Category: International

Scientists Say Atlantic Current Collapse Could Lead to Extreme Cold in Europe and North America

Futurism

Scientists Say Atlantic Current Collapse Could Lead to Extreme Cold in Europe and North America

Victor Tangermann – July 31, 2023

Researchers are warning that the crucial ocean currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could collapse as soon as 2025 — an impending, climate change-fueled disaster that could usher in a new era of extreme temperature fluctuations.

It’s important to note that not every scientist is convinced by this assessment. And though the researchers say the collapse could take place as soon 2025, they also say it could take another 70 years.

That said, a team of researchers led by Peter Ditlevsen, professor and climate researcher at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark anticipate in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications that the currents could collapse anywhere between 2025 and 2095 — if we don’t cut global carbon emissions, that is.

If it were to collapse, much of the Western world could be plunged into an extended period of extreme cold — a counterintuitive result of climate change. Previous collapses, which have predominantly occurred during ice ages many thousands of years ago, have indeed led to temperatures going haywire.

“I think we should be very worried,” Ditlevsen told The Guardian. “This would be a very, very large change. The AMOC has not been shut off for 12,000 years.”

Back in 2021, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany warned in a separate paper that the AMOC is being driven to the brink of collapse due to climate change. In the short term, this collapse could cause temperatures to plunge in Europe and North America, resulting in prolonged periods of extreme cold.

And if the planet’s past history is anything to go by, the stakes are significant. 12,000 years ago, the melting of a massive glacial lake plunged Europe into an extreme cold spell for almost a millennium.

Now, by analyzing statistics from the last 150 years, Ditlevsen and his team say they’ve calculated with a 95 percent certainty that the AMOC will collapse between 2025 and 2095.

“Shutting down the AMOC can have very serious consequences for Earth’s climate, for example, by changing how heat and precipitation are distributed globally,” Ditlevsen said in a statement.

“While a cooling of Europe may seem less severe as the globe as a whole becomes warmer and heat waves occur more frequently, this shutdown will contribute to increased warming of the tropics, where rising temperatures have already given rise to challenging living conditions,” he added.

This change could be far more rapid than the incremental 1.5 degrees Celsius rise caused by climate change over a century. With a collapsed AMOC, we’d be looking at far more extreme changes in the ten to 15 degrees Celsius range over just a decade.

“Our result underscores the importance of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible,” Ditlevsen said.

But while researchers generally agree with this final conclusion, not everybody is convinced the AMOC is about to, well, run amok.

For one, the conclusion contradicts the latest findings of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found in its most recent report that the current was unlikely to just collapse within this century.

“The work provides no reason to change the assessment of the [IPCC],” Jochem Marotzke of the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, told Politico.

“We just don’t have the evidence to state that it has declined,” Penny Holliday, researcher at the UK’s National Oceanography Center, told the BBC. “We know that there is a possibility that AMOC could stop what it’s doing now at some point, but it’s really hard to have certainty about that.”

At the same time, while we may never get a 100 percent accurate prediction — after all, our planet’s climate systems are incredibly complex — we should still heed Ditlevsen and his colleagues’ warning.

“We do still have to take the idea seriously that there could be abrupt changes in the North Atlantic climate system,” University of Reading atmospheric scientist Jon Robson told the BBC. “But the exact predictions that it will happen — and within this time frame — you have to take that with some skepticism.”

DeSantis’s economic plan sounds like Biden’s

Yahoo! Finance

DeSantis’s economic plan sounds like Biden’s

Rick Newman, Senior Columnist – July 31, 2023

Who said it, Ron DeSantis or Joe Biden?

1. “We need a future that’s made in America. That means using products, parts, and materials built right here in the United States of America. It means bringing manufacturing back, jobs back, building the supply chains here at home, not outsourcing abroad.”

2. “We need to incentivize the repatriation of American capital and investment here in the United States so we can recapture our supply chains and build a strong durable industrial base.”

The first quote is President Biden, from a speech on his economic vision in January 2022. The second is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s running for the Republican nomination for president, outlining his own economic agenda on July 31, 2023. DeSantis isn’t plagiarizing Biden, exactly, but it sure sounds like he’s borrowing ideas he’s heard before.

DeSantis, badly lagging Donald Trump in Republican polling for the 2024 race, is trying to establish himself as a conservative populist akin to Trump, but with a better reputation for competence and governing. To further the cause, he outlined a “Declaration of Economic Independence” during a July 31 campaign stop in New Hampshire, his first major effort to present an economic vision.

It’s surprisingly similar to Biden’s. Both men favor protectionism and a heavier government role than usual to steer the US economy toward future prosperity. Both vilify China and say the United States needs to end its reliance on the huge trade partner for key products. And they both bash big corporations for building massive amounts of wealth at the expense of ordinary workers.

