In today’s news: Experts now believe high levels of vaccine hesitancy will make it impossible to reach COVID-19 “herd immunity” through vaccinations. That means the virus—and whatever new variants arise as the virus continues to mutate—will now pose a public health threat indefinitely. And yes: Republicans did that. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gives an ultimatum to Biden.
With over 100 million American adults fully vaccinated, the possibility of our country’s public health situation returning to a baseline of normality felt like it was within reach. Key word: was. Unfortunately, the same crew of people thwarting our progress toward normalcy are the same people who botched the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, continued to promote anti-science sentiments, and amplified the anti-vaxxer movement.
The day before the family and friends of slain father Andrew Brown Jr. paid their respects on Monday in a North Carolina museum, a journalist walked through the home Brown was shot just outside of. Brown’s neighbor Michael Gordon told journalist Hunter Walker that Brown’s car crashed into the crepe myrtle tree in his front yard.
Dozens of groups, including organizations that advocate for Venezuelan immigrants, are calling on Florida Republicans Marco Rubio and Rick Scott to support legislation reintroduced to the Senate earlier this year that would put Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients onto a path to legalization and citizenship.
When the Proud Boys and their far-right cohorts led the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, they did so largely operating under their longstanding belief that the police were on their side. This weekend, breaking their weeks of quiet amid a stream of post-Jan. 6 arrests, they held an armed “Second Amendment” rally in Salem, Oregon—without a whiff of police presence.
The Australian government announced it will jail and fine citizens attempting to return from India.
Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration has been pressing Washington for help obtaining vaccines since December, before Donald Trump left office.
Tunulliarfik Fjord has always played an outsize role in global history. One thousand years ago, the Viking Erik the Red settled there, the last outpost in the Norse expansion into North America. When the United States established a protectorate over Greenland during World War II, it built one of its first airports in what is now Narsarsuaq, a large town on the fjord. And now Tunulliarfik is the site of a mining project that has overturned politics on Greenland.
The administration announced it was formally raising the cap to 62,500 for the remainder of this fiscal year after blowback last month.
Lidia Morawska has been working in her office for months. You might think that’s because she’s an aerosols expert, and her work is crucial for helping bring the pandemic to heel. But really, it’s because she’s an aerosols expert at Queensland University of Technology, in Australia. The country has recorded only three cases of community transmission of the coronavirus in the past week.
Did I step over a line here?
China was mentioned only four times in Joe Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress, but it shadowed almost every line of the speech. “We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,” Biden said. His aides describe the president as preoccupied with the challenge from China.
“The 2020 presidential election was not stolen,” the Wyoming Republican correctly noted on Monday.
Parenting advice on masculinity, mean girls, and undermining moms.
Big Pharma has hired an army of lobbyists to pressure U.S. lawmakers to block an effort at the World Trade Organization to loosen intellectual property rules on COVID-19 vaccines, which would allow countries around the world to ramp up production, vaccinate more people and bring the pandemic to an end sooner. Dozens of countries from the Global South, led by India and South Africa, are demanding a temporary waiver on vaccine patents, but rich countries, including the U.S.
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the 1971 May Day protests, when tens of thousands of protesters demonstrated against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C., and brought much of the capital to a standstill through acts of civil disobedience. The mass demonstrations terrified the Nixon administration, and police would arrest over 12,000 people — the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.
More than 100 people marched alongside the family of Anthony Alvarez in Chicago Saturday, calling for the police officer who shot and killed him to be charged. Newly released video reveals police killed 22-year-old Alvarez while he was running away during a foot chase. Police have not said why they initially confronted and then chased Alvarez, who was killed just two days after Chicago police shot dead another young Latinx male, 13-year-old Adam Toledo.
I thought I saw something in the road.It was after 1 a.m. one night in April 2016, and I was heading home from a friend’s house on the outskirts of Atlanta. From a distance, the dark spot looked like an oil stain. Then she turned her head and my headlights lit her face. A woman in dark clothing was standing in my lane on Interstate 75. I pounded the brake, but I was too late.
Editor’s Note: With Lori Gottlieb on book leave, Rebecca J. Rosen, the editor of “Dear Therapist,” begins another month as The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” archivist, pointing readers to some of Lori’s most beloved columns. For this month’s “Dear Therapist” roundup, I’ve gathered together a set of columns on one of the topics Lori covers often: parenthood.Parents write to Lori frequently.
The White House expected vaccination rates to drop off in rural communities and among younger people who are hesitant about the shot.
Let’s talk about the period when Roosevelt actually created the modern welfare state.
And what the gig economy really has to fear.
One group has too much power over what gets built—or, more often, what doesn’t.
The American Families Plan is really a plan to give us what other industrialized countries already have.
A sensible, way overdue idea for fixing the welfare state.
The comments from the commander in chief come as the Pentagon has sounded the alarm about service members refusing the shots in large numbers.
The challenge for Biden, his response team and state health officials will be managing the rolling series of outbreaks possibly driven by more dangerous virus variants.
The agency has long faced calls to act on menthol cigarettes, which are disproportionately smoked by Black Americans and teens just starting to use tobacco.
The menthol ban would be one of FDA’s most aggressive tobacco reform efforts since the agency first began regulating the industry in 2009.
