence the speech and thought patterns of billions of people. What the world is seeing now, through the window provided by reams of internal documents, is that Facebook catalogs and studies the harm it inflicts on people. And then it keeps harming people anyway.

“I am worried that Mark’s continuing pattern of answering a different question than the question that was asked is a symptom of some larger problem,” wrote one Facebook employee in an internal post in June 2020, referring to Zuckerberg. “I sincerely hope that I am wrong, and I’m still hopeful for progress. But I also fully understand my colleagues who have given up on this company, and I can’t blame them for leaving. Facebook is not neutral, and working here isn’t either.”

It is quite a thing to see, the sheer number of Facebook employees—people who presumably understand their company as well as or better than outside observers—who believe their employer to be morally bankrupt.

I spoke with several former Facebook employees who described the company’s metrics-driven culture as extreme, even by Silicon Valley standards

Facebook workers are under tremendous pressure to quantitatively demonstrate their individual contributions to the company’s growth goals, they told me. New products and features aren’t approved unless the staffers pitching them demonstrate how they will drive engagement.

e worries have been exacerbated lately by fears about a decline in new posts on Facebook, two former employees who left the company in recent years told me. People are posting new material less frequently to Facebook, and its users are on average older than those of other social platforms.

One of Facebook’s Integrity staffers wrote at length about this dynamic in a goodbye note to colleagues in August 2020, describing how risks to Facebook users “fester” because of the “asymmetrical” burden placed on employees to “demonstrate legitimacy and user value” before launching any harm-mitigation tactics—a burden not shared by those developing new features or algorithm changes with growth and engagement in mind

The note said:We were willing to act only after things had spiraled into a dire state … Personally, during the time that we hesitated, I’ve seen folks from my hometown go further and further down the rabbithole of QAnon and Covid anti-mask/anti-vax conspiracy on FB. It has been painful to observe.

Current and former Facebook employees describe the same fundamentally broken culture—one in which effective tactics for making Facebook safer are rolled back by leadership or never approved in the first place.

That broken culture has produced a broken platform: an algorithmic ecosystem in which users are pushed toward ever more extreme content, and where Facebook knowingly exposes its users to conspiracy theories, disinformation, and incitement to violence.

One example is a program that amounts to a whitelist for VIPs on Facebook, allowing some of the users most likely to spread misinformation to break Facebook’s rules without facing consequences. Under the program, internal documents show, millions of high-profile users—including politicians—are left alone by Facebook even when they incite violence

whitelisting influential users with massive followings on Facebook isn’t just a secret and uneven application of Facebook’s rules; it amounts to “protecting content that is especially likely to deceive, and hence to harm, people on our platforms.”

Facebook workers tried and failed to end the program. Only when its existence was reported in September by The Wall Street Journal did Facebook’s Oversight Board ask leadership for more information about the practice. Last week, the board publicly rebuked Facebook for not being “fully forthcoming” about the program.

As a result, Facebook has stoked an algorithm arms race within its ranks, pitting core product-and-engineering teams, such as the News Feed team, against their colleagues on Integrity teams, who are tasked with mitigating harm on the platform. These teams establish goals that are often in direct conflict with each other.

“We can’t pretend we don’t see information consumption patterns, and how deeply problematic they are for the longevity of democratic discourse,” a user-experience researcher wrote in an internal comment thread in 2019, in response to a now-infamous memo from Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a longtime Facebook executive. “There is no neutral position at this stage, it would be powerfully immoral to commit to amorality.”

Zuckerberg has defined Facebook’s mission as making “social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us,” but in internal research documents his employees point out that communities aren’t always good for society:

When part of a community, individuals typically act in a prosocial manner. They conform, they forge alliances, they cooperate, they organize, they display loyalty, they expect obedience, they share information, they influence others, and so on. Being in a group changes their behavior, their abilities, and, importantly, their capability to harm themselves or others

Thus, when people come together and form communities around harmful topics or identities, the potential for harm can be greater.

The infrastructure choices that Facebook is making to keep its platform relevant are driving down the quality of the site, and exposing its users to more dangers

hose dangers are also unevenly distributed, because of the manner in which certain subpopulations are algorithmically ushered toward like-minded groups

And the subpopulations of Facebook users who are most exposed to dangerous content are also most likely to be in groups where it won’t get reported.

And it knows that 3 percent of Facebook users in the United States are super-consumers of conspiracy theories, accounting for 37 percent of known consumption of misinformation on the platform.

Zuckerberg’s positioning of Facebook’s role in the insurrection is odd. He lumps his company in with traditional media organizations—something he’s ordinarily loath to do, lest the platform be expected to take more responsibility for the quality of the content that appears on it—and suggests that Facebook did more, and did better, than journalism outlets in its response to January 6. What he fails to say is that journalism outlets would never be in the position to help investigators this way, because insurrectionists don’t typically use newspapers and magazines to recruit people for coups.