The biggest difference between the two agendas, in fact, may be that Biden is already pursuing efforts to achieve many of those goals, while DeSantis is only talking about them as a candidate. There are other differences between the two, some largely rhetorical, others more substantive. But the unusual similarities between a center-left president and a far-right challenger indicate how much traditional political views have shifted as foreign threats have changed during the last decade and the global economy has transformed.

Like most challengers facing an incumbent, DeSantis argues that the current leadership has sent the nation into “decline.” Corporate fat cats and Beltway opportunists are lining their pockets while everybody else falls behind. This is a reprise of Bernie Sanders in 2020, Donald Trump in 2016, and even Barack Obama in 2008.

One big change between then and now is an increasingly aggressive China that seems bent on confrontation with the United States and the democratic West, rather than the trade symbiosis of 10 or 15 years ago. “We have to stop selling out this country’s future to China,” DeSantis demanded in his July 31 speech.

Well, Biden beat him to it. And Trump beat him to it before Biden.

Trump started by decrying the US trade deficit with China and slapping tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese imports each year to fix it. The tariffs raised the cost of US imports to the United States but did almost nothing to alter the trade balance. Then COVID hit in 2020, exposing extreme American dependence on China for medical supplies, electronics, minerals, and other crucial products.

Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gestures during a campaign event, Monday, July 31, 2023, in Rochester, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gestures during a campaign event, Monday, July 31, 2023, in Rochester, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

After Biden took office in 2021, he left the Trump tariffs in place and went further. Biden began encouraging allies to join the United States in containing China’s expansionist policies, instead of going it alone the way Trump did. In 2022, Biden lobbied for and signed the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, a huge package of subsidies meant to boost US manufacturing of semiconductors, green energy components, and many other things — much as China subsidizes its own domestic manufacturing. A boom in US factory construction suggests those incentives are working.

Then last fall, Biden rolled out extensive restrictions on the exports of advanced US semiconductors and other high-end technology to China. In June, Biden told a private audience Xi Jinping was “a dictator,” which irked the Chinese president, even if it might be true. China called Biden’s quip needlessly provocative and said US-China relations were at the lowest point in more than 40 years.

So what might DeSantis do on top of all this? He called for an end to normal trade relations with China and said he would ban the import of Chinese products built with stolen technology. That’s not a big expansion of Biden policies and it might be little more than symbolic. China’s “normal” trade relationship with the United States is already undermined by the Trump tariffs and Biden sanctions, and who knows how the US government would assess which of the thousands of Chinese products coming to the United States include pirated technology.

Like Biden, DeSantis also wants to exert a government hand to boost certain parts of the manufacturing sector. He’d seek to repeal Biden’s green energy subsidies, however, and focus more on the domestic fossil fuel industry. If he were president, DeSantis could do a bit of that on his own through regulatory and executive action, but it would require Congress to undo hundreds of billions in green energy subsidies Congress passed last year, and replace them with subsidies directed elsewhere — no easy lift.

DeSantis distinguishes himself from Biden more clearly on cultural issues that have economic implications, such as diversity and inclusion policies and investing focused on environmental factors. DeSantis says he will “end the politicization of the economy” by discouraging or forbidding these kinds of policies in businesses, schools, and other organizations, but critics argue that DeSantis is the one politicizing the economy by focusing on these issues in the first place. Whatever the case, voters haven’t responded very enthusiastically to DeSantis’s “anti-woke” crusade, and DeSantis didn’t use his go-to word—”woke”— a single time in his July 31 speech. The dogs have not responded to this dog whistle. Maybe DeSantis decided to stop blowing it.

Here’s a fresh and interesting DeSantis idea: Hold universities accountable if students take on gobs of debt to get a degree and don’t earn enough once they graduate to pay it off. That does differ from Biden’s approach, which is to forgive a certain amount of debt, which would benefit the borrower but require nothing of the university. Mostly everybody agrees the cost of college in the United States is out of control and the current system of financing badly broken.

Finally, DeSantis finds a familiar bogeyman responsible for America’s economic woes in the Federal Reserve. He says the Fed should worry about inflation alone and stay out of extraneous matters such as saving the US economy during a financial crash or a pandemic. Except guess what: If DeSantis were president during such a crisis, he’d beg the Fed to ride to the rescue, because it’d be foolish to let a depression ruin lives if you had an alternative, and because President DeSantis’s own political survival would depend on a Fed bailout. Tough talk often ends the moment the election takes place.

Brain fog and other long COVID symptoms are the focus of new small treatment studies

Associated Press

Brain fog and other long COVID symptoms are the focus of new small treatment studies

Lauran Neergaard – July 31, 2023

FILE – This undated, colorized electron microscope image made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, indicated in yellow, emerging from the surface of cells, indicated in blue/pink, cultured in a laboratory. The National Institutes of Health is opening a handful of studies to start testing possible treatments for long COVID, an anxiously awaited step in U.S. efforts against the mysterious condition. The announcement, Monday, July 31, 2023 comes amid frustration from patients who’ve struggled for months or years with sometimes disabling health problems. (NIAID-RML via AP, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)More

WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Institutes of Health is beginning a handful of studies to test possible treatments for long COVID, an anxiously awaited step in U.S. efforts against the mysterious condition that afflicts millions.

