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The political action committee, called Win It Back, has close ties to the influential fiscally conservative group Club for Growth. It has already spent more than $4 million trying to lower Mr. Trump’s support among Republican voters in Iowa and nearly $2 million more trying to damage him in South Carolina

But in the memo — dated Thursday and obtained by The New York Times — the head of Win It Back PAC, David McIntosh, acknowledges to donors that after extensive testing of more than 40 anti-Trump television ads, “all attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective.”

“Even when you show video to Republican primary voters — with complete context — of President Trump saying something otherwise objectionable to primary voters, they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it,” Mr. McIntosh states in the “key learnings” section of the memo.

Migration could be “a dissolving force for the European Union” due to deep cultural differences between European countries and their long-term inability to reach a common policy, the EU’s most senior diplomat has said.

Borrell said nationalism was on the rise in Europe but this was more about migration than Euroscepticism. “Brexit actually was feared to be an epidemic. And it has not been,” he said. “It has been a vaccine. No one wants to follow the British leaving the European Union.

He attributed this to deep cultural and political differences inside the EU: “There are some members of the European Union that are Japanese-style – we don’t want to mix. We don’t want migrants. We don’t want to accept people from outside. We want our purity.”

“People who are vaccinated and relatively healthy who are getting COVID are not getting that sick,” Lisa Lee, an epidemiologist at Virginia Tech, told me. “And so people are thinking, Wow, I’ve had COVID. It wasn’t that bad. I don’t really care anymore.”

Still, there are many reasons to continue caring about COVID. About 300 people are still dying every day; COVID is on track to be the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. for the third year running. The prospect of developing long COVID is real and terrifying, as are mounting concerns about reinfections.

ow more than ever, we must remember that COVID is not just a personal threat but a community one.

Long dismissed as wacky and harmless gadflies, the group, called the Reichsbürger, or Citizens of the Reich, which does not recognize the modern German state, has seen its ranks grow by 2,000 to some 21,000 members since the first Covid-19 lockdowns, government estimates show.

Among those arrested this week were a judge, a doctor, a classical tenor and a former police officer, officials said, as a disturbing picture emerged on Thursday of a group that had expanded its appeal well beyond its roots on the political fringe.

At least 15 had strong links to the military, including several former or current soldiers and two reservists with access to weapons, putting the German authorities on high aler

The tragedy of Ian ought to help more Floridians understand the consequences of environmental destruction, perfunctory planning, and climate denial.

our politics might be less disastrous if more people understood why it still feels like paradise.

For too long, too much of the Florida economy has been an ecological Ponzi scheme that depends on bringing in 1,000 new residents a day, including the mortgage brokers and drywall installers and landscapers whose livelihoods depend on bringing 1,000 more new residents the next day. There’s no culture of long-term planning or investing, no ethic of limits or responsibility or risk management. Florida has always been about now, mine, more.

By keeping evidence that seemed to provide ammunition to proponents of a lab leak theory under wraps and resisting disclosure, U.S. officials have contributed to making the topic of the pandemic’s origins more poisoned and open to manipulation by bad-faith actors.

Treating crucial information like a dark secret empowers those who viciously and unfairly accuse public health officials and scientists of profiting off the pandemic. As Megan K. Stack wrote in Times Opinion this spring, “Those who seek to suppress disinformation may be destined, themselves, to sow it.”

According to an Economist/YouGov poll published in March, 66 percent of Americans — including majorities of Democrats and independents — believe the pandemic was caused by research activities, a number that has gone up since 2020

An estimated 100 million Americans have medical debts. Their bills make up about half of all outstanding debt in the country.

About 20 percent of hospitals nationwide have debt-collection policies that allow them to cancel care, according to an investigation last year by KFF Health News. Many of those are nonprofits. The government does not track how often hospitals withhold care

Under federal law, hospitals are required to treat everyone who comes to the emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. But the law — called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — is silent on how health systems should treat patients who need other kinds of lifesaving care, like those with aggressive cancers or diabetes.

Wildlife, intensively fed and bred livestock, and humans to all intents and purposes, now constitute a common planetary reservoir of perpetually evolving and mutating micro-organisms, some of them baleful. The Global Virome Project, established, as its name suggests, to coordinate worldwide research, estimates that there are 1.6m potential zoonotic viruses in the world with just 1% of them currently identified and analysed.

All this is happening at ever briefer intervals. Demography remakes geography, transforming – right now, and not for the better – the future of life on Earth.

y the end of 2021, up to 18 million people had died, worldwide, from Covid-19 infection, according to some estimates. You would suppose that in the face of a pandemic – an outbreak that by definition is global – together with a recognition of shared vulnerability, governments and politicians might have set aside the usual mutual suspicions and, under the aegis of the WHO, agreed on common approaches to containment, vaccination and control

With black-and-white, yes-or-no thinking, “we do ourselves a disservice,” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University, told me. Binary communication “has been one of the biggest failures of how we’ve managed the pandemic,

Here, then, are five of the most memorable numerical shorthands we’ve cooked up for COVID,

It’s long past time that we forget them all.

