Today's Liberal News

The Pandemic Is Heading Toward a Strange In-Between Time

Is the United States past the worst of the pandemic? Cases and hospitalizations have fallen in most states in the past few days, and vaccination news has brightened. Johnson & Johnson published trial data showing that its one-dose vaccine is safe and effective, and the Biden administration has bought 200 million additional vaccine doses from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, which already have approved vaccines.

Joe Biden’s Challenge Was Barack Obama’s Victory

When Myanmar was summoned to The Hague last year to face allegations that its armed forces had carried out a genocide against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, no military officers attended. Instead, it was the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi lamenting that the horrific reports and photos seen by the world were “an incomplete and misleading factual picture of the situation.” Domestically, her speech was viewed as a defense of her country.

The Deadliest Month Yet

On January 21, 2020, the United States confirmed its first case of COVID-19. One year later, the country is still breaking grim records: January 2021 was the deadliest month of the pandemic yet, claiming more than 95,000 Americans, about one-fifth of the 433,751 deaths recorded to date, according to The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project.The U.S. hit this mark even as the pandemic seems to be letting up, at least for now.

How Sophie Showed the Humanity of Electronic Music

Electronic music is old—1800s-old, earlier-than-Elvis old, old-enough-to-forget-it-needed-to-be-invented old. But it still sports the halo of newness because it still offers the possibility of creating tomorrow. In 1910, the Manifesto of Futurist Musicians laid out the idealistic (though fascism-linked) hope of early machine musicians: “The liberation of individual musical sensibility from all imitation or influence of the past.

Alexei Navalny Faces “Kafkaesque” Charges in Russia for Breaking Parole While in Poison-Induced Coma

Russian authorities have arrested thousands of people during anti-government protests in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been held in jail since returning to Russia on January 17 after recovering in Germany from an attempt on his life in August using the nerve agent Novichok. Navalny has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of being behind the poisoning that nearly killed him.

Russia’s Sputnik V Is Found to Be 91.6% Effective, Providing Boost for Global Vaccination Effort

Russia has been one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, recording about 73,000 deaths and over 3.8 million infections over the past year. Meanwhile, there is widespread skepticism over the domestically developed Sputnik V vaccine, with many Russians reluctant to get the shot. Now a peer-reviewed study published in the respected Lancet medical journal has confirmed the vaccine’s 91.6% efficacy, as developers of the shot have long maintained.

Latinx COVID Deaths Soar 1,000% in Los Angeles as Communities of Color Lag Behind in Vaccine Rollout

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Black and Latinx people in the United States have died at higher rates, and new data shows that they are getting vaccinated at much lower rates than white people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports more than 60% of those vaccinated were white, while just 11.5% were Latinx, 6% were Asian, and just over 5% were Black. The CDC data is based on details gathered during the first month of the U.S.

Monday Night Owls: President Biden should go on a hiring spree of federal workers

Night Owls is a themed open thread appearing at Daily Kos seven days a week.

Eleanor Eagen of the Revolving Door Project writes at The American Prospect—Why Recent American Governments Have Fumbled Crises. While our population has doubled in the past 70 years, the number of federal employees hasn’t increased (in case you wonder why our pandemic response has lagged).

In the nearly seven decades since 1952, the U.S. population has more than doubled.