Monday’s announcement from the NIH’s $1.15 billion RECOVER project comes amid frustration from patients who’ve struggled for months or even years with sometimes-disabling health problems — with no proven treatments and only a smattering of rigorous studies to test potential ones.

“This is a year or two late and smaller in scope than one would hope but nevertheless it’s a step in the right direction,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University in St. Louis, who isn’t involved with NIH’s project but whose own research highlighted long COVID’s toll. Getting answers is critical, he added, because “there’s a lot of people out there exploiting patients’ vulnerability” with unproven therapies.

Scientists don’t yet know what causes long COVID, the catchall term for about 200 widely varying symptoms. Between 10% and 30% of people are estimated to have experienced some form of long COVID after recovering from a coronavirus infection, a risk that has dropped somewhat since early in the pandemic.

“If I get 10 people, I get 10 answers of what long COVID really is,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said.

That’s why so far the RECOVER initiative has tracked 24,000 patients in observational studies to help define the most common and burdensome symptoms — findings that now are shaping multipronged treatment trials. The first two will look at:

— Whether taking up to 25 days of Pfizer’s antiviral drug Paxlovid could ease long COVID, because of a theory that some live coronavirus, or its remnants, may hide in the body and trigger the disorder. Normally Paxlovid is used when people first get COVID-19 and for just five days.

— Treatments for “brain fog” and other cognitive problems. They include Posit Science Corp.’s BrainHQ cognitive training program, another called PASC-Cognitive Recovery by New York City’s Mount Sinai Health System, and a Soterix Medical device that electrically stimulates brain circuits.

Two additional studies will open in the coming months. One will test treatments for sleep problems. The other will target problems with the autonomic nervous system — which controls unconscious functions like breathing and heartbeat — including the disorder called POTS.

A more controversial study of exercise intolerance and fatigue also is planned, with NIH seeking input from some patient groups worried that exercise may do more harm than good for certain long COVID sufferers.

The trials are enrolling 300 to 900 adult participants for now but have the potential to grow. Unlike typical experiments that test one treatment at a time, these more flexible “platform studies” will let NIH add additional potential therapies on a rolling basis.

“We can rapidly pivot,” Dr. Amy Patterson with the NIH explained. A failing treatment can be dropped without ending the entire trial and “if something promising comes on the horizon, we can plug it in.”

The flexibility could be key, according to Dr. Anthony Komaroff, a Harvard researcher who isn’t involved with the NIH program but has long studied a similarly mysterious disorder known as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME/CFS. For example, he said, the Paxlovid study “makes all sorts of sense,” but if a 25-day dose shows only hints of working, researchers could extend the test to a longer course instead of starting from scratch.

Komaroff also said that he understands people’s frustration over the wait for these treatment trials, but believes NIH appropriately waited “until some clues came in about the underlying biology,” adding: “You’ve got to have targets.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Asian American workers most likely to be replaced by AI, study reveals

Next Shark

Asian American workers most likely to be replaced by AI, study reveals

Ryan General – July 31, 2023

Asian Americans are among the groups most vulnerable to displacement by artificial intelligence (AI) in the U.S., a new study by Pew Research Center has revealed.

About the study: The study, released on Wednesday, looked into the exposure of American workers to AI technologies and their potential risk of being replaced or assisted by AI systems.

Technical writers, budget analysts, web developers and data key operators are among those with high exposure to AI displacement, while workers such as firefighters, barbers and janitors have low exposure due to the nature of their work.

Impact on racial disparities: Overall, the study found that approximately 19% of American workers held jobs that are the most exposed to AI technologies.

More from NextShark: Bruce Lee may have died from drinking too much water, new study says

Asian workers face the highest risk of displacement at 24% compared to their white, Black and Hispanic counterparts. According to the findings, about 20% of white workers were found to be exposed, while 15% of Black workers and 13% of Hispanic workers faced similar risks.

Other findings: Women faced a slightly higher risk with 21% of female workers being exposed to AI in their jobs, compared to 19% of male workers. This discrepancy is attributed to the different types of jobs typically held by individuals of different genders.

The study also revealed a correlation between education levels and susceptibility to AI displacement or assistance. Workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher accounted for 27% of the workforce and were more than twice as likely to be exposed to AI technologies in their jobs than those with only a high school diploma, of which 12% faced similar risks.

The study also shed light on income disparities among workers with varying levels of AI exposure. Those in jobs with the highest exposure to AI technologies earned an average hourly wage of $33, while those in positions with the least exposure earned an average of $20 per hour.

Study’s implications: The findings, which provide crucial insights into the impact of AI on the American workforce, hold significant implications for policymakers and employers.

