Cherry blossoms in London, lava flowing in Iceland, Nowruz celebrations in Iraq, spring training in Florida, a COVID-19 memorial in Prague, a “rally against hate” in New York, record flooding in Australia, a stuck ship in the Suez Canal, and much more.
In today’s not-quite news, a much-awaited White House press conference once again proved an exercise in media narcissism over substance. In the day’s actual news, however, there was quite a bit going on.
The recent shootings in Atlanta highlighted a surge of anti-Asian violence in the United States throughout the pandemic. Disease stigma and racism have together shaped pandemic response and policy for centuries.And so to better understand this history, on the podcast Social Distance, co-hosts James Hamblin and Maeve Higgins speak with Alexandre White, a sociologist and medical historian at Johns Hopkins University.
Most of us don’t think Bill Gates has uploaded Windows Vista into the COVID-19 vaccine, and we won’t give credence to inanities burped out by semi-ambulatory heaps of knob cheese who listen to demon sperm doctors instead of world-renowned infectious disease experts. Why? Because we’re astute consumers of media.
But Republicans, by and large, are not.
State Rep. Park Cannon, a Black woman, was arrested and accused of obstruction after protesting a bill that makes it harder for Georgians to vote.
Spring is here!
But everything’s still busted!
If you need a breather from seasonal hard partying, here’s some statehouse action to fill your downtime (and possibly give you a reason to drink more).
On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate voted 52-48 to confirm Dr. Rachel Levine, an openly transgender pediatrician, as assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services. Levine, who previously served as Pennslyvania’s secretary of health, is the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the Senate, as reported by NPR. In other words, Levine quite literally made history.
Leaders of Trump’s Covid response are aligning their stories, worried that Azar will try to pin the blame on them in upcoming books.
Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News gig has been a long march into the bottom of an ocean awash in fearmongering, bigotry, and misinformation. Like most Fox News programming this past year, Bartiromo’s programs have been showcases for easily debunked conspiracy theories, all racist and anti-China by nature.
On Monday, CNN reported Eric Spinato, a senior Fox News employee who’d been with the network for 20 years, died from COVID-19 complications.
The low levels of flu during the Covid-19 pandemic have left experts with a much smaller pool of data used for predicting which flu strains will predominate next winter.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a restrictive new voting bill into law late Thursday, just hours after it passed the GOP-led legislature.
Joe Biden has a reputation as a softie—grandfatherly if you’re inclined toward him, somewhat windy and elderly if you aren’t. But when he reached for a phrase to define his approach to office during his first press conference, held today, he didn’t pick an Irish poet or an American statesman. Instead, he quoted the hardheaded Teutonic conservative known as the “Iron Chancellor”: “Politics is the art of the possible,” Biden said.
Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer was called out on Twitter after he said the president was “week” for bringing notes to the meeting.
Yesterday, with only a few minutes left in my weekly Zoom appointment with my therapist, I decided to derail the proceedings to ask her what I believed was an essential question. It had nothing to do with my fear of vulnerability or difficulty asking for help; in fact, it had nothing to do with me at all.
South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds posted a photo of a statue of himself holding a gun with his dog, raising alarm on Twitter.
He was, however, asked if he would run for reelection in 2024.
The moves are possible due to an expected vast increase in vaccine supply, Newsom said in a statement.
It was 1996, Bill Clinton was president, and endangered bald eagles were dying in his home state of Arkansas.Twenty-nine were found dead at a man-made reservoir called DeGray Lake, before deaths spread to two other lakes. But what really puzzled scientists was how the eagles acted before they died. The stately birds were suddenly flying straight into cliff faces. They hit trees. Their wings drooped. Even on solid ground, they stumbled around as if drunk.
The president framed the more ambitious target as the best and fastest way to contain the virus, which he said is his most important mission.
The Coleman FlipLid Personal Cooler is now $13, or 33 percent off.
As the world’s worst humanitarian crisis enters its seventh year in Yemen, we look at the toll of the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led air war. A new report by the Yemen Data Project summarizing the impact of air raids over the past six years finds the bombing campaign has killed almost 1,500 civilians every year on average, a quarter of them children. Journalist Iona Craig, who heads up the Yemen Data Project, says there have been almost 23,000 air raids since the war began in 2015.
We get an update on a massive fire at the world’s largest refugee camp: the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. The fire killed at least 15 people and displaced 45,000 this week, with hundreds possibly still missing. Bangladeshi authorities are investigating the cause of the fire, which destroyed about 17,000 shelters as the blaze ripped through the crowded camp, leaving behind scenes of utter destruction and despair as people were separated from their loved ones.
Nearly one in five people facing charges related to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol had some connection to the military, including at least two active-duty troops, prompting Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to order a 60-day stand-down across the services to address extremism. Ahead of the first deadline on April 6, the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing Wednesday on extremism in the U.S. military. We speak with one of the experts who testified.
A new report reveals that as a record number of people in the United States lost their jobs and struggled to put food on the table during the past year of the pandemic, the combined wealth of the 657 billionaires in the country grew more than $1.3 trillion, nearly 45%, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who saw his personal wealth increase by $65 billion — more than $7 million every hour.
How do I determine if my child is ready for school?
The president’s team is preparing a $3 trillion spending proposal to power through Congress. They’re betting markets and the economy will cooperate long enough to pass it.
“First class” is about to become a misnomer.
Few problems are simultaneously so distressing and so addressable.