Facebook wants people to believe that the public must choose between Facebook as it is, on the one hand, and free speech, on the other. This is a false choice. Facebook has a sophisticated understanding of measures it could take to make its platform safer without resorting to broad or ideologically driven censorship tactics.

Facebook knows that no two people see the same version of the platform, and that certain subpopulations experience far more dangerous versions than others do

Facebook knows that people who are isolated—recently widowed or divorced, say, or geographically distant from loved ones—are disproportionately at risk of being exposed to harmful content on the platform.

It knows that repeat offenders are disproportionately responsible for spreading misinformation.

All of this makes the platform rely more heavily on ways it can manipulate what its users see in order to reach its goals. This explains why Facebook is so dependent on the infrastructure of groups, as well as making reshares highly visible, to keep people hooked.

It could consistently enforce its policies regardless of a user’s political power.

Facebook could ban reshares.

It could choose to optimize its platform for safety and quality rather than for growth.

It could tweak its algorithm to prevent widespread distribution of harmful content.

Facebook could create a transparent dashboard so that all of its users can see what’s going viral in real time.

It could make public its rules for how frequently groups can post and how quickly they can grow.

It could also automatically throttle groups when they’re growing too fast, and cap the rate of virality for content that’s spreading too quickly.

Facebook could shift the burden of proof toward people and communities to demonstrate that they’re good actors—and treat reach as a privilege, not a right

You must be vigilant about the informational streams you swim in, deliberate about how you spend your precious attention, unforgiving of those who weaponize your emotions and cognition for their own profit, and deeply untrusting of any scenario in which you’re surrounded by a mob of people who agree with everything you’re saying.

It could do all of these things. But it doesn’t.

Lately, people have been debating just how nefarious Facebook really is. One argument goes something like this: Facebook’s algorithms aren’t magic, its ad targeting isn’t even that good, and most people aren’t that stupid.

All of this may be true, but that shouldn’t be reassuring. An algorithm may just be a big dumb means to an end, a clunky way of maneuvering a massive, dynamic network toward a desired outcome. But Facebook’s enormous size gives it tremendous, unstable power.

Facebook takes whole populations of people, pushes them toward radicalism, and then steers the radicalized toward one another.

When the most powerful company in the world possesses an instrument for manipulating billions of people—an instrument that only it can control, and that its own employees say is badly broken and dangerous—we should take notice.

The lesson for individuals is this:

Facebook could say that its platform is not for everyone. It could sound an alarm for those who wander into the most dangerous corners of Facebook, and those who encounter disproportionately high levels of harmful content

Without seeing how Facebook works at a finer resolution, in real time, we won’t be able to understand how to make the social web compatible with democracy.

Within weeks of those remarks, cases spiked, I.C.U.s overflowed, and we were reminded yet again of Covid’s power to outwit us.

Dr. Mokdad can literally map how our desire to prematurely claim victory, rather than accept the virus’s continuance, has led us to throw off restrictions, with deadly effect

“We all want it to be over. But contingency planning for long-term response is absolutely essential.”

If we think Covid-19 is going away, then we will drop our guard and not make essential investments now.

we need to organize effectively for the very long haul, dramatically improve our pandemic response and embed safeguards into our everyday lives.

Masks, which so many Americans abandoned when it seemed the end of the pandemic was in sight, could still make a difference: If 95 percent of Americans wore a mask, his model projects roughly 56,000 fewer deaths by Feb. 1.

An escape variant

is not a certainty, said the experts with whom I spoke. But it is not far-fetched, either, in part because of our slow pace at vaccinating the world.

That mind-set is not only a crucial hedge against complacency, in which we settle for the good-enough defenses we have now. It could drive us to capitalize on the extraordinary scientific progress of the past year.

As we come to terms with Covid forever, what might our daily lives look like?

Will we have to pare back our holiday party guest lists for years to come? Will home testing before any social gathering become de rigueur? Will vending machines in every subway station carry cheap KN95 masks?

“We would expect that the transmission will never go to zero,” Dr. Mokdad told me. “The virus is going to be with us for a long time” — meaning that deaths, and efforts to prevent them, could continue for years.

the biggest shift in our new normal could be a growing societal embrace of protective measures, rather than a continued war over school mask wearing or workplace vaccine mandates.

Samuelson did write a best-selling textbook that brought Keynesian economics — the idea that changes in government spending and taxes can be used to manage the economy — to American college classrooms. And his concept of the “neoclassical synthesis” — markets can work, but only with government-created guardrails — in effect provided the intellectual justification for the postwar economy. But it’s clear that for him politics was never more than a peripheral concern.