By identifying the groups most vulnerable to AI displacement, the study’s authors aim to provide policymakers with the ability to devise targeted strategies to support affected individuals and create measures to minimize potential workforce disruptions.

Global disruption: A previous study published by the University of Oxford in 2013 predicted that 47% of U.S. jobs could be eliminated by AI over the next two decades.

Meanwhile, a more recent study by Goldman Sachs suggested that generative AI tools could potentially disrupt around 300 million full-time jobs worldwide, signifying a significant disruption in the global job market.

The big idea: is it too late to stop extremism taking over politics?

The Guardian – The Big Idea Books

The big idea: is it too late to stop extremism taking over politics?

Bizarre conspiracy thinking has infiltrated the mainstream in many western democracies. How can we push back?

Julia Ebner – July 31, 2023

Elia Barbieri

Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian

Welcome to the 2020s, the beginning of what history books might one day describe as the digital middle ages. Let’s briefly travel back to 2017. I remember sitting in various government buildings briefing politicians and civil servants about QAnon, the emerging internet conspiracy movement whose adherents believe that a cabal of Satan-worshipping elites runs a global paedophile network. We joked about the absurdity of it all but no one took the few thousand anonymous true believers seriously.

Fast-forward to 2023. Significant portions of the population in liberal democracies consider it possible that global elites drink the blood of children in order to stay young. Recent surveys suggest that around 17% of Americans believe in the QAnon myth. Some 5% of Germans believe ideas related to the anti-democratic Reichsbürger movement, which asserts that the German Reich continues to exist and rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. Up to a third of Britons believe that powerful figures in Hollywood, government and the media are secretly engaged in child trafficking. Is humanity on the return journey from enlightenment to the dark ages?

I am often asked why the UK doesn’t have a successful far-right populist party. My answer is: Because it doesn’t need to

As segments of the public have headed towards extremes, so has our politics. In the US, dozens of congressional candidates, including the successfully elected Lauren Boebert, have been supportive of QAnon. The German far-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland is at an all-time high in terms of both its radicalism and its popularity, while Austria’s xenophobic Freedom party is topping the polls. The recent rise to power of far-right parties such as Fratelli d’Italia and the populist Sweden Democrats bolster this trend.

I am often asked why the UK doesn’t have a successful far-right populist party. My answer is: because it doesn’t need to. Parts of the Conservative party now cater to audiences that would have voted for the BNP or Ukip in the past. A few years ago, the far-right Britain First claimed that 5,000 of its members had joined the Tory party. Not unlike the Republicans in the US, the Tories have increasingly departed from moderate conservative thinking and lean more and more towards radicalism.

In 2020, Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski was asked to apologise for attending the National Conservatism conference in Rome. The event is well known for attracting international far-right figures such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the hard-right US presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. This year, an entire delegation of leading Conservatives attended the same conference in London. It might be hard for extreme-right parties to rise to power in Britain, but there is no shortage of routes for extremist ideas to reach Westminster.

‘Invasion on our southern coast’ … UK home secretary Suella Braverman.
‘Invasion on our southern coast’ … UK home secretary Suella Braverman. Photograph: AP

Language is a key indicator of radicalisation. The words of Conservative politicians speak for themselves: home secretary Suella Braverman referred to migrants arriving in the UK as an “invasion on our southern coast”, while MP Miriam Cates gave a nod to conspiracy theorists when she warned that “children’s souls” were being “destroyed” by cultural Marxism. Using far-right dog whistles such as “invasion” and “cultural Marxism” invites listeners to open a Pandora’s box of conspiracy myths. Research shows that believing in one makes you more susceptible to others.

I sometimes wonder what a QAnon briefing to policymakers might look like in a few years. What if the room no longer laughs at the ludicrous myths but instead endorses them? One could certainly imagine this scenario in the US if Donald Trump were to win the next election. In 2019 – before conspiracy myths inspired attacks on the US Capitol, the German Reichstag, the New Zealand parliament and the Brazilian Congress – I warned in a Guardian opinion piece of the threat QAnon would soon pose to democracy. Are we now at a point where it is it too late to stop democracies being taken over by far-right ideologies and conspiracy thinking? If so, do we simply have to accept the “new normal”?

There are various ways we can try to prevent and reverse the spread of extremist narratives. For some people who have turned to extremism over the past few years, too little has changed: anger over political inaction on economic inequality is now further fuelled by the exacerbating cost of living crisis. For others, too much has changed: they see themselves as rebels against a takeover by “woke” or “globalist” policies.

What they have in common is a sense that the political class no longer takes their wellbeing seriously, and moves to improve social conditions and reduce inequality would go some way towards reducing such grievances. But beyond that, their fears and frustrations have clearly been instrumentalized by extremists, as well as by opportunistic politicians and profit-oriented social media firms. This means that it is essential to expose extremist manipulation tactics, call out politicians when they normalize conspiracy thinking and regulate algorithm design by the big technology companies that still amplify harmful content.