I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side

I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

One idea that I often encounter in the world of economic discussion, and which annoys me greatly, is that nations get rich by looting other nations.

This idea is a pillar of “third world” socialism and “decolonial” thinking, but it also exists on the political Right. This is, in a sense, a very natural thing to believe — imperialism is a very real feature of world history, and natural resources sometimes do get looted. So this isn’t a straw man; it’s a common misconception that needs debunkin

it’s important to debunk it, because only when we understand how nations actually do get rich can we Americans make sure we take the necessary steps to make sure our nation stays rich.

Decrying what he saw as the liberal bias of ChatGPT, Elon Musk earlier this year announced plans to create an artificial intelligence chatbot of his own. In contrast to AI tools built by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google, which are trained to tread lightly around controversial topics, Musk’s would be edgy, unfiltered and anti-“woke,” meaning it wouldn’t hesitate to give politically incorrect responses.

Musk is fielding complaints from the political right that the chatbot gives liberal responses to questions about diversity programs, transgender rights and inequality.

“I’ve been using Grok as well as ChatGPT a lot as research assistants,” posted Jordan Peterson, the socially conservative psychologist and YouTube personality, Wednesday. The former is “near as woke as the latter,” he said.

In emails to workers at SpaceX and Tesla, Mr. Musk said they were required to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week in the office.

“The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence,” Mr. Musk said. “That is why I spent so much time in the factory — so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, SpaceX would long ago have gone bankrupt.”

The issue has become more fraught as coronavirus vaccinations have increased and an abatement of the pandemic seemed to be near. Some companies began saying they expected workers to return to the office. Still, plans have continued to fluctuate. Apple last month suspended its requirement that employees return to the office in May for at least three days a week because of a resurgence of Covid-19 cases. Airbnb recently told its employees that they never had to return to the office.

But those plans, experts say, may be just that – plans and proposals, many of which need unlikely approval by an uncooperative Congress or are subject to the whims of hostile foreign leaders, unpredictable markets or other forces beyond any president's control.

"Did you anticipate that the closure of the Abbott facility, because it was not producing the quality that was necessary, that it would have this profound effect immediately, or did it take a little time?" Biden asked. The question appeared directed at criticisms that the administration did not work better, earlier, to head off shortages when Abbott was forced to recall contaminated formula.The public relations effort, however, may not be enough to boost Biden's low approval ratings in time to help Democrats in a challenging midterm election season this fall. And in many cases, Biden's ability to fix the problems bedeviling the administration is limited.

On COVID-19, Biden has indeed ramped up testing and vaccinations during his term, Perry says. But he can't fight Mother Nature and human nature, she adds, noting that public impatience with masking and the virus's mutations aren't things he can control.On Ukraine, Biden has repeatedly noted his success in strengthening the NATO alliance. But "has he ended the war? No. That's something a president can't do," Perry adds. Aside from the threat of the war itself, the ongoing Russian invasion means higher gas prices as well, since the U.S. and its allies have imposed embargoes on Russian energy.

Coronavirus infections surged in South Africa in recent months despite research suggesting that about 98 percent of the population had some antibodies from vaccination, previous infection, or both.

But though the vast majority of the South African population had antibodies against the virus, many still became infected in the latest virus wave, which began in April and was driven by BA.4 and BA.5, new subvariants of Omicron.

New daily deaths also rose

The complaint also cites internal records about the platform’s Climate Science Information Center, a much-touted hub designed to connect people with authoritative climate information. Awareness of the webpage was “very low,” even for people who had visited it.

“Climate change knowledge is generally poor,” one of the internal reports from 2021 said. “Given how many people use Facebook for information about climate change … climate science myths are a problem across all surveyed markets.”

The filings argue that it’s particularly urgent that Facebook tackle climate change misinformation, in part because of the popularity of the site. An internal company document cited in the complaint says Facebook is the second-most common source for news related to climate change, behind only television news and ahead of news aggregators, movies, online climate news sources and other social media platforms.

It is men and women like Bildt, who believe that the international order is secured by pen and ink, who have been living in a fantasy land. They have spent a generation inviting catastrophe into their sitting rooms.

They watched Putin jail and destroy Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia.They watched Putin assassinate dissidents on the ground in NATO countries.They watched Putin’s army commit war crimes in Chechnya.They watched his 2007 Munich speech in which he literally said, out loud, that he wanted to roll back the Westernization of Eastern Europe and restore Russia’s dominance.They watched the invasions of Georgia and then Ukraine.

In response these same men and women decommissioned nuclear power plants in Europe and built gas pipelines to Russia so that they could have good feelings about “environmentalism” while also pocketing economic windfalls.They crossed their fingers and closed their eyes.You tell me who “lost contact with reality.”