Still, most economists continued to believe that a more flexible form of monetary policy could keep things under control — that the Federal Reserve could manage the economy without bringing Congress into the act

his magnum opus, “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960” (with Anna Schwartz), while a magisterial work of scholarship, clearly had a major political ax to grind. For its big takeaway was the claim that the Great Depression wouldn’t have happened if the Federal Reserve Board had done its job and stabilized the money supply. That is, simple technocratic measures would have been sufficient — no need for all that Keynesian stuff.

The influence of Friedman’s monetary ideas peaked around 1980, then went into steep decline. Both the United States and Britain tried to implement Friedman’s belief that the authorities could stabilize the economy by ensuring steady, slow growth in the money supply; both efforts failed dismally

Friedman was no mere propagandist: He was a brilliant analytical economist capable of doing pathbreaking academic work when he set his mind to it. His work on monetary policy, in particular, persuaded many economists who disagreed with him about almost everything else.

But a number of economists had looked closely at Friedman’s arguments about the Great Depression, and found them wanting. And the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis vindicated the doubters. Ben Bernanke, the Fed chair and a huge Friedman admirer, did everything Friedman and Schwartz said the Fed should have done in the 1930s — and it wasn’t enough. Soon Bernanke was pleading for help from fiscal policy — that is, pleading for Keynesianism to come to the rescue.

What about Friedman’s broader faith in free markets? Libertarian policies reached a high-water mark in the 1990s, as industries from power generation to banking were deregulated. But all too many of these deregulatory ventures ended in grief, with incidents like the California power crisis of 2000-1 and, yes, the banking crisis of 2008.

And where are we now? If you look at the Biden administration’s proposals

they sound a lot like what Paul Samuelson was saying decades ago.

So by all means you should read Wapshott’s history of the disputes that roiled economics over much of the second half of the 20th century

you should also ask a question I don’t think the book answers: Was all of this just a grand, ideologically driven detour away from sensible economic theory and policy? And why did that happen?

He entered politics to advocate for traditional or socially conservative beliefs. “He glowed with certain passions—outlawing abortion, preserving family values, fighting bureaucrats on behalf of the little guy—that could not be championed in the stables,” Alberta writes. McBroom stated his position on gun ownership in 2012: “The Second Amendment guarantees our rights to own firearms[,] and I stand strongly for that correct interpretation.”

The American Conservative Union gave McBroom the best marks of any Michigan state senator—voting in line with the organization’s position 95 percent of the time—in 2019, the most recent year of data. By the old rules of political communication, no one is more qualified to be a “credible messenger” to the right-of-center voters of the U.P. than Ed McBroom.

last month, McBroom and three of his senate colleagues—two of them Republicans, only one a Democrat—released their report, and it “crackled with annoyance at certain far-flung beliefs,” writes Alberta:

His committee interviewed scores of witnesses, subpoenaed and reviewed

thousands of pages of documents, dissected the procedural mechanics of Michigan’s highly decentralized elections system, and scrutinized the most trafficked claims about corruption at the state’s ballot box in November. McBroom’s conclusion hit Lansing like a meteor: It was all a bunch of nonsense. “Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan,” McBroom wrote in the report. “There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.” For good measure, McBroom added: “The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”

“McBroom said he is not fazed by the criticism or the prospect of a primary challenge, which he was already expecting,” notes the Michigan Bridge. “I’ve been totally honest and up front, and if (voters) judge that’s not what they want, and if the majority of them want a different course of action, that’s okay,” he told that publication.

Yet despite three of the four senators who wrote the election report being Republicans; and despite McBroom’s ideological reputation, the product of a decade in Michigan’s state legislature (he was a state rep from 2010 to 2018), and the familiarity of the McBroom family name, and McBroom’s culturally Christian values—despite all that, his political standing is still taking a hit.

Trump trashed McBroom and the state senate president, Republican Mike Shirkey. He published their office phone numbers. He urged people to “vote them the hell out of office.”

more to the point about credible messengers is this: McBroom said that he’s felt heat from people he knows—allies of his—not just randos on social media. “It’s been very discouraging, and very sad, to have people I know who have supported me, and always said they respected me and found me to be honest, who suddenly don’t trust me because of what some guy told them on the internet,” he told Alberta.

So thorough were the authors’ conclusions that they recommended “the [state] attorney general consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County,” where an obvious and brief reporting error showed Biden thumping Trump, “to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”

What McBroom clarified is this:

Trump’s base is the animating force of the Republican party, which holds GOP officials accountable mostly for their accountability to Trump. To this group, there is no such thing as a credible critic of the former president.

the unanswered question that confronts coalition-builders today is how to reach a movement for which all reasoning is motivated reasoning; for which facts and proof are subjective