If the private sector is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. Surveys by the Edelman Trust Barometer found that people in liberal democracies have largely lost trust in governments, media and even NGOs but, surprisingly, still trust their employers and workplaces. Companies can play an important role in the fight for democratic values. For example, the Business Council for Democracy tests and develops training courses that firms can offer to employees to help them identify and counter conspiracy myths and targeted disinformation.

Young people should be helped to become good digital citizens with rights and responsibilities online, so that they can develop into critical consumers of information. National school curricula should include a new subject at the intersection of psychology and internet studies to help digital natives understand the forces that their parents have struggled to grasp: the psychological processes that drive digital group dynamics, online engagement and the rise of conspiracy thinking.

Elia Barbieri

Ultimately, the next generation will vote conspiracy theorists in or out of power. Only they can reverse our journey towards the digital middle ages.

 Julia Ebner is the author of Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over (Ithaka Press).

Further reading

How Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky (Penguin, £10.99)

How Civil War Starts by Barbara F Walter (Penguin, £10.99)

Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko (Redwood, £16.99)

Coronavirus is back, but how worried should you be?

Yahoo! News

Coronavirus is back, but how worried should you be?

Parts of the country are seeing an uptick, and hospitalizations are rising nationwide.

Alexander Nazaryan, Senior W. H. Correspondent  – July 28, 2023

A cluster of people in face masks come in and out of a COVID-19 vaccine clinic.
People at a COVID-19 vaccine clinic in Los Angeles on Aug. 5, 2022. (Xinhua via Getty Images)

Dr. Bob Wachter was an expert who diligently practiced what he preached. For three years, the prominent University of California at San Francisco physician advocated masking and vaccination for those who, like him, wanted to avoid the coronavirus, as well as the mysterious, long-lasting symptoms known as long COVID.

When Wachter’s wife contracted the coronavirus last year when they were on a trip to Palm Springs, Calif., together, he still managed not to get sick — even after they sat next to each other in the car on the nine-hour trip back home.

But Wachter’s luck ran out earlier this month, when he finally contracted the coronavirus. To make matters worse, he fell in the bathroom while battling flulike symptoms and was hospitalized for stitches.

Wachter wrote on Twitter that he wanted his experience to serve as a “teachable moment,” a reminder that “Covid’s still around [and] it can still be pretty nasty.”

Not only is the coronavirus still around, but it appears to be returning in parts of the United States.

Read more from Yahoo News: Is the COVID pandemic really over?

A summer mini-spike
An overcrowded airport lounge with lines of travelers in the background.
Weary holiday travelers wait for air traffic to resume at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Va., on June 30. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

Washington was not especially rattled by the infections, but the cases are a reminder that the virus lingers. Students competing in the Solar Car Challenge in Orange County, Calif., for instance, saw the race disrupted this month after about two dozen competitors tested positive for COVID-19.

When the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, visited the White House earlier this month, several members of his delegation tested positive for COVID-19. In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper also caught the coronavirus this month. These do not appear to be isolated incidents.

Wastewater analysis in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Wachter lives, shows increasing levels of the coronavirus. Los Angeles is seeing a similar trend.

“There’s no doubt compared to our nadirs, or the stability that we’ve enjoyed, that there’s a slight increase in test positivity,” California’s health secretary, Dr. Mark Ghaly, told the Los Angeles Times this week.

While most people aren’t locking down or sending kids home from summer camp, the virus appears to be causing a vibe shift. “The U.S. has experienced increases in COVID-19 during the past three summers, so it’s not surprising to see an uptick,” CDC spokeswoman Kathleen Conley told Yahoo News.

In previous coronavirus waves, colder weather drove people indoors and allowed the pathogen to spread. Extremely hot weather could have the same effect. “We are in a very warm year, and people are spending a lot of time indoors,” infectious disease expert Dr. Luis Ostrosky told the Wall Street Journal. “People are congregating in air-conditioned settings, and that is providing an opportunity for transmission.”

Most institutions that had reported coronavirus cases with online trackers are no longer producing daily updates, making both local and national trends difficult to spot. For its part, the CDC drastically scaled back its own tracking in May.

Read more from Yahoo News: COVID-19 emergency isn’t over, and the most ‘painless’ way to prevent it is being ignored, doctors warn

‘Clearly rising,’ but nothing like the past
A pedestrian waits at an intersection by a COVID-19 testing site.
A COVID-19 testing site on a sidewalk in Manhattan in December 2022. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

According to the Centers for Disease Control, COVID-19 hospitalizations rose by 10% in the week of July 15, as compared to the previous week, from 6,444 hospitalizations to 7,109.

“Risk of getting infected is still fairly low, but clearly rising now,” Dr. Tatiana Prowell, a Johns Hopkins oncologist, wrote on Twitter. “Be aware.”

Masking continues to be an easy means of protection, especially when traveling or gathering in crowded settings like concert venues or sports arenas. And many people have neglected to update their vaccines, meaning that they lack some protection from the ever-evolving disease. The latest spike could be driven, in part, by an Omicron subvariant known as Arcturus.

According to the CDC, only 17% of the American population has received the bivalent booster introduced last fall.

“At this time, CDC’s genomic surveillance indicates that the increase in infections is caused by strains closely related to the Omicron strains that have been circulating since early 2022,” CDC’s Conley told Yahoo News.

Those are the very strains the bivalent booster was created to target. The Food and Drug Administration is also preparing an updated booster shot that should be available in September.

Read more from Yahoo News: There will be a new COVID vaccine this fall, but will people get it?

Moving on
A woman in a hat and face mask on a sidewalk.
A pedestrian in a face mask in New York City on July 6. (Amr Alfiky/Reuters)

During the Delta spike in the summer of 2021, nationwide hospitalizations for COVID-19 topped 100,000. A year later, the Omicron wave hospitalized 16,000 people across the country.

Today’s figures are much smaller by comparison. And as of the week of July 22, there had been 166 deaths from COVID-19 across the United States — a far cry from the 26,000 weekly deaths recorded in the U.S. in the first week of 2021.

Those at high risk for severe outcomes should make sure they’re up to date on boosters and know where to access treatment if they contract the virus, Dr. Leana Wen, a professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, told Yahoo News.

Between vaccination and multiple infections, the overwhelming majority of Americans have some immunity. Many have thus simply accepted the coronavirus as a part of life.

“The pandemic, for all intents and purposes, now is gone,” Donald Yealy, chief medical officer of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, told the Washington Post several weeks ago.

But, he cautioned, “the virus isn’t gone yet.”

“Incandescently stupid”: Former DHS official says he had to “dumb” down classified memos for Trump

Salon

“Incandescently stupid”: Former DHS official says he had to “dumb” down classified memos for Trump

Gabriella Ferrigine – July 26, 2023

Donald Trump Mark Makela/Getty Images
Donald Trump Mark Makela/Getty Images

Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump, shared how he often had to oversimply national security reports for the former president.

“This fifty-page memo that we would normally give to any other president about what his options are is something Trump literally can’t read. The man doesn’t read. We’ve gotta boil this down into a one-pager in his voice,” Taylor told podcast host Brett Meiselas on Tuesday. “And so I had to write this incandescently stupid memo called something like, ‘Afghanistan, How to Put America First and Win.’ And then bullet by bullet, I summed up this highly classified memo into Trump’s sort of bombastic language because it was the only way he was gonna understand,” Taylor added. “I mean, I literally said in there, ‘You know, if we leave Afghanistan too fast, the terrorists will call us losers. But if we wanna be seen as winners, we need to make sure the Afghan forces have the strength to push back against these criminals.’ I mean, it was that dumb and that’s how you had to talk to him.”

Is America on the brink of tyranny? Trump’s plan if elected in 2024 should frighten us all.

USA Today – Opinion

Is America on the brink of tyranny? Trump’s plan if elected in 2024 should frighten us all.

Austin Sarat and Dennis Aftergut – July 20, 2023

The New York Times published an article Monday that’s bone-chilling for anyone who cherishes our freedom, democracy and constitutional governance. The story recounted, with full cooperation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, his plans to eliminate executive branch constraints on his power if he is elected president in 2024.

The obstacles to be eliminated include an independent Justice Department, independent leadership in administrative agencies and an independent civil service. Richard Neustadt, one of the country’s best known students of the American presidency, has said that in a constitutional democracy the chief executive “does not obtain results by giving orders – or not. … He does not get action without argument. Presidential power is the power to persuade.”

Trump’s plan would substitute loyalty to him for loyalty to the Constitution. This vision is simultaneously frightening and unsurprising. In 2019, he said, “I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.” And in December, Trump called for the “termination of … the Constitution.”

Former President Donald Trump speaks to campaign volunteers in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on July 18, 2023.
Former President Donald Trump speaks to campaign volunteers in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on July 18, 2023.

In effect, he attempted to do exactly that in the run-up to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by pressuring state officials to reverse President Joe Biden’s electoral victory, attempting to weaponize the Justice Department and bullying Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election.

Trump now may face federal charges for his role in fomenting the riot.

And while he was president, in addition to appointing subservient heads of executive departments, he took steps to increase his control over the regulatory authority of administrative agencies. To cite one example, in 2019, Trump forced climate change researchers in the Department of Agriculture to move from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Missouri, producing a huge exodus from federal employment.

In 2020, he attempted to undermine the independence of the civil service by issuing an executive order adopting “Schedule F.” It purported to vastly augment a president’s power to hire and fire federal officials by expanding the number of “political appointees” throughout government employment who were outside civil service protections.

Trump’s plan is to centralize power in Oval Office

The Times story outlined his 2025 road map to implement this command-and-control model of executive authority and centralization of power if he’s returned to the Oval Office. In effect, the article described how his team would replace our constitutional republic with an authoritarian state.

Such a state seeks to eliminate the independence of civil servants. Saying good things about bureaucracy may be unpopular, but federal employees’ competence, expert judgment and commitment to governance by law is essential to democratic government.

Will heat wave impact politics? Climate change isn’t a top issue for Democrats or Republicans. Record heat should change that.

One definition of an authoritarian state is that it is characterized by the consolidation of power in a single leader, “a controlling regime that justifies itself as a ‘necessary evil.'” That kind of control necessarily features “strict government-imposed constraints on social freedoms such as suppression of political opponents and anti-regime activity.”

Those characteristics describe the contours of the 2025 blueprint that the Trump campaign wanted the public to see via the Times’ report. As the story notes, they are setting the stage, if Trump is elected, “to claim a mandate” for the goal of centralizing power in him.

The Times quoted John McEntee, Trump’s 2020 White House director of personnel, defending the rejection of checks and balances on a president: “Our current executive branch was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. … What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

Founders warned about danger of too much presidential power

In fact, the executive branch, like the two other branches, was devised by the framers of our Constitution, to limit power by dividing it. Even Alexander Hamilton, who defended energy in the executive branch, suggested that the path to tyranny was marked when government officials are “obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man.”

James Madison joined Hamilton in warning in The Federalist 48 that “power is of an encroaching nature.” For that reason, The Federalist 51 states, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

It described the paradox facing the framers as this: One must “enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

Trump’s 2025 blueprint would end governmental control on a president so he can dominate and control the governed.

The threat is real: Our nuclear weapons are much more powerful than Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb

Along with divided power, the central constraint that our founding documents create is the overarching legal institution known as the rule of law. That is why Trump’s plan for a radical reorganization of the executive branch starts with ending “the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.”

Controlling the prosecutorial power allows a president to use it to favor friends, destroy enemies and intimidate ordinary citizens tempted to speak out.

That would sound the death knell of American freedom. As John Locke, the 17th century political philosopher who inspired the authors of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” Or as Blake Smith put it in an article in Foreign Policy last year, “The bureaucratic ethos is essential to the functioning of the state and the preservation of private life as a separate, unpolitical domain of tolerated freedom.”

At the close of America’s first decade as a constitutional republic, George Washington voluntarily chose not to seek a third term as president to avoid setting the country on the road to the tyranny of lifetime rule by a president. He understood from the revolution against a king that retaining the personal power of one person is the central goal of authoritarianism.

If voters elect Trump president in 2024, he will implement the plan his campaign has purposefully leaked. The outcome is easy to foretell. A bureaucracy purged of those loyal to the Constitution rather than to Trump will send free and fair elections to history’s landfill, along with the Bill of Rights and the freedoms they were designed to protect.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, is counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.

Authoritarianism Expert Warns Why It’s Critical To Listen To Trump’s Words Right Now

HuffPost

Authoritarianism Expert Warns Why It’s Critical To Listen To Trump’s Words Right Now

Lee Moran – July 20, 2023

Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned on Wednesday that when Donald Trump talks about obliterating and then politicizing the civil service, and seizing control of every aspect of government if he wins the White House in 2024, he really means it.

“Nobody is ever prepared” for an authoritarian takeover of their country, Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.

“They think they are going to be the exception. They don’t listen to the warning signs until it’s too late,” she continued.

But Trump is actually “being very clear” with what he is saying, said Ben-Ghiat.

Last week, a New York Times article said Trump would seek to expand presidential authority “over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”

Ben-Ghiat cautioned: “Authoritarians always tell you what they are going to do as a kind of challenge and as a warning, and people don’t listen until it’s too late.”

If Trump wins election again, he will “be finishing the job that he started, and by the way that’s not just destroying democracy internally,” she added. His other main aim was “to take America out of the realm of democratic internationalism and align it with autocracies. That will happen as well.”

Watch the interview here:

How Paramount buried a Vice documentary on Ron DeSantis at Guantanamo Bay

Semafor

How Paramount buried a Vice documentary on Ron DeSantis at Guantanamo Bay

Max Tani – July 20, 2023

The Scoop

Showtime slated “The Guantanamo Candidate,” a 30 minute-long episode of its Vice documentary series, for May 28.

The episode opens with a shot of the outside the US prison complex at the southern tip of Cuba, where Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis served as a lawyer from March 2006 to January 2007.

Vice reporters had secured on camera interviews with a former detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, and a guard at the prison, staff sergeant Joe Hickman. Both said they remembered seeing DeSantis at the prison during a controversial detainee hunger strike. The Vice crew traveled to Guantanamo Bay to attempt to try to speak to military staff, and made several attempts to ask DeSantis about the allegations directly, eventually confronting him at a press conference in Israel, according to a detailed description provided to Semafor.

But Showtime viewers who turned on their televisions May 28 never saw the episode. (They were treated to a re-run of the scripted drama Yellowjackets.)

Showtime and Vice cited “scheduling” in a statement after The Hollywood Reporter noticed the missing episode.

But in fact, two people familiar with the incident said, the Paramount-owned cable channel ditched the DeSantis episode over fears of the political consequences. One person briefed on the decision told Semafor that the company’s Washington lobbyist, DeDe Lea, raised concerns about the piece.

Showtime declined to comment on the decision to pull the episode.

“We not only stand behind our rigorous reporting but are proud of the incredible journalism showcased in this story,” a spokesperson for Vice, Elise Flick, told Semafor.

Know More

The politicized decision to kill the DeSantis episode came as Showtime’s parent company, Paramount, cut costs to reflect a gloomy streaming business. The company folded a diminished Showtime under the streaming umbrella Paramount+, and laid off a wave of staffers, including the executive who greenlit prestige unscripted shows and documentaries.

The new president Chris McCarthy, has a background in less expensive reality TV.

But the first sign of trouble for the DeSantis episode came on only Thursday, May 25 days before it was set to air.

The episode had already been vetted by Vice’s internal legal team, and returned by Showtime executives without any requests for changes. Both Showtime and Vice had already sent around promotional materials and screeners for the episode to reporters.

On Showtime’s site, the network said the episode contained allegations from “former detainees that he was present at force-feedings that were condemned as torture by the UN” raised the “role of Navy JAGs in the investigation of the detainee deaths.”

But just four days before the show was set to air, Vice received a note from Showtime’s post-production staff, which normally focuses on issues like color and sound. The production team told Vice “the broader network group teams are taking a deeper internal look at this Sunday’s episode, which will delay its premiere.”

Vice, which had just declared bankruptcy and was desperate to save anything it could, proceeded delicately. Subrata De, Vice’s EVP and global head of programming and documentary, and Vice’s showrunner Beverly Chase, sent a note to the production team at Showtime asking for more details. They told employees they would return to the DeSantis piece later in the season.

The new Showtime team didn’t respond to their inquiries, people familiar with the situation said. And Showtime quickly scrubbed promotion of the episode from its website.

When the Hollywood Reporter broke the news a week later that the episode had been shelved, Vice asked that the two sides work together to draft joint statements to give to reporters, and a spokesperson told reporters that “we are very much still in discussion about the scheduling of this episode. We are proud of our reporting and of our continuing partnership with Showtime.”

But within days, it became clear that Showtime was not still in discussion about the scheduling of the episode. Executives at the network stopped communicating with editorial employees at Vice including De and Chase. And immediately after the seventh episode aired, the company filed a motion in bankruptcy court to opt out of its contract to pay Vice.

Max’s view

Showtime’s decision to kill the DeSantis story has gotten lost amid the two companies’ other woes — Vice’s bankruptcy, Paramount’s scramble to cut expensive original programming.

But the episode is in fact a rare, and serious, glimpse at how a big media company killed a potentially controversial story. Perhaps they had reason to be fearful: DeSantis showed that he was willing to take on a much bigger and more influential media company, Disney.

And that kind of decision is made far more likely by the fragile state of the television business, where “the challenges are greater than I had anticipated,” as Disney CEO Bob Iger said earlier this month.

Both Vice and Paramount have spent the last several months sharply reducing costs, laying off staff and gutting the operations that produced critically-acclaimed work. And Vice’s bankruptcy presented a good opportunity for Showtime to claw back at least several million dollars at a moment when it is on a much tighter budgetary leash within Paramount.

When Vice was at the top of the world, Showtime executives may have thought twice about canceling an episode it didn’t particularly care for. Of course, Showtime wasn’t the distributor of the Vice docuseries at its peak. That would be HBO, which unceremoniously parted ways with the Vice weekly years ago when its parent company gave a similar edict: Trim the fat. And with it, the risk.

The View From Tallahassee

DeSantis has declined to discuss his time at Guantanamo recently, but the Washington Post reported that he discussed it in previous interviews. He had advised guards they could force-feed prisoners, he said.

He said in 2018 that he learned from the hunger strikes that detainees “are using things like detainee abuse offensively against us. It was a tactic, technique and procedure.”

Notable
  • “DeSantis had little authority to address these crises as a 27-year-old lieutenant at a notorious facility micromanaged from Washington. But it was a formative period for a career-minded officer who had enlisted hoping for a deployment to Guantánamo Bay, where he would come face to face with the realities of America’s least conventional war,” McClatchy reported.
  • DeSantis was present for the investigation of three apparent detainee suicides whose circumstances remain in dispute, The Guardian wrote.
  • “DeSantis was stationed at Guantanamo during a year marked by riots, hunger strikes and death,” according to the Independent.
  • Vice is now looking for a new home for the series, according to